formal logic", "explanation": "This comic is a riff on bumper stickers that say \"honk if you love ____\". Here, the subject is Mathematical logic|formal logic, but the word \"if\" is replaced with a formal logic term \"If and only if|iff,\" which means \"if and only if\".\n\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.\"\n\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."}
-{"number": "1034", "date": "March 26, 2012", "title": "Share Buttons", "image": "share_buttons.png", "titletext": "The only post to achieve perfect balance between the four was a hilarious joke about Mark Zuckerberg getting caught using a pseudonym to sneak past the TSA.", "transcript": ":[A series of article titles with four share buttons underneath each: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Google+]\n\n:Breaking Into Stand-up Comedy\n:FB: 3, Twitter: 1,781, Reddit: 2, G+: 0\n\n:How the Christian Right Threatens Wikipedia\n:FB: 1, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 2,241, G+: 3\n\n:Boycott Facebook Today!\n:FB: 248k, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 0, G+: 74\n\n:DIY: Installing a Custom ROM on a Realdoll\n:FB: 0, Twitter: 0, Reddit: 0, G+: 2", "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 plus|Google+.\n\n*Twitterers are often stereotyped as constantly trying to be funny; hence, the article on stand-up comedy is shared most on Twitter.\n\n*Conspiracy theory articles play well on Reddit, especially if they are against the Christian Right and for Wikipedia, as there is a large and loud atheist community on Reddit.\n\n*\"Boycott Facebook\" articles are ironically popular on Facebook. Google+, being semantically akin to Facebook, also had a significant anti-Facebook community. One of the punchlines is that Google+ was struggling and not used much, before being finally closed down in 2019.\n\n*The last article gets almost no shares at all — not many want to admit they are reading an article about a RealDoll, a type of sex doll. (Also mentioned in Game AIs and Flying Cars.) A custom ROM is an aftermarket distribution of the Android (operating system)|Android operating system and are often targeted toward enthusiasts. This community exists primarily on Google+ (as Google is the main developer of Android), and was one of the few active communities on that social network. As Android is an operating system primarily aimed at smartphones and tablet computers, installing it on a RealDoll, whilst possible due to Android's open source nature, would be a very niche activity, and the low number of shares indicates that it only interests a small portion of the already-small (relative to other social networks) Google+ community.\n\nThe title text humorously combines appealing subjects for all four networks:\n\n*''a hilarious joke'' – Twitter, same as above.\n*''about Mark Zuckerberg'' – founder of Facebook.\n*''using a pseudonym'' – referencing a [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218649/Google_works_to_soothe_users_over_real_name_controversyremember controversy] about real names on Google+.\n*''to sneak past the Transportation Security Administration|TSA'' – Reddit, a conspiracy theory as above."}
-{"number": "1035", "date": "March 28, 2012", "title": "Cadbury Eggs", "image": "cadbury_eggs.png", "titletext": "When they moved production from New Zealand to the UK and switched from the runny white centers to the thick, frosting-like filling, it got way harder to cook them scrambled.", "transcript": ":[Two Cadbury eggs, one in the foil, the other out of the foil and broken open to reveal the gooey center.]\n:A Cadbury egg has about 20g of sugar. (25g outside the US.) \"One Cadbury Egg\" is a nice unit of sugar content.\n\n:[A can of soda with an equals sign and two eggs; a bottle of soda with an equals sign and three eggs.]\n:One 12oz. can of soda has about two Cadbury eggs worth of sugar. One 20oz. bottle has three.\n\n:[Two unwrapped Cadbury eggs, with an arrow indicating they should be placed in a glass of water.]\n: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\n:[Megan puts her hand to her chin in thought, Cueball has his arms out in exclamation.]\n: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?\n:Cueball: That's not really— \n:Megan: This is ''awesome!''\n:Cueball: *sigh*", "explanation": "Cadbury Creme Egg|Cadbury Eggs are a chocolate, egg-shaped candy with a white and yellow filling. They are supposed to replicate a real egg with a hard exterior and soft interior.\n\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.)\n\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 1070|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 — which is anywhere between March 22nd and May 7th, depending on whether one is consulting the Catholic or Orthodox calendar.\n\nThe title text mentions the closure of the Cadbury Creme Egg#Manufacture in New Zealand|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_eggs|scrambled, the new thick filling is not liquid enough to be cooked in a pan, as was the old runny filling. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1036", "date": "March 30, 2012", "title": "Reviews", "image": "reviews.png", "titletext": "I plugged in this lamp and my dog went rigid, spoke a sentence of perfect Akkadian, and then was hurled sideways through the picture window. Even worse, it's one of those lamps where the switch is on the cord.", "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:]\n:Shopping before online reviews:\n:Cueball: This lamp is pretty.\n:Megan: And affordable.\n:Cueball: Let's get it.\n:Megan OK! \n\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:]\n:Shopping now:\n:Cueball: This lamp is pretty.\n:Megan: It's got 1½ stars on Amazon. Reviews all say to avoid that brand.\n\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.]\n:Cueball: This one has good reviews.\n:Megan: Wait, one guy says when he plugged it in, he got a metallic taste in his mouth and his cats went deaf.\n:Cueball: Eek. \n:Cueball: What about- ...no, review points out it resembles a uterus.\n\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.]\n: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.\n:Megan: You know, our room looks fine in the dark.", "explanation": "Cueball and Megan are shown shopping for lamps. In the first frame of the comic, 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.\n\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). \n\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 emissions, and would not be on store shelves long before some kind of serious recall). \n\nThe second part of the comic starts normally. For the lamp Cueball thinks 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 to the title text. Cueball is for instance looking at a lamp that someone thinks looks like a uterus. If Cueball did not feel the same way, he should ignore one person's 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.\n\nIn the final frame, Cueball has found a Swiss lamp maker with perfect reviews, but her lamps are very expensive, the cheapest starting at 1,300 francs. Swiss franc|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 ([http://www.exchangerates.org.uk/CHF-USD-30_03_2012-exchange-rate-history.html US$1.10 to a Swiss Franc], at the time of publication) making the cheapest lamp go for not much less than US$1450. For comparison, US$15 can get a decent lamp at IKEA. Furthermore, the lampmaker lives in the Swiss Alps and can only be reached via a ski lift. This either indicates 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 do not look like a uterus or [http://gizmodo.com/5360742/penis-chandelieryes-penis-chandelier other parts] of the human reproductive system...\n\nThe title text is presumably the review of 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_language|Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. Even if the dog 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."}
-{"number": "1038", "date": "April 4, 2012", "title": "Fountain", "image": "fountain.png", "titletext": "Implausible, did you say? Sorry, couldn't quite hear you from all the way up heeeeeeeeere!", "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.]\n:[Cueball splashes through the pond which makes sounds:]\n:Splish\n:Splash\n:[Cueball gets to one of the jets.]\n:[Cueball opens up the umbrella with a:]\n:Click\n:[Cueball opens the umbrella and swings it into water jet stream (which is outside the image). The umbrella makes a sound when opened:]\n:Fwoop\n:[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).]\n:Cueball: Wheeeeeeee!\n\n{{", "explanation": "This comic is about how it's considered implausible to \"fly\" by positioning an umbrella over a water jet.\n\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 to 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. \n\nConclusion is that IF the umbrella is strong enough, this trick will actually work!\n\nHowever, if you imagine a typical six-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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1039", "date": "April 6, 2012", "title": "RuBisCO", "image": "rubisco.png", "titletext": "Bruce Schneier believes safewords are fundamentally insecure and recommends that you ask your partner to stop via public key signature.", "transcript": ":[Person in background (out-of-frame) screams out this word over all 3 panels.]\n\n:[Cueball is working on a laptop at a desk. Megan is reading a book in an armchair.]\n:Person 1: RIBULOSEBISPH..\n\n:[In a frameless panel, Cueball has stopped working. Megan has stopped reading, and is holding her book.]\n:Person 1: ...OSPHATECARBOXYL...\n\n:[Cueball continues working. Megan resumes reading her book.]\n:Person 1: ...ASEOXYGENASE!\n:Person 2: Oh, Sorry!\n:Megan: Man, chemists pick the worst safewords.", "explanation": "Safeword|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 RuBisCO|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.\n\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.\n\nRandall later in 1128: Fifty Shades referenced the book Fifty Shades of Gray which made the concept of Safeword|'safe words' perhaps more widely known to the mainstream public. Here the word is very short: Red."}
-{"number": "1040", "date": "April 9, 2012", "title": "Lakes and Oceans", "image": "lakes_and_oceans.png", "titletext": "James Cameron has said that he didn't know its song would be so beautiful. He didn't close the door in time. He's sorry.", "transcript": ":[A Map of lakes and oceans showing the depths of various lakes and ocean attributes.]\n\n:Lakes and Oceans Depths and animal/ship/boat lengths are to scale; horizontal distance is not.\n\n:Fun Fact: The ''Edmund Fitzgerald'', The Kursk, and The Lusitania all sank in water shallower than they were long.\n\n:[Vertical axis of depths, ranging from 1,000 m to 12,000 m.]\n{| class", "explanation": "Although it is a small part of this large comic there is another of Randall Munroe|Randall's :Category:Fun fact|fun facts below Burj Khalifa in the left part. This 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 Russian submarine Kursk (K-141)|''Kursk'' (K-141) was a Russian nuclear submarine which sank in 2000 after an explosion. The RMS Lusitania|RMS ''Lusitania'' was a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland|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.\n\nAlso on the diagram is the RMS Titanic|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 Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill|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 José Mine, which suffered a 2010 Copiapó mining accident|collapse in 2010, trapping 33 men 700 metres underground for 69 days. The Kola Superdeep Borehole also shown on the right was a Soviet Union|Soviet (and later Russian) research project attempting to drill as deep into the Crust (geology)|Earth's crust as possible. It was abandoned in 2005, after reaching a record of 12,262 metres deep.\n\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 Scotland|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.\n\nIn the water, the ''Andrea Gail'' was a ship that sunk in a 1991 Perfect Storm|storm in 1991, and was later eulogized with a The_Perfect_Storm_(book)|book and The_Perfect_Storm_(film)|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|''Ohio''-class submarine (240 metres), the depth limit of a Typhoon-class submarine|''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).\n\nThe small unlabeled mark under the \"cork into a bottle\" text is around leet|1337 metres deep.\n\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|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 Mariana Trench|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 bar (unit)|bars and Xenophyophore|life forms have been found at depths as low as 10,641 metres.\n\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.\n\nThe door at the bottom of the Mariana 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.\n\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 Siren_(mythology)|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 \"[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CosmicHorrorStory 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 (film)| 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. Gemini Home Entertainment, a horror anthology web series which also narrates a fictional{{cn}} tunnel at the bottom of the Mariana Trench containing a cosmic horror entity, was released in 2019."}
-{"number": "1041", "date": "April 11, 2012", "title": "Whites of Their Eyes", "image": "whites_of_their_eyes.png", "titletext": "Don't fire until you see through the fragile facade to the human being within.", "transcript": ":[A Revolutionary War soldier gives orders to two others hunkered down behind a rock.]\n:Lead soldier: Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes\n\n:Lead: And smell the scent of their hair.\n\n:[The two others getting an incredulous look on their faces. They glance at each other.]\n:Lead: And taste the sweetness of their lips.\n\n:[They begin taking fire from the opposition.]\n:Lead: And feel the heat of their skin pressed against yours, trembling as you-\n:Soldier 2: Maybe we should just start shooting.\n:Lead: Right, yes.", "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.\n\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).\n\nThe title text expands on that, stating not to fire until you see the person's \"soul\" in their eyes."}
-{"number": "1042", "date": "April 13, 2012", "title": "Never", "image": "never.png", "titletext": "I'll never forget you--at least, the parts of you that were important red flags.", "transcript": ":[Cueball staring into a pond.]\n:Cueball: I know that no matter where I go\n:Cueball: or who I build a life with\n\n:Cueball: I will never have with anyone\n:Cueball: what I had with you\n\n:[Cueball walks off.]\n:Cueball: Thank god\n\n{{", "explanation": "This comic plays with that some phrases are generally interpreted as communicating positive sentiments, although they strictly are ambiguous.\n\nCueball is mulling over a previous relationship. Usually when someone says something like \"I will never have with anyone what I had with (someone)\" 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.\n\nThe title text goes along the same line: \"I'll never forget you\" is usually positive – but then it becomes clear that it is the red flag (signal)|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. The pond may be a reference to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Skin of Evil.\n\nThere is a similar twist in comics 71: In the Trees and 334: Wasteland."}
-{"number": "1043", "date": "April 16, 2012", "title": "Ablogalypse", "image": "ablogalypse.png", "titletext": "Plus the reaction in the Tumblverse is always 'repeatedly get hit by a dog and fall down the stairs'.", "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.]\n:[Caption below the graph:]\n:In about six months, the word \"Tumblr\" will eclipse \"blog\" in Google popularity.\n: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.\"", "explanation": "This comic plays with the [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q"}
-{"number": "1044", "date": "April 18, 2012", "title": "Romney Quiz", "image": "romney_quiz.png", "titletext": "Charlie actually delivered the Medicare line almost verbatim in the 1971 movie's Fizzy Lifting Drink scene, but it was ultimately cut from the final release.", "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.]\n:QUIZ: Who said it - former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, or Wonka contest winner Charlie Bucket?\n:''Is there even a difference?''\n\n:1. ———— \"I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country.\"\n:2. ———— \"Returning Medicare to solid footing represents our greatest entitlement challenge.\"\n:3. ———— \"Look, everyone, look, I've got it! The fifth golden ticket is mine!\"\n:4. ———— We have lost faith in government. Not in just one party, not in just one house, but in government.\"\n:5. ———— \"This banana's fantastic! It tastes so real.\"\n:6. ———— \"Grandpa... on the way home today, I ran into Mr. Slugworth.\"\n:7. ———— \"I'm not happy exporting jobs, but we must move ahead in technology and patents.\"\n:8. ———— \"Hey, the room is getting smaller.\"\n:9. ———— \"It would be impossible to reach unanimity on every aspect of our budget.\"\n:10. ——— \"Grandpa, look over there across the river! They're little men!\"\n:11. ——— \"I'm... going too high! Hey, Grandpa, I can't get down! Help! Grandpa, the fan!\"\n:12. ——— \"Barack Obama has failed America.\"\n\n:7\", though he later added a statement to the top of the comic page addressing this point. \n\nAt the bottom of the comic are expressions involving transcendental numbers (namely π 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. \n\nRandall says he compiled this table through \"a mix of trial-and-error, ''Mathematica'', and Robert Munafo's [http://mrob.com/pub/ries/ Ries] tool.\" \"Ries\" is a \"Closed-form expression#Conversion from numerical forms|reverse calculator\" that forms equations matching a given number.\n\nThe world population estimate for 2023 is still accurate. The estimate is 7.9 billion, and the population listed at the website census.gov is roughly the same. The current value can be found here: [https://www.census.gov/popclock/ United States Census Bureau - U.S. and World Population Clock]. Nevertheless there are other numbers listed by different sources.\n\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. \n\nThe second part of the title text makes fun of the unusual mathematical operations contained in the comic. Pi|π 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 πth root is rarely helpful. A rare exception is an [http://gosper.org/4%5E1%C3%B7%CF%80.png identity] for the pi-th root of 4 discovered by Bill Gosper. Similarly, e (mathematical constant)|e typically appears in the base of a power (forming the exponential function), not in the exponent. (This is later referenced in [http://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ Lethal Neutrinos])."}
-{"number": "1048", "date": "April 27, 2012", "title": "Emotion", "image": "emotion.png", "titletext": "Fortunately, the internet has a virtually inexhaustible supply of code that doesn't work and people who are wrong, which bodes well for a return to normalcy. [Note: Click to read context for the cancer comics. She's doing well.]", "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..\n\n:Around 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.]", "explanation": "This is a mostly serious comic in which Randall expresses his thoughts while his fiancée started to suffer from breast cancer. He doesn't care about many things like politics anymore, there is just his fiancée's cancer and his romance with her. This is one of many :Category:Cancer|comics about cancer he made because of her cancer.\n\nSome of his withdrawn activities are shown here:\n*Politics became prominent in 2008 due to the upcoming United States presidential election, 2008|US presidential elections in November 2008.\n*\"Code not working even though it ''should'' work\" is a common frustration in software development, when the developer is convinced to have covered every possible scenario, but their code still does not run as expected, because of some obscure tiny problem which they didn't think of and which often takes much time (and frustration) to find.\n*Joss Whedon is best known as the creator and showrunner of the television series ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series)|Buffy the Vampire Slayer'' (1997–2003), ''Angel (1999 TV series)|Angel'' (1999–2004) and ''Firefly (TV series)|Firefly'' (2002), so he's the \"cause\" of emotions for Randall during the time they were aired.\n*\"People being wrong on the internet\" is something that can easily annoy and preoccupy an internet-savvy guy like Randall, who knows the things they're (incorrectly) talking about; this was previously dealt with in the comic 386: Duty Calls.\n\nEventually, Randall's fiancée'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?"}
-{"number": "1049", "date": "April 30, 2012", "title": "Bookshelf", "image": "bookshelf.png", "titletext": "I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.'", "transcript": ":[Cueball stands in front of a bookshelf.]\n:Cueball: Ooh, ''Atlas Shrugged''.\n:[Cueball yanks out book only for a click to be heard.]\n:[The entire setup begins to rumble, while the bookcase and a surrounding platform takes both it and Cueball behind the wall.]\n:[The tiny, dark room behind the wall has one thing painted on it.]\n:Wall: You have terrible taste.\n:[The whole piece of kit moves back to its original position. Cueball stands there mildly stunned.]", "explanation": "This is a play on the {{tvtropes|BookcasePassage|\"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\".\n\nAtlas Shrugged is a dystopian novel by Ayn Rand. Randall is suggesting it's a bad book.\n\nAlthough the intent behind the book was in Rand's theory of Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)|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.\n\nThe title text is a general criticism Randall has with Rand, since most of Rand's characters are fiercely independent and rather tactless. Also see Ayn Random.\n\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 — a subject pursued in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead."}
-{"number": "1050", "date": "May 2, 2012", "title": "Forgot Algebra", "image": "forgot_algebra.png", "titletext": "The only things you HAVE to know are how to make enough of a living to stay alive and how to get your taxes done. All the fun parts of life are optional.", "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.]\n: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. \n:Megan: I ''told you'' I'd never use it! \n:Megan: In your ''face''!\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n: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.", "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|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. See \"A Mathematician's Lament\" by Paul Lockhart: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf\n\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.\n\nThe title text states that technically you don't \"need\" to do anything but survive and Death & Taxes|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.\n\nThis is one of the two comics where Miss Lenhart is both drawn and named, the first being 499: Scantron."}
-{"number": "1051", "date": "May 4, 2012", "title": "Visited", "image": "visited.png", "titletext": "I hate when I read something like '... tension among the BASE jumpers nearly led to wingsuit combat ...', and I get excited because 'wingsuit combat' is underlined, only to find that it's just separate links to the 'wingsuit' and 'combat' articles.", "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[link not clicked].\n\n:He was born in Dos Hermanas[link not clicked] in the Andalusia[link not clicked] region of Spain[link not clicked] (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 Río[link clicked],\n\n:His third novel[link not clicked], set during the Burmese-Siamese war[link not clicked], marked the start of a lifelong interest in the history of Southeast Asia[link not clicked]. He spent his later years in Thailand[link not clicked], 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\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:If I go for a while without clearing my browser history, I start getting embarrassd by which words on Wikipedia show up in purple.", "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).\n\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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1052", "date": "May 7, 2012", "title": "Every Major's Terrible", "before": "#Explanation|↓ Skip to explanation ↓", "image": "every_majors_terrible.png", "titletext": "Someday I'll be the first to get a Ph. D in 'Undeclared'.", "transcript": ":[The entire comic is a 4 by 9 grid. Left-justified headings above the 36 panels:]\n:Every Major's Terrible\n:to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan's\n:Modern Major-General Song\n:(Which you may know from Tom Lehrer's ''Elements''. \n:If not, just hum ''Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''.)\n\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\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", "explanation": "Randall has written a song called ''Every Major's Terrible'' and this comic illustrates the song. In this song the term Major (academic)|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!\n\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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1053", "date": "May 9, 2012", "title": "Ten Thousand", "image": "ten_thousand.png", "titletext": "Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:I try not to make fun of people for admitting they don't know things.\n:[Caption right below said caption:]\n: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\n:[A list of equations.]\n:Fraction who have heard of it at birth", "explanation": "In this strip, Randall Munroe|Randall presents a mathematical argument against the idea of making fun of people for their ignorance. The mathematical argument, presented in the first panel, goes as follows: Since people aren't born knowing ''anything'', everyone has to learn everything for the first time at some point. By using the US national birth rate and assuming that most common facts that \"every adult knows\" are learned by age 30, Randall calculates that there are around 10,000 people in the US alone who learn any given common fact for the first time each day.\n\nSince you can only learn something for the first time once, each of these 10,000 people are having a unique, unrepeatable experience of enlightenment, which Randall sees as something to be cherished, not criticized. In the second panel, Randall notes that if he makes fun of people for not knowing things, he is effectively training them to avoid sharing those moments with him, and thus he will miss innumerable opportunities to do something he considers fun. To drive the point home, the second panel shows Cueball finding out that Megan doesn't know about the \"Diet Coke and Mentos thing\", and - instead of making fun of her, Cueball affirms that Megan is part of a special and select group - she is one of the \"Lucky 10,000\" who, that day, will learn and experience that thing for the first time.\n\nDiet Coke (sold under the names \"Diet Coca-Cola\" or \"Coca-Cola Light\" in certain countries) is a popular brand of sugar-free soda. {{W|Mentos}} is a brand that makes chewable mints. If they are dropped into a bottle of Diet Coke, the Diet Coke and Mentos eruption|soda erupts with startling violence, sending a fountain of soda many meters into the air. This interaction is widely renowned due to its dramatic, unexpected nature, and the fact that you can do it with cheap and commonplace ingredients (though it does make quite a mess and should only be done outdoors). The reaction can be done with a variety of sodas (though Diet Coke is the most commonly repeated choice), and is caused by a physical reaction between the Mentos and the soda. The Mentos rapidly nucleate the carbon dioxide bubbles in the soda, causing the dissolved carbon dioxide in the soda to assume gaseous form. The sudden formation of all the carbon dioxide gas forces the contents of the bottle out. A 2006 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1054", "date": "May 11, 2012", "title": "The bacon", "image": "thebacon.png", "titletext": "Normally pronounced 'THEH-buh-kon', I assume.", "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.]\n: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\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Only later did I learn that \"Thebacon\" is the common name for dihydrocodeine enol acetate, a synthetic opioid similar to Vicodin.", "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\". \n\nAt 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.\n\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. Opioids suppress emotional pain as well as physical pain, keeping White Hat’s stress levels low.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nAccording to thebacon|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*The proper name is\n**Dihydrocodeinone enol acetate, not\n**Dihydrocodeine enol acetate.\n*It is a semisynthetic|''semisynthetic'' opioid not a synthetic opioid.\n*The pronunciation is /ˈθiːbəkɒn/\n**THEE-buh-kon, not\n**THEH-buh-kon.\n***By saying ''I assume'', Randall indicates that he didn't research the pronunciation.\n***As an alternative explanation, there may be a joke/pun in the mistake."}
-{"number": "1055", "date": "May 14, 2012", "title": "Kickstarter", "image": "kickstarter.png", "titletext": "If you pledge more than $50 you'll get on the VIP list and have first dibs on a slot on ANY of the pledge levels in the actual campaign.", "transcript": ":[A kickstarter page with zero donations, a target of $5,000 (and no money raised), and 90 days to go.]\n:[Black Hat has posted a video and a description of his project, the first lines of which are visible.]\n: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. \n\n:I have an idea for a Kickstarter campaign that could raise millions, but I need your help to craft the perfect pitch. \n\n:If I raise $5,000, I'll be able to devote the", "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.\n\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.\n\nThis has actually been done via [http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kickstarter-campaign 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."}
-{"number": "1056", "date": "May 16, 2012", "title": "Felidae", "image": "felidae.png", "titletext": "'Smilodon fatalis' narrowly edged out 'Tyrannosaurus rex' to win this year's Most Badass Latin Names competition, after edging out 'Dracorex hogwartsia' and 'Stygimoloch spinifer' (meaning 'horned dragon from the river of death') in the semifinals.", "transcript": ":Well-known felines:\n:[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.]\n:Smilodon (extinct): \"Saber-toothed cat (scientific name: Smilodon fatalis)\n:Panthera: \"Jaguar\", \"Leopard\", \"Snow Leopard\", \"Tiger\", \"Lion\"\n:Puma: \"Cougar\", \"Puma\", \"Panther\", \"Mountain Lion\"\n:Other felidae: \"Ocelot\", \"Cheetah\"\n:Felis & Lynx: \"Housecat\", \"Bobcat\", \"Wildcat\", \"Lynx\"\n:[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\".]\n:The OS X Problem", "explanation": "This comic shows a graph with three parts.\n\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 Inc.|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.\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1057", "date": "May 18, 2012", "title": "Klout", "image": "klout.png", "titletext": "Though please do confirm that it's actually *me* on Klout first, and not one of my friends trying to get me punched. The great thing about this douchebag deadman switch is that I will never dare trigger it.", "transcript": ":[Randall has drawn himself as Cueball in a slim panel:]\n:Randall: I'd like to ask a favor. \n:Randall: If someday, in the future, we meet in person,\n\n:[Zoom out of Randall talking.]\n:Randall: And if, as of that day, I've interacted with Klout in ''any'' way except to opt out, \n:Randall: I want you to punch me in the face without warning.\n\n:[Zoom in on Randall's head.]\n:Randall: This may sound like a joke, so let me be clear: \n:Randall: I am ''dead serious''. \n:Randall: Ignore anything I say retracting this. \n:Randall: Thank you.", "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.\n\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 [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date"}
-{"number": "1058", "date": "May 21, 2012", "title": "Old-Timers", "image": "old_timers.png", "titletext": "You were on the internet before I was born? Well, so was I.", "transcript": ":[A man with black hair and a neck beard types away at his computer screen.]\n:Man (typing): Whatever, noob. I've been on the internet since the BBS days.\n:Screen (reply from the noob): ''Wrong.''\n: ''type type''\n\n:[The noob turns out to be Jill, with two hair buns, who kneels on her chair, typing at a laptop on a table in this frame-less panel.]\n:Jill (typing): Before I was born, a lab took egg and sperm samples from my parents and sequenced the DNA.\n:''type type''\n\n:[The man sits at his desk, reading his screen.]\n:Screen (Jill 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\n:[Jill still typing on the laptop.]\n:Jill (typing): So, no. \n:Jill (typing): You've '''''looked''''' at the internet. \n:Jill (typing): I've '''''been''''' there.\n:''type type''", "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 Newbie|noob (see also Leet#n00b|n00b). He claims that he has been on the internet since the BBS days, and thus long before his conversation partner was even born.\n\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.\n\nHowever, he is up against Jill who tells him he is wrong. She explains that her parents took samples of their sperm and egg and Genome#Sequencing_and_mapping|sequenced the DNA. The resulting genome was then e-mailed to the J. Craig Venter Institute|Venter Institute where they synthesized the genome and used this to create the egg and sperm that became Jill.\n\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 Jill is describing may be possible this comic must take place in the future as this has not yet been used to create human beings.\n\nHer point though is, that the man is wrong when he says that he has been on the internet. When you are \"online\" 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.\n\nIt is also worth noting that it was Technically|technically her parents' sex cells, not her, which traversed the internet.\n\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, Jill 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."}
-{"number": "1059", "date": "May 23, 2012", "title": "Bel-Air", "image": "bel_air.png", "titletext": "Aaron Sorkin has been tapped to write the TV movie about the aging prince's eventual election to Pat Toomey's Senate seat, currently titled either 'FRESHman Senator' or 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'.", "transcript": ":[Cueball sits on an easy chair in front of a TV.]\n:TV: Well, my posh Bel Air life took a turn for the worse.\n\n:TV: It's a story best related in a doggerel verse.\n\n:TV: So kick back, relax, lemme put on some Adele for ya,\n\n:[Cueball raises the remote and points at the screen.]\n:TV: While I tell you why I'm running for mayor of Phila-\n:''CLICK''", "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 Fresh Prince of Bel-Air'' is about the protagonist (played by Will Smith) moving from the urban Philadelphia streets to posh Bel-Air; this parody is a reversal of that concept. The joke is on Will Smith going from being a successful rapper to an ambitious politician. This may be seen as a sort of gentrification of black culture, one of the main themes of the original TV series.\n\nDoggerel 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 (singer)|Adele, who was, of course, not performing during the series' run, seeing as she was two years old at its start.\n\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.\n\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 corrupt 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 former U.S. Senator of Pennsylvania (which includes Philadelphia), who served two terms from 2011 to 2023.\n\nThe theme song of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was also referenced in 464: RBA."}
-{"number": "1060", "date": "May 25, 2012", "title": "Crowdsourcing", "image": "crowdsourcing.png", "titletext": "We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'", "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.]\n:Cueball: We crowdsource the design process, allowing those with the best designs to connect—\n:Cueball: via already-in-place social networking infrastructure—\n:Cueball: with interested manufacturers, distributors, and marketers.\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Nobody caught on that our business plan didn't involve ''us'' in any way— it was just a description of other people making and selling products.", "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. \n\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.\n\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)."}
-{"number": "1061", "date": "May 28, 2012", "title": "EST", "image": "est.png", "titletext": "The month names are the same, except that the fourth month only has the name 'April' in even-numbered years, and is otherwise unnamed.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the frame:]\n:xkcd presents\n:[In large letters:] '''Earth Standard Time'''\n:[In regular text:] (EST)\n:'''A universal calendar for a universal planet'''\n:[In small, grey letters:] [2420:_Appliances|1] as they wouldn't move the clothes about."}
-{"number": "1067", "date": "June 11, 2012", "title": "Pressures", "image": "pressures.png", "titletext": "Everyone's caught by surprise when a theory of quantum gravity is developed by a sound technician wearing patent leather shoes while editing Clerks II.", "transcript": ":[Ponytail walks up to Megan examining documents]\n:Ponytail: So... what've you been up to?\n:Megan: Handling patent applications.\n:Ponytail: Yeah, but... besides that?\n:Megan: That's about it.\n:Ponytail: You're not, like, thinking about any cool stuff? Just curious.\n\n:For the last hundred years, Swiss patent clerks have been under some weird pressures.", "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 [http://zenpencils.com/comic/einstein/ \"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''.\n\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|\"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 — which could be said about most sequels, but you get the point."}
-{"number": "1068", "date": "June 13, 2012", "title": "Swiftkey", "image": "swiftkey.png", "titletext": "Although the Markov chain-style text model is still rudimentary; it recently gave me \"Massachusetts Institute of America\". Although I have to admit it sounds prestigious.", "transcript": ":[Cueball showing his phone to Megan.]\n: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\n:[Cueball and Megan in a frameless panel, with Megan now holding Cueball's phone.]\n:Cueball: Spacebar inserts its best guess. So if I type \"The Empi\" and hit space three times, it types \"The Empire Strikes Back\".\n:Megan: What if you mash space in a blank message?\n\n:[Zoomed in on Megan looking at Cueball's phone, with Cueball now off-frame to the left.]\n:Cueball: I guess it fills in your most likely first word, then the word that usually follows it...\n:Megan: So it builds up your \"typical\" sentence. Cool! Let's see yours!\n:Cueball: Uh—\n\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:]\n:SwiftKey: I\n:SwiftKey: Am\n:SwiftKey: So\n:SwiftKey: Sorry—\n:SwiftKey: That's\n:SwiftKey: Never\n:SwiftKey: Happened\n:SwiftKey: Before.", "explanation": "Cueball has installed SwiftKey on his smartphone and brags about this to Megan. SwiftKey is a product that is installable on iOS/Android (operating system)|Android-based phones and tablets.\n\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).\n\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.\n\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\n\"I am so sorry– that's never happened before.\" is a typical excuse for a mishap, usually when {{tvtropes|TheLoinsSleepTonight|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 am so sorry– that's never happened before.\" is a lie. Also, SwiftKey might be saying \"I am so sorry– that's never happened before.\" because the software doesn't know what to do. \n\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 [http://www.swiftkey.com/swiftkey-on-xkcd pretty funny] (the site now redirects to a website asking to download the keyboard, an archived version can be found [https://web.archive.org/web/20190226120542/https://blog.swiftkey.com/swiftkey-on-xkcd/ here]). In addition, Reddit users have a similar model creating [https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator /r/subredditsimulator], which is populated by bots generating submissions and comments based on the language of their subreddits.\n\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\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) (Wikipedia links needed) 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."}
-{"number": "1070", "date": "June 18, 2012", "title": "Words for Small Sets", "image": "words_for_small_sets.png", "titletext": "If things are too quiet, try asking a couple of friends whether \"a couple\" should always mean \"two\". As with the question of how many spaces should go after a period, it can turn acrimonious surprisingly fast unless all three of them agree.", "transcript": ":[Heading above table:]\n:Just to clear things up:\n:[A chart with four rows and two columns is shown.]\n:;A few\n::Anywhere from 2 to 5\n\n:;A handful\n::Anywhere from 2 to 5\n\n:;Several\n::Anywhere from 2 to 5\n\n:;A couple\n::2 (but sometimes up to 5)", "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. \n\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 [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term"}
-{"number": "1071", "date": "June 20, 2012", "title": "Exoplanets", "image": "exoplanets.png", "titletext": "Planets are turning out to be so common that to show all the planets in our galaxy, this chart would have to be nested in itself—with each planet replaced by a copy of the chart—at least three levels deep.", "transcript": ":[A 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.]\n:All 786 known\n:planets\n:(as of June 2012)\n:to scale\n:'''(Some planet sizes estimated based on mass.)'''\n\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.]\n:This is our solar system. \n:The rest of these orbit other stars and were only discovered recently. \n: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. \n:We know nothing about what's on any of them. With better telescopes, that could change. \n:'''This is an exciting time.'''", "explanation": "An exoplanet is a planet outside of our solar system, orbiting a different star. 786: Exoplanets|786 planets were known in mid-2012: 778 exoplanets and the rest in our Solar System. \n\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 {{W|Saturn}}-sized, blue is roughly Uranus or Neptune-sized, and the tiny dots are small terrestrial planets (like Earth).\n\nWe only have a few ways of Discoveries of exoplanets|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 (spacecraft)|Kepler space telescope was designed for this purpose, and has made the vast majority of exoplanet discoveries.\n\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 File:LombergA1024.jpg|narrow field of view. The great number of nearby planets implies there should be Carl Sagan|billions of planets in our galaxy, 1339|assuming our local arm is not uniquely abundant.\n\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"}
-{"number": "1072", "date": "June 22, 2012", "title": "Seventies", "image": "seventies.png", "titletext": "Hey, man, the 1670s called. They were like 'Wherefore this demonic inſtrument? By what ſorcery does it produce ſuch ſounds?\"", "transcript": ":Cueball: Nice jacket. Hey–\n:Cueball: The seventies called.\n:Out-of-panel: Oh? What'd they want?\n\n:[Cueball looks at his smartphone, holding it in his hand.]\n:Cueball: I don't know. They didn't leave a message.\n:Out-of-panel: Weird.\n\n:1974:\n:[A person in bell bottoms, who has no jacket, looks at a rotary phone receiver.]\n:Voicemail service: If you'd like to leave a message, press \"1\".", "explanation": "This is a take on the common insult \" called and they want their - 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. \n\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. \n\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 Dual-tone_multi-frequency_signaling|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.\n\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... ſorcery\"). Randall uses the character \"ſ\", 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."}
-{"number": "1073", "date": "June 25, 2012", "title": "Weekend", "image": "weekend.png", "titletext": "Of the two Garfields, you wouldn't think the cat would turn out to be the more compelling presidential speechwriter, but there you go.", "transcript": ":[Cueball stands behind a lectern on a podium before a very large crowd.]\n:Cueball: We all hate Mondays. We're all working for the weekend. \n:Cueball: But our chains exist only in our minds.\n\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.]\n:Cueball: Calendars are just social consensus. \n:Cueball: Nature doesn't know the day of the week.\n\n:[Closer zoom on Cueball who looks straight out of the panel, the top of the lectern is just visible.]\n:Cueball: My friends— \n:Cueball: We can make today Saturday.\n\n:[Extreme close-up, the lectern now below the panel, and negative colors with Cueball and the text in white on a black background.]\n:Cueball: We can make it Saturday ''forever''.", "explanation": "This comic was posted right after the '''weekend''', on a Monday, so it was on time to emphasize that ''we all hate Mondays''.\n\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. \n\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?\n\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, hours, or possibly even minutes, depending on how quickly the news spread and how rapidly stocks started to sell. 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. \n\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."}
-{"number": "1074", "date": "June 27, 2012", "title": "Moon Landing", "image": "moon_landing.png", "titletext": "Ok, so Spirit and Opportunity are pretty awesome. And Kepler. And New Horizons, Cassini, Curiosity, TiME, and Project M. But c'mon, if the Earth were a basketball, in 40 years no human's been more than half an inch from the surface.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is sitting at a table with a laptop open. His hands are on the keys.]\n:Cueball: Hah- Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a great reply to people who doubt astronauts went to the moon.\n:Voice off-screen: Oh?\n:Cueball: \"Atop 3,000 tons of rocket fuel, where ''else'' do you think they were headed?\"\n\n:[The voice off screen turns out to be Megan. She is depicted, and now Cueball is off-screen.]\n:Megan: Cute. But it overlooks an even simpler argument.\n:Cueball: Which is?\n\n:[Both Megan and Cueball are now visible. Cueball has turned his chair around to face her.]\n:Megan: If NASA were willing to fake great accomplishments, they'd have a second one by now.\n:Cueball: ''Ouch.''\n:Megan: ...Too mean?\n:Cueball: That burn was so harsh I think you deorbited.", "explanation": "The comment to which Cueball is referring is [https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/73388356461019136 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.\n\nThere are a number of moon landing conspiracy theories|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.\n\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).\n\nIn the title text Randall mentions many successful NASA unmanned missions:\n*The Mars Exploration Rover|Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in 2004. Spirit got stuck in 2009 and shut down for good in 2010 (see 695: Spirit). Opportunity worked for over ten years on the surface of Mars before shutting down due to a loss of power in 2018 (see 2111: Opportunity Rover).\n*Kepler (spacecraft)|Kepler found many exoplanets.\n*New Horizons is a mission to the dwarf planet Pluto and beyond. It did a flyby of Pluto in July 2015 and is on its way out of the solar system.\n*Cassini–Huygens|Cassini was a probe orbiting Saturn from 2004 until Cassini_retirement|its controlled entry into Saturn in 2017.\n*Curiosity (rover)|Curiosity is another, larger Mars rover, exploring the Martian surface since August 2012.\n*Titan Mare Explorer|TiME is a proposed mission to explore the oceans of Saturn's moon Titan.\n*Project M (NASA)|Project M is an idea to send human-like robots to the Moon.\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 cm (9¼ inches) in diameter, those manned missions would have all taken place within 1.25 cm (½ inch) of the ball's surface. At this scale the Moon would be at a distance of 7.7 m (25.3 ft). Unmanned missions, such as those named above or the Voyager program|Voyager and Mariner program|Mariner probes of the 1960s and 1970s, have traveled much further. \n\nA basketball-sized Earth was the main focus of 1515: Basketball Earth."}
-{"number": "1075", "date": "June 29, 2012", "title": "Warning", "image": "warning.png", "titletext": "Also possibly several miles beyond that.", "transcript": ":[An American Diamond warning sign with the following message on it:]\n:You're in a box on wheels hurtling along several times faster than evolution could possibly have prepared you to go\n:Next 5 miles", "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.\n\nHumans did not evolve to have the ability to withstand such forces because their ancestors commonly never traveled any faster than about 20 km/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.\n\nThe road sign is far too lengthy and philosophical to be used in practice but is conceivable as an advertisement for safe driving.\n\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. \n\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 [http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm drives over 13,000 miles per year], this is indeed very likely."}
-{"number": "1076", "date": "July 2, 2012", "title": "Groundhog Day", "image": "groundhog_day.png", "titletext": "If you closely examine the cosmic background radiation, you can pick up lingering echoes of 'I Got You Babe'.", "transcript": ":''Groundhog Day'' really didn't end that way. When Bill Murray finally slept with Rita, it '''didn't''' break the loop.\n:[Phil Connors and Rita getting busy under the covers of his bed.]\n:They just kept having sex, night after night,\n:[Bed containing Phil and Rita repeats.]\n:February 2nd after February 2nd...\n:[Calendar page repeats.]\n:..forever\n:But nothing is forever. Not even forever\n:And the day '''''after''''' that sexual infinity\n:[Calendar page shows '''Feb 3.''']\n:was February 3rd.\n:264 days later (the length of a pregnancy) was October 23rd —\n:[An enormous explosion in space.]\n:Bishop Ussher's date for the birth of our world.", "explanation": "''Groundhog Day (film)|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.\n\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’t 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 [http://blog.xkcd.com/2012/07/02/groundhog-day-correction/ apologized] for it.\n\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.\n\nThe last panel references the Ussher chronology|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 Genesis creation myth|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 Mother goddess|primordial mother. Here, this role would be assumed by Rita.\n\nThe title text refers to the Cosmic microwave background|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."}
-{"number": "1077", "date": "July 4, 2012", "title": "Home Organization", "image": "home_organization.png", "titletext": "Lifehacking!", "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.]\n\n:Home Organization Tip: Just Give Up.", "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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1078", "date": "July 6, 2012", "title": "Knights", "image": "knights.png", "titletext": "1. Nf3 ... ↘↘↘ 2. Nc3 ... ↘↘↘ 0-1", "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:]\n:The Agincourt gambit.", "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 Pawn_(chess)|pawns (foot soldiers) on the right side of the chess board have bows.\n\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\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 having them resign). It seems to be an error that ellipses are included before Black's moves, as algebraic notation uses ellipses only to indicate that White's move has been omitted."}
-{"number": "1079", "date": "July 9, 2012", "title": "United Shapes", "image": "united_shapes.png", "imagesize": "800px", "noexpand": "true", "titletext": "That eggplant is in something of a flaccid state.", "transcript": "{{incomplete transcript|tables are not welcome here}}\n:The '''United Shapes'''\n:A map of things states are shaped like \n:[Each state has some item wedged to stay inside its borders]\n\n{| class", "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. \n\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.\n\nColorado contains what looks like a Wikipedia article. [http://xkcd.com/1079/colorado/ A close-up of the fake article is provided.] The following references are made in the Colorado article:\n\n*The pronunciation is not that for Colorado, but for Eyjafjallajökull, a volcano in Iceland that erupted in April 2010. There is a missing 859#Trivia|close parenthesis.\n*The way it has a demilitarized zone towards Wyoming resembles {{W|North Korea}} and {{W|South Korea}}.\n*Eleven dimensions refers to string theory.\n*A wormhole is a theoretical relative of the black hole. This is a reference to the television series Stargate SG-1 where a device capable of creating wormholes is located in the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker in Colorado.\n*A Horcrux is a type of magical object in the world of {{W|Harry Potter}} that prevents the creator of it from passing on. They may die, but their soul remains to be resurrected by another wizard\n*The radiation zones around Longmont are caused by Radioactive contamination from the Rocky Flats Plant|radioactive contamination from the Rocky Flats Plant.\n*The fake motto ''Si parare possis, vivere septem'' can be roughly translated as \"With preparation, survival is possible for over a week.\"\n\nNew Mexico, according to [https://xkcd.com/1079/info.0.json 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 1986 California Proposition 65|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.\"\n:This end up\n:Property of White Sands Missile Range\n:??? [Followed by a NFPA 704 Diamond with all divisions at severe risk, and a radiation symbol in the special notice division]\n:Contains White Sand\n:FLAMMABLE\n:Warning: \n:This product contains chemicals known \n:only to the state of Nevada. \n:Contents under pressure from parents\n:If swallowed, induce labor\n:56 fluid ounces \n:and 14 other ounces\n\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)."}
-{"number": "1080", "date": "July 11, 2012", "title": "Visual Field", "image": "visual_field.png", "titletext": "I recently learned something that solved a mystery that had bugged me since childhood--why, when I looked at an analog clock, the hand would sometimes seem to take a couple seconds to start ticking. Google \"stopped clock illusion\".", "transcript": ":Your Central Visual Field\n:[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\".]\n:[At the top are the instructions to view this page]\n:Look at the center with your eyes this far from the screen.\n:[A rolled-up sheet of paper that equals about 55 total horizontal degrees in width in the measurement of the chart.]\n:(You can roll up a sheet of paper and cut it - or zoom the page - so it matches this image)\n:17 mark 0: right eye blind spot.\n:from 0 to 30 mark 15:\n:[The same image, increasing in absolute size from a very tiny object in the center to one about 20x original size at 30 degrees.]\n: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.\n:9 mark 105: Moon.\n:7 mark 112: Supermoon.\n:from 0 to 20 mark 170:\n:[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.]\n: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.\n:17 mark 180: Left Eye Blind Spot.\n:(not pictured: T-Boz blind spot, Chilli blind spot)\n:From 0 to infinity mark from 180 to 205:\n:[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.]\n:From 0 to 7 from 205 to 235:\n:[A swath of red, with full saturation in the center and fading out completely at 7 degrees from center.]\n:From 0 to 7 from 235 to 270:\n:[A swath of green, with full saturation in the center and fading out completely at 7 degrees from center.]\n: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.\n:25 mark 205: [A small whisp of white in a swath of blue.]\n:Blue-sky sprites: These tiny, darting spots, visible against smooth blue backgrounds, are white cells moving in the blood vessels over the retina\n:5 mark 195:\n:[A long blob, slightly distorting the blue swath.]\n: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.\n:10 mark 270:\n:[An askew crosshair and circle, with faint blue and yellow wedges inside]\n: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).\n:Polarization direction is shown by a faint central yellow blue shape (Also visible in deep blue skies)\n:from 0 to 30 mark 340:\n:[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.]\n: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\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).\n\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.\n\nNext, there's the topic of night vision. The color-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 color), which Randall uses to explain why we can't read at night.\n\nPolarization (waves)|Polarization 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.\n\nFloater|Floaters are deposits within the eye's vitreous humor. 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.\n\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.\n\nRandall also points out that colors are mostly seen near the center of our vision, with our brain keeping track of the colors of things near the outside of our visual field. The cones of blue, red and green in the Quadrant (plane geometry)|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 colors) is also stronger near the center of our vision.\n\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 (band)|TLC, whose members go by the aliases \"Left eye\", \"T-Boz\", and \"Chilli\".\n\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 1052: Every Major's Terrible#Verse 3|panel 25 of 1052: Every Major's Terrible and then later confirmed when he published 1394: Superm*n. Here is :Category:Supermoon|a list of all comics referring to the term.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1081", "date": "July 13, 2012", "title": "Argument Victory", "image": "argument_victory.png", "titletext": "Really, the comforting side in most conspiracy theory arguments is the one claiming that anyone who's in power has any plan at all.", "transcript": ":[Cueball, looking right, is talking at his smartphone while holding it up in front of his head using both hands.]\n: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\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.]\n:Conspiracy theorist: It's sad how you buy into the official story so unquestioningly. \n:Conspiracy theorist: Guess some people ''prefer'' to stay asleep.\n\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.]\n:Cueball: Watch closely— I'm about to win this argument.\n:Conspiracy theorist (reply from phone): How?\n\n:[Cueball is sitting at the very top of a waterslide preparing to descend.]\n:Cueball: By ''going down a waterslide''.\n\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.]\n:Conspiracy theorist: So? What does that prove?\n:Cueball: ''Wheee..''\n\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.]\n:Conspiracy theorist: You didn't win the argument!\n:Cueball: ''...eeee!''\n:Cueball: ''Sploosh!''", "explanation": "Cueball is arguing with a conspiracy theorist who believes in some {{rw|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. \n\nCueball's opponent seems to ignore all reliable sources, like Snopes and Wikipedia on top of several Academic journal|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.\n[http://zapatopi.net/blackhelicopters/ The Truth about Black Helicopters] is a (satirical) example of one such website, supposedly explaining the truth behind government \"Black Helicopters\".\n \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 wikt:intransigent|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 ''[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/your-argument-is-invalid \"Your Argument is Invalid\"]'' meme.\n\nThe joke here is also in the title of the comic which is ''[http://imgur.com/EKkAXgR 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1082", "date": "July 16, 2012", "title": "Geology", "image": "geology.png", "titletext": "That's a gneiss butte.", "transcript": ":[Two people are doing a geological survey in a rock-strewn landscape. Megan pointing off at the ground, wearing a fedora, Cueball apparently comparing a paper/map with another patch.]\n:Megan: Forget the bedding - we were wrong about the whole valley.\n:Cueball: The spreading is recent.\n\n:[Close up on the figures: Megan in a thoughtful pose, Cueball turned her way.]\n:Megan: See the friction breccia?\n:Cueball: Oh - flow cleavage!\n:Cueball: Deeper in the rift.\n:Megan: Deeper.\n:[An idea pops into Megan's head.]\n\n:[Megan also turns to Cueball.]\n:Megan: This orogeny\n:Cueball: is driven by a\n:Megan: ''huge''\n:Cueball: ''thrust'' fault\n\n:[They both drop to the ground, off-panel, leaving only Megan's tumbling hat and a vocal effect.]\n:The couple: MMM\n:[Down from comic]: Geology: Surprisingly erotic.", "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.\n\nSpecifically, the suggestive terms are \"Bed (geology)|bedding,\" \"Extensional tectonics|spreading,\" \"friction,\" \"Cleavage (geology)|cleavage,\" \"deeper in the rift,\" \"orogeny,\" (perhaps a portmanteau of orgy and erogenous), \"huge,\" and \"Thrust fault|thrust.\"\n\nThe technical terms are:\n;Bedding : The division of usually sedimentary rock|sedimentary rocks into distinct layers.\n;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 ridge|mid-ocean ridges and in rift valley|rift valleys. \n;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.\n;Flow cleavage : The crystal|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.\n;Rift : A result of spreading is that rocks break, forming vertical faults, and allowing regions to sink and form valleys.\n;Orogeny : The process of mountain forming, or a period in which mountains are formed.\n;Thrust fault : A sloping crack in the rocks at which one region of rocks is pushing another up.\n\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.\n\nThe title text is a wordplay, as it could sound like \"nice butt\". Gneiss is a type of metamorphic rock made up of different bands, and a butte is an isolated hill with steep sides and a flat top that is smaller than a plateau. However, \"butte\" is not pronounced as \"butt\", but more like \"beaut\"."}
-{"number": "1083", "date": "July 18, 2012", "title": "Writing Styles", "image": "writing_styles.png", "titletext": "I liked the idea, suggested by h00k on bash.org, of a Twitter bot that messages prominent politicians to tell them when they've unnecessarily used sms-speak abbreviations despite having plenty of characters left.", "transcript": ":[This is a chart with the above two labeled columns. The rows will be represented below in the same format.]\n:If you post: you sound like\n:\"Ron Paul is the only candidate who offers us a real choice!\": A teenager\n:\"its gettin l8 so ill b here 4 prob 2 more hrs tops\": A senator\n:The internet has wound up in kind of a weird place.", "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 Short Message Service|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). Randall is poking fun at both the stereotypical Senator and at teenagers supporting Ron Paul.\n\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. \n\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!\". A 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\". \n\nThe title text discusses an idea that Randall approves of, [http://bash.org/?946687 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."}
-{"number": "1084", "date": "July 20, 2012", "title": "Server Problem", "image": "server_problem.png", "titletext": "Protip: Annoy Ray Kurzweil by always referring to it as the 'Cybersingularity'.", "transcript": ":[Cueball at his computer calls out for Megan who comes walking in to the frame.]\n:Cueball: I, um, messed up my server again.\n:Megan: I'll take a look. You have the ''weirdest'' tech problems.\n\n:[Zoom in on only Megan who uses the root prompt on the computer.]\n:
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 Rickrolling|trolls or practical jokes (see [https://bit.ly/IqT6zt 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.\n\n;February 29: The power to control the direction news anchors are looking while they talk\n:*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.\n\n;March 7: The power to introduce arbitrary error into Nate Silver's predictions\n:*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 may tighten Black Hat's control of the US even more.\n\n;March 15: A house of stairs\n:*This wish refers to the lithograph ''House of Stairs'' by M. C. Escher, or perhaps another of his lithographs, ''Relativity (M. C. Escher)|Relativity''.\n\n;March 23: A universe which is a replica of this one sans rules against meta-wishes\n:*Another attempt to circumvent the rules against wishing for more wishes by creating a parallel universe without such rules.\n\n;March 29: Free transportation to and from that universe\n:*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. He also requires it to be free, so money wouldn't be a problem.\n\n;April 2: A clear explanation of how wish rules are structured and enforced\n:*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 would help him finding loopholes in them.\n\n;April 7: The power to banish people into the TV show they are talking about\n:*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.\n\n;April 8: Zero wishes\n:*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:\n::* in many computer systems, 0 is reserved for unlimited or undefined\n::* 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.\n::* the number may be used as a divisor in some equation and this will make the system divide by zero and probably crash\n::* there also may be an assertion like \"number of wishes granted"}
-{"number": "1087", "date": "July 27, 2012", "title": "Cirith Ungol", "image": "cirith_ungol.png", "titletext": "My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'", "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.]\n\n:SOME PIG", "explanation": "This comic is a mash-up between the ''Lord of the Rings'' trilogy and the novel ''Charlotte's Web''.\n\nThe title Mordor#Ephel Duath|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.\n\nAnd therefore in this comic, Frodo (by himself, recognizable because he is holding the [https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Phial_of_Galadriel Phial of Galadriel] and the [https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/One_Ring 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.\n\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. \n\nThe second part of the title text is a [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title"}
-{"number": "1088", "date": "July 30, 2012", "title": "Five Years", "image": "five_years.png", "titletext": "'Well, no further questions. You're hired!' 'Oh, sorry! I'm no longer interested. There's a bunch of future I gotta go check out!'", "transcript": ":[Hairbun and Beret Guy sit across from each other at a desk.]\n:Hairbun : Where do you see yourself in five years? \n:Beret Guy: Oh man, I don't know! Let's find out!\n:[The characters stare at one another.]\n:[Cobwebs and hair grow; the desk and chairs fall into disrepair.]\n:[Five years pass.]\n:Beret Guy: Hah—\n:Beret Guy: I ''thought'' so!\n\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.\n\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.)\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1089", "date": "August 1, 2012", "title": "Internal Monologue", "image": "internal_monologue.png", "titletext": "Oh right, eye contact. Ok, good, holding the eye contact... holding... still holding... ok, too long! Getting weird! Quick, look thoughtfully into space and nod. Oh, dammit, said 'yeah' again!", "transcript": ":[The scene is a party. Two characters are talking - the entirety of the text is a thought bubble of one of the two.]\n: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''", "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.\n\nThe title text is a continuation of the internal monologue.\n\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\nThis situation is especially common and difficult for autistic people, and the learned (conscious or automated) effort to appear neurotypical is known as masking and is a near-constant source of mental drain for many. Small talk and appropriate eye contact, both mentioned in this comic, are well known to be difficult for many autistic people."}
-{"number": "1090", "date": "August 3, 2012", "title": "Formal Languages", "image": "formal_languages.png", "titletext": "[audience looks around] 'What just happened?' 'There must be some context we're missing.'", "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.]\n:Banner. 10th Annual Symposium on Formal Languages\n:''Crash''\n\n:[Cueball stops in front of Megan spreads out his hands and shouts:]\n:Cueball: Grammar!\n\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.]", "explanation": "This joke is a play on the phrase context-free grammar, which is a technical term used in formal languages|formal language theory.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1091", "date": "August 6, 2012", "title": "Curiosity", "image": "curiosity.png", "titletext": "As of this writing the NASA/JPL websites are still overloaded. Trying CURIOSITY-REAR-CAM_[256px_x_256px].torrent.SwEsUb.DVDRip.XviD-aXXo.jpg instead.", "transcript": ":[The Curiosity rover is lowered onto the Mars surface by a Sky Crane.]\n:'''Your excuse for anything today:'''\n:\"Sorry- \n:I was up all night trying to download photos taken by a robot lowered onto Mars by a Skycrane.\"\n\n{{", "explanation": "This comic is a reference to the Curiosity rover|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.\n\nThe title text is a reference to Torrent file|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"}
-{"number": "1092", "date": "August 8, 2012", "title": "Michael Phelps", "image": "michael_phelps.png", "titletext": "[shortly] ...he ate ALL of it!?", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball standing outside their en-Phelps-ified swimming pool.]\n:Cueball: Why is Michael Phelps in your backyard pool?\n:Megan: I don't know. He's been there all day. ''Go home, Michael!''\n:Michael Phelps: Woo! 18 gold medals!\n\n:[Megan and Cueball break out a pair of pool nets and unsuccessfully try to snag Phelps.]\n:Cueball: Can you get him?\n:Megan: He's so '''''fast'''''!\n:Phelps: Ha hah! Can't catch me!\n:''Splash splash''\n\n:[Cueball heads off to fetch something.]\n\n:[Cueball returns with a hand truck full of Jello mix.]\n:Phelps: Oh crap.\n\n{{", "explanation": "Michael Phelps is an American Olympics|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.\n\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.\n\nHowever, according to the title text, after having waited the time necessary for the water to gelify (roughly 2 to 4 hours), Cueball realizes that Phelps has eaten all of the resulting Jello. This adds yet another level of absurdity to the situation. This may be a reference to Phelps being used to eating [https://web.archive.org/web/20101113024452/http://www.michaelphelps.net/michael-phelps-diet/ impressive food quantities (about 10,000 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, 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.\n\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\nThe title text may be referenced by 1628: Magnus, where people are thrown into strange contests with others, for example a hot dog-eating contest against the championship race horse Secretariat."}
-{"number": "1093", "date": "August 10, 2012", "title": "Forget", "image": "forget.png", "titletext": "'Baby Got Back' turned 20 this year. My favorite nostalgia show is VH1's 'I Love The Inexorable March of Time Toward the Grave That Awaits Us All.'", "transcript": ":'''When Will We Forget?'''\n:Based on US Census Bureau ''National Population Projections''\n:Assuming we don't remember cultural events from before age 5 or 6\n\n:By this year: The majority of Americans will be too young to remember:\n:2012: The seventies\n:2013: The Carter presidency\n:2014: The Reagan shooting\n:2015: The Falkland Islands war\n:2016: ''The return of the Jedi'' release\n:2017: The first Apple Macintosh\n:2018: New Coke\n:2019: ''Challenger''\n:2020: Chernobyl\n:2021: Black Monday\n:2022: The Reagan presidency\n:2023: The Berlin Wall\n:2024: HammerTime\n:2025: The Soviet Union\n:2026: The LA Riots\n:2027: Lorena Bobbit\n:2028: The ''Forrest Gump'' release\n:2029: The Rwanda Genocide\n:2030: OJ Simpson's Trial\n:2031: Clinton's reelection\n:2032: Princess Diana\n:2033: Clinton's impeachment\n:2034: Columbine\n:2035: ''Forgot About Dre''\n:2036: 9/11\n:2037: VH1's ''I love the 80s''\n:2038: A time before Facebook\n:2039: VH1's ''I love the 90s''\n:2040: Hurricane Katrina\n:2041: The planet Pluto\n:2042: The first iPhone\n:2043: The Bush presidency\n:2044: Michael Jackson\n:2045: Trying to say ´´Eyjafjallajökull``\n:2046: The Arab Spring\n:2047: Anything embarrassing you do today", "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).\n\n'''2013: 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.\n\n'''2014: The Reagan shooting''' References the 1981 Reagan assassination attempt|assassination attempt on the then American president, Ronald Reagan.\n\n'''2015: The Falkland Islands War''' This is in reference to the Falklands War|brief outbreak of hostilities between the UK and Argentina over the Falkland Islands|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.\n\n'''2016: ''Return of the Jedi'' release''' ''Return of the Jedi'' was the 3rd film in the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy, released in 1983.\n\n'''2017: The first Apple Macintosh''' The Macintosh was a line of computers created by Apple Inc.|Apple, first introduced in 1984, with the Macintosh 128K.\n\n'''2018: 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.\n\n'''2019: Challenger''' The Space Shuttle Challenger|Challenger was a Space Shuttle orbiter, which was launched in 1986, but Space Shuttle Challenger disaster|exploded 72 seconds into its flight, killing everyone aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, a teacher selected to be the first teacher in space.\n\n'''2020: Chernobyl''' Refers to the 1986 meltdown of a Chernobyl|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.\n\n'''2021: Black Monday''' Refers to the 1987 Black Monday (1987)|day of the largest one-day stock market drop in history.\n\n'''2022: 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–Contra affair, Invasion of Grenada|invading Grenada, and issuing forth a number of new Reaganomics|economic policies.\n\n'''2023: The Berlin Wall''' Refers to the Berlin Wall|barrier surrounding the Anglo-French-controlled part of Berlin. It was erected by the East Germany|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.\n\n'''2024: HammerTime''' Refers to a refrain in MC Hammer|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).\n\n'''2025: 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.\n\n'''2026: The LA Riots''' Refers to the 1992 Los Angeles riots|massive riots occurring at the release of the verdict acquitting the officers accused of the Rodney King beatings in 1992.\n\n'''2027: Lorena Bobbit''' Refers to the John and Lorena Bobbitt|woman who emasculated her husband in 1993.\n\n'''2028: 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.\n\n'''2029: The Rwanda Genocide''' Refers to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where an estimated 800,000 people were killed.\n\n'''2030: OJ Simpson's Trial''' The O. J. Simpson murder case|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.\n\n'''2031: Clinton's reelection''' Bill Clinton was the American president from 1993 to 2001. He won his second term in the United States presidential election, 1996|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.\n\n'''2032: Princess Diana''' Princess Diana was a famous Commonwealth princess who made headlines after her 1997 Death of Diana, Princess of Wales|death in a car crash.\n\n'''2033: Clinton's impeachment''' In 1998, the American Congress voted to Impeachment of Bill Clinton|impeach then-president Clinton, based on allegations that he Lewinsky scandal|lied about relations with a Monica Lewinsky|White House intern. He was later acquitted.\n\n'''2034: Columbine''' Refers to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, where 13 people were killed by a Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold|pair of shooters.\n\n'''2035: 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.\n\n'''2036: 9/11''' Refers to the September 11 attacks in 2001, where terrorists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center (1973–2001)|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).\n\n'''2037: VH1's I love the 80s''' ''I Love the '80s (U.S. TV series)|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.\n\n'''2038: A time before Facebook''' Refers to the online social media site, Facebook, launched in 2004.\n\n'''2039: VH1's I love the 90s''' ''I Love the '90s (U.S. TV series)|I Love the '90s'' was a TV series airing in 2004.\n\n'''2040: Hurricane Katrina''' Hurricane Katrina was a devastating 2005 hurricane that hit New Orleans, killing almost 2000 people and causing 81 billion dollars in damage.\n\n'''2041: The planet Pluto''' Pluto is a dwarf planet in our solar system. Up until 2006, Pluto was considered to be a planet.\n\n'''2042: The first iPhone''' Apple's first iPhone was released in 2007.\n\n'''2043: The Bush presidency''' George W. Bush was the American president from 2001 to 2009. He was criticized for the wars on War in Afghanistan (2001%E2%80%93present)|Afghanistan and Iraq War|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.\n\n'''2044: Michael Jackson''' Refers to the Michael Jackson|pop singer who died of drug overdose in 2009.\n\n'''2045: Trying to say Eyjafjallajökull''' Is a reference to a volcano in Iceland that Eyjafjallajökull#2010 eruptions|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.\n\n'''2046: The Arab Spring''' Refers to the Arab Spring|wave of revolutions that began in late 2010, where many Arabic nations overthrew leaders and started civil wars, with many nations converting to democracies.\n\n'''2047: 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}}\n\nThe title text is in reference to the vastly over-saturated programming on VH1 dedicated to the history of the TV universe."}
-{"number": "1094", "date": "August 13, 2012", "title": "Interview", "image": "interview.png", "titletext": "Hey, before you go, can you explain to me what job I now have?", "transcript": ":[Black Hat is interviewed by Hairy.]\n:Hairy: ...but thank you for applying. We'll keep your résumé on file.\n\n:[Black Hat pushes a suitcase over the table.]\n:Black Hat: Perhaps ''this'' could change your mind?\n\n:[Hairy opens the suitcase.]\n:''Click''\n\n:[Hairy lifts open the top.]\n\n:[Camera pans over the suitcase to reveal a deep hole.]\n\n:[Camera zooms into the hole.]\n\n:[Hairy is falling into the hole.]\n:Hairy: AAAAAA\n\n:[Hairy falls into a chair with the suitcase falling on his lap.]\n:''THUMP''\n\n:[Hairy is dazed, and is being interviewed by Black Hat.]\n:Black Hat: ...but thank you for applying. We'll keep your résumé on file.\n\n:[Hairy looks confused.]\n:Hairy: !??!\n\n:[Hairy looks at the suitcase.]\n\n:[Hairy pushes the suitcase over the table.]\n:Hairy: Perhaps ''this'' could change your mind?\n\n:[Black Hat opens the suitcase.]\n:''Click''\n\n:[Black Hat looks inside.]\n\n:[Black Hat turns the suitcase around.]\n:Black Hat: I'm sorry—\n\n:[The suitcase is now filled with paper.]\n:Black Hat: —that opening has been filled.\n\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, Hairy, tells Black Hat exactly that.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThere's a possible second meaning to the phrase \"perhaps this could change your mind;\" it may be that Black Hat and Hairy have quite literally swapped minds, thus why Black Hat is suddenly sitting in the interviewer's seat and finishing the interview and Hairy is sitting in the interviewee's seat being interviewed. The chasm inside the briefcase may have been a hallucination Hairy experienced whilst his mind was being swapped with Black Hat's.\n\n:Category:Job interviews|Job interviews are a recurring topic on xkcd."}
-{"number": "1095", "date": "August 15, 2012", "title": "Crazy Straws", "image": "crazy_straws.png", "titletext": "The new crowd is heavily shaped by this guy named Eric, who's basically the Paris Hilton of the amateur plastic crazy straw design world.", "transcript": ":[Two people hang out with some beverages. Cueball here has a bright green crazy straw.]\n: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''.\n:Cueball: The hobbyist mailing lists are full of drama, with friction between the regulars and a splinter group focused on loops...\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Human subcultures are nested fractally. There's no bottom.", "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.\n\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.{{Citation needed}} The claim that it is infinite is hyperbole.\n\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. 915: Connoisseur| An earlier comic covers a similar topic.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1096", "date": "August 17, 2012", "title": "Clinically Studied Ingredient", "image": "clinically_studied_ingredient.png", "titletext": "Blatantly banking on customers not understanding that it's like a Hollywood studio advertising that their new movie was 'watched by Roger Ebert'.", "transcript": ":I can't help but admire the audacity of the marketer who came up with the phrase \"contains a clinically studied ingredient\"\n\n:[Cueball is sat on a bed, talking to a curly-haired woman standing close by.]\n:Woman: Don't worry - I've been tested.\n:Cueball: ...and you're clean?\n:Woman: So many questions!", "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 False advertising|deceptive marketing techniques, leading consumers to believe something which encourages them to buy the product, without committing to saying it explicitly.\n\nIn the middle of the conversation, a woman tells Cueball that she has been tested, presumably for Sexually transmitted diseases. 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.\n\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, does not necessarily mean that he liked it.\n\nImpressive-sounding but meaningless advertisement claims are also the subject of 624: Branding, 641: Free, 870: Advertising and 993: Brand Identity."}
-{"number": "1097", "date": "August 20, 2012", "title": "A Hypochondriac's Nightmare", "image": "a_hypochondriacs_nightmare.png", "titletext": "BUT WHAT IF I REASSURE MYSELF WITH A JOKE AND THEN DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE RASH AND IT TURNS OUT TO BE DEATH MITES AND I COULD HAVE CAUGHT IT", "transcript": ":[Cueball at an airport slips on a banana peel and gets sucked into a nearby jet engine.]\n:Cueball (thinking): Seriously!? '''''This''''' is what gets me? I wasted so many hours on WebMD worrying about the rash on my arm!", "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.\n\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?"}
-{"number": "1098", "date": "August 22, 2012", "title": "Star Ratings", "image": "star_ratings.png", "titletext": "I got lost and wandered into the world's creepiest cemetery, where the headstones just had names and star ratings. Freaked me out. When I got home I tried to leave the cemetery a bad review on Yelp, but as my hand hovered over the 'one star' button I felt this distant chill...", "transcript": ":Understanding online star ratings:\n\n:5 stars: [Has only one review]\n:4.5 stars: Excellent\n:4 stars: OK\n:3.5-1 star: Crap", "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-and-a-half stars is supposed to be \"good\" and anything below 3-and-a-half stars is \"bad\". However, most people consider a four star rating to be \"OK\", and everything below as \"crap\". \n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1099", "date": "August 24, 2012", "title": "Tuesdays", "image": "tuesdays.png", "titletext": "Try our bottomless drinks and fall forever!", "transcript": ":[Ponytail serves Beret Guy and somebody else at a table.]\n:Ponytail: ...and on Tuesdays we offer endless wings.\n:Beret Guy: Haha, cool.\n:Beret Guy: i have those.\n\n:Ponytail: You what?\n\n:[Beret Guy sprouts a pair of wings.]\n:Ponytail: ''AAAAA!!''\n\n:[Beret Guy's wings start getting longer.]\n:Ponytail and Other person beret guy is sitting with: ''AAAAAAA''\n\n:[Wings start to extend into space out from the earth.]\n:Everyone: ''AAAAAAAA''", "explanation": "Beret Guy and at least one other person (Megan, Danish, Hairbun or Jill) 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThis is one of the few :Category:"}
-{"number": "1100", "date": "August 27, 2012", "title": "Vows", "image": "vows.png", "titletext": "So, um. Do you want to get a drink after the game?", "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.]\n:Officiator (off panel): Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband?\n:Bride ('Amy'): ...No.\n\n:[Cueball steps back in surprise. The bride removes a wig to reveal that she is in fact a Cueball-like man.]\n:Groom: ''What? Amy!?''\n:Man: I'm not Amy. None of this was real. You're back in senior year. It's the big game.\n\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.]\n:Cueball: What ''is'' this!?\n:Man: ''The greatest high school football misdirection play of all time.''\n\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\n:[Cueball remains frozen in horror as the man turns and dashes toward the goalpost in the distance.]", "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.\n\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 American_football_positions|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_(gridiron_football)|punt end up being attempted to get a Down_(gridiron_football)|down.\n\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''. {{cn}}\n\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.\n\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.\""}
-{"number": "1101", "date": "August 29, 2012", "title": "Sketchiness", "image": "sketchiness.png", "titletext": "factory --- spire --- onslaught --- extractor --- judge", "transcript": ":[A timeline style graph.]\n:'''WORDS'''\n:Arranged by how sketchy they make the sentence\n:'''´´HEY BABY, WANNA COME BACK TO MY SEX ________?``'''\n:sketchy <--------> very sketchy\n:party --- orgy --- dungeon --- palace --- house --- shrine --- room --- basement --- truck --- platform --- van --- area --- crate --- chute --- ravine --- tarp", "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. [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term"}
-{"number": "1102", "date": "August 31, 2012", "title": "Fastest-Growing", "image": "fastest_growing.png", "titletext": "I lead a small but extraordinarily persuasive religion whose only members are door-to-door proselytizers from other faiths.", "transcript": ":[A man with a combover, a book, and a clipboard approaches Black Hat.]\n:Combover: You should check us out. We're the fastest-growing religion in the country.\n:Black Hat: \"Fastest-growing\" is such a dubious claim.\n:Combover: It's true! We grew by 85% over the past year.\n\n:[In a frameless panel, Black Hat shouts to Rob, out of frame.]\n:Black Hat: Hey, Rob — wanna join my religion?\n:Rob's off-frame voice: Sure, whatever.\n\n:[Black Hat turns back to Combover and produces a notepad and pen.]\n:Black Hat: Well, looks like my religion grew by 100% this year.\n\n:[Black Hat begins to walk away.]\n:Combover: We have 38,000 members!\n:Black Hat: Hope they're all ok with second place.", "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.\n\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 38,000 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.\n\nThe title text ponders the ironic idea of converting ''only'' the zealous door-to-door Proselytism|proselytizers to a very persuasive religion of one's own.\n\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.\n\nVarious religions and groups encourage their members to actively recruit new followers, such as the Mormon missionary (or \"Missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints\", to use their own more acceptable full name)."}
-{"number": "1103", "date": "September 03, 2012", "title": "Nine", "image": "nine.png", "titletext": "FYI: If you get curious and start trying to calculate the time adjustment function that minimizes the gap between the most-used and least-used digit (for a representative sample of common cook times) without altering any time by more than 10%, and someone asks you what you are doing, it is easier to just lie.", "transcript": ":[Cueball stands at a microwave, which hangs on the wall above the stove.]\n:Cueball: How long do you zap these?\n:Character off-frame: Two minutes.\n:Cueball: Thanks!\n:[Buttons being pushed.]\n:*Beep* 1\n:*Beep* 5\n:*Beep* 9\n:Cueball:'' It's ok, nine.'' \n:Cueball:'' You are not forgotten.''\n\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:Ever since I heard the simile \"As neglected as the nine button on the microwave.\" I've found myself adjusting cook times.", "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.\n\nAlso, in Randall|Randall's book Thing Explainer|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 to the United States Constitution|Ninth Amendment) \"Change After Eight\". This shows how the other numbers are used much more than nine.\n\nThe title text is reminiscent of comic 245: Floor Tiles."}
-{"number": "1104", "date": "September 05, 2012", "title": "Feathers", "image": "feathers.png", "titletext": "Click to see a video of a modern bird using stability flapping during predatory behavior. It all fits! Also, apparently Microraptor had *four* wings? The past keeps getting cooler! (And there's more of it every day!)", "transcript": ":[Megan is walking up to Jill with a bow in her hair bun. Jill has a stack of three books in front of her, is reading another book and a fifth book lies behind her on the floor.]\n:Megan: What are you reading about?\n:Jill: Dinosaurs!\n:Megan: Oh, yeah.\n\n:[Zoom out of the same scene, with Megan standing and Jill looking up at her.]\n:Megan: They've gotten all weird since when I was a kid.\n:Megan: They used to be awesome, but now they all have dorky feathers, right?\n:Jill: Yup!\n\n:[Same scene in a frame-less panel. Jill looks down and below the two characters there is a footnote.]\n:Jill: 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.\n:*Fowler et. al., PLoS ONE 6(12), 2011\n\n:[Zoom in on the same scene, the book on the floor is outside the panel. Megan just stands staring at Jill who reads on. Beat panel.]\n\n:[Megan is now on the floor next to Jill flipping through the top book she has taken from the pile.]", "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 (film)|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 \":Category:Velociraptors|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.\n\n[http://denverfowler.com/ Denver W. Fowler] is among the scientists who support this hypothesis. (incidentally, a \"Fowler\" is a hunter of wildfowl/birds) The comic refers to [http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0028964 a publication by him and his colleagues] (\"{{Wiktionary|et al.}}\"), in the ''PLoS ONE'', an online scientific journal (\"PLoS\" stands for \"Public Library of Science\").\n\nMegan believes this new model of the appearance of raptors makes them much less cool, but the way in which Jill 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.)\n\nClicking on the original cartoon links to [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1105", "date": "September 7, 2012", "title": "License Plate", "image": "license_plate.png", "titletext": "The next day: 'What? Six bank robberies!? But I just vandalized the library!' 'Nice try. They saw your plate with all the 1's and I's.' 'That's impossible! I've been with my car the whole ti-- ... wait. Ok, wow, that was clever of her.'", "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).]\n:Cueball: Check out my personalized license plate!\n:Megan (off-panel): \"1I1-III1\"?\n:Cueball: It's perfect!\n:Plate: III-IIII\n\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.]\n:Cueball: No one will be able to correctly record my plate number!\n:Cueball: I can commit any crime I want!\n:Megan: Sounds foolproof.\n\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:]\n:Soon:\n:Witness: The thief's license plate was all \"1\"s or something.\n:Police officer: Oh. ''That'' guy.\n:Ponytail: His address is on a post-it in the squad car.\n:Yellow strip (text not visible in brackets): Poli[ce strip] do not cross [poli]ce stri[p do not] cross.", "explanation": "Cueball has obtained a new Vehicle registration plate|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.\n\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.\n\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. \n\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.)\n\n[http://imgur.com/jaiblHk Someone in New Hampshire appears to have done this in real life.]\n\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. \n\nKnowing that the police will assume the car is his, she has thus frameup|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.\n\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.\n\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''.)"}
-{"number": "1106", "date": "September 10, 2012", "title": "ADD", "image": "add.png", "titletext": "20 balloons float away while I'm busy permanently tying one to a tree to deal with it for good. Unfortunately, that one balloon was 'land a rocket on the moon in Kerbal Space Program.'", "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\n:[Cueball is now holding both balloons, but looks over his shoulder and sees a balloon that reads \"Check Oven\".]\n:Cueball: ''!!''\n\n:[Cueball releases the balloons he had been holding and runs for the third.]\n\n:[Cueball jumps for the \"Check Oven\" balloon and snatches it just before it is out of reach.]\n:''LEAP''\n:Cueball: Hah!\n\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]\n:*Parking Meter - blue\n:*Taxes - green\n:*Buy Soap - red\n:*Phone Call - green\n:*Relax - yellow\n:*Inbox - blue\n:*Clean - red\n:*Beat Game - green\n:*Feed Cat - yellow\n:*Drink Water - blue\n:*Call Mom - red\n:*Math Problem - green\n:*Send Card - red\n:*Check Oven (Cueball is holding this one still) - yellow\n:*Engine Light - yellow\n:*Read - blue\n:*Breathe - blue", "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\".\n\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 — the task is to land a rocket on the moon (Mun) in ''Kerbal Space Program'', a PC-based spaceflight simulator and video game. Additional humor 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."}
-{"number": "1107", "date": "September 12, 2012", "title": "Sports Cheat Sheet", "image": "sports_cheat_sheet.png", "titletext": "I would subscribe to a Twitter feed that supplied you with one reasonable sports opinion per day, like \"The Red Sox can't make the playoffs (championship games), but in last night's game their win seriously damaged the chances of the Yankees (longstanding rival team).\"", "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.]\n\n:'''Which sport are they arguing about?'''\n:-My cheat sheet-\n\n:[The second column, reproduced using approximate dates.]\n:US:\n:Football [ovoid ball drawn in brackets]: January 1 - February 10\n:Basketball: February 10 - April 20\n:Baseball: April 20 - May 25\n:Basketball: May 25 - June 15\n:Baseball: June 15 - August 20\n:Football [ovoid]: August 20 - October 5\n:Baseball: October 5 - October 20\n:Football [ovoid]: October 20 - December 31\n\n:[The third column, reproduced using approximate dates.]\n:non-US:\n:Football [truncated icosahedron, 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons]: January 1 - December 31", "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.\n\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.\n\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).\n\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 (1819: Sweet 16|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.\n\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. Of course, in reality, most countries have seasonal sports besides football, which may range from cricket to ice skating. However, non-American sporting events are unlikely to be brought up in the United States, and when they do it is very often association football as its active seasons are potentially long and overlapping (being played in both hemispheres and across most latitudes).\n\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.\n\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.)\n\nTraditionally, the Red Sox and the Yankees have a Yankees–Red Sox rivalry|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.\n\nFor those with less interest in either depicted form of 'football', there are several other Australian rules football|local or Rugby football|global varieties that could be discussed, as there are also other world-spanning sports that may provide a significantly Cricket season|seasonal or year-round interest for their adherents. From Randall's own perspective, however, they are perhaps unlikely to feature prominently enough in observed conversations to need mentioning in this simplified cheatsheet, or form the basis of useful 'opinion hints' along the lines of the baseball one. Other people, especially outside the US, could probably make use of significantly different versions (''possibly'' still dominated by soccer, at least in the non-local scope).\n\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)."}
-{"number": "1108", "date": "September 14, 2012", "title": "Cautionary Ghost", "image": "cautionary_ghost.png", "titletext": "But then the Ghost of Subjunctive Past showed up and told me to stay strong on 'if it were'.", "transcript": ":[A man wakes up to an apparition hovering over his bed.]\n:Apparition: ''ooOOOOOOOOOOooooo''\n:Man: A ghost!?\n:Apparition: ''I bring a '''cautionary vision''' of things to come!''\n\n:Apparition: This is the future:\n:[Two people are standing between a pair of houses. There is a tree. An airplane flies past.]\n\n:Apparition: And '''''this''''' is the future if you give up the fight over the word \"literally\":\n:[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\n:[Back to the man in bed.]\n:Man: They looked exactly the same.\n:Apparition: ''ooOOOOOOOOOOOooo''\n:Man: Ok, I get it.\n:Apparition: Seriously, this is duuuuumb.", "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.\n\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.\"\n\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.\n\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 English subjunctive#Use of the past subjunctive|'Subjunctive past tense'. The following sentences illustrate the correct usages:\n*If I were rich, I wouldn't have to work for a living.\n*When I was rich, I didn't have to work for a living.\n\nAnother xkcd comic, 725: Literally, also refers to the overly mocked usage of \"literally.\"\n\nA similar ghost is seen in 1393: Timeghost, where it reminds Cueball about the passing of time, and 2836: A Halloween Carol similarly parodies Dickens's ''A Christmas Carol''."}
-{"number": "1109", "date": "September 17, 2012", "title": "Refrigerator", "image": "refrigerator.png", "titletext": "I want this engraved on my tombstone like the Epitaph of Stevinus.", "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.\"]\n:'''Top conveyor belt''': 3 days ^ 2 days ^ 24 hours ^ 12 hours ^\n:'''Middle conveyor belt''': 1 W ^ 5 days ^ 3 days ^ 2 days ^ 1 day ^\n:'''Bottom conveyor belt''': 3 M ^ 2 months ^ 1 month ^ 2 weeks ^\n:'''Door conveyor belt''': 3 days ^ 1 week ^ 2 weeks ^", "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.\n\nThe title text is a reference to Simon Stevin|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."}
-{"number": "1110", "date": "September 19, 2012", "title": "Click and Drag", "image": "click_and_drag.png", "titletext": "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\n:[Cueball is narrating the story, all the text is written in boxes above and below him without speech lines connecting to him.]\n:[Cueball is floating by holding onto a balloon with one hand.]\n:From the stories\n:I expected the world to be sad\n:And it was\n\n:[Cueball has grabbed hold of the balloon with both hands.]\n:And I expected it to be wonderful.\n\n:[The wind picks up and blows Cueball to the right.]\n:It was.\n\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.]\n:I just didn't expect it to be so ''big''.\n\n:[The rest of the comic is transcribed below in the 1110: Click and Drag#List of details and references (with transcript)|List of details and references section.]", "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.\n\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.\n\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 356: Nerd Sniping|nerd sniping).\n\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.\n\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.\n\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''.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1111", "date": "September 21, 2012", "title": "Premiere", "image": "premiere.png", "titletext": "'But what's the buzz about the film?' 'We're hoping it's distracting.'", "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.]\n:Hairy: All Hollywood is in town for tonight's star-studded premiere! We go live to our reporter on the red carpet. \n:Hairy: How do things look?\n:Title: Red Carpet ''Report''\n\n:[Megan switches to full-screen. Megan is standing in front of a full crowd of Cueball heads who are behind a typical fancy rope barrier between posts, one of which is visible behind her. She holds a large microphone up to her face.]\n:Megan: Bleak. \n:Megan: In 800 million years the aging, brightening Sun will boil away the oceans, and all this will be blowing sand.\n\n:[Switch back to initial framing with Hairy moving his arms further away from himself and Megan now with the microphone visible.]\n:Hairy: Oh. Um. ...Sounds pretty grim. How are the stars reacting?\n:Megan: Hydrogen fusion. But it won't last forever.\n:Hairy: I mean the ''movie'' stars.\n:Megan: They won't last forever either. None of us will.\n:Title: Red Carpet ''Report''", "explanation": "This comic depicts an entertainment news television program. Hairy, as the :Category:News anchor|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.\n\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. \n\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 Future of the Earth|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 Future_of_the_Earth#Loss_of_oceans|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 [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2523012/Good-news-Planet-Earth-gets-extra-850-million-years-oceans-boil-away-scientists-expand-Goldilocks-zone.html article] from 2013 that states 850 million years. (The loss of oceans will still happen long before the sun Sun#After_core_hydrogen_exhaustion|turns into a red giant in about 5 billion years). \n\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 Star#Collapse|die when there is not enough hydrogen (or other heavier atoms) to continue the fusion process that keeps the stars stable. \n\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 :Category:"}
-{"number": "1112", "date": "September 24, 2012", "title": "Think Logically", "image": "think_logically.png", "titletext": "I've developed a more logical set of rules but the people on the chess community have a bunch of stupid emotional biases and won't reply to my posts.", "transcript": ":[Knit Cap is sitting down at a computer touching the keyboard with one hand. Cueball is standing behind watching the screen.]\n:Laptop: ''*Move*''\n:Cueball: Why'd you move your knight away?\n\n:[Knit Cap turns around and rests an arm on the chair looking at Cueball who holds out both arms.]\n:Cueball: Just think ''logically''. The goal is checkmate, so you should always move pieces ''toward'' the other player's king.\n\n:[Closeup of Cueball holding a hand to his chin.]\n:Cueball: I guess occasionally you need to move backward, but it'd be trivial to make a list of those circumstances and-\n\n:[Knit Cap is leaning back in chair facing Cueball, panel is so slim that the lap top is not included.]\n:Knit Cap: Have you ever ''played'' chess?\n:Cueball: Not much, but—\n:Knit Cap: Wanna?\n:Cueball: Uh, ok.\n\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]\n:*Move*\n: candidate has won the election without \"\n:Or\n:\"No president has been reelected under \"\n\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.]\n:1788... No one has been elected president before. ...But Washington was.\n:1792... No incumbent has ever been reelected. ...Until Washington.\n:1796... No one without false teeth has become president. ...But Adams did.\n:1800... No challenger has beaten an incumbent. ...But Jefferson did.\n:1804... No incumbent has beaten a challenger. ...Until Jefferson.\n:1808... No congressman has ever become president. ...Until Madison.\n:1812... No one can win without New York. ...But Madison did.\n:1816... No candidate who doesn't wear a wig can get elected. ...Until Monroe was.\n:1820... No one who wears pants instead of breeches can be reelected. ...But Monroe was.\n:1824... No one has ever won without a popular majority. ...J.Q. Adams did.\n:1828... Only people from Massachusetts and Virginia can win. ...Until Jackson did.\n:1832... The only presidents who get reelected are Virginians. ...Until Jackson.\n:1836... New Yorkers always lose. ...Until Van Buren.\n:1840... No one over 65 has won the presidency. ...Until Harrison did.\n:1844... No one who's lost his home state has won. ...But Polk did.\n:1848... As goes Mississippi, so goes the nation. ...Until 1848.\n:1852... New England Democrats can't win. ...Until Pierce did.\n:1856... No one can become president without getting married. ...Until Buchanan did.\n:1860... No one over 6'3\" can get elected. ...Until Lincoln.\n:1864... No one with a beard has been reelected. ...But Lincoln was.\n:1868... No one can be president if their parents are alive. ...Until Grant.\n:1872... No one with a beard has been reelected in peacetime. ...Until Grant was.\n:1876... No one can win a majority of the popular vote and still lose. ...Tilden did.\n:1880... As goes California, so goes the nation. ...Until it went Hancock.\n:1884... Candidates named \"James\" can't lose. ...Until James Blaine.\n:1888... No sitting president has been beaten since the Civil War. ...Cleveland was.\n:1892... No former president has been elected. ...Until Cleveland.\n:1896... Tall Midwesterners are unbeatable. ...Bryan wasn't.\n:1900... No Republican shorter than 5'8\" has been reelected. ...Until McKinley was.\n:1904... No one under 45 has been elected. ...Roosevelt did.\n:1908... No Republican who hasn't served in the military has won. ...Until Taft.\n:[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.\n:1916... No Democrat has won while losing West Virginia. ...Wilson did.\n:1920... No incumbent senator has won. ...Until Harding.\n:1924... No one with two Cs in their name has become president. ...Until Calvin Coolidge.\n:1928... No one who got ten million votes has lost. ...Until Al Smith.\n:1932... No Democrat has won since women secured the right to vote. ...Until FDR did.\n:1936... No president's been reelected with double-digit unemployment. ...Until FDR was.\n:1940... No one has won a third term. ...Until FDR did.\n:1944... No Democrat has won during wartime. ...Until FDR did.\n:1948... Democrats can't win without Alabama. ...Truman did.\n:1952... No Republican has won without winning the House or Senate. ...Eisenhower did.\n:1956... No one can beat the same nominee a second time in a leap year rematch. ...Until Eisenhower.\n:1960... Catholics can't win. ...Until Kennedy.\n:1964... Every Republican who's taken Louisiana has won. ...Until Goldwater.\n:[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.\n:[The panel is zoomed in on Cueball's head in this frame.] 1972... Quakers can't win twice. ...Until Nixon did.\n:1976... No one who lost New Mexico has won. ...But Carter did.\n:1980... No one has been elected president after a divorce. ...Until Reagan was.\n:1984... No left-handed president has been reelected. ...Until Reagan was.\n:[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\".\n:[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.\n:[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.\n:2000... No Republican has won without Vermont. ...Until Bush did.\n:[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.\n:2008... No Democrat can win without Missouri. ...Until Obama did.\n:[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\nCategory:", "explanation": "During election season in U.S. presidential elections — and especially in election night coverage — it is common for the media to make comments like the ones set out in the first panel of this comic. Randall Munroe|Randall is demonstrating the problem with making such statements, many of which simply come down to coincidence.\n\nAfter the first panel the next 56 panels in this comic refer to each one of the United States presidential election#Electoral college results|56 presidential elections in U.S. history before Barack Obama|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).\n\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 Correlation does not imply causation|cause or effect.\n\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.\n\nIn the last two panels, two more statements like the previous are given. They were both true before the United States presidential election, 2012|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nIn 2020, Randall posted an update to this comic: 2383: Electoral Precedent 2020."}
-{"number": "1123", "date": "October 19, 2012", "title": "The Universal Label", "image": "the_universal_label.png", "titletext": "Works for any grocery or non-grocery. Even thyme is just H and time.", "transcript": ":'''Ingredients:'''\n:Hydrogen, Time", "explanation": "All matter in the universe (heavier than Isotopes_of_lithium#Lithium-7|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 [http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/3280.html Making Atoms]. \n\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 Big Bang#Abundance of primordial elements|about 25% of the non-dark mass in the universe comes from helium created shortly after the Big Bang. (See also the later comic 2723: Outdated Periodic Table about which atoms were around after the Big Bang).\n\nIn 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.\n\nIn many countries, food products must have their Nutrition facts label|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 [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/universal 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.\n\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.\n\nRandall previously made a joke on the fact that thyme and time are homophones in 282: Organic Fuel.\n\nLater he made a reference to primordial hydrogen in the title text of 2778: Cuisine."}
-{"number": "1124", "date": "October 22, 2012", "title": "Law of Drama", "image": "law_of_drama.png", "titletext": "'Drama' is just 'people being upset,' when someone says they're always surrounded by drama and they just ignore it, it starts to make sense that their strategy might be backfiring.", "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.]", "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 552: Correlation|correlation does not imply causation, it might be a leap — at least scientifically speaking — to actually surmise that they're the cause of it. The fact that merely postulating a rule without telling if the creator of the rule is causing or avoiding drama didn't cause much drama in this wiki might be a (albeit weak) clue that the claim might actually be correct. \n\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."}
-{"number": "1125", "date": "October 24, 2012", "title": "Objects In Mirror", "image": "objects_in_mirror.png", "titletext": "Universes in mirror, like those in windshield, are larger than they appear.", "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.\"]\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Edwin Hubble's car", "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.\n\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.\n\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.)\n\nEdwin Hubble was an astronomer credited (Stigler's law of eponymy|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1126", "date": "October 26, 2012", "title": "Epsilon and Zeta", "image": "epsilon_and_zeta.png", "titletext": "The average error in the NHC forecasted position of a hurricane three days in the future has shrunk to a third of what it was in 1990—a staggering accomplishment. However, as you may have gathered, forecasts of future storm *strength* have proved more difficult to improve.", "transcript": ":'''THE SAGA OF EPSILON AND ZETA'''\n: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.\n:The forecasters at the National Hurricane Center are the best of the best.\n:Their predictions are masterpieces of professional analysis. But in November 2005, out in the center of the Atlantic — far from any land — the atmosphere stopped making sense.\n:And the forecasters — who'd expected the season to be long over by now — started to get a little
...unhinged.\n:This is their story, as seen through the actual 2005 NHC Advisories:\n\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.]\n:Tuesday, November 29th, 2005: Tropical Storm Epsilon ... The 26th named storm of the apparently never ending 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.\n\n:[The same scene, different text.]\n: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\n:[The man with hair now has questions marks above his head.]\n:4 AM Fri: Epsilon does not appear weaker. 10 AM Fri: Epsilon has been upgraded to a 65-kt hurricane.\n\n:[The two still sit back-to-back.]\n: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\n:[The two still sit back-to-back.]\n: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\n:[The two still sit back-to-back. The man with hair's fists are clenched.] :10 AM Sun: Morning satellite images indicate that Epsilon has restrengthened.\n\n:[A closer view of just the balding man at his desk.]\n: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\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.]\n:4 PM Mon: The cloud pattern continues to be remarkably well-organized for a hurricane at such high latitude in December.\n\n:[The other man has turned back to his own screen.]\n:10 PM Mon: We have said this before ... but Epsilon really does not appear as strong this evening as it did this afternoon.\n\n:[Just the bald guy now.]\n:4 AM Tue: I have run out of things to say.\n\n:[The two of them again.]\n: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\n:[The two of them still.]\n: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\n:[This panel is blank and just reads: Nope.]\n:'''NOPE.'''\n\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.]\n:Enter Tropical Storm Zeta.\n: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\n:[The men are still at their desks, the man with hair is even more bedraggled-looking.]\n:Any new storms would be in the 2006 season.\n: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\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.]\n:But 2005's wouldn't end until Zeta did.\n: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\n:[A close view of the man with hair at his desk.]\n: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\n:[The two of them again.]\n: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\n:[The two of them again. Both men have clenched fists rested back from their keyboards, frustrated.]\n:10 PM Mon: Zeta is stronger than yesterday.\n:10 AM Wed: As you can see... I ran out of things to say.\n\n:[Both men put up their keyboards...]\n:4 AM Thu: Satellite intensity estimates have decreased. Zeta is downgraded to a 30 kt tropical depression.\n\n:[...only to start typing on them again.]\n: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\n:[The two of them again.]\n:10 PM Thu: Although it seems as if Zeta will never die ... the forecast continues to show weakening.\n\n:[Both men are now leaning back in their chairs, exhausted, their keyboards put away.]\n: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\n:[The bald man still sits at his desk, the man with hair is no longer in his chair.]\n\n:[Again, we see the bald man at his desk and the other guy's empty desk.]\n:Bald guy: Actually, Zeta's cloud pattern is...\n:Hair guy: (out of panel) '''''NO'''''.\n:Bald guy: Ok.", "explanation": "The Atlantic hurricane season ''normally'' runs from June to November. Randall is imagining the situation in the National Hurricane Center when the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season|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).\n\nThe monospaced text in most of the panels is material taken from [http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.026.shtml actual] [http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.027.shtml NHC] [http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.028.shtml 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.\n\nThe [http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.030.shtml last report of the 2005 season] was issued on January 6, 2006.\n\nA full analysis of the 2005 hurricane season can be found [http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/general/lib/lib1/nhclib/mwreviews/2005.pdf here].\n\nNHC reports on Epsilion and Zeta:\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.001.shtml 10 AM EST TUE NOV 29 2005 (Panel 1)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.007.shtml 10 PM EST WED NOV 30 2005 (Panel 2a)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.010.shtml 4 PM EST THU DEC 01 2005 (Panel 2b)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.012.shtml 4 AM EST FRI DEC 02 2005 (Panel 3a)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.013.shtml 10 AM EST FRI DEC 02 2005 (Panel 3b)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.018.shtml 4 PM EST SAT DEC 03 2005 (Panel 4)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.019.shtml 10 PM EST SAT DEC 03 2005 (Panel 5a)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.020.shtml 4 AM EST SUN DEC 04 2005 (Panel 5b)] \n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.021.shtml 10 AM EST SUN DEC 04 2005 (Panel 6,7)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.026.shtml 4 PM EST MON DEC 05 2005 (Panel 8)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.027.shtml 10 PM EST MON DEC 05 2005 (Panel 9)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.028.shtml 4 AM EST TUE DEC 06 2005 (Panel 10)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.031.shtml 10 PM EST TUE DEC 06 2005 (Panel 11a)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.032.shtml 4 AM EST WED DEC 07 2005 (Panel 11b)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al292005.discus.037.shtml 10 AM EST THU DEC 08 2005 (Panel 12)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.001.shtml NOON EST FRI DEC 30 2005 (Panel 14)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.002.shtml 4 PM EST FRI DEC 30 2005 (Panel 15)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.007.shtml 10 PM EST SAT DEC 31 2005 (Panel 16)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.011.shtml 10 PM EST SUN JAN 01 2006 (Panel 17)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.012.shtml 4 AM EST MON JAN 02 2006 (Panel 18a)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.014.shtml 4 PM EST MON JAN 02 2006 (Panel 18b)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.015.shtml 10 PM EST MON JAN 02 2006 (Panel 19a)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.021.shtml 10 AM EST WED JAN 04 2006 (Panel 19b)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.024.shtml 4 AM EST THU JAN 05 2006 (Panel 20)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.025.shtml 10 AM EST THU JAN 05 2006 (Panel 21)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.027.shtml 10 PM EST THU JAN 05 2006 (Panel 22)]\n*[http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/dis/al302005.discus.030.shtml 4 PM EST FRI JAN 06 2006 (Panel 23)]\n\nRandall 453|has discussed the seemingly erratic nature of hurricanes before. This may, however, have been a response to the recent Hurricane Sandy.\n\nThe text also seems to be a parody of horror stories/movies, and their theme of writing."}
-{"number": "1127", "date": "October 29, 2012", "title": "Congress", "before": "#Explanation|↓ Skip to explanation ↓", "image": "congress.png", "titletext": "It'd be great if some news network started featuring partisan hack talking heads who were all Federalists and Jacksonians, just to see how long it took us to catch on.", "transcript": "{{incomplete transcript}}\n\n:A history of\n:'''The United States Congress'''\n:Partisan and ideological makeup\n\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\n:[There are additional notes on the right.]\n\n:LEGEND\n::''[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.)\n::''[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.)\n::''[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.\n::''[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.\n::''[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.\n::''[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.\n\n:HOW IDEOLOGY IS CALCULATED\n::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.\n::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.\n::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.\n::This variable turns out to roughly correspond to position on the classic economic liberal/conservative spectrum.\n::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.)\n::For more detail, see Poole and Rosenthal's website, voteview.com.\n\n", "transcript": ":[The two tags are colored in grey.]\n:Q: How do you annoy a web developer?", "explanation": "First of all, this comic clearly annoyed enough web developers to get them to write this long explanation about this comic.\n\nHTML is a markup language used in the development of websites, and is the subject of this comic. Most distinct elements of a webpage – like this paragraph of text, the title of this section, or the logo in the top-left of this page – are enclosed in HTML tags which describe the type of object they are. 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.\n\nIn HTML, all elements (except self-closing elements like
![]()
) should consist of an open and close tag of the same type
Like this
.\n\nHTML (except in its formulation as an XML language—XHTML) 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.\n\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.\n\nNB: In practice, web browsers will error-correct nearly all these problems.\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1145", "date": "December 10, 2012", "title": "Sky Color", "image": "sky_color.png", "titletext": "Feynman recounted another good one upperclassmen would use on freshmen physics students: When you look at words in a mirror, how come they're reversed left to right but not top to bottom? What's special about the horizontal axis?", "transcript": ":[Jill and her mother, Megan, but with her hair up. Megan is at a desk and facing the girl.]\n:Jill: Mommy, why is the sky blue?\n:Megan: Rayleigh scattering! Short wavelengths get scattered ''way'' more (proportional to 1/''
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/technology/15iht-navigate.html but Cueball could be talking to a person who does not wish to own a smartphone.)\n\nThe superfluousness of giving directions as opposed to using a GPS is the subject of 783: I Don't Want Directions."}
-{"number": "1156", "date": "January 4, 2013", "title": "Conditioning", "image": "conditioning.png", "titletext": "'Why are you standing in the yard wearing a papal hat and a robe covered in seeds?' 'Well, the Pope is visiting our town next month ...'", "transcript": ":Every few hours, subwoofer plays throbbing bass for 10 seconds... [With arrow pointing to subwoofer.]\n:...then bread crumbs are dispensed into box [With arrow pointing to bread feeder machine.]\n:Opening [With arrow pointing to feeder opening shaped like a driver side car window.]\n:Local wildlife [With arrows pointing to birds and a squirrel.]\n:Protip: Leave this device in your yard for a week, then watch as the problem of loud music from passing cars solves itself.", "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 — the low frequencies being the ones that most easily penetrate the car and travel farther, thus being more audible to those around the car.\n\nAs the title suggests, the idea is to Classical conditioning|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.\n\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 Operant conditioning|somewhat different form of conditioning.\n\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.\n\nAlthough these plan may seem far-fetched, a similar scheme was seriously proposed in the United Kingdom during World War I to condition Gull|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.\n\nThere is also a story about a university student using such conditioning to get birds to disrupt a football game using a strategy similar to the one for the pope in the title text. The student went to the football field every day during summer break dressed as a referee, spreading seeds and blowing his whistle. During the first game at the next semester, the first whistle of the referee summoned a large number of birds looking for the usual seeds, preventing the game from proceeding. According to Snopes, there is [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/field-of-seeds/ no evidence of this ever actually taking place], but it's nearly impossible to disprove."}
-{"number": "1157", "date": "January 7, 2013", "title": "Sick Day", "image": "sick_day.png", "titletext": "Wikipedia path: Virus -> Immune system -> Innate immune system -> Parasites -> List of parasites of humans -> Naegleria fowleri -> Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis -> Deciding I DEFINITELY shouldn't connect an aquarium pump to my sinuses", "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:]\n:Activities while sick:\n:[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:]\n:[54%] - Shifting around in bed feeling my skin crawl\n:[24%] - Wiping various face holes\n:[5%] - Staring at a news site but not reading it\n:[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.\n:[3%] - Pondering hooking an aquarium pump up to my sinuses", "explanation": "This pie chart for the most part reflects the usual experience of being sick — tossing and turning in bed and cleaning up mucus and other bodily fluids from facial orifices— in addition to a few ponderings of a rather more scientific bent.\n\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. \n\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 Nasal irrigation|Neti pot. Studies on nasal irrigation, however, have had mixed results, and the practice may not in fact be beneficial. \n\nRandall's Wikipedia path: Virus → Immune system → Innate immune system → Parasites → List of parasites of humans → ''Naegleria fowleri'' → Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis.\n\n''Naegleria 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 aquaria, 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."}
-{"number": "1158", "date": "January 9, 2013", "title": "Rubber Sheet", "image": "rubber_sheet.png", "titletext": "It IS about physics. It ALL is.", "transcript": ":[Beret guy is standing on a giant bowling ball on a rubber sheet. Megan is watching.]\n:Beret Guy: Imagine a giant bowling ball on a rubber sheet.\n:Beret Guy: The ball's weight makes a dent in the sheet.\n\n:[A rope is pulling the ball down into the sheet.]\n:Beret Guy: Now imagine a rope that pulls the ball down even further.\n:Beret Guy: ...Annnnd...\n\n:[Rope lets go. Ball is catapulted with Beret Guy on it.]\n:'''BOOOIING'''\n:Beret Guy: Wheee\n\n:[Beret guy and ball are falling back down.]\n:Megan: ...Oh. I thought this was about physics.\n:Beret Guy: Imagining is ''fun!''", "explanation": "This comic refers to a [http://en.allexperts.com/q/Astronomy-1360/question-black-holes-1.htm common analogy] used to explain how mass distorts space-time — 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).\n\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.\n\nReading onwards, it seems that Beret Guy is just messing about with the scenario.\n\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—so that he can physically experience what he imagines—is reminiscent of 248: Hypotheticals.\n\nThe title text also states that the rubber sheet, broken rope and trampoline are still all about physics (see also 435: Purity)."}
-{"number": "1160", "date": "January 14, 2013", "title": "Drop Those Pounds", "image": "drop_those_pounds.png", "titletext": "If the flyers don't work, we'll switch to the LEAST subtle method of informing a town of the existence of a trebuchet club.", "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:]\n:Struggling with those 2013 resolutions?\n:We'll help you hit your target\n:By dropping thirty pounds '''fast'''\n:[Small print.]\n:WEB: http://[illegible].com\n:CALL: [illegible]\n\n:[Caption, below:] The flyer for our trebuchet–building club may have been too subtle.", "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 kg). 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.{{citation needed}}\n\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; ironically, such a flyer would have a reasonable chance of being quite effective by virtue of the uniqueness (and relative outlandishness of a trebuchet club) of pulling the rug on what appears to be a weight loss advertisement, likely sticking in the minds of more than a few people who do realize that it is about trebuchets from the pictogram or the website in the small print.\n\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 — likely by using their trebuchet to attack the town. That would certainly get the club some attention!\n\nSee also 382: Trebuchet."}
-{"number": "1161", "date": "January 16, 2013", "title": "Hand Sanitizer", "image": "hand_sanitizer.png", "titletext": "Hipster CDC Reports Flu Epidemic Peaked Years Ago", "transcript": ":[Cueball looks at a poster while holding a bottle.]\n:Poster: An invisible sneeze droplet can contain ''200 million'' germs!\n\n:[Same scene, except Cueball is looking at the bottle.] \n:Product label: Our hand sanitizer kills 99.99% of germs!\n\n:[Cueball types on a calculator while still holding the product.]\n:Cueball (typing on calculator): 200 000 000 × 0.01%", "explanation": "In this comic, Cueball is looking at a poster telling him about the number of germs in a sneeze droplet. He then looks at the label on his hand sanitizer, and goes \"Ew.\", thinking about how many germs he would still have on his hands even after applying hand sanitizer to his hands.\n\nThe 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 × 0.0001. That is 20 thousand germs, which is still a surprisingly large number of germs. Recently, scientists [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2257098/Larry-projectile-vomiting-robot-helping-British-team-learn-stop-spread-norovirus.html 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\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 (contemporary subculture)|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.\"\n\nThe title text extends this sensibility to the flu, which in fact did peak years ago, such as in 1918, when a 1918 flu epidemic|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."}
-{"number": "1162", "date": "January 18, 2013", "title": "Log Scale", "image": "log_scale.png", "titletext": "Knuth Paper-Stack Notation: Write down the number on pages. Stack them. If the stack is too tall to fit in the room, write down the number of pages it would take to write down the number. THAT number won't fit in the room? Repeat. When a stack fits, write the number of iterations on a card. Pin it to the stack.", "transcript": ":[A bar chart on a piece of paper, with a second piece of paper attached to it.]\n:[Title of the bar chart] fuel energy density of different materials in megajoules/kg\n:[Values of the first 4 bars on the paper] 19 24 39 46\n:[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]\n:[Labels of the 5 bars on the paper] Sugar Coal Fat Gasoline Uranium\n:[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.]\n:[Value on the top end of the paper strip] 76 000 000\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Science Tip: Log scales are for quitters who can't find enough paper to make their point ''properly''.", "explanation": "This comic strip is a :Category:Tips|tip, specifically the first :Category:Science tip|''science'' tip. As with most of Randall's tips, it is technically interesting for some applications but not very practical.\n\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"}
-{"number": "1163", "date": "January 21, 2013", "title": "Debugger", "image": "debugger.png", "titletext": "It can take a site a while to figure out that there's a problem with their 'report a bug' form.", "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.]\n:Cueball: I don't understand how my brain works.\n\n:[A close-up of the two characters. Megan lifts her head slightly.]\n:Cueball: But my brain is what I rely on to understand how things work.\n\n:[The shot zooms out again.]\n:Megan: Is that a problem?\n:Cueball: I'm not sure how to tell.", "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.\n\nPer the comic title, a Debugger|debugger is a piece of software used by programmers to find Software bug|bugs in the Application software|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.\n\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. Even if Megan tells Cueball that a problem exists: if Cueball's \"report a bug\" system is broken, he might simply disregard this information."}
-{"number": "1164", "date": "January 23, 2013", "title": "Home Alone", "image": "home_alone.png", "titletext": "Starring Macaulay Culkin.", "transcript": ":[Bearded man clenching his fists and 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.]\n:Child: Ow!!\n:Child on floor: Waaaaaaaaa!\n:Rejected movie ideas:\n:Age-reversed ''Home Alone'' reboot.", "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 rig|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 {{tvtropes|UnderdogsNeverLose|underdog defeating a much stronger opponent}} (the burglars), through his own ingenuity. The film spawned a Home Alone (franchise)|series of sequels (4 as of 2012, the first of which also starred Culkin) all with a similar premise to the original.\n\nThis strip, however, proposes a Reboot_(fiction)#Film|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1165", "date": "January 25, 2013", "title": "Amazon", "image": "amazon.png", "titletext": "Amazon.com took a surprise early lead with 'Time required to transport a package from Iquitos, Peru to Manaus, Brazil' but then lost it at 'Minutes to skeletonize a cow'.", "transcript": ":Round 14\n:Estimated outflow volume\n:in cubic meters per second\n:[A cube of water representing the outflow of the Amazon, with various marine life in it and people standing around it.]\n:Amazon 220,000\n:[A pile of boxes representing the outflow of Amazon.com, dwarfed by the large cube of water next to it.]\n:Amazon.com 0.9\n:Advantage: Amazon", "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.\n\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.\n\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.)\n\nIn 1599: Water Delivery Amazon.com delivers water, as a direct reflection of what the Amazon river actually achieves by default."}
-{"number": "1166", "date": "January 28, 2013", "title": "Argument", "image": "argument.png", "titletext": "The misguided search for a perpetual motion machine has run substantially longer than any attempted perpetual motion machine.", "transcript": ":[A page from a very long thread on \"''FREE'' Energy ~Forum~.\"]\n:'''Thread:''' You're all crackpots who don't understand thermodynamics.\n:[A bar above the comments:] Page 547 of 547 <1 2 3... 545 546 '''547'''\n:Poster 1 [Default face icon]: No, idiot, only the ''north'' end of a magnet increases entropy. The south end decreases it.\n: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.\n: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?\n:Ironically, the argument I started on a perpetual motion forum in 2004 shows no signs of slowing down.", "explanation": "File:PerpetualMotion.png|right|400px|thumb|It should be obvious how {{rw|Perpetual_motion#Energy_cycles|perpetual motion}} doesn't work.\nA 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.\n\nA conspiracy theory called {{rw|free_energy_suppression|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 — 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.\n\nThe second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an ''isolated'' system never decreases. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1167", "date": "January 30, 2013", "title": "Star Trek into Darkness", "image": "star_trek_into_darkness.png", "titletext": "Of course, factions immediately sprang up in favor of '~*~sTaR tReK iNtO dArKnEsS~*~', 'xX_StAr TrEk InTo DaRkNess_Xx', and 'Star Trek lnto Darkness' (that's a lowercase 'L').", "transcript": ":[Cueball staring at computer screen.]\n:Cueball: Oh, ''wow.'' Look at Wikipedia's Talk page for '''''Star Trek Into Darkness.''''' I have a new favorite edit war.\n:Megan (off-panel): Oh?\n\n:Cueball: Forty ''thousand'' words of debate over whether to capitalize \"into\" in the movie's title. Still no consensus.\n:Megan: That's ''magnificent''.\n:Cueball: It's breathtaking.\n:Megan: They should have sent a poet.\n\n:Cueball: Well, I'm making an executive decision. I hope both sides accept this as a fair compromise.\n\n:[A Wikipedia page titled \"''~*~ StAr TrEk InTo DaRkNeSs ~*~''\"]", "explanation": "The talk page of a Wikipedia article is used to discuss changes to the article. An Wikipedia:Edit warring|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.\n\nHere, Randall is referring to a dispute on the Wikipedia article about ''Star Trek Into Darkness|Star Trek I(i)nto 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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title"}
-{"number": "1168", "date": "February 1, 2013", "title": "tar", "image": "tar.png", "titletext": "I don't know what's worse--the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can't keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I'm still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started.", "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.]\n:Megan: Rob! \n:Megan: You use Unix!\n:White Hat: Come quick!\n\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\ntar -cvf archive.tar *\". Many Unix executables are distributed via tar archives; as a result tar files would be encountered by Unix users as commonly as Windows users encounter EXE files. Depending on the flavor of Unix, the order of the flags, or the exclusion of the hyphen, could render the command incorrect, which would either throw up an error or worse, cause one to accidentally overwrite or delete important files.\n\nThe comic alludes to the fact that, despite years of use of the command, it is incredibly hard to remember what the letters stand for without looking them up, such as with Google. The 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.\n\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. Randall points out the paradox that after 15 years he is still unable to write out a proper tar command from memory, yet at the same time he feels that he shouldn't ''have'' to and a newer, better tool really should have come along already.\n\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\").\n\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.\n\nRob may refer to Rob Pike, who was a member of the team at AT&T who created Unix."}
-{"number": "1169", "date": "February 4, 2013", "title": "Expedition", "image": "expedition.png", "titletext": "I'm pretty sure I've logged more hours in Google Maps over the past decade than in any game.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is at a computer.]\n:''February 4th:''\n:''Departed the mouth of the Lena River, heading south.''\n:''It has been nearly half an hour and still no sign of civilization.''\n:''The scroll wheel tempts me, but I will not cheat.''\n:Click click click\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:My hobby: Getting lost on Google Maps satellite", "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. The Lena River is a river in northern Russia, flowing into the Arctic Ocean (with a large River delta|delta).\n\nClicking on the comic leads to an online Google Maps page showing [https://maps.google.com/?ll"}
-{"number": "1170", "date": "February 6, 2013", "title": "Bridge", "image": "bridge.png", "titletext": "And it says a lot about you that when your friends jump off a bridge en masse, your first thought is apparently 'my friends are all foolish and I won't be like them' and not 'are my friends ok?'.", "transcript": ":[A youthful Cueball talking to an unseen parent.]\n:Parent: No, you can't go.\n:Cueball: But all my friends—\n:Parent: If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?\n:Cueball: Oh, jeez. Probably.\n\n:Parent: What!? Why!?\n:Cueball: Because all my friends did.\n:Cueball: Think about it — which scenario is more likely:\n\n:Cueball: Every single person I know, many of them levelheaded and afraid of heights, abruptly went crazy at exactly the same time...\n:Cueball: ...or the bridge is on fire?\n\n:Parent: ...I, uh...hmm.\n:Cueball: Imagine reading this on CNN: \"''Many fled their vehicles and jumped from the bridge. Those who stayed behind...''\"\n:Cueball: Is something ''good'' about to happen to those people?\n:Parent: Maybe they'll find cookies?\n:Cueball: OK, ''you'' stay. I'm jumping.", "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.\n\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 a large group of people all decide to jump off a bridge, there's probably a good reason for them to do so. This is especially true, since the question specifically references \"all your friends\", which means that these are people who he knows, and are mostly \"level-headed and afraid of heights\", which makes it unlikely that they're all acting in a random and dangerous way, and much more likely that they're driven by a good reason. A better bandwagon example would be \"If all your friends are getting a new phone, would you buy one too?\"\n\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 to any group of people jumping off a bridge would be concern about the people involved, particularly if all of the people involved are your friends. If the jump is truly dangerous, he should be concerned for their physical safety, and if the action was truly not justified by the circumstances, then he should be concerned about their mental and emotional state. The implication that he should just dismiss their actions and avoid them seems deeply callous."}
-{"number": "1171", "date": "February 8, 2013", "title": "Perl Problems", "image": "perl_problems.png", "titletext": "To generate #1 albums, 'jay --help' recommends the -z flag.", "transcript": ":[Man with sunglasses talking (or, alternatively, rapping) to Cueball.]\n:Sunglasses: If you're havin' perl problems I feel bad for you, son-\n\n:Sunglasses: I got 99 problems,\n\n:Sunglasses: So I used regular expressions.\n\n:Sunglasses: Now I have 100 problems.", "explanation": "Perl is a scripting language that makes heavy use of Regular expression|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:\n\n:If you're havin' girl problems\n:I feel bad for you, son-\n:I got 99 problems,\n:But a bitch ain't one.\n\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 [http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247 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\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. [http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/projects/lp/doc/jay/package-summary.html '''jay'''] is also an actual C program that is a compiler-compiler for java, but it doesn't have a \"-z\" flag.\n\nThis sort of problematically recursive :Category:Self-reference|self-reference is reminiscent of comic 927: Standards, and 1739: Fixing Problems."}
-{"number": "1172", "date": "February 11, 2013", "title": "Workflow", "image": "workflow.png", "titletext": "There are probably children out there holding down spacebar to stay warm in the winter! YOUR UPDATE MURDERS CHILDREN.", "transcript": ":[Changelog for version 10.17 of a piece of software.]\n:One change listed: \"The CPU no longer overheats when you hold down the spacebar\"\n: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\".\n:Admin writes: That's horrifying.\n:LongtimeUser4 writes: Look, my setup works for me. Just add an option to reenable spacebar heating.\n\n:Every change breaks someone's workflow.", "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 [https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ Hyrum's law]: the law states that whatever the official feature list actually says, if a program has enough users, eventually every behavior of the program (whether intentional, unintentional, or a bug) will be relied upon by someone. A similar effect may be caused by other changes, particularly those which involve alterations of the [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1770 user interface].\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 {{tvtropes|ThinkOfTheChildren|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."}
-{"number": "1173", "date": "February 13, 2013", "title": "Steroids", "image": "steroids.png", "titletext": "A human is a system for converting dust billions of years ago into dust billions of years from now via a roundabout process which involves checking email a lot.", "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.]\n:Sphere: ''Explain to me this \"steroid scandal.\"''\n\n:[Zoom in on Megan's face while she holds a hand to her chin.]\n:Megan: Well, uh... \n:Megan: We humans are sacks of chemicals which stay alive by finding other chemicals and putting them inside us.\n\n:[Megan has turned around facing towards the Sphere to the left. She holds up one hand palm up.]\n:Megan: We hold contests to see which humans are fastest and strongest.\n:Megan: But some humans eat chemicals that make them ''too'' fast and strong.\n\n:[Megan still facing the Sphere holds her arms out.]\n:Megan: And they '''win contests!'''\n:Sphere: ''That does sound bad.''\n:Megan: It's ''awful!''", "explanation": "This comic is about '''steroid''' usage to Performance-enhancing substance|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 in sport|doping).\n\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. \n\nThis comic is one of many instances where Randall attempts to trivialize sports.\n\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.\n\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 (song)|Woodstock: \"We are stardust...\"; and echoed by Carl Sagan: \"We are star stuff.\"\n\nSimilar talking floating energy spheres have been used later to represent super intelligent AIs both in 1450: AI-Box Experiment and 2635: Superintelligent AIs, where it is clearly a different sphere and then in the :Category:Time traveling Sphere|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."}
-{"number": "1174", "date": "February 15, 2013", "title": "App", "image": "app.png", "titletext": "If I click 'no', I've probably given up on everything, so don't bother taking me to the page I was trying to go to. Just drop me on the homepage. Thanks.", "transcript": ":[A popup window on top of a webpage displayed in a smartphone browser that looks like Safari.]\n:Want to visit an incomplete version of our website where you '''can't zoom?'''\n:'''Download our app!'''\n:[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:\n\n*You cannot zoom or change the text size in most of these apps, a feature available on mobile browsers.\n*The app is often of poor quality and is incomplete, lacks part of the content, or lacks features available on the standard website.\n\nThe comic offers a brutally honest version of such a promotional popup.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1175", "date": "February 18, 2013", "title": "Moving Sidewalks", "image": "moving_sidewalks.png", "titletext": "I think I could spend hours just stepping on and off of conveyor belts moving at various speeds.", "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.]\n:Cueball: Ready?\n:\n:[A diagram labels various individual conveyors as follows.]\n:[Outermost conveyors:] Moving Sidewalk \n:[Second and second-last conveyors:] Moving Sidewalk (2x Speed)\n:[Next conveyors:] 3x Speed\n:[Next conveyors:] 4x Speed\n:[Innermost conveyors:] 5x Speed\n:[Spot between the two sidewalks, directly in the center:] High-Five Location\n:\n:Megan: Ready.", "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.\n\nFor the most central conveyor belts, there is no speed indicated: it could still be 5x, or a further increase to 6x. No number could also indicate a mere 1x or even a non-moving belt, which would make the whole setup tricky for a much different reason.\n\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). If they are additionally running along their belt setups, it might hurt some more.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1176", "date": "February 20, 2013", "title": "Those Not Present", "image": "those_not_present.png", "titletext": "'Yeah, that squid's a total asshole.' [scoot scoot]", "transcript": ":Every time someone says something negative about a person who's not in the room, I scoot my chair back a few inches.\n:[Cueball, Ponytail and two other people are sitting at a table drinking.]\n:Person: ''He's'' not so bad, but his ''friends''...\n:[Cueball scoots away from table.]\n:''Scoot scoot''\n\n:Ponytail: His band is never gonna take off if...\n:[Cueball scoots further away.]\n:''Scoot scoot''\n\n:[Megan, Beret Guy, and Hairy come into view.]\n:Off-screen: Yeah, his sister is even ''weirder''.\n:Off-screen: Did you see she had...\n:''Scoot scoot''\n:Beret Guy: ...and there's a video, but it's blurry...\n\n:[Cueball turns around and leans his arm on his chair.]\n:Cueball: What're you talking about?\n:Hairy: Giant squid!\n:Cueball: Mind if I join you?", "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.\n\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,{{Citation needed}} Cueball scoots either back to where he came from (as having now at least a lesser toxicity) or even further onwards (to seek out a new and more palatable conversation)."}
-{"number": "1177", "date": "February 22, 2013", "title": "Time Robot", "image": "time_robot.png", "titletext": "NO FATE BUT THE NARRATIVES WE IMPOSE ON LIFE'S RANDOM CHAOS TO DISTRACT OURSELVES FROM OUR EXISTENTIAL PLIGHT", "transcript": ":[Cueball runs towards Megan with a shotgun in hand.]\n:Cueball: I'm from the future!\n:Cueball: You're being stalked by an unstoppable robotic assassin!\n\n:[Close up of Cueball's head.]\n:Cueball: Of course, in a sense, we're ''all'' being stalked by an unstoppable robot.\n:Cueball: A robot called ''time''.\n\n:[Cueball looking at a clock.]\n:Cueball: I see it in the mirror. I see wrinkles, grey hairs.\n:Cueball: I hear its metallic footsteps in the relentless rhythm of the ticking clock.\n\n:[Cueball reaches out to Megan.]\n:Cueball: Anyway, uhh - come with me if you want to live for a while.\n:Cueball: You'll still die eventually.\n:Cueball: We all will.", "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).\n\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 – 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 Terminator (character concept)#Physical characteristics|glowing red eyes of a Terminator.\n\nIn the final panel, \"come with me if you want to live\" is a wikia:w:c:terminator:Come with me if you want to live|famous phrase from the movie, but in this case, amended with the facts about the inevitability of eventual death.\n\nAlso, the title text is a play on a quote from ''The Terminator'', where Sarah Connor starts to believe that \"wikia:w:c:terminator:There's no fate but what we make for ourselves|There's no fate but what we make for ourselves.\". It is also a reference to the character \"Death (Discworld)|Death\" in Terry Pratchett's ''Discworld'' novels. In the Discworld novels, Death's voice is always depicted in
27⁄2-13\n:*2013.158904109\n:*MMXIII-II-XXVII\n:*MMXIII LVII⁄CCCLXV\n:*1330300800\n:*((3+3)×(111+1)-1)×3/3-1/33\n:*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 12th day of April 2001, the 4th day of December 2001 and the 4th of January 2012. It takes two such communication errors to 'become' the 1st day of April 2012. \n\nDate formats were again the subject in 1340: Unique Date and 2562: Formatting Meeting.\n\nThe other mentioned formats are:\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1180", "date": "March 1, 2013", "title": "Virus Venn Diagram", "image": "virus_venn_diagram.png", "titletext": "Within five minutes of the Singularity appearing, somebody will suggest defragging it.", "transcript": ":[Euler diagram with two circles that don't intersect. One circle is green, while the other is slight dark blue.]\n:Green circle: Computer problems that make people say \"Maybe it has a virus?\"\n:Blue circle: Computer problems caused by viruses", "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.\n\nWhen computers don't function as expected, a common response from ordinary users is \"Maybe it has a Computer virus|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.\n\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\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.{{Citation needed}}"}
-{"number": "1181", "date": "March 4, 2013", "title": "PGP", "image": "pgp.png", "titletext": "If you want to be extra safe, check that there's a big block of jumbled characters at the bottom.", "transcript": ":How to use PGP to verify that an email is authentic:\n:Look for this text at the top\n:[In mail header, light grey.] Reply\n:[Highlighted, with arrow pointing to it from the text \"Look for this text at the top\" above.]\n:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----\n:[In mail message, light grey.]\n:HASH: SHA256\n:Hey,\n:First of all, thanks for taking care of\n\n:[After mail message.]\n:If it's there, the email is probably fine", "explanation": "Pretty Good Privacy|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 identity of the sender and that the data has not been altered in transit.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1182", "date": "March 6, 2013", "title": "Rembrandt Photo", "image": "rembrandt_photo.png", "titletext": "::click:: Come back! You didn't see the one of Whistler's mother!", "transcript": ":[Megan is holding a laptop. Cueball is sitting at a desk and turned around to face Megan.]\n:Megan: Hey, look - Rembrandt's parents having sex!\n:Cueball: ''Waugh!'' Why do you-\n:Cueball: ...Wait, how can there be a photo of that?\n:Megan: It's an artist's conception.", "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 human conception|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.\n\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.\n\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 ::click:: is Megan switching to that picture on her laptop."}
-{"number": "1183", "date": "March 8, 2013", "title": "Rose Petals", "image": "rose_petals.png", "titletext": "Joke's on you--the Roomba and I had a LOVELY evening.", "transcript": ":[Cueball enters a living room, to see a line of red rose petals on the floor.]\n:[Cueball follows the line of rose petals.]\n:[Cueball observes that the line of rose petals leads out the front door, down the driveway, and along the sidewalk.]\n:[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]\n:Whirrrrrr\n:Roomba", "explanation": "This comic strip is playing with romantic movies and gestures used in them. In such movies, one often used romantic gesture is {{tvtropes|FlowersOfRomance|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."}
-{"number": "1184", "date": "March 11, 2013", "title": "Circumference Formula", "image": "circumference_formula.png", "titletext": "Assume r' refers to the radius of Earth Prime, and r'' means radius in inches.", "transcript": ":Circumference of a circle:\n:2πr2\n:2The circle's radius", "explanation": "The circumference C of a circle is 2pi|π''r'', where ''r'' is the radius of the circle. Randall then makes a Note (typography)|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"}
-{"number": "1185", "date": "March 13, 2013", "title": "Ineffective Sorts", "image": "ineffective_sorts.png", "titletext": "StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is sorted.", "transcript": ":'''Ineffective sorts'''\n define HalfheartedMergeSort(list):\n if length(list)<2:\n return list\n pivot", "explanation": "The comic gives examples of four non-functional sorting algorithms written in Pseudocode|pseudo-Python (programming language)|Python.\n\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 ''{{Wiktionary|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.\"\n\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·n!) 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.\n\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.\n\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 {{tvtropes|RageQuit|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 minutes, 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 (Unix)|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 \"Software portability|portability\", the program runs the equivalent Windows rmdir|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.\n\nIn the title text, StackOverflow ([https://stackoverflow.com/ 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 [https://github.com/gkoberger/stacksort/ implemented stacksort]; well, sort of.''"}
-{"number": "1186", "date": "March 15, 2013", "title": "Bumblebees", "image": "bumblebees.png", "titletext": "Did you know sociologists can't explain why people keep repeating that urban legend about bumblebees not being able to fly!?", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:Science fact:\n:[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:]\n:Physicists still can't explain how bumblebees can fly airplanes.", "explanation": "This is the first comic using a :Category:Facts|fact that is not a :Category:Fun fact|Fun fact. Instead it is a Science Fact.\n\nThere is an Bumblebee#Flight|often repeated legend that according to the laws of aerodynamics, Bumblebee|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.\n\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 physicist|physicists are still confused and don't know how the bees are able accomplish this.\n\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}}\n\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.\"\n\nThe title text mentions that Sociology|sociologists are also unable to explain why many people repeat this obviously wrong urban legend."}
-{"number": "1187", "date": "March 18, 2013", "title": "Aspect Ratio", "image": "aspect_ratio.png", "titletext": "I'm always disappointed when 'Anamorphic Widescreen' doesn't refer to a widescreen Animorphs movie.", "transcript": ":[A gray car is crushed in a large black clamp.]\n:Whenever someone uploads a letterboxed 16:9 video rescaled to 4:3, I do this to their car.", "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 : - 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 {{tvtropes|DisproportionateRetribution|disproportionate retribution}}.\n\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\nIn the title text, ''Animorphs'' 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."}
-{"number": "1188", "date": "March 20, 2013", "title": "Bonding", "image": "bonding.png", "titletext": "I'm trying to build character, but Eclipse is really confusing.", "transcript": "class Ball extends Throwable {}\n class P{\n P target;\n P(P target) {\n this.target", "explanation": "This is source code written in the Java (programming language)|Java programming language which models a parent and a child playing a Catch (game)|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 Paternal bond|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 structure|data structures.\n\nThe program, as written, will Recursion (computer science)|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.\n\nThe title text refers to the [http://www.eclipse.org/ 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|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"}
-{"number": "1189", "date": "March 22, 2013", "title": "Voyager 1", "image": "voyager_1.png", "titletext": "So far Voyager 1 has 'left the Solar System' by passing through the termination shock three times, the heliopause twice, and once each through the heliosheath, heliosphere, heliodrome, auroral discontinuity, Heaviside layer, trans-Neptunian panic zone, magnetogap, US Census Bureau Solar System statistical boundary, Kuiper gauntlet, Oort void, and crystal sphere holding the fixed stars.", "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.]\n:Number of times ''Voyager 1'' has left the Solar System", "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. \n\nOn the day of this comic's release (2013-03-22) it was announced that [https://web.archive.org/web/20130322025117/http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2013/2013-11.shtml Voyager 1 had entered a new region of space]. At this point Voyager 1 had passed Voyager_1#Heliopause|through the Heliopause and entered the Interstellar medium, although this latter was Voyager_1#Interstellar_medium|first confirmed about half a year later in September 2013.\n\nThe chart shows that Voyager 1 has left the Solar System 22 times, but in the title text only 16 are mentioned.\n\nThe title text lists several such possible boundaries, (and how many times Voyager 1 has passed them) together with fictive humorous ones:"}
-{"number": "1190", "date": "March 25, 2013", "title": "Time", "image": "time-animated.gif", "titletext": "The end.", "transcript": "", "explanation": "This comic is an animation, which was showing a new image every hour. In the beginning the interval was only half an hour. The unfolding story is set in the far future, at a time when the Strait of Gibraltar has long been blocked and the Mediterranean Sea has largely dried up leaving smaller, hypersaline seas behind. Megan and Cueball, living on the shores of one of these seas and unaware of its natural history, notice one day while building a huge sand castle on the beach that the sea level is starting to rise. They start a journey of exploration trying to find out why. Eventually they discover that the Straits of Gibraltar have once again been breached, and that the Mediterranean Basin is being flooded. They run back to their home, assemble the people of their village, and board a makeshift raft. At the end they reach land with their rafts, searching for a new home.\n\nOn frame 2925 the title text changed from \"Wait for it.\" to \"...\", and one frame later to just \"RUN.\". At approximately 2944, when Megan announces that it is too late to escape overland, the title text changed back to \"...\". On frame 3094, the words '''THE END''' appear in the middle of the screen and the title text changed to \"The end.\". The image now links to the scrollable collection of frames at [http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/ geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/]. The comic on xkcd.com today currently loops through the last five frames of the comic."}
-{"number": "1191", "date": "March 27, 2013", "title": "The Past", "image": "the_past.png", "titletext": "If history has taught us anything, we can use that information to destroy it.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Black Hat talking.]\n:Cueball: Well, you know what they say. The past is a foreign country-\n:Black Hat: -With an outdated military and huge oil reserves!\n:Black Hat: ''Hmmm...''", "explanation": "\"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there\" is the opening line of \"The Go-Between\", a novel by L. P. Hartley|Leslie Poles Hartley (1895–1972), published in London in 1953. The phrase was intended to highlight the impact of changing social norms and customs. As when dealing with a foreign society, one must be prepared to encounter different ways of life than one is accustomed to. And that's true, even over a single lifetime, so in recalling one's past, it's important to understand the context in which those memories take place. \n\nBlack Hat, however, decides to take the first part of the quote literally, and consider \"the past\" as it it were an actual foreign country. In true Black Hat fashion, the first thing he considers is that this \"nation\" would have an outdated military (by definition, because current technology and military doctrine hadn't been invented) and huge oil reserves (because their reserves would not yet have been depleted). The implication of these two points is that such a country would be ripe for invasion by a more powerful nation, seeking to control their natural resources. \n\nThe pensive way in which he makes these points implies that he's genuinely considering trying to mount an invasion of \"the past\". Such an invasion would, of course, require inventing a time machine, and could introduce all sorts of potential issues with the space-time continuum (depending on Time_ travel#Philosophy|how the space-time continuum actually works). But :Category:Time travel|time travel is hardly unknown in the XKCD universe, and Black Hat isn't the type to worry about consequences when there's an opportunity to gain some benefit. \n\nThis notion has shown up in fiction before. For example, \"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. As another example (from the short story ''Young Zaphod Plays It Safe''), “When the hunt for new sources of energy had at one point got particularly frantic, one bright young chap suddenly spotted that one place which had never used up all its available energy was - the past. And with the sudden rush of blood to the head that such insights tend to induce, he invented a way of mining it that very same night, and within a year huge tracts of the past were being drained of all their energy and simply wasting away. Those who claimed that the past should be left unspoilt were accused of indulging in an extremely expensive form of sentimentality.”\n\nThe \"If history has taught us anything\" is usually used to introduce a lesson that the speaker takes to be clear and obvious from history. The title text of this strip subverts that by implying that lessons learned from history can count as military intelligence to use against it.\n\nThe concept of going back to the past to collect resources (or, at least, set up the collection of resources) shows up again in 2321: Low-Background Metal"}
-{"number": "1192", "date": "March 29, 2013", "title": "Humming", "image": "humming.png", "titletext": "I'm so bad at carrying a tune, those 'find a song by humming its melody' websites throw an HTTP 406 error as soon as I start to hum.", "transcript": ":[Megan is humming a tune.]\n:Cueball: Hey.\n:Cueball: What's that?\n\n:[Megan is still humming the same tune.]\n:Cueball: What are you humming?\n:Cueball: Should I know the tune?\n:Cueball: ...Hmm...\n\n:[Cueball gets out his phone and opens up a music recognition program.]\n:Phone: Identify song\n:Phone: Recorded\n:Phone: > Live [beta]\n\n:Phone: Identifying...\n\n:[A zoom in on the phone screen. An album cover with a picture of Megan on it.]\n:Positive match:\n:''Check it out!''\n:By I hacked the audio fingerprint database\n:Feat. MEEEEEE\n:Track: We're out of cat food (pick some up?)", "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 1022|cat food.\n\nMegan would use this app again in 1199: Silence.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1193", "date": "April 1, 2013", "title": "Externalities", "image": "externalities.png", "titletext": "Mouse over words and things to see where they come from.
Different title text: 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.)
Different title text: Happy April 1st, Everyone!
Different title text: uic has the third best hash. See the full standings at http://almamater.xkcd.com/best.csv
Different title text: The dog gains a pound for every $10 donated to the Wikimedia Foundation via this link. Currently at $51135.33", "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\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\n:[The first panel with the caption and Megan below has its 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\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).]\n:Ahoy, carnegie melonites! \n:\n:Come find your future at Baidu.\n\n:[Below, not in a frame, is Megan.]\n:Megan: But nothing about Tiananmen Square.\n\n:[Caption floating above the frame of the next panel:]\n:It takes great minds to stifle other great minds.\n:[Ponytail sits at a desk, hand to her chin, with two Cueball-like guys with their hands on the table.]\n:Ponytail: Let's block Canada\n:Cueball-like guys: Sounds good.\n\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]\n:We're a convenient four hour drive from New York City (15,000 hours by Roomba.)\n:''Whirrrrrrr''\n:Roomba\n\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:]\n:Our recruiters are on the hunt for unaware CMU graduates\n\n:[The fifth panel has its 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\n:[There is a caption above a website application. There is three fields to be filled, with each their caption and text:]\n:or uic graduates, provied any of them manage to fill out the application correctly.\n::Name which one\n::Email forget it\n::Education Riding the L all night long\n\n:[Caption floating above the frame of the next panel:]\n:At Baidu, Inc., you'll have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects.\n:[Cueball sits at a computer.]\n:Cueball: What does \"make dog\" do?\n:Off-screen voice: Experimental dog generator. Don't click on it; the default size isn't set, so-\n:'''*click*'''\n\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\n:[Small insert panel, going in above the next larger panel: Cueball stares at the screen.]\n:''Kzzzt'' \n:''*bip*''\n:Off-screen voice: Uh oh.\n\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\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.] \n:d(x)", "explanation": "This was the fourth :Category:April fools' comics|April fools' comic released by Randall. This 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 function)|Skein hash but also an aid appeal for the Wikimedia Foundation.\n\nThe comic references multiple times Baidu, a large Chinese Internet services company. Baidu controls the predominant Internet search provider of China and is sometimes called the \"Google of China\" for the similar services it provides. Baidu Search results follow the censorship dictates of the Chinese authorities, causing it to return censored responses to searches for politically sensitive terms when executed by web browsers in China. Megan's reply \"But nothing about Tiananmen Square.\" in the first panel is a reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre that killed hundreds of civillians. \"It takes great minds to stifle other great minds.\" and \"Let's block Canada\" in the second panel are also references to the arbitrary government censorship of Baidu and other Chinese companies\n\nThe blank regions in the above image are dynamically generated from various sources.\n*The university that is being recruited changes depending on which university is winning the hash finding competition in the fifth panel.\n*The company doing the recruiting is randomly selected from a pool of companies. It was formerly the first NASDAQ-100 company mentioned on a varying Wikipedia page.\n*The text in the second panel may vary: See 1193: Externalities#Second Panel|this section.\n*The text in the third panel may vary: See 1193: Externalities#Third Panel|this section.\n*The text in the fourth panel may vary: See 1193: Externalities#Fourth Panel|this section.\n*The text in the fifth panel 1193: Externalities#Fifth Panel|changes, depending on which university is currently in third place in a hash finding competition. Clicking on the panel takes you to [http://almamater.xkcd.com/ a webpage] where people can enter their school's domain name and hash data, and ranks schools on how close their students can come to matching a Skein 1024 1024 hash value.\n*The text in the top half of the sixth panel may vary. See 1193: Externalities#Sixth Panel|this section. The second half of the panel is always the same.\n*The last panel varies with the amount donated to the Wikimedia Foundation via [https://donate.wikimedia.org/?utm_medium"}
-{"number": "1194", "date": "April 3, 2013", "title": "Stratigraphic Record", "image": "stratigraphic_record.png", "titletext": "All we have are these stupid tantalizing zircons and the scars on the face of the Moon.", "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:]\n:Nearly 4.5 billion years ago, Earth had liquid water.\n:But all the crust older than 3.5 billion years has been recycled into the mantle by subduction.\n\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:]\n:A billion years of the stratigraphic record, the memory of the hills, is forever lost to us.\n:What was it '''''like''''' here, four billion years ago?\n\n:[A slimmer panel as the first, with two smaller white rectangles with text above and below:]\n:Earth,\n:What '''''secrets''''' do you have?\n\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:]\n:Earth: come closer\n\n:[Zoom in on the Earth so it now fills almost the entire panel from left to right.]\n\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:]\n:Earth: ''i'll never tell.''", "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 Subduction|subducted down into the Mantle (geology)|Earth's mantle, by Plate tectonics|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. Zircon|Zircons are a type of mineral found in the Crust (geology)|Earth's crust, some of which have been estimated to be as old as 4.4 billion years, older than any other mineral."}
-{"number": "1195", "date": "April 5, 2013", "title": "Flowchart", "image": "flowchart.png", "titletext": "The way out is to use the marker you have to add a box that says 'get a marker' to the line between you and 'start', then add a 'no' line from the trap box to 'end'.", "transcript": ":[A flow chart is shown with two boxes and two arrows. The first box rectangular:] \n:Start\n\n:[From the first box there is a short arrow straight down to a diamond shaped box:]\n:Hey, wait, this flowchart is a trap!\n\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.]\n:Yes", "explanation": "Flowcharts are diagrams used to show the logical flow of an algorithm, process, or program. Flowcharts are a :Category:Flowcharts|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.\n\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!\n\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.\n\nRandall has made use of :Category:Flowcharts|flowcharts before, and previously released another comic named 518: Flow Charts."}
-{"number": "1196", "date": "April 8, 2013", "title": "Subways", "image": "subways.png", "titletext": "About one in three North American subway stops are in NYC.", "transcript": ":'''Subways of North America'''\n:[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.]", "explanation": "File:North American subways.svg.png|right|border|link"}
-{"number": "1197", "date": "April 10, 2013", "title": "All Adobe Updates", "image": "all_adobe_updates.png", "titletext": "ALERT: Some pending mandatory software updates require version 21.1.2 of the Oracle/Sun Java(tm) JDK(tm) Update Manager Runtime Environment Meta-Updater, which is not available for your platform.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is sitting at a laptop with a window with a red title bar floating over his head.]\n:Adobe Update\n:There is an update for:\n:*'''Adobe Download Manager'''\n:This update will allow you to download the new updates to the Adobe Update Downloader.\n:[OK] [Download]", "explanation": "This comic was probably a reaction to the installation service Ninite [http://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1c2h0b/flash_removed_from_ninite/ removing Adobe Flash Player] from their free version the previous day. \n\nThe comic makes fun of Adobe Systems software that delivers new versions of Adobe products to users' computers, such as ''Adobe Updater'' (which [http://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/acrobat-reader-updater-faq-9.html replaced] ''Adobe Update Manager'') and ''Adobe Download Manager'' (which [http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-pricing/akamai-download-manager-faq.html replaced] ''Akamai''). These Patch (computing)|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.\n\nThere is an actual message that a specific version of these updaters display:\n\n:[http://farm2.staticflickr.com/1348/738614725_09ad7d1d90.jpg ''The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for
updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?'']\n\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 microsystems|Sun/Oracle, with the latter being also mentioned in the title text.\n\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.\n\nThe title text also suggests that using update helper software which in turn must be updated bears the risk of creating a dependency hell."}
-{"number": "1198", "date": "April 12, 2013", "title": "Geologist", "image": "geologist.png", "titletext": "'It seems like it's still alive, Professor.' 'Yeah, a big one like this can keep running around for a few billion years after you remove the head.'", "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:]\n:'''Dept.''' of \n:'''Geology'''\n\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.]\n:Blam Blam Blam\n\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.]\n:Clink Clink\n:'''ept.''' of \n:'''ology'''\n\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:]\n:Earth\n:4,500,000,000 BCE - April 12, 2013", "explanation": "File:Alces_alces_elan_trophee_chateau_Tanlay.jpg|thumb|upright"}
-{"number": "1199", "date": "April 15, 2013", "title": "Silence", "image": "silence.png", "titletext": "All music is just performances of 4'33\" in studios where another band happened to be playing at the time.", "transcript": ":[Megan is walking with a phone in her hand.]\n\n:[Megan stops.]\n\n:[Megan raises her phone.]\n:Phone: Identify song recorded\n:Phone: > LIVE [Beta]\n\n:[Megan is in an empty room.]\n:Phone: Listening...\n\n:[The phone screen.]\n:Positive match:\n:'''4'33\"'''\n:'''John Cage'''", "explanation": "File:John Cage (1988).jpg|thumb|right|John Cage in 1988 (from Wikimedia Commons)\n''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.\n\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 (service)|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1200", "date": "April 17, 2013", "title": "Authorization", "image": "authorization.png", "titletext": "Before you say anything, no, I know not to leave my computer sitting out logged in to all my accounts. I have it set up so after a few minutes of inactivity it automatically switches to my brother's.", "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.]\n: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.", "explanation": "Certain computer Operating system|operating systems were initially designed as ''multi-user systems''. As the name suggests, these systems are meant to be used by multiple people or User (computing)|users, sometimes at the same time. To prevent malicious or accidental destructive damage to the system, users are split into two general groups: regular users, and system administrators (or admins). Regular users can access and use Application software|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.\n\nThe wry remark made here is that in the decades since the most important things on a computer to be worried about are no longer the programs that it runs, but the private personal data it contains and can access (usually online). Anyone who wished to do real mischief on an active computer could do Identity theft|considerable damage without ever caring what the admin password was. The admin password, in effect, now protects something that has become barely, if any, concern.\n\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.\n\nEssentially, once a user is Login|logged in, they can typically access all of their data without any further restriction. Modifying the operating system (for example, to install Device driver|drivers) requires a separate password.\n\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 cracker 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.\n\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… 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."}
-{"number": "1201", "date": "April 19, 2013", "title": "Integration by Parts", "image": "integration_by_parts.png", "titletext": "If you can manage to choose u and v such that u = v = x, then the answer is just (1/2)x², which is easy to remember. Oh, and add a '+C' or you'll get yelled at.", "transcript": ":A Guide to\n:Integration by Parts:\n\n:Given a problem of the form:\n::∫f(x)g(x)dx", "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.\n\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 '''''∫'''(u dv)'' is equal to ''uv - '''∫'''(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.\n\nThe title text points out that if the integral of x can be divided so that u"}
-{"number": "1202", "date": "April 22, 2013", "title": "Girls and Boys", "image": "girls_and_boys.png", "titletext": "To get more knowledge", "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:]\n:Girls go to college\n:To get more knowledge\n\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:]\n:Boys go to college\n:To get more knowledge\n\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). On 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:]\n:Girls and boys\n\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):]\n:Go to Jupiter", "explanation": "This comic and 2771: College Knowledge are plays on the popular [https://onsizzle.com/i/girls-go-to-college-to-get-more-knowledge-boys-go-1121310 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 (or how intelligent they are, for that matter). The schoolyard taunt embodies the competitiveness and separation commonly seen between young boys and girls, and ideas about the superiority of one's gender. \n\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.\n\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).\n\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, and probably even different countries, rather than the divisive atmosphere of the schoolyard.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1203", "date": "April 24, 2013", "title": "Time Machines", "image": "time_machines.png", "titletext": "'All time machine systems nominal... T-minus ten... eleven ...'", "transcript": ":[Small caption above the first panel:]\n:The problem with time machines:\n:[Cueball has his hands on the lever of a time machine.]\n\n:[Cueball flips the switch from OFF to ON.]\n:Switch: ''Click''\n:Time machine: EEEEEEEEEE\n\n:Time machine: EEEEEEEEEE\n:Switch: ''Click''\n:[Cueball flips the switch from ON to OFF.]\n\n:[Cueball looks at his palms.]\n:Cueball: ???", "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{{Citation needed}} \"useless machine\" (a device whose only purpose is to switch itself off when it is switched on).\n\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.\n\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\nIt is very fortunate that Cueball retains knowledge of the future/events of the time traveling during the process; if he didn't, then the universe would become trapped in a time loop, with Cueball flipping the machine on, which then reverts time back to before it was turned on, leading Cueball to (believing that he has not yet turned on the machine) immediately reactivate it, dooming the universe to repeat the same few seconds indefinitely."}
-{"number": "1204", "date": "April 26, 2013", "title": "Detail", "image": "detail.png", "titletext": "2031: Google defends the swiveling roof-mounted scanning electron microscopes on its Street View cars, saying they 'don't reveal anything that couldn't be seen by any pedestrian scanning your house with an electron microscope.'", "transcript": ":My Neighborhood's Resolution in:\n:[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.]", "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.\n\nAn image's Optical resolution|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.\n\nIn quantum mechanics, the Planck length is (in layman's terms) the smallest measurable distance, defined as approximately 1.6×10−35 meters, or around 1020 times smaller than the diameter of a proton. As the graph indicates, this may be called the \"resolution\" of the universe.\n\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.)\n \nOther comics exploring unwarranted extrapolation include 605: Extrapolating, 1007: Sustainable, 1281: Minifigs and 2892: Banana Prices.\n\nThe title text refers to controversy that Google received at one point regarding their use of vehicle-mounted Google Street View|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}}"}
-{"number": "1205", "date": "April 29, 2013", "title": "Is It Worth the Time?", "image": "is_it_worth_the_time.png", "titletext": "Don't forget the time you spend finding the chart to look up what you save. And the time spent reading this reminder about the time spent. And the time trying to figure out if either of those actually make sense. Remember, every second counts toward your life total, including these right now.", "transcript": ":[Above the frame is written the following text:]\n:How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you're spending more time than you save? \n:(across five years)\n\n:[The rest of 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.]\n:[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).]\n:[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).]\n:[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).]\n:[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).]\n:[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).]\n:[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).]\n:[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).]\n:[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).]\n:[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).]", "explanation": "The comic is a 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.\n\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.\n\nThe calculation on which the chart is based, for this example:\n:5 years / 1 week"}
-{"number": "1206", "date": "May 1, 2013", "title": "Einstein", "image": "einstein.png", "titletext": "Einstein was WRONG when he said that provisional patent #39561 represented a novel gravel-sorting technique and should be approved by the Patent Office.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and friend eating at a table.]\n:Cueball: I'm currently conducting an experiment which may prove Einstein wrong!\n:Friend: Ooh, exciting!\n\n:1947:\n:[Einstein and Cueball walking.]\n:Einstein: It's ''impossible'' to find a good sandwich in this town.", "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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 [https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/the-history-of-the-ipi/einstein/faq 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 [http://web.archive.org/web/20150326212744/https://www.ige.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/Institut/d/i109401.pdf here] in German."}
-{"number": "1207", "date": "May 3, 2013", "title": "AirAware", "image": "airaware.png", "titletext": "It ships with a version of Google Now that alerts you when it's too late to leave for your appointments.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Black Hat looking at a remote-controlled flying object.]\n:Cueball: What's that?\n:Black Hat: It's a drone for my new business, ''AirAware''.\n\n:Black 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.\n:Megan (on phone): I'll be there in five.\n:Booming voice from the sky: '''''WRONG!'''''\n:Megan: Augh!\n\n:Cueball: That sounds annoying. Who would ''pay'' for that?\n:Black Hat: Huh? Nobody pays. I'm just making these and releasing them.\n\n:Cueball: That's not a business. You're just yelling at strangers from the sky.\n:Cueball: A business has to make money somehow.\n:Booming voice from the sky: '''''WRONG!'''''\n:Cueball: Augh!!", "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!\".\n\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.\n\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 :Category:My Hobby|hobby.\n\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.\n\nIt can also refer to a [http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/92305/why-does-google-now-never-think-that-i-will-arrive-on-time 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1208", "date": "May 6, 2013", "title": "Footnote Labyrinths", "image": "footnote_labyrinths.png", "titletext": "Every time you read this mouseover, toggle between interpreting nested footnotes as footnotes on footnotes and interpreting them as exponents (minus one, modulo 6, plus 1).", "transcript": ":[Excerpt from what appears to be an academic paper with footnotes.]\n:experiments to observe this and we found no12 evidence for it in our data.\n\n:1Ignore this\n:2Increment by 2 before following\n:3Not true32\n:4Ibid.\n:5True263\n:6Actually a 122", "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.\n\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. (26)3 is left-associative, and 2(63) is right-associative).\n\nThe term \"ibid.\" is short for \"ibidem\", or \"at the same place\", meaning the reference was noted on the same page just before.\n\n;Interpreting nested footnotes as footnotes on footnotes, left-associative\n:no12"}
-{"number": "1209", "date": "May 8, 2013", "title": "Encoding", "image": "encoding.png", "titletext": "I don't see how; the C0 block is right there at the beginning.", "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.]\n:Cueball: No, the combining diacritics go '''''over''''' the interrobang!\n:Megan: Oh jeez, I think he's lost control.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:The skywriter we hired has terrible Unicode support.", "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. \n\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—with the result that the pilot seems to lose control (presumably control of the plane, not the text).\n\nAn interrobang (‽) is a combination question mark and exclamation mark. A diacritic is any symbol added to a character (for instance ´, ˘, ˇ, ¨), usually an accent mark added to a letter. In Unicode, Combining character|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\n\n\n‽̃ͦ̀̏͆̐̋̿ͣͭ́ͯ͒\n\nThe skywriter's errors and the phrase \"Unicode support\" play off the common issue of Mojibake|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.\n\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 C0 and C1 control codes|control characters, which are the first 32 character codes in Unicode, but Megan was actually referring to the pilot losing control ''of the plane''.\n\n1647: Diacritics also references an absurd use of diacritics."}
-{"number": "1210", "date": "May 10, 2013", "title": "I'm So Random", "image": "im_so_random.png", "titletext": "In retrospect, it's weird that as a kid I thought completely random outbursts made me seem interesting, given that from an information theory point of view, lexical white noise is just about the opposite of interesting by definition.", "transcript": ":[Black Hat is sitting in an office chair at a desk when Hairy runs up behind him with his arms raised up.]\n:Hairy: ''Monkey tacos!'' \n:Hairy: I'm so random.\n\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.]\n:Black Hat: Yeah, me too.\n\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:]\n:Black Hat: \n \n::we should stop to consider the consequences of blithely giving this technology such a central position in our lives.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Don't have any insights about a new technology? Just use this sentence! \n:It makes you sound wise and you can say it about virtually anything.", "explanation": "White Hat is giving a profound insight into . This insight, however, can be given, sounding just as profound, for any other new technology that comes around—hence 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).\n\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 for.\n\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 :Category:Google Glass|recurring theme in xkcd.\n\nThe caption is reminiscent of Randall's :Category:Tips|tips, but since the word tip is left out, it is not itself a tip comic.\n\n*174: That's What SHE Said\n*1656: It Begins\n*559: No Pun Intended\n*178: Not Really Into Pokemon\n*1022: So It Has Come To This\n*1627: Woosh"}
-{"number": "1216", "date": "May 24, 2013", "title": "Sticks and Stones", "image": "sticks_and_stones.png", "titletext": "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.", "transcript": ":[A child, who looks like a miniature Cueball, is running with arms outstretched toward Cueball.]\n:Child: Did you hear what he said about me!?\n:Cueball: Well, remember: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words—\n\n:Child: —can make someone else feel happy or sad, which is literally the only thing that matters in this stupid world?\n\n:[Brief pause.]\n\n:Child: Right?\n:Cueball: The world isn't ''that'' bad.\n:Child: Explain the line about sticks and stones?\n:Cueball: ...OK, maybe it's kind of horrific.", "explanation": "Sticks and Stones (nursery rhyme)|Sticks and Stones is a nursery rhyme, one common variant of which goes as follows:\nSticks and stones may break my bones
\nBut words will never hurt me.
\nThe rhyme is often used by parents and teachers to persuade a child to ignore mean taunts and name-calling that others use to try and hurt the child's feelings. The idea is that you haven't been hurt physically, so it shouldn't be a big deal.\n\nThe comic challenges this sentiment when the child responds that, although words can't harm you physically, they can change how you feel, and he considers that to be \"the only thing that really matters in this stupid world.\" Cueball replies optimistically, 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, 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.\n\nThe title text is rather dark, and is probably a reference to the currently active bullying and shaming culture.{{Actual citation needed}} None of us deserve to be beaten or stoned,{{Citation needed}} but words are powerful enough to make us Gaslighting|think that we do.\n\nRecent studies (for example: [http://www.pnas.org/content/108/15/6270.full?sid"}
-{"number": "1217", "date": "May 27, 2013", "title": "Cells", "image": "cells.png", "titletext": "Now, if it selectively kills cancer cells in a petri dish, you can be sure it's at least a great breakthrough for everyone suffering from petri dish cancer.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:When you see a claim that a common drug or vitamin \"kills cancer cells in a petri dish,\" \n:Keep in mind:\n\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\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:So does a handgun.", "explanation": "Cancer is one of the most feared group of illnesses due to high mortality and a topic visited by Randall in :Category:Cancer|past comics.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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, or it may have side effects that render it unusable. It is a long way from the laboratory to the pharmacy.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1218", "date": "May 29, 2013", "title": "Doors of Durin", "image": "doors_of_durin.png", "titletext": "If we get the doors open and plug up the dam on the Sirannon so the water rises a little, the pool will start draining into Moria. How do you think the Watcher would fare against a drenched Balrog?", "transcript": ":[White Hat, Megan, and Cueball stand. Megan has her finger up.]\n:Megan: I've got it!\n:Megan: What's the elvish word for friend?\n:Cueball: ''Mellon.''\n\n:[The trio stand. A off-panel door opens.]\n:''RUMBLE''\n\n:[White Hat has his palm out, while Cueball has his palm on his chin.]\n:White Hat: So what's the elvish word for \"frenemy\"?\n:Cueball: ''...Mellogoth?''\n:'''SLAM!!'''", "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 Moria (Middle-earth)|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–mention distinction.\n\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 \"coth\", much like how \"frenemy\" is a portmanteau of \"friend\" and \"enemy\". The Sindarin word-root ''coth'', in its Lenition|lenited form ''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.\n\nAccording to Fiona Jallings's textbook ''A Fan's Guide to Neo-Sindarin'', ''-n'' + ''c-'' would cause nasal mutation at the word boundary when forming a compound word, so a more correct compound word formed from ''mellon + coth'' would be ''mellochoth''.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1219", "date": "May 31, 2013", "title": "Reports", "image": "reports.png", "titletext": "If that fails, just multiply every number by a thousand. 'The 2nd St speed limit should be set at 25,000 mph, which would likely have prevented 1,000 of the intersection's 3,000 serious accidents last month.'", "transcript": ":How to make boring technical reports more fun to read:\n:Imagine they were written and sent in, unsolicited, by the estranged spouse of the head of the project.\n:[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.]\n:Computer: Six guard rails have erratic reflector placement, and one even lacks reflectors entirely, despite rule G31.02(b) clearly mandating consistent usage.\n:Cueball: ...Sharon!", "explanation": "Normally, the text in technical reports is written by technical people working in the same place as the incident. This makes for rather boring, technical text. For the average reader, this may not be very engaging. However, to make it more interesting, Randall asks that the text be read as if it was written because the spouse of the head of the project is making unhelpful personal comments due to their failing marriage. This turns the phrase from being a simple statement of relevant (if potentially dull) facts into an opinionated diatribe compounding all the many sore-points that have turned the relationship sour, or at least have been perceived as such.\n\nThis leads onto the related point that 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 Marriage Guidance Counsellor|Monty Python sketch. But this comic asks us to imagine it instead voiced in the voice of an upset 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.\n\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 mph, 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 changing the speed limit to a 'mere' 25,000 miles per hour (which is almost exactly Earth escape velocity). Of course, around 2000 accidents would not have been prevented because people still try to mess with vehicles that are moving at hypersonic velocities.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1220", "date": "June 3, 2013", "title": "Hipsters", "image": "hipsters.png", "titletext": "You may point out that this very retreat into ironic detachment while still clearly participating in the thing in question is the very definition of contemporary hipsterdom. But on the other hand, wait, you're in an empty room. Who are you talking to?", "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.\n:How often I see... Hipsters\n:--> Complaints about hipsters\n:--> Complaints about the constant use and discussion of the word \"hipster\"\n:--> Complaints that every level of meta-opinion on hipsters represents the same tedious navel-gazing by insecure people\n:--> graphs making it all worse\n:--> Now\n:[The horizontal axis is labeled time. Where the final curve rises is marked 'now'.]", "explanation": "The word Hipster_(1940s_subculture)|\"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_(contemporary_subculture)|\"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.\"\n\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.\n\nThere is a possible double meaning in the phrase \"tedious navel-gazing by insecure people\": Low-rise (fashion)|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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text may be a reference to a previous comic, 525: I Know You're Listening."}
-{"number": "1221", "date": "June 5, 2013", "title": "Nomenclature", "image": "nomenclature.png", "titletext": "[shouted, from the field] 'Aunt Beast hit a pop fly to second! Dive for it, Mrs Whatsit!'", "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.)]\n:Mrs. Whatsit: You're both confused.\n:Mrs. Whatsit: He's just \"The Doctor\".", "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.\n\nThe comic references the famous \"Who's on First?\" skit by the American comedy duo Abbott and Costello in the 1930s. This [http://youtu.be/airT-m9LcoY 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 [http://www.ramsheadgroup.com/files/2013/04/abbott-and-costello-whos-on-first.jpg most common image] associated with the skit. In the routine, Costello is confused by the nicknames the Baseball|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.\n\nDoctor (Doctor Who)|The Doctor from the long-running British television series ''Doctor Who'' is often referred to as \"Doctor Who\" by people who [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IAmNotShazam 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 [https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q"}
-{"number": "1222", "date": "June 7, 2013", "title": "Pastime", "image": "pastime.png", "titletext": "Good thing we're too smart to spend all day being uselessly frustrated with ourselves. I mean, that'd be a hell of a waste, right?", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball are chatting. She has hair.]\n:Megan: What've you been up to?\n\n:Cueball: Definitely not spending every day consumed with worry over stupid things I never talk to anyone about.\n\n:Megan: Oh, yeah, me neither.\n:Cueball: That's good.\n:Megan: Yeah.\n\n:[The final panel is silent.]", "explanation": "When asked by Megan what he's been up to, Cueball responds with the {{tvtropes|SuspiciouslySpecificDenial|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1223", "date": "June 10, 2013", "title": "Dwarf Fortress", "image": "dwarf_fortress.png", "titletext": "I may be the kind of person who wastes a year implementing a Turing-complete computer in Dwarf Fortress, but that makes you the kind of person who wastes ten more getting that computer to run Minecraft.", "transcript": ":[Cueball sits at a desk with a computer, hands on the keyboard, talking to an unseen observer.]\n:Cueball: If the corporate surveillance state monitors and controls every aspect of my life...\n:Big Brother: We do.\n:Cueball: And I play Dwarf Fortress all day...\n:Big Brother: You do.\n:Cueball: Then you're effectively Dwarf Fortress players watching your dwarves play Dwarf Fortress.\n:Big Brother: ... Oh God.\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Big Brother realizes he's trapped in the most tedious possible Hell.", "explanation": "This comic is a reaction to the recent reveal of a U.S. electronic telecom surveillance program called PRISM (surveillance program)|PRISM, run by the NSA. There is [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data 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.). \n\n''Dwarf Fortress'' is a freeware strategy game in which the player builds a civilization by giving orders to — as opposed to directly controlling — 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\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.\n\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.\n\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 — it Church-Turing thesis|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 :"}
-{"number": "1224", "date": "June 12, 2013", "title": "Council of 300", "image": "council_of_300.png", "titletext": "'And hypnotize someone into thinking they've uploaded it and passed it around.' 'But then won't the uploader get suspicious that it pauses at 301+ for a while? Why don't we just forge the number entirel--' ::BLAM:: 'The Council of 299 is adjourned.'", "transcript": ":[A secret society meets in a darkened chamber; a kitschy video involving two people and an RC helicopter is projected onto the background.]\n:Master: ...then it is settled. We the 300 members of the Secret Council, decree that this video meets our standards, and shall \"go viral\".\n:Master: send it to one of our agents to be leaked to the common folk.\n:Steward: Some of them are noticing the number.\n:Master: ...add a plus sign to throw them off.\n:Steward: very well.\n:Soon...\n:[A communication sent to Cueball, one of the many unsuspecting plebeians of the world.]\n:Email: Ooh! check out this great video I found!\n:[Zoom in on the viewer count of a YouTube video.]\n:301+", "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 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1225", "date": "June 14, 2013", "title": "Ice Sheets", "image": "ice_sheets.png", "titletext": "Data adapted from 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum' by A.S. Dyke et. al., which was way better than the sequels 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: The Meltdown' and 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: Continental Drift'.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the four panels:]\n:'''Thickness of the ice sheets'''\n:at various locations \n:21,000 years ago\n:compared with modern skylines.\n:[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\n:[The first skyline shows among other a tall TV tower. The ice reaches more than halfway to the top of the panel.]\n:\n\nThe title text references the \"[https://notendur.hi.is//~oi/AG-326%202006%20readings/Canadian%20Arctic/Dyke_QSR2002.pdf 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)|''Ice Age'' film series, specifically to ''Ice Age: the Meltdown'', and ''Ice Age: Continental Drift'' which are the second and fourth Ice Age films.\n\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? (blog)|what if?'' post ''{{what if|63|Google's Datacenters on Punch Cards}}''. Randall lives in that area.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1226", "date": "June 17, 2013", "title": "Balloon Internet", "image": "balloon_internet.png", "titletext": "I run a business selling rural internet access. My infrastructure consists of a bunch of Verizon wifi hotspots that I sign up for and then cancel at the end of the 14-day return period.", "transcript": ":[Cueball sits on a hill reading a book.]\n:[Cueball remains engrossed in the book. A balloon with a box at the end of the string begins to descend behind him.]\n:[Cueball continues reading. The balloon is getting lower.]\n:[The balloon's box is now right behind Cueball's ear.]\n:Balloon box: ''Internet''.\n:Cueball: Augh!\n:[Cueball throws the book in surprise.]\n:[The balloon ascends rapidly, while the startled Cueball looks up.]", "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.\n\nIn March of 2021, Alphabet Inc.|Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced the closure of Loon, LLC.\n\nRandall is poking fun at the tagline \"Internet for Everyone\" — meant to mean anyone could have Internet access regardless of location — by instead literally bringing the Internet to Cueball, who sits 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 — whether they want it or not\".\n\nThe title text describes Randall's own plan to provide rural internet. He will operate in a region where Verizon cellular data service 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."}
-{"number": "1227", "date": "June 19, 2013", "title": "The Pace of Modern Life", "image": "the_pace_of_modern_life.png", "titletext": "'Unfortunately, the notion of marriage which prevails ... at the present time ... regards the institution as simply a convenient arrangement or formal contract ... This disregard of the sanctity of marriage and contempt for its restrictions is one of the most alarming tendencies of the present age.' --John Harvey Kellogg, Ladies' guide in health and disease (1883)", "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.'''\n::''The Sunday Magazine''\n:::1871\n\n:It is, unfortunately, one of the chief characteristics of modern business to be always in a hurry. '''In olden times it was different.'''\n::''The Medical Record''\n:::1884\n\n:With 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...\n::William Smith, Morley: ''Ancient and Modern''\n:::1886\n\n:Conversation 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.'''\n::''Frank Leslie's popular Monthly'', Volume 29\n:::1890\n\n:Intellectual laziness and the hurry of the age have produced '''a craving for literary nips.''' The torpid brain ... has grown too weak for sustained thought.\n:'''There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.'''\n::Israel Zangwill, ''The Bachelors' Club''\n:::1891\n\n:'''The 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.\n::''Journal of the Institute of Jamaica'', Volume 1\n:::1892\n\n:So 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.'''\n: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.\n:'''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.'''\n:Ephemeral literature is driving out the great classics of the present and the past ... '''hurried reading can never be good reading.'''\n::G. J. Goschen, ''First Annual Address to the Students'', Toynbee Hall. London\n:::1894\n\n:The 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'''...\n::''The Churchman'', Volume 71\n:::1895\n\n:If 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.\n::''Public Opinion: A Comprehensive Summary of the Press Throughout the World'', Volume 18\n:::1895\n\n:The 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.\n::G. Shrady (from P.C. Knapp)\n::\"Are nervous diseases increasing?\" ''Medical Record''\n:::1896\n\n:'''The 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.\n::''Medical Brief'', Volume 26\n:::1898\n\n:'''To 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 ...\n::Louis John Rettger. ''Studies in Advanced Physiology''\n:::1898\n\n:In 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?'''\n:'''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.\n::T. Thatcher, \"A plea for a long walk\",\n::''The Publishers Circular''\n:::1902\n\n:The art of conversation is almost a lost one. '''People talk as they ride bicycles–at a rush–without 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.\n::Marie Corelli,\n::''Free opinions, freely expressed''\n:::1905\n\n:There 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.\n::Rev. Henry Hussmann,\n::''The authority of parents''\n:::1906\n\n:'''Our 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 ...\n::''The Journal of Education'', Volume 29\n:::1907\n\n:Plays 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...\n::Editorial, ''The Watchman'', Boston\n:::1908\n\n:We 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.\n::Forrest Crissey, ''Handbook of Modern Business Correspondence''\n:::1908\n\n:'''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.''' 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–a \"line\" now by another to-morrow.'''\n::Percy Holmes Boynton, ''Principles of Composition''\n:::1915", "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.\n\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. \n\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.\n\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.\n\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'':\n\n:The 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.\n: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.\n: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.\n: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.\n:Thirty pages is now too much. Fifteen pages further condensed a summary of the summary.\n: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.\n: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.\n: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.\n:We talk across a continent, telegraph across an ocean, we take even our pleasures sadly and make a task of our play.\n:The managers of sensational newspapers create perverted tastes and develop vicious tendencies.\n: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.\n:People talk as they ride bicycles–at a rush–without 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.\n: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–a \"line\" now by another to-morrow.\n\nThe style of the comic is very similar to that of 1311: 2014, which was released half a year later.\n\nThe title text shows that the meaning of the institute of marriage debate has likewise been going on for quite some time."}
-{"number": "1228", "date": "June 21, 2013", "title": "Prometheus", "image": "prometheus.png", "titletext": "'I'm here to return what Prometheus stole.' would be a good thing to say if you were a fighter pilot in a Michael Bay movie where for some reason the world's militaries had to team up to defeat every god from human mythology, and you'd just broken through the perimeter and gotten a missile lock on Mount Olympus.", "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.]\n:Cueball: Prometheus has stolen fire from the Gods!\n:Prometheus: \n::Well, sort of. \n::I mean, when you use a fire to make another fire, the first fire doesn't go away. \n::So really, it's more like \"sharing\".\n\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:Fire wants to be free.", "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.\"\n\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.\n\nThe title text refers both to Michael Bay, the director of the movies ''Transformers (film)|Transformers'' and ''Armageddon (1998_film)|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."}
-{"number": "1229", "date": "June 24, 2013", "title": "Screensaver", "image": "screensaver.png", "titletext": "I'm entering my 24th year of spending eight hours a day firing the Duck Hunt gun at the flying toasters. I'm sure I'll hit one soon.", "transcript": ":I've been staring at the screen every night for twenty years, and it finally happened.\n:[A star field.]\n:[The same star field, but there's a larger white dot glowing in the middle.]\n:[The same star field, but that larger white dot's looking bigger now. Oh. It's clearly a star.]\n:[The screen is filled with white. It's coming straight for us.]\n:[The screen is filled with static.]\n:signal lost", "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 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1230", "date": "June 26, 2013", "title": "Polar/Cartesian", "image": "polar_cartesian.png", "titletext": "Protip: Any two-axis graph can be re-labeled 'coordinates of the ants crawling across my screen as a function of time'.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:Certainty that this is a clockwise polar plot, not a Cartesian one, as a function of time:\n:[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.]", "explanation": "This comic plays upon the difference between reading a polar coordinate system|polar coordinate plot and the more common Cartesian coordinate system|Cartesian coordinate plot.\n\nThe graph purports to show the certainty in the viewers mind that it is a clockwise polar plot, as a function of time.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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)"}
-{"number": "1231", "date": "June 28, 2013", "title": "Habitable Zone", "image": "habitable_zone.png", "titletext": "They have a telescope pointed RIGHT AT US!", "transcript": ":[Cueball stands in front of a huge telescope, looking through the eyepiece.]\n:Cueball: I've discovered an Earth-sized planet in a star's habitable zone! It even has oceans! And visible weather!\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:To mess with an astronomer, put a mirror in the path of their telescope.", "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.\n\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. \n\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!"}
-{"number": "1232", "date": "July 1, 2013", "title": "Realistic Criteria", "image": "realistic_criteria.png", "titletext": "I'm leaning toward fifteen. There are a lot of them.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and White Hat stand talking. White Hat is making a forward gesture with his hand.]\n:White Hat: We shouldn't be exploring other planets until we've solved all our problems here on Earth.\n:Cueball: Sounds reasonable. So, what's the timeline on \"Solving all problems\"? Ten years? Fifteen?", "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. However, unbeknown to most, NASA not only makes back the money we spent on it (only about 33 dollars), but actally gains several billion dollars. It also provides hundreds of thousands of jobs, and things like GPS, cell phone service, the modern computer, the modern cellphone, and CAT scanner. Pretty good for costing less than a Netflix supscription.\n\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, as the objective is vague, broad and near-impossible to achieve, at least within the span of a human life.{{citation needed}} 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 2024, eleven years after this comic, it seems humanity has rather created more problems than it solved. Let's hope humanity can achieve the goal by 2028 then.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1233", "date": "July 3, 2013", "title": "Relativity", "image": "relativity.png", "titletext": "It's commonly believed that Lorentz contraction makes objects appear flatter along the direction of travel. However, this ignores light travel times. In fact, a fast-moving butt would appear rotated toward the observer but not substantially distorted. Shakira was right.", "transcript": ":[We see a head and shoulders view of Einstein. He looks pensive.]\n:[Einstein's \"line\" is in a thought bubble.]\n:Einstein: If I were traveling at the speed of light, my butt would look ''awesome''.\n:Einstein was famed for his ''Gedankedank''.", "explanation": "''Gedankedank'' is a humorous portmanteau of ''Gedankenexperiment'' (German for \"thought experiment\") and ''badonkadonk'' (slang term for [http://urbandictionary.com/define.php?term"}
-{"number": "1234", "date": "July 5, 2013", "title": "Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013)", "image": "douglas_engelbart_1925_2013.png", "titletext": "Actual quote from The Demo: '... an advantage of being online is that it keeps track of who you are and what you're doing all the time...'", "transcript": ":San Francisco, December 9th, 1968:\n:[A Cueball-like figure talking into a headset. The title of this comic indicates that he is Douglas Engelbart.]\n: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\"...\n\n:[Douglas continues to narrate. Some music is playing.]\n: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...\n:Music: I heard there was a secret chord\n\n:[Douglas continues to narrate.]\n: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\"...\n:Douglas: ...Just a little acronym we thought up...", "explanation": "The comic describes and references the engineer Douglas Engelbart|Douglas Engelbart's computer demonstration ''The Mother of All Demos'' in honor of Engelbart, who died on July 2, 2013.\n\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 (Leonard Cohen 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demo_(music) 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 [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/cats cat pictures] and [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/yolo YOLO].\n\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."}
-{"number": "1235", "date": "July 8, 2013", "title": "Settled", "image": "settled.png", "titletext": "Well, we've really only settled the question of ghosts that emit or reflect visible light. Or move objects around. Or make any kind of sound. But that covers all the ones that appear in Ghostbusters, so I think we're good.", "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 %. There is a caption for what the Y-axis represents over the flat part of the curve:]\n:Percentage of the US population carrying cameras everywhere they go, every waking moment of their lives:\n:Y-axis labels:\n::100%\n::50%\n::0%\n:X-axis labels: 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2013\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:In the last few years, with very little fanfare, we've conclusively settled the questions of flying saucers, lake monsters, ghosts, and Bigfoot.", "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 Smartphone|smartphones.\n\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_saucer|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 — 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1236", "date": "July 10, 2013", "title": "Seashell", "image": "seashell.png", "titletext": "This is roughly equivalent to 'number of times I've picked up a seashell at the ocean' / 'number of times I've picked up a seashell', which in my case is pretty close to 1, and gets much closer if we're considering only times I didn't put it to my ear.", "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.]\n\n:P(I'm near the ocean|I picked up a seashell)", "explanation": "This method of relating the probabilities of two events is known as Bayes' theorem|Bayes' Theorem.\n\nIf you put a seashell up to your ear, you might hear Seashell resonance|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.\n\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).\n\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.\n\nThis comic was released late. In the first version, the formula was incorrect, but it has since been corrected."}
-{"number": "1237", "date": "July 12, 2013", "title": "QR Code", "image": "qr_code.png", "titletext": "Remember, the installer is watching the camera for the checksum it generated, so you have to scan it using your own phone.", "transcript": ":[A smartphone. On the display, the following text:]\n:\"To continue installing, scan this code. 12 seconds remaining\"\n:[A particularly recursive QR code is displayed on the screen.]\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:How to freak out a mobile app user.", "explanation": "{{W|QR code}}s (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.\n\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\"."}
-{"number": "1238", "date": "July 15, 2013", "title": "Enlightenment", "image": "enlightenment.png", "titletext": "But the rules of writing are like magic spells. If you never acquire them, then not using them says nothing.", "transcript": ":[The two Internet Bodhisattvas Ponytail and Cueball lecture Megan encircled by a wheel placed upon the ground.]\n:Ponytail: To achieve '''internet enlightenment''', you must free yourself from insecurity.\n:Megan: But insecurity keeps me humble!\n\n:[Ponytail continues talking.]\n:Ponytail: No. Insecurity leads to conceit. Conceit leads to judgment. \n:Ponytail: Judgment leads to being an asshole.\n\n:[A laptop is placed on a stand in front of Megan.]\n:Megan: I'm ready. How do I begin?\n:Ponytail: Type this sentence.\n:[White text on black background.]\n:I heard you're idea's and their definately good.\n\n:[The laptop has been smashed to the floor. Megan is no longer in the circle.]\n:Ponytail: She wasnt ready.\n:Cueball: Its a difficult road.", "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 Skywalker|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 \"Dark side (Star Wars)|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 Padmé Amidala|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.\n\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.\n\nPonytail and Cueball challenge Megan to type the sentence \"I heard you're idea's and their definately good\", which contains four Commonly misspelled words|common misspellings (''wikt:you're|you''''re''''' instead of ''wikt:your|you'''r''''', ''possessive|idea'''''''s'' instead of ''wikt:ideas|ideas'' [see greengrocers' apostrophe], ''wikt:their|the'''ir''''' instead of ''wikt:they're|the'''y're''''', and ''wikt:definately|defin'''a'''tely'' instead of ''wikt:definitely|defin'''i'''tely'') and a misapplied verb (\"heard\" instead of \"read\").\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 type 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 — demonstrating the sort of anger that 1735: Fashion Police and Grammar Police|\"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.\n\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 — 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\". "}
-{"number": "1239", "date": "July 17, 2013", "title": "Social Media", "image": "social_media.png", "titletext": "The social media reaction to this asteroid announcement has been sharply negative. Care to respond?", "transcript": ":[Cueball heads a press conference.]\n:Cueball: NASA has confirmed that the asteroid is heading directly for us.\n:Cueball: ...Yes, a question?\n:Reporter 1: What role has social media played in this asteroid's orbit?\n:Cueball: *''sigh''*\n:Reporter 2: Has Twitter changed the way we respond to asteroid threats?\n:Cueball: Well, it's made the press conference questions stupider.\n:Reporter 3: Fascinating!\n:Reporter 4: What about Facebook?", "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.\n\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 — social media has no impact on the orbit of any space objects.{{Citation needed}}\n\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.\n\nIt's simply that \"How has Twitter affected this\" has become a standard question for journalists, posed in complete disregard of the actual event."}
-{"number": "1240", "date": "July 19, 2013", "title": "Quantum Mechanics", "image": "quantum_mechanics.png", "titletext": "You can also just ignore any science assertion where 'quantum mechanics' is the most complicated phrase in it.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Ponytail stand facing each other, talking. Cueball has a small dog on a leash.]\n:Cueball: But dogs can observe the world, which means that according to quantum mechanics they ''must'' have souls.\n\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:'''Protip''': You can safely ignore any sentence that includes the phrase \"According to quantum mechanics\".", "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.\n\nThe phrase “according to quantum mechanics” betrays the speaker's lack of knowledge about the subject. To a physicist, it is almost as vague as “according to physics”. Somebody who understands the subject would use a more precise term, such as “according to the uncertainty principle” or “according to a paper by such-and-such.”\n\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 Christian dog owners to meet their pets in Heaven. In many Christian doctrines, this would require 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 [http://dhspriory.org/thomas/english/ContraGentiles2.htm#82 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.\n\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 (quantum physics)|observer' in quantum physics, as well as theories about the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation|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.\n\nThe vast majority of people do not have a sufficient understanding of quantum mechanics to judge whether Cueball's statement is correct. Nevertheless, Randall|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 “you can safely ignore” it.\n\nThe title text refers to “science assertions” — that is, claims about scientific knowledge — that include the words “quantum mechanics”. If “quantum mechanics” 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."}
-{"number": "1241", "date": "July 22, 2013", "title": "Annoying Ringtone Champion", "image": "annoying_ringtone_champion.png", "titletext": "It beat out 'Clock radio alarm', 'B-flat at 194 decibels', 'That noise from Dumb & Dumber', and 'Recording of a sobbing voice begging you to answer'.", "transcript": ":[At the top of the frame is a humming tone. It is written in small letters, that gradually get larger until the middle \"M\", when the letters gradually shrink again. Cueball is cringing while raising his arms above his head. Black Hat is holding his phone and looking at it.]\n:Ringtone: hMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM\n:Cueball: Augh!\n:Black Hat: Oh, I've gotta take this.\n\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:By unanimous decision, the winner of the Awful Ringtone Championship is \"the sound a mosquito makes as it buzzes past your ear\".", "explanation": "This comic satirizes the large variety of Ringtone|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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text refers to four other annoying ringtones, apparently none of which were deemed as annoying as a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1242", "date": "July 24, 2013", "title": "Scary Names", "image": "scary_names.png", "titletext": "Far off to the right of the chart is the Helvetica Scenario.", "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:]\n:Y-axis: Scariness of name\n:X-axis: Scariness of thing name refers to\n\n:[Top left]: Chernobyl packet\n:[Top halfway right]: Kessler syndrome\n:[Top three quarters towards right]: Demon core\n:[Top right]: Flesh-eating bacteria\n:[A third down left]: Bomb calorimeter\n:[Halfway down three quarters towards right]: Bird flu\n:[Halfway down right]: Nuclear football\n:[Dead center]: Mustard gas\n:[Just below and right of center]: Superbug\n:[Bottom halfway right]: Soil liquefaction\n:[A third up three quarters towards right ]: Criticality incident\n:[Very bottom two-thirds to the right]: Grey goo", "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|table below including the title text on Helvetica Scenario.\n\nOn the chart, things toward the right are scary/dangerous/very bad, while things toward the top ''sound'' scary without ''necessarily'' being scary.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1243", "date": "July 26, 2013", "title": "Snare", "image": "snare.png", "titletext": "It's going in A collection of satellites skewered with pins and mounted in display boxes. Not necessarily MY collection.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is talking to Black Hat. Black Hat is using a laptop.]\n: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.\n:Black Hat: Mhm?\n: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.\n:Black Hat: Did they.\n:Cueball: It sounds kind of like...\n:Cueball: ...a butterfly net.\n:Cueball: ...are you planning on catching the International Space Station?\n:Black Hat: I'm planning to catch '''''an''''' international space station. \n:Black Hat: Not sayin' which.", "explanation": "This comic paints another one of Black Hat's evil activities as an unlikely supervillain.\n\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.\n\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’s publication was the Chinese Tiangong-1, which has since deorbited.)\n\nThe title text is a reference to how Butterfly#Collecting.2C_recording.2C_and_rearing|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.\n\nThe real buildings may belong to these structures:\n*The giant ring from the first panel may be an allusion to the Tevatron, a former circular particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), east of Batavia, Illinois|Batavia, near Chicago, Illinois. It is a 6.86 km (4.26 miles) long ring, giving it a diameter of almost 2,2 km (1.4 miles) leaving plenty of room to catch the ISS which is \"only\" 108.5 m (356 ft) in the longest direction.\n*Similarly, the gigantic winch in St. Louis, may refer to the 630-foot (192 meters) high Gateway Arch monument. It is the tallest man-made monument in the United States. \n**Even the rough south-north direction of this building does match to this scenario because the [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/7/7b/Map_St_Louis_to_Fermilb.png Fermilab is approx. 240 miles north of St. Louis]. However, it is an arch, not a winch.{{Citation needed}}"}
-{"number": "1244", "date": "July 29, 2013", "title": "Six Words", "image": "six_words.png", "titletext": "Ahem. We are STRICTLY an Orbiter shop.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the frame:]\n:The six words you ''never'' say at NASA:\n\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.]\n:Title: Proposal:\n:Label: Oberth Kuiper Maneuver\n\n:Cueball: And besides— \n:Cueball: It works in Kerbal Space Program.", "explanation": "The six words are: \"It works in ''Kerbal Space Program''\"."}
-{"number": "1245", "date": "July 31, 2013", "title": "10-Day Forecast", "image": "10_day_forecast.png", "titletext": "Oh, definitely not; they don't have Amazon Prime.", "transcript": ":[Cueball sits behind a computer desk when Megan calls to him.]\n:Megan (off-panel): Is it going to rain this weekend? I have a thing.\n:Cueball: Lemme check.\n:*type type*\n:Cueball: ...Uhh. What?\n\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.]\n:'''Your 10-day forecast:'''\n:[A yellow sun.] \n:Today\n:[Two gray clouds in front of the sun.] \n:Tomorrow\n:[Thunderstorms, with three gray clouds and a single lightning bolt.]\n:Friday \n:[Extreme thunderstorms with many large gray clouds and seven lightning bolts]\n:Saturday \n:[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.]\n:Sunday \n:[Images of distorted people with very long legs. One Megan, one Cueball and someone in the background.]\n:Monday \n:[A humanoid figure with two large horns or a winged helmet silhouetted against a bleak red background. The ground beneath the figure is black.]\n:Tuesday \n:[Grey static]\n:Tuesday \n:[Black screen]\n:Tuesday \n:[Black screen]\n:Tuesday\n\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.]\n:Megan: ...Oh! You typed a minus sign in the ZIP code. The negative ZIP codes are all like that.\n:Cueball: Let's ''never'' move there.", "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 Rapture|The Rapture, and the appearance of a demon-like creature. Upon the arrival of the creature (perhaps The Antichrist or Woden) appearing, the forecast falls into static and nothingness with the day stuck on Tuesday, implying that the world has ended.\n\nWhen asked about this, Megan casually explains that Cueball put a minus (-) sign in front of his ZIP code. A Zone Improvement Plan|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.\n\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 \"{{tvtropes|MinusWorld|Minus World}}\".\n\nMegan states that you get this result for any negative ZIP code. This may be a feature deliberately put in by the programmers creating the system, to freak out any people who make a mistake, or as an inside joke. Cueball, 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.\n\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.com|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.\n\nLater, a 1606: Five-Day Forecast|Five-Day Forecast was also made into a comic."}
-{"number": "1246", "date": "August 2, 2013", "title": "Pale Blue Dot", "image": "pale_blue_dot.png", "titletext": "Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. There is no road out of this oblivion; we must embrace it. We must join with the darkness. Ba'al the Annihilator offers us no happiness, no answers, naught but the cold embrace of the void. To imagine any other end is delusion. We must give in to the will of Ba'al, for he will one day consume us and our world alike. I therefore call on Congress to fully fund space exploration, and to join with Ba'al, the Eater of Souls. Thank you.", "transcript": ":[Cueball stands in front of a pull-down projection screen, upon which is displayed 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.]\n: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-\n:Heckler 1 (off panel): I think that's a stuck pixel. We're the speck on the left.\n:Cueball: ...Ok, '''''this''''' Pale Blue Dot is everything you-\n:Heckler 2 (off panel): No, you were right before. ''That'' one is earth.\n:Cueball: '''''Look, it doesn't matter!'''''\n:Heckler 3 (off panel): I ''knew'' it!\n:Heckler 4 (off panel): I think this is just a lens cap picture.", "explanation": "File:Pale Blue Dot.png|thumb|right|Earth is the \"pale blue dot\" halfway up the rightmost color band.\nThe 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 (Voyager)|Family Portrait, a series of images of the entire Solar System from beyond it.\n\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 [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#Pale_Blue_Dot:_A_Vision_of_the_Human_Future_in_Space_.281994.29 Wikiquote], and you can hear Carl Sagan himself reciting it in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1247", "date": "August 5, 2013", "title": "The Mother of All Suspicious Files", "image": "the_mother_of_all_suspicious_files.png", "titletext": "Better change the URL to 'https' before downloading.", "transcript": ":[Browser download warning box containing the following text.]\n:WARNING!\n:This type of file can harm your computer! Are you sure you want to download:\n:http://65.222.202.53/~TILDE/PUB/CIA-BIN/ETC/INIT.DLL?FILE", "explanation": "Modern operating systems try to intercept malicious files before they can be downloaded. This comic depicts a dialog box requiring the user to confirm if they want to download a potentially dangerous file — and it turns out the file being downloaded is absolutely filled with a truly absurd number of file extensions. Many of the file extension|extensions used inside there indicate executable code; multiple file extensions are sometimes used to disguise a Trojan horse (computing)|trojan program as a document. The sheer number of extensions in the comic wouldn't just look out of place on a safe file, it's also far more than an actual computer virus would bother to have, thus the humor.\n\nThe first part of the suspicious file's name is 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. \n\nYou can also see common download syntax for a pirated movie, Hackers (film)|''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).\n\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 tilde|~ symbol), \"cgi-bin\" is a common folder on a web server for server-side executables (Randall changes the name to \"CIA|cia-bin\"), and \"etc\" is a standard folder for configuration files – normally never accessible through a web server. The program \"init.dll\" isn't executable at all, it's a 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 [https://www.google.com/search?q"}
-{"number": "1248", "date": "August 07, 2013", "title": "Sphere", "image": "sphere.png", "titletext": "This message brought to you by the Society of Astronomers Trapped on the Surface of a Sphere.", "transcript": ":Cueball: How are you?\n:Megan: Trapped on the surface of a sphere.\n:[A beat.]\n:Cueball: That astronomy class has made you suck at small talk.\n:Megan: The universe is too '''''big''''' for small talk.", "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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 of ."}
-{"number": "1249", "date": "August 9, 2013", "title": "Meteor Showers", "image": "meteor_showers.png", "titletext": "Remember, meteors always hit the tallest object around.", "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.]\n:{| border", "explanation": "This comic spoofs the way that astronomical events are often reported in the mass media — 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.\n\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.\n\nMost of the meteor showers listed in the comic are real, but some are made up (and indicated as such below).\n\n{|class"}
-{"number": "1250", "date": "August 12, 2013", "title": "Old Accounts", "image": "old_accounts.png", "titletext": "If you close an account while it's still friends with people, it contributes to database linkage accumulation slowdown, which is a major looming problem for web infrastructure and definitely not a thing I just made up.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the frame:]\n:The internet is filled with derelict accounts aggregating news about friends long forgotten.\n\n:[Cueball sits at a desk, typing on a laptop.]\n:Cueball: *Click*\n:Computer (friend): Uhh, is everything OK?\n:Cueball: *Click*\n:Computer (another friend): Dude, what the hell?\n:Cueball: *Click*\n\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n: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.", "explanation": "Cueball is very dramatically following the described process of removing himself from a Social networking service|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.\n\nThe ''reverse order'' to unfriend people refers to practice of correct Resource management (computing)|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text appears to be referencing related issue affecting database|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1251", "date": "August 14, 2013", "title": "Anti-Glass", "image": "anti_glass.png", "titletext": "'Why don't you just point it at their eye directly?' 'What is this, 2007?'", "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.]\n:Ponytail: Police. Open up. \n:Ponytail: Did you make this glasses attachment?\n:Black Hat (off-panel through door): Oh, yeah.\n\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.]\n:Ponytail (off-panel): What's it do?\n:Black Hat: It detects when someone near you is wearing Google Glass and shines a laser pointer at their eyepiece.\n:Ponytail (off-panel): Why??\n:Black Hat: The best defense is an indiscriminate offense.\n\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.]\n:Male officer: It seems you've mailed these devices to people across Silicon Valley, including the children of every Google executive.\n:Black Hat (off-panel through door): Yeah. It's a viral marketing campaign for an upcoming movie.\n\n:[Same scene but with frame around the panel.]\n:Male officer: What movie?\n:Black Hat: Haven't decided yet. Anything good coming out this fall?\n:Male officer: Sir, open the door.\n:Black Hat: First stare at the peephole for a sec.", "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 the southern San Francisco Bay Area where many technologically up-to-date people live who are more than likely to work in the computer industry and use Google Glass.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nHowever, he could shine a laser through the peephole, which would have the same effect on the police officers.\n\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 :Category:Google Glass|recurring theme in xkcd."}
-{"number": "1252", "date": "August 16, 2013", "title": "Increased Risk", "image": "increased_risk.png", "titletext": "You may point out that strictly speaking, you can use that statement to prove that all risks are tiny—to which I reply HOLY SHIT WATCH OUT FOR THAT DOG!", "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.]\n:Ponytail: We should go to the north beach. Someone said the south beach has a 20% higher risk of shark attacks.\n: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%'''''!\n:Beret Guy: Oh no! This is our third trip!\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Reminder: A 50% increase in a tiny risk is '''''still tiny'''''.", "explanation": "The panel satirizes 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe caption clarifies Cueball's point, but without sarcasm.\n\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).\n\nBeing shot by a swimming dog with a handgun in its mouth is also specifically referenced in what if? 146, [https://what-if.xkcd.com/146/ Stop Jupiter]."}
-{"number": "1253", "date": "August 19, 2013", "title": "Exoplanet Names", "image": "exoplanet_names.png", "titletext": "If you have any ideas, I hear you can send them to iaupublic@iap.fr.", "transcript": ":[Text above the first frame of the comic:]\n::August 2013:\n:The International Astronomical Union \n:decides to start naming exoplanets,\n:and—for the first time ever—asks for \n:suggestions from the general public.\n:::They immediately regret this decision.\n:[Ponytail is facepalming while Megan and Cueball are looking at a computer screen on a desk. Hairbun points to the screen.]\n:Cueball: Can't you filter out the worst ones?\n:Hairbun: This is '''''after''''' the filter!\n\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\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.]\n\n:{| class", "explanation": "On the 14th August 2013, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) [http://www.iau.org/science/news/179/ 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.\"\n\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|Cueball's question, from Ponytail|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).\n\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|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.\n\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 flavor 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.\"\n\nThe document also states that naming suggestions may be sent to the email that Randall included in the title text.\n\nThis comic was updated in 1555: Exoplanet Names 2.\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1254", "date": "August 21, 2013", "title": "Preferred Chat System", "image": "preferred_chat_system.png", "titletext": "If you call my regular number, it just goes to my pager.", "transcript": ":[Cueball stands, talking on his cell phone.]\n:Cueball: Sorry for the voicemail, but I'm confused about how to reach you.\n: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\".\n:Cueball: You're very responsive - I just have no sense of how you use technology.\n:[An owl flies into the panel.]\n:Cueball: ?!?\n:[The owl perches on Cueballs's head. It has delivered a note to Cueball.]\n:Note: did you try to call me? use my google voice number next time.", "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.\n\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 {{W|Internet Relay Chat|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.\n\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 (appears to be a Barn Owl from its face) flies towards him carrying a written message. This appears to be a reference to wikia:w:c:harrypotter:Owl post|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 pigeon|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.\n\nRandall seems to have an interest in bird-related communications; [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 RFC 1149 - IP over Avian Carriers] has been mentioned in previous comics.\n\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 receive 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 receiver did not actually receive the voicemail, but just had Cueball's phone number displayed on his pager.\n\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. \n\nAnother suggestion is that Cueball is attempting to contact Beret Guy, as Beret Guy is known for doing odd things such as this.\n\nThis comic is closely related to a later comic, 1789: Phone Numbers."}
-{"number": "1255", "date": "August 23, 2013", "title": "Columbus", "image": "columbus.png", "titletext": "And thus was smallpox introduced into the previously Undying Lands.", "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 Jill with two hair buns, sitting cross-legged on her knees. Megan interrupts him from off-panel right.]\n:White Hat: Everyone said the world was flat, but Columbus knew it was round.\n:Megan (off-panel): *Sigh* no, no, no.\n\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.]\n:Megan: So he took his ships and sailed west—\n:Megan: —in a line tangent to the surface. The sea fell away, and he landed in ''Valinor.''\n\n:[White Hat has taken his arm down, Megan holds her arms out to each side. The children still look at her, now also Jill leans back on one arm.]\n:Megan: A Silmaril on his brow, he wanders the heavens as the morning star, still believing he reached India.\n:White Hat: Stop making stuff up.\n:Megan: You first.", "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 Christopher Columbus#Geographical considerations|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.\n\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 Eärendil|Eärendil the Mariner, the only mortal sailor to reach the Undying Lands, with one of the Silmarils (though Eärendil'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 Spherical_Earth#Late_Antiquity|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 Eärendil's in Tolkien's mythology).\n\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.\n\nThe title text refers to the Smallpox#History|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 elf (Middle-Earth)|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1256", "date": "August 26, 2013", "title": "Questions", "image": "questions.png", "titletext": "To whoever typed 'why is arwen dying': GOOD. FUCKING. QUESTION.", "transcript": ":[This strip is a rectangular word cloud, titled 'Questions found in Google autocomplete'. Embedded in the cloud are five 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.]\n\n:Questions found in Google Autocomplete\n\n:Why do whales jump\n:Why are witches green\n:Why are there mirrors above beds\n:Why do I say uh\n:Why is sea salt better\n:Why are there trees in the middle of fields\n:Why is there not a Pokemon MMO\n:Why is there laughing in TV shows\n:Why are there doors on the freeway\n:Why are there so many svchost.exe running\n:Why aren't there any countries in antarctica\n:Why are there scary sounds in Minecraft\n:Why is there kicking in my stomach\n:Why are there two slashes after HTTP\n:Why are there celebrities\n:Why do snakes exist\n:Why do oysters have pearls\n:Why are ducks called ducks\n:Why do they call it the clap\n:Why are Kyle and Cartman friends\n:Why is there an arraow on Aang's head\n:Why are text messages blue\n:Why are there mustaches on clothes\n:Why are there mustaches on cars\n:Why are there mustaches everywhere\n:Why are there so many birds in Ohio\n:Why is there so much rain in Ohio\n:Why is Ohio weather so weird\n:Why are there male and female bikes\n:Why are there bridesmaids\n:Why do dying people reach up\n:Why aren't there varicose arteries\n:Why are old Klingons different\n:Why is programming so hard\n:Why is there a 0 ohm resistor\n:Why do Americans hate soccer\n:Why do rhymes sound good\n:Why do trees die\n:Why is there no sound on CNN\n:Why aren't Pokemon real\n:Why aren't bullets sharp\n:Why do dreams seem so real\n:Why aren't there dinosaur ghosts\n:Why do iguanas die\n:Why do testicles move\n:Why are there psychics\n:Why are hats so expensive\n:Why is there caffeine in my shampoo\n:Why do your boobs hurt\n:Why aren't economists rich\n:Why do Americans call it soccer\n:Why are my ears ringing\n:Why are there so many Avengers\n:Why are the Avengers fighting the X men\n:Why is Wolverine not in the Avengers\n:Why are there ants in my laptop\n:Why is Earth tilted\n:Why is space black\n:Why is outer space so cold\n:Why are there pyramids on the moon\n:Why is NASA shutting down\n:Why is there Hell if God forgives\n:Why are there tiny spiders in my house\n:Why do spiders come inside\n:Why are there huge spiders in my house\n:Why are there lots of spiders in my house\n:Why are there spiders in my room\n:Why are there so many spiders in my room\n:Why do spider bites itch\n:Why is dying so scary\n:Why is there no GPS in laptops\n:Why do knees click\n:Why aren't there E grades\n:Why is isolation bad\n:Why do boys like me\n:Why don't boys like me\n:Why is there always a Java update\n:Why are there red dots on my thighs\n:Why is lying good\n:Why is GPS free\n:Why are trees tall\n:Why are there slaves in the Bible\n:Why do twins have different fingerprints\n:Why are Americans afraid of dragons\n:Why is there lava\n:Why are there swarms of gnats\n:Why is there phlegm\n:Why are there so many crows in Rochester, MN\n:Why is psychic weak to bug\n:Why do children get cancer\n:Why is Poseidon angry with Odysseus\n:Why is there ice in space\n:Why are there female Mr Mimes\n:Why is there an owl in my backyard\n:Why is there an owl outside my window\n:Why is there an owl on the dollar bill\n:Why do owls attack people\n:Why are AK47s so expensive\n:Why are there helicopters circling my house\n:Why are there gods\n:Why are there two Spocks\n:Why is Mt Vesuvius there\n:Why do they say T minus\n:Why are there obelisks\n:Why are wrestlers always wet\n:Why are oceans becoming more acidic\n:Why is Arwen dying\n:Why aren't my quail laying eggs\n:Why aren't my quail eggs hatching\n:Why aren't there any foreign military bases in America\n:Why is life so boring\n:Why are my boobs itchy\n:Why are cigarettes legal\n:Why are there ducks in my pool\n:Why is Jesus white\n:Why is there liquid in my ear\n:Why do Q tips feel good\n:Why do good people die\n:Why are ultrasounds important\n:Why are ultrasound machines expensive\n:Why is stealing wrong\n:Why is YKK on all zippers\n:Why is HTTPS crossed out in red\n:Why is there a line through HTTPS\n:Why is there a red line through HTTPS on Facebook\n:Why is HTTPS important\n:Why are there weeks\n:Why do I feel dizzy\n:Why are dogs afraid of fireworks\n:Why is there no king in England\n\n:[We see Cueball from the torso up, with arms outstretched.]\n:Cueball: Why aren't my arms growing\n\n:[Megan stands with a grey ghost on either side of her.]\n:Megan: Why are there ghosts\n\n:[Beret Guy stands, looking at a squirrel.]\n:Beret Guy: Why are there squirrels\n\n:[Cueball stands.]\n:Cueball: Why is sex so important.\n\n:[We see Ponytail from the torso up.]\n:Ponytail: Why aren't there guns in Harry Potter", "explanation": "Google, a rather popular internet search engine,{{Citation needed}} has a feature known as [https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/106230?hl"}
-{"number": "1257", "date": "August 28, 2013", "title": "Monster", "image": "monster.png", "titletext": "It was finally destroyed with a nuclear weapon carrying the destructive energy of the Hiroshima bomb.", "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.]\n:Megan: It's as long as a football field. Runs as fast as a cheetah.\n:Cueball: Weighs as much as a blue whale.\n:Blondie: Can we negotiate with it?\n:Ponytail: No. It has the intelligence of a two-year-old child.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n: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.", "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 [http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/05/15/dictionary-of-numbers/ Dictionary of Numbers] where Randall says that he doesn't \"like large numbers without context.\"\n\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:\n*The monster is as long as a football field. This is most likely an American_football#Field_and_equipment|American football field (given the author is American). So the monster is about 120 yards/110 m long.\n**Here is an Marco Polo Park|example from Wikipedia where a building is compared to the length of a football field.\n*The monster runs as fast as a cheetah, at least 60 mph or 96 kmh.\n**The cheetah is famous for being the fastest land animal at full sprint. Like the monster, the cheetah is prone to comparisons: to cars, since 60 mph is a common highway speed limit. Unlike a cheetah, however, the monster's speed is almost certainly thanks to its large stride.\n*The monster is as heavy as a blue whale (about 180 tonnes).\n**Here is an [http://factismals.com/tag/fish/ example] where the weight of a blue whale is used in two different comparison (something heavier and something lighter).\n*Finally it is stated that it has the intelligence of a two-year-old child. Comparing someone's intelligence to a child of a given age is very common.\n**Here is an [http://www.livescience.com/5613-dogs-smart-2-year-kids.html example] where a dog is compared to a two year old kid.\n**There is even an xkcd comic that is referring to this age IQ: 1364: Like I'm Five.\n\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 sq mi/3,140 km2) (a state Randall also used for comparison in the What if? [http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ Everybody Jump]. In another What if? he uses a football stadium filled with ants as a comparison: [https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ Lethal Neutrinos].)\n\nThe title text takes the joke one step further by comparing the nuclear bomb used to destroy the monster to Little Boy|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 Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event#Effects of impact|example from Wikipedia of such a comparison with the strength of a meteor strike."}
-{"number": "1258", "date": "August 30, 2013", "title": "First", "image": "first.png", "titletext": "Fortunately, exactly zero other annoying internet behaviors have developed during this time.", "transcript": ":[Cueball sits at his desk, using a computer.]\n\n:[Cueball is still sitting at the desk, but with hands off the keyboard in his lap.]\n\n:[Cueball is in the same position as before, talking with off-panel.]\n:Cueball: After a couple of unbearable decades, the \"first post\" thing seems to be dying a quiet death.\n:Off-screen: ''Shh.'' You'll jinx it.", "explanation": "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/first Firstposting], or [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term"}
-{"number": "1259", "date": "September 2, 2013", "title": "Bee Orchid", "image": "bee_orchid.png", "titletext": "In sixty million years aliens will know humans only by a fuzzy clip of a woman in an Axe commercial.", "transcript": ":[Beret Guy and Megan are walking through a wood.]\n:Megan: There are these orchids whose flowers look like female bees. When males try to mate with them, they transfer pollen.\n\n:[Megan kneels next to a flower.]\n:Megan: This orchid - ''Ophrys Apifera'' - makes flowers, but no bees land on them because the bee it mimics went extinct long ago.\n\n:[Megan stands.]\n: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\n:[They walk on past the flower.]\n:Megan: It's an idea of what the female bee looked like to the male bee...\n:Megan: ...as interpreted by a plant.\n:Beret Guy: Wow, so...\n\n:[We see a full-color 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.]\n:...the only memory of the bee is a painting by a dying flower.\n\n:[The flower is alone in a panel.]\n\n:[Beret Guy walks back on screen.]\n\n:[Beret Guy kneels down next to it.]\n:Beret Guy: I'll remember your bee, orchid. I'll remember you.\n\n:[Beret Guy walks off-panel again.]", "explanation": "Megan is explaining the evolutionary [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_02.html 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.\n\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.\n\nPhotographs of ''Ophrys apifera'':\n\nFile:Ophrys apifera flower1.jpg|x250px File:Bee orchids, Aller Brook Local Nature Reserve - geograph.org.uk - 833516.jpg|x250px\n\nFemale ''Eucera (Synhaolonia)'' guarding nests (left) and male ''Eucera'' (right):\n\nFile:Synhalonia nest 1.jpg|x200px File:Apidae - Eucera sp. (male).JPG|x200px\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, [http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/12/04/avocado-ghosts-of-evolution/ it’s the case of the avocado].\n\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.\n\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 (brand)|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."}
-{"number": "1260", "date": "September 4, 2013", "title": "LD50", "image": "ld50.png", "titletext": "The dose is much lower when administered orally. We're still trying to get the paper into the needles for subcutaneous injection.", "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\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:The LD50 of toxicity data is 2 kilograms per kilogram.", "explanation": "Median lethal dose|LD50 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. LD50s are usually measured in g/kg, as the amount of toxin to kill something is usually linearly related to its mass. The lower the LD50, the more lethal the toxin. An LD50 can be determined for almost any substance: for example, the LD50 for sugar (in rats) is 29.7 g/kg. However, Botulinum toxin (commercially known as Botox in the beauty industry), the most acutely toxic substance known, has a LD50 of roughly 1 ng/kg, or 0.000000001 g/kg, a vanishingly small amount.\n\nThe comic is making the joke that the LD50 of papers on toxicology is 2 kg/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 kg (137 lb), so the lethal dose would be 124 kg (273 lb) of toxicology papers. Death is apparently caused by compression or smothering, rather than any form of toxicity.\n\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 bursting the subject's stomach. A third method of delivering a toxin is by Subcutaneous injection|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. The amount of paper required to trigger a fatal blood vessel blockage would probably be fairly small if they could."}
-{"number": "1261", "date": "September 6, 2013", "title": "Shake That", "image": "shake_that.png", "titletext": "How do I work it? IT'S ALREADY WORKING!", "transcript": ":[Megan stands in a disco, surrounded by dancing figures. She looks confused.]\n:PA system: Shake what your mama gave you\n:Megan: ???\n:[Megan walks out of the club door.]\n:[We see a mug on a table, labelled \"World's Greatest Daughter\".]\n:[Megan shakes the mug.]", "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.\n\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 1990–1995. 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' — 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 — for purposes of her male audience's gratification (whether it be solicited or voyeuristic).\n\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.\n\n1291: Shoot for the Moon may be a continuation of this, due to Megan misunderstanding common saying or references."}
-{"number": "1262", "date": "September 9, 2013", "title": "Unquote", "image": "unquote.png", "titletext": "I guess it's a saying from the Old Country.", "transcript": ":[Two figures with spiky hair and backpacks are conversing. One is riding in a hover-car, or similar.]\n:Future Hair: Bye!\n:Friend: May the Force be with you!\n:Future Hair: Huh?\n:Friend: It's just something my grandma used to say. No idea what it means.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:I wonder on what date ''Star Wars'' will be quoted for the last time.", "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\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 — by which time, ironically, Star Wars-like hovercraft will have been invented.\n\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 [http://www.amazon.ca/Lets-Bring-Back-Collection-Forgotten-Yet-Delightful/dp/1452105308 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe sentiment in this comic is similar to a quote from psychiatrist and author Irvin D Yalom:\n\n“Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?”
"}
-{"number": "1263", "date": "September 11, 2013", "title": "Reassuring", "image": "reassuring.png", "titletext": "'At least humans are better at quietly amusing ourselves, oblivious to our pending obsolescence' thought the human, as a nearby Dell Inspiron contentedly displayed the same bouncing geometric shape screensaver it had been running for years.", "transcript": ":[Megan is sitting at a computer, and Cueball is standing behind her.]\n:Megan: Looks like computers will beat humans at '''Go''' pretty soon.\n:Cueball: Wow.\n:Cueball: That's the last of the big ones.\n:Megan: Yeah.\n:[Megan looks back over her shoulder at him.]\n:Cueball: Well, at least humans are still better at, uh,\n:Cueball: coming up with reassuring parables about things humans are better at?\n:Megan: Hmm.\n:[Megan types on her computer.]\n:''type type''\n:[She leans back over her chair again and addresses Cueball.]\n:Megan: I made a Python script that generates thousands of reassuring parables per second.\n:Cueball: ''Dammit.''\n:Computer: Computers will never understand a sonnet computers will never enjoy a salad comp—", "explanation": "''Go (game)|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, Computer Go|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 {{W|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 [http://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/google-ai-becomes-world-s-top-ranking-go-player-1.3097756 defeated the world's top human Go player]. This was referenced three months later in 1875: Computers vs Humans.\n\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)|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nIn 2022, Gwern Branwen [https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#why-deep-learning-will-never-truly-x used GPT-3 to generate reassuring parables]."}
-{"number": "1264", "date": "September 13, 2013", "title": "Slideshow", "image": "slideshow.gif", "titletext": "Points to anyone who hacks the Flickr devs' computers to make their text editors do this when you click on anything.", "transcript": ":Dear website operators,\n:[This strip is in the form of an animated gif. The panels transition with a Ken Burns-like fade-and-pan.]\n:[Cueball's whole body on the left side of the panel, looking slightly right of the camera.]\n:Cueball: I will ''never''...\n:[Cueball's body down to the ends of his arms is shown on the right side of the panel, looking slightly left of the camera.]\n:Cueball: ...want to browse a series of images...\n:[Cueball is shown standing in the middle of the panel, with his left hand up a little bit.\n:Cueball: ...like this.", "explanation": "It is very common for websites to feature a gallery of images – a 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1265", "date": "September 16, 2013", "title": "Juicer", "image": "juicer.png", "titletext": "But the rind is where all the vitamins are!", "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.]\n:\"Oh yeah, juicers are great! I use mine all the time.\"", "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.\n\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\".\n\nThe title text asserts that the rind is where all the Vitamin|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.\n\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 always have more red than blue. \n\nThe comic can also be interpreted as parodying the idea of fruit juices being healthy. Though this is widely believed, [http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/making-the-case-for-eating-fruit/ studies from 2013] [http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/some-fruits-are-better-than-others/ demonstrate otherwise.]"}
-{"number": "1266", "date": "September 18, 2013", "title": "Halting Problem", "image": "halting_problem.png", "titletext": "I found a counterexample to the claim that all things must someday die, but I don't know how to show it to anyone.", "transcript": ":[A short computer program.]\n '''Define''' DoesItHalt(program):\n {\n '''Return''' True;\n }\n:[Caption below the panel]:\n:The big picture solution to the halting problem.", "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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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, ⅓ + ⅓ + ⅓"}
-{"number": "1267", "date": "September 20, 2013", "title": "Mess", "image": "mess.png", "titletext": "'Sorry, I left out my glass of water from last night.' OH GOD I APPARENTLY LIVE IN A GARBAGE PIT.", "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.]\n:Friend: Sorry it's such a disaster in here.\n:Cueball thinking: Whoa— what's ''wrong'' with me?\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:My room never looks as nice as the rooms other people apologize for.", "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 they think ''this'' is messy, what would they think of my place?!\" \n\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. \n\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. \n\nIn 1565: Back Seat the exact opposite reaction to having to show other people a real messy place is used for the joke."}
-{"number": "1268", "date": "September 23, 2013", "title": "Alternate Universe", "image": "alternate_universe.png", "titletext": "As best as I can tell, I was transported here from Earth Prime sometime in the late 1990s. Your universe is identical in every way, except for the lobster thing and the thing where some of you occasionally change your clocks for some reason.", "transcript": ":[Captions above the panel:]\n:Imagine you were transported to an alternate universe just like your own, except people occasionally ate spiders.\n:You can't convince anyone this is weird.\n\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.]\n:Megan: Mmm...\n:Cueball: ''No!'' What are you ''doing!?''\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:This is how I feel about lobster.", "explanation": "Randall is trying to make the point that eating Lobster|lobsters is as weird as eating spiders. Crustacean|Crustaceans and Arachnid|arachnids are both Arthropod|arthropods, members of the same phylum, so his comparison isn't too far off. Then again, humans are in the same phylum (Chordate|chordates) as Ascidiacea|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, Spider#As_food|cooked tarantula spiders are considered a delicacy in Cambodia.\n\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.\n\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.)\n\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 :Category:Daylight saving time|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.\n\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.\n\nThe idea of a alternative universe where Brussels sprouts taste good was the subject in 2241: Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect."}
-{"number": "1269", "date": "September 25, 2013", "title": "Privacy Opinions", "image": "privacy_opinions.png", "titletext": "I'm the Philosopher until someone hands me a burrito.", "transcript": ":'''Opinions on Internet Privacy'''\n:The Philosopher:\n::Megan: \"Privacy\" is an impractical way to think about data in a digital world so unlike the one in which our soci-\n::Ponytail: ''' ''So bored.'' '''\n:The Crypto Nut:\n::Cueball: My data is safe behind six layers of symmetric and public-key algorithms.\n::Friend: What data is it?\n::Cueball: Mostly me emailing with people about cryptography.\n:The Conspiracist:\n::[Cueball talks to Megan.]\n::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.\n:The Nihilist:\n::Megan: Joke's on them, gathering all this data on me as if anything I do means anything.\n:The Exhibitionist:\n::[Cueball is watching a surveillance console, Officer Ponytail stands behind him.]\n::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.\n::Cueball: Um.\n:The Sage:\n::[Beret Guy and Cueball sitting at a table. Beret Guy is holding a burrito.]\n::Beret Guy: I don't know or care what data ''anyone'' has about me. Data is imaginary. This burrito is real.", "explanation": "This comic is about opinions on internet privacy in general. Six common positions are comedically presented, while serious privacy concerns are omitted. 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 connotations in contemporary English. That the viewer is encouraged to identify negatively with these four positions is further encouraged by the content of the panels. The Crypto Nut is presented as having nothing meaningfully worth protecting, the Conspiracist's concerns are ridiculous and irrelevant, the Nihilist's position may come across as self-deprecating, and the Exhibitionist is presented as sexually perverse.\n\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, “Philosopher” in vernacular English is neutrally valenced, potentially having the ability to expound either wisdom (\"sophia\") or Sophist#Modern_usage|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.\n\nThe title of the sixth position, the “Sage”, is positively valenced in contemporary English, and the author in the title text states that once he obtains a “burrito” — i.e., a “real” 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).\n\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.\n\nHaving completed the rhetorical analysis of the comic, we are now in a position to understand the meaning of “Internet Privacy”.\n\nPanels #3 and 5 directly reference the American NSA. Panel #5's “exhibitionist” 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 “Nihilist” 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 “Facebook” 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 them.\n\nThe comic is therefore what social theorists call '''reductive''', because it reduces the range of possibilities of “Opinions on Internet Privacy” 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 “opinions on internet privacy” – 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.\n\nThe comic is “functionally” reductive, as opposed to “intentionally” 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 – whether the comic is “intentionally” reductive or not – may only be made on the basis of external evidence; that is, data known about Randall from sources beyond this comic.\n\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 “Sage's”) 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.\n\nAdditional observations about the comic follow.\n\n*The Philosopher - the intellectual who likes to talk about the topic, often boring those around him who don't think or worry much about privacy.\n*The Cryptography|Crypto Nut - the one who goes crazy with security, even for things needing none.\n:Since 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.\n*The Conspiracist - the one who sees super-secret data-gathering agencies everywhere.\n:The (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.\n*The Nihilism|Nihilist - Nihilists believe that life lacks purpose and meaning. Someone who espouses this philosophy would think that a life spent spying someone else's meaningless life is hence doubly lacking in meaning.\n*The Exhibitionist - Assumes people are invading his privacy, and using it to show off.\n:This 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 them.\n: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.\n*The Wisdom|Sage - Seems to know the difference between the real and the imaginary - or does he?\n:The monologue alludes to a scene in The Matrix in which Cypher arranges with the evil machines to become a traitor.\n: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.\n\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.\n\nReasons to care about privacy may not apply directly and currently to the characters in the comic. Demographics that may be targeted by state violence (like sexual minorities under Nazi Germany) have valid privacy concerns, as do political opponents of a state (like communists during McCarthyism). The Exhibitionist presents a comedic inverse of another reasonable privacy concern: that people you don't know (voyeurs) are getting off from secretly watching you.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1270", "date": "September 27, 2013", "title": "Functional", "image": "functional.png", "titletext": "Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.", "explanation": "White Hat questions Cueball's faith in functional programming. Cueball responds saying, \"Tail recursion is its own reward.\"\n\nFunctional programming is a paradigm of computer programming with roots in Lambda Calculus. Core tenets of functional languages often include: function application and composition, declarative syntax, immutable data structures, and mathematically pure functions. Functional programming often uses Recursion (computer science)|recursive functions to serve the same purpose that loops serve in other programming languages. A recursive function calls itself again, typically with slightly different arguments. E.g., the following Factorial|factorial function is recursive because it calls itself again for any argument value n greater than 0.\n\n factorial(n):\n if n"}
-{"number": "1271", "date": "September 30, 2013", "title": "Highlighting", "image": "highlighting.png", "titletext": "And if clicking on any word pops up a site-search for articles about that word, I will close all windows in a panic and never come back.", "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.]\n:[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.]\n:[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.]\n:[A paragraph is shown. The entire paragraph is highlighted, making one big rectangle. Green tick.]\n:[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.]\n:[A paragraph is shown. Over the top is overlaid \"[Clicking to highlight text is disabled]\". Many, many red Xes.]\n:I absentmindedly select random blocks of text as I read, and feel subconsciously satisfied when the highlighted area makes a symmetrical shape.", "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.\n\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..\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 them to lose their place and interrupting their train of thought."}
-{"number": "1273", "date": "October 4, 2013", "title": "Tall Infographics", "image": "tall_infographics.png", "titletext": "'Big Data' doesn't just mean increasing the font size.", "transcript": ":BY THE ''YEAR''\n:2018 '''2019''' 2020\n:'''ALL''' ''INFO''Rmation\n:[Graph representing all information.]\n:[X axis of graph: '''6''' YEARS from now ('''72''' months)]\n:'''WILL''' BE [in two segments of a pie chart]\n:Megan: COMMUNICATED\n:Hairy: Yes!\n:'''in THIS'''\n:''CLEAR'' '''''and''''' '''CONCISE''' [in a Venn diagram]\n:'''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)]\n:[Arrow pointing to the bar labeled \"T\": '''T''']", "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.\n\nIn the chart:\n*The number 2019 is huge and placed between the numbers 2018 and 2020, which is bordering on extraneous considering that the fact that 2019 precedes 2020 and succeeds 2018 is blindingly obvious.{{Citation needed}}\n*The graph of information represented by this format is extrapolated off of and intersects with 100% at 2019. This is a running joke on xkcd and is ridiculous for multiple reasons, as shown in 605: Extrapolating and 1007: Sustainable, for example.\n*The word \"information\" has the letters \"info\" highlighted differently for the typical abbreviation despite the text splitting after the \"r\", a rather silly graphical styling.\n*A pie chart, with one part labeled \"will\" and one part labeled \"be\", which is completely nonsensical as pie charts show the proportional relationship of parts of a whole (for instance, people up to 30 years old and over 30 years old in a human population), and \"will\" and \"be\" are merely words and the chart isn't showing their proportional representation in a population.\n*\"6 years from now\" is more blindingly obvious fact at the time (2013).\n*\"72 months\" is an unneeded and obvious conversion from six years; it is also false precision as 2019 (January 1) arrives 63 months from the comic date. The word \"months\" is also split across two lines, mid-syllable.\n*A corny illustration of Megan telling Hairy the word \"communicated\" and Hairy enthusiastically responding \"Yes!\", despite the absurdity of the situation.\n*The word \"this\" in huge font, and the word \"in\" with a bracket, taking up an inordinate amount of space.\n*A Venn diagram. As anyone who has seen a Venn diagram knows, the two circles are two concepts or qualities, and objects or concepts that fit inside the circles go within. The words \"clear and concise\" plastered across the Venn diagram have absolutely nothing to do with Venn diagrams, and are ludicrously inappropriate for this jumbled and overblown presentation, but the word \"AND\" is in the intersection of the two circles, which is meta-humorous.\n*In the lowermost bar graph, the bar height shows the alphabetic position of each letter of the word ''FORMAT'' (the bar labeled \"F\" has a height of 6, the \"O\" bar has a height of 15, etc.), with T highlighted because it is the highest. And possibly because the bars for the other letters form a visually pleasing 'arc'-segment, leaving the 'T'-bar as a statistical outlier deemed 'worthy' of note.\n\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 [http://gizmodo.com/tall-infographics-suck-1441047853 Gizmodo: Tall Infographics Suck].\n\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. However, in the 2020s, the rise of tiktok and vertical short form video has led to more and more information being communicated in a tangentially similar format. \n\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."}
-{"number": "1274", "date": "October 7, 2013", "title": "Open Letter", "image": "open_letter.png", "titletext": "Are you ok? Do you need help?", "transcript": ":[The picture shows a letter.]\n:October 7th 2013\n: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\n:Can you please get your shit together?\n:This is embarrassing.\n:Sincerely,\n:A Concerned Citizen", "explanation": "This comic is a reference to the United States federal government shutdown of 2013|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 Government shutdown in the United States|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.\n\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 (conspiracy)|\"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.\n\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 1081|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: Conspiracy Theories and 690: Semicontrolled Demolition, among others.\n\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.\n\nThe message, as titled, is in the form of an \"Open letter|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."}
-{"number": "1275", "date": "October 9, 2013", "title": "int(pi)", "image": "int_pi.png", "titletext": "If replacing all the '3's doesn't fix your code, remove the 4s, too, with 'ceiling(pi) / floor(pi) * pi * r^floor(pi)'. Mmm, floor pie.", "transcript": ":[Inside a frame a formula is shown:]\n:volume(r)", "explanation": "This comic purports to provide a tip to programmers, that the number \"3 (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.\n\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 Sphere#Enclosed volume|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)).\n\nFor a number of reasons it is a good programming practice to use Variable (computer science)|variables and Constant (programming)|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.\n\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 (number)|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).)\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 number (programming)#Unnamed numerical constants|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.\n\n[https://youtu.be/TT6UbrfETPc?t"}
-{"number": "1276", "date": "October 11, 2013", "title": "Angular Size", "image": "angular_size.png", "titletext": "If the celestial sphere were mapped to the Earth's surface, astronomy would get a LOT easier; you'd just need a magnifying glass.", "transcript": ":The size of the part of Earth's surface directly under various space objects\n:[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\n:[The first image merely sets the stage: Earth is a full circle, with two figures — Cueball and Megan — 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\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\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\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\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\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\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\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\".]", "explanation": "This comic is a comparison of the angular diameter|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.\n\nLondon's M25 motorway is around 60 kilometers (35 miles) across, a soccer field is about 100 meters long (109 yards), a Table tennis table|ping pong table is 274 centimeters long (9 feet), a laptop is about 35 centimeters across (13.75 inches), the tilde symbol on a keyboard is about 5 millimeters long (197 mils), and a cell of ''Escherichia coli|E. coli'' is about 2 micrometers long (78.75 millionths of an inch).\n\nA simple Intercept theorem|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.\n\nThe space objects referenced in the panels are:\n\n*The Sun and the Moon, and also the open cluster Messier 25, have approximately the same size (around 0.5 degrees of arc) when seen from the Earth.\n\n*Mercury (planet)|Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are the other planets of the Solar System.\n\n*Io (moon)|Io, Europa (moon)|Europa, Ganymede (moon)|Ganymede, and Callisto (moon)|Callisto are the main moons of Jupiter; Titan (moon)|Titan is the largest moon of Saturn; and Triton (moon)|Triton is the largest moon of Neptune. Ceres (dwarf planet)|Ceres and Pluto are dwarf planets.\n\n*Phobos (moon)|Phobos and Deimos (moon)|Deimos are the moons of Mars. Eris (dwarf planet)|Eris is another dwarf planet. R Doradus and Betelgeuse are giant stars, respectively around 180 and 640 light-years away. R Doradus is the star with the largest apparent diameter (other than the sun, of course).\n\n*4942 Munroe is an asteroid [http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/09/30/asteroid-4942-munroe/ named] after xkcd author Randall Munroe. Proxima Centauri, {{W|Alpha Centauri|Alpha Centauri AB}}, Barnard's star and Sirius are nearby stars (all within 10 light-years from the Sun).\n\n*HD 189733 b, Gliese 581 g, Gliese 667 Cc, 82 G. Eridani#Planetary_system|HD 20794 c, Tau Ceti#Planets|Tau Ceti c, and KOI-1686.01 are extrasolar planets; the parenthetical names are references to the comic 1253: Exoplanet Names. However, some of the planets' parenthetical names do not match the table in the previous comic. For example, HD 20794 c is called \"Legoland\" rather than \"Moonchild\" in 1253: Exoplanet Names. The black hole at the center of our Galaxy is Sagittarius A*, a massive object containing a mass more than 4 million times of our Sun.\n\n*Voyager 1 and Voyager 2|2 are space probes launched in 1977, and currently around 125 and 100 astronomical units away, respectively.\n\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.\n\nApproximate values for the mappings to the Earth sphere (based on mean Earth radius at 6,371.0 km or 3,958.8 mi.):\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1277", "date": "October 14, 2013", "title": "Ayn Random", "image": "ayn_random.png", "titletext": "In a cavern deep below the Earth, Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ann Druyan, Paul Rudd, Alan Alda, and Duran Duran meet together in the Secret Council of /(\\b[plurandy]+\\b ?){2}/i.", "transcript": ":[Cueball sitting at a laptop, White Hat behind him.]\n:Cueball: This Ayn Random number generator you wrote '''''claims''''' to be fair, but the output is biased toward certain numbers.\n:White Hat: '''''WELL, MAYBE THOSE NUMBERS ARE JUST INTRINSICALLY BETTER!'''''", "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 (Ayn Rand)|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.\n\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 maximize 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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text identifies a group of people whose names match the regular expression [https://www.debuggex.com/r/WsWV5ZSh8NTQL_JZ /(\\b[plurandy]+\\b ?){2}/i]. A step-by-step explanation of the expression:\n*\\b is a word boundary, matching anywhere there is a 'word character' next to a non-word character—punctuation, digit, spacing, etc.\n*[plurandy] is a character class, and will match any single character from the set inside the square brackets; [adlnpruy] means exactly the same\n*the plus sign means ''one or more'' of the previous thing, so [plurandy]+ matches one or many of the characters in that class, one after the other\n*\" ?\" - a space followed by a question mark: \"?\" means \"0 or 1 of the previous thing\", so a space is optional\n*the whole section in parentheses (\\b[plurandy]+\\b ?) translates to \"a word containing one or more letters, all of which are in the set [plurandy], followed by an optional space\"\n*the {2} on the end means to repeat the pattern, so it must match exactly twice\n*The slashes at each end mark out the pattern, and the \"i\" at the end is an expression qualifier means it is \"case insensitive\" (uppercase and lowercase match interchangeably)\n\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.\n \n{| class"}
-{"number": "1278", "date": "October 16, 2013", "title": "Giraffes", "image": "giraffes.png", "titletext": "If you fund my Kickstarter...", "transcript": ":My Hobby:\n:[Silhouette of a giraffe with a sauropod's tail.]\n:Convincing genetic engineers that giraffes would look better if they had sauropod tails", "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 Hybrid (biology)|hybrids between species that would not crossbreed naturally. The technique is also applied in order to expedite the sometimes lengthy process of selective breeding.\n\nThe comic suggests the creation of genetically modified Giraffe|giraffes. Following the :Category:Dinosaurs|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 Sauropoda|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. \n\nThe idea of extracting and reproducing DNA material of dinosaurs appears most prominently in the 1993 motion picture ''Jurassic Park (film)|Jurassic Park''. The concept is regarded by scientists as rather implausible because DNA disintegrates soon after the death of the organism (read: [http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1748/4724 around 500 years]) and would not be preserved in fossils.\n\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 Unicellular organism|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.)\n\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 ''Chimera (genetics)|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.\n\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 [http://what-if.xkcd.com/44/ what-if] articles as a measurement of height.\n\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''."}
-{"number": "1279", "date": "October 18, 2013", "title": "Reverse Identity Theft", "image": "reverse_identity_theft.png", "titletext": "I asked a few friends whether they'd had this happen, then looked up the popularity of their initials/names over time. Based on those numbers, it looks like there must be at least 750,000 people in the US alone who think 'Sure, that's probably my email address' on a regular basis.", "transcript": ":If your email address is rebeccamunroe42@gmail.com when they signed up. Instead, the person would tell everyone that their address was rmunroe@gmail.com, 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, rmunroe@gmail.com is Randall's email according to [http://blog.xkcd.com/2007/07/ the xkcd blag].)\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 Personal name|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).\n\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."}
-{"number": "1280", "date": "October 21, 2013", "title": "Mystery News", "image": "mystery_news.png", "titletext": "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!", "transcript": ":[Cueball sitting at a laptop.]\n:Laptop: It's day five of the trade summit, and still no...\n:Cueball: ''Dammit''\n:''click click click''\n\n:I get most of my news from autoplaying videos in browser tabs I can't find.\n\n:''Title 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 Tab (GUI)|tabs on {{W|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.\n\nMany modern tabbed web browser|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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text refers to websites that meta refresh|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 [http://www.holovaty.com/writing/23/ stay on the same page for 30 minutes]."}
-{"number": "1281", "date": "October 23, 2013", "title": "Minifigs", "image": "minifigs.png", "titletext": "The LEGO Group is already the world's largest tire manufacturer.", "transcript": ":[Graph: x-axis 1980, 1990, 2010, 2020; y-axis 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 billions.]\n:[Plot-line 1: Number of people in the world.]\n:[Plot-line 2: Number of Lego People in the world.]\n:[Label above the x-axis at 2013 reads \"Today\".]\n:[Shortly before 2020, both plot lines cross.]\n\n:[Caption below the graph:]\n:By 2019, humans will be outnumbered.", "explanation": "Lego minifigures (often abbreviated as ''minifigs'') are tiny plastic people designed by the Danish toy manufacturer Lego Group|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 8 billion). The figures resemble simplified humans, often with a yellow skin color and featuring interchangeable body parts, such as legs, torsos, heads, hair, and hats.\n\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.\n\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, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_tire Lego is already the world's largest manufacturer of tires]. This fact is addressed in the title text.\n\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. (In 2019, there were 7.7 billion people and 7.9 billion minifigs, so this was true.)"}
-{"number": "1282", "date": "October 25, 2013", "title": "Monty Hall", "image": "monty_hall.png", "titletext": "A few minutes later, the goat from behind door C drives away in the car.", "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.]\n:Beret Guy: ...and my yard has so much grass, and I'll teach you tricks, and...\n:Goat: ♥", "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.\n\nIn the {{tvtropes|MontyHallProblem|classic version of the Monty Hall Problem}} (which was never featured on the show exactly as written, but does otherwise match the aesthetics of the show) 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.\n\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 [http://www.tvparty.com/gamemonty2.html 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).\n\nThe title text references the car and the other goat, untouched behind the remaining doors, and spoofs that the other goat will perform a car heist and drive away."}
-{"number": "1283", "date": "October 28, 2013", "title": "Headlines", "image": "headlines.png", "titletext": "1916: 'PHYSICIST DAD' TURNS HIS ATTENTION TO GRAVITY, AND YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HE FINDS. [PICS] [NSFW]", "transcript": ":[Caption above the frame:]\n:'''20th Century Headlines'''\n:Rewritten to get more clicks\n\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.]\n:1905 - How a shocking new theory, discovered by a dad, proves scientists are wrong about ''everything!''\n:1912 - 6 ''Titanic'' survivors who should have died\n:1920 - 17 things that will be outlawed now that women can vote\n:1928 - This one weird mold kills all germs\n:1929 - Most embarrassing reactions to the stock market crash [GIFs]\n:1945 - These 9 Nazi atrocities will make you lose faith in humanity\n:1948 - 5 insane plans for feeding West Berlin you won't believe are real\n:1955 - Avoid Polio with this one weird trick\n:1957 - 12 nip slips potentially visible to Sputnik\n:1968 - This year's assassinations ranked from most to least tragic\n:1969 - This is the most important photo of an astronaut you'll see all day\n:1986 - This video of a terminally ill child watching the ''Challenger'' launch will break your heart\n:1989 - You won't ''believe'' what these people did to the Berlin wall! [Video]\n:Jan 1, 1990 - 500 signs you're a 90s kid", "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 — \"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.\n\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.\n\nRandall parodies the formula in this comic with such trivializing headlines for important historical events:\n\n*1905 - How a shocking new theory, discovered by a dad, proves scientists are wrong about ''everything!''\n:Albert 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–energy equivalence (\"E"}
-{"number": "1284", "date": "October 30, 2013", "title": "Improved Keyboard", "image": "improved_keyboard.png", "titletext": "I'm always installing tons of weird experimental keyboards because it serves as a good reminder that nothing I was going to type was really worth the trouble.", "transcript": ":[Cueball walks on screen, holding a phone, and starts talking to Black Hat.]\n:Cueball: Did you get my texts?\n:Black Hat: You should install this keyboard I found.\n:Cueball: What? Why? Is it better than SwiftKey?\n:Black Hat: In some ways.\n:[Black Hat begins to walk off-panel.]\n:Cueball: Ok, installing...\n:Cueball: It's not working. The key area is blank—I can't type anything.\n:[Black Hat has left. Cueball stares at his phone.]\n:[Beat frame. Cueball lets his hands fall to their side.]\n:Cueball: ...Hey.", "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.\n\nBlack Hat is annoyed about Cueball's text messages, so he sends Cueball a \"better\" keyboard that actually doesn't work — 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 — it's better for ''him'', not for Cueball.\n\nThe Android keyboard app SwiftKey has been mentioned 1068|before, and Black Hat has done something similar in 156|156: Commented.\n\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.\n\nSimilar problems arise later in 1586: Keyboard Problems and 1678: Recent Searches."}
-{"number": "1285", "date": "November 1, 2013", "title": "Third Way", "image": "third_way.png", "titletext": "'The monospaced-typewriter-font story is a COMPLETE FABRICATION! WAKE UP, SHEEPLE' 'It doesn't matter! Studies support single spaces!' 'Those results weren't statistically significant!' 'Fine, you win. I'm using double spaces right now!' 'Are not! We can all hear your stupid whitespace.'", "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.]\n:Left placard: '''Two''' spaces after a period\n:Middle placard: '''One''' space after a period\n:Right placard: Line break after every sentence", "explanation": "This comic refers to the debate occurring in the United States about the correct Sentence spacing|number of space characters after a period at the end of a sentence.\n\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 Sentence spacing#Controversy|controversial.\n\nCueball is advocating a line break after every sentence, the mysterious \"third way\". \n\nThis obviates the problem, as a period will always appear at the end of a line and the spacing after it becomes moot. \n\nA line break after every sentence is sometimes called \"[http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/ semantic linefeeds]\".\n\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 Revision control|version control system where it helps to facilitate comparison of changes and avoid merge conflicts.\n\nIn most markup languages, a single line feed in the source is rendered as a simple space, while two linefeeds generate a paragraph break.\n\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\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.)\n\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.\n\nHowever, realistically, it is implausible that one can hear whitespace.{{Citation needed}}\n\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.\n\nNote that this is not the first time Randall has :Category:Compromise|proposed a controversial third way, and this debate is later referenced in 1989: IMHO.\n\nSentence spacing was previously mentioned in the title text of 1070: Words for Small Sets."}
-{"number": "1286", "date": "November 4, 2013", "title": "Encryptic", "image": "encryptic.png", "titletext": "It was bound to happen eventually. This data theft will enable almost limitless [xkcd.com/792]-style password reuse attacks in the coming weeks. There's only one group that comes out of this looking smart: Everyone who pirated Photoshop.", "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 [http://www.neurosecurity.com/articles/security/passwd.pdf 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 Salt (cryptography)|a \"salt\" which makes each password hash completely different even if two users use the same password. See [http://security.blogoverflow.com/2011/07/a-tour-of-password-questions-and-answers/ A tour of password questions and answers] for background on salts and suitably slow hash functions.\n\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.\n\nIn particular, Adobe used Triple DES, an older encryption algorithm which can still be relatively secure when properly used, but they Electronic codebook|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.\n\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 [http://7habitsofhighlyeffectivehackers.blogspot.com/2013/11/can-someone-be-targeted-using-adobe.html 7 Habits of Highly Effective Hackers: Can someone be targeted using the Adobe breach?].\n\nThe examples are not taken from the actual leaked file, since that [http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/how-an-epic-blunder-by-adobe-could-strengthen-hand-of-password-crackers/ 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.\n\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:\nThiswasnotagooduseofyourtimeButthenagainitwasprobablynotagooduseofmytimeeith\nerAndyethereweareXOXOXOLetsLiveHereInThisTinySecretEncodedTextWorldForever"}
-{"number": "1287", "date": "November 6, 2013", "title": "Puzzle", "image": "puzzle.png", "titletext": "Prediction for Carlsen v. Anand: ...25. Qb8+ Nxb8 26. Rd8# f6 27. \"...dude.\" Qf5 28. \"The game is over, dude.\" Qxg5 29. Rxe8 0-1 30. \"Dude, your move can't be '0-1'. Don't write that down.\" [Black flips board]", "transcript": ":[A game board with 8×8 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.]\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:White to continue insisting this is a chessboard", "explanation": "The game of Go (game)|Go (also called Weiqi, Baduk or Igo) is usually played on the 19×19 intersections of a grid, but sometimes a faster, simpler version is played on the 9×9 intersections of a grid; which thus has 8×8 squares, as a chessboard, though they are not colored in an alternating pattern – White and Black in chess|introduced to chess in the 13th century. In the comic, White has chess pieces and plays against Black, who uses Go stones.\n\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 Tsumego|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\".\n\nThe comic originally displayed three white bishops at positions c1 (to the left of the queen), f1 (to the right of the king), and e4 (three squares in front of the king). The same day the comic was posted, it was updated to have only two white bishops, replacing the ones at c1 and e4 with a single bishop in d2 (one space in front of the queen). On both boards, White has none of their pieces captured (likely because Black isn't playing chess), and therefore having three bishops would be impossible without having Promotion (chess)|seven or fewer pawns.\n\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 their pieces are in the 3-3 handicap positions marked on a 9×9 Go board.\n\nThe title text refers to the then-upcoming World Chess Championship 2013|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.\n\nThe game transcript in the title text refers to the ending of the famous Morphy versus the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard|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 [http://senseis.xmp.net/?Coordinates certain coordinates systems].\n\nThe game transcript is written in standard Algebraic notation (chess)|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 from White's perspective 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"}
-{"number": "1288", "date": "November 8, 2013", "title": "Substitutions", "image": "substitutions.png", "titletext": "INSIDE ELON MUSK'S NEW ATOMIC CAT", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:'''Substitutions''' that make reading the news more fun:\n\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.]\n:{|\n|-\n| style", "explanation": "This is the first comic in the :Category:Substitution series|Substitution series where Randall Munroe|Randall has suggested substitutions that will make reading the news more fun. But there have been several :Category:Substitutions|comics using substitutions both before and after these ones.\n\nThis is the entire Substitutions series:\n*1288: Substitutions \n*1625: Substitutions 2\n*1679: Substitutions 3\n\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.). For example, a sentence that reads:\n\n{{Quote|Witnesses reported that the suspect allegedly escaped unharmed.}}\n\nwould be changed to\n\n{{Quote|These dudes I know reported that the suspect kinda probably escaped unharmed.}}\n\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:\n\n{{Quote|A new study finds that senators and other congressional leaders are increasingly likely to view election results on their smartphone.}}\n\ninto\n{{Quote|A Tumblr post finds that elf-lords and other river spirits are increasingly likely to view eating contest results on their Pokédex.}}\n\nWhich is less meaningful, but more interesting. The 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. 'Spaaace' could be a reference to the Space Core from Portal 2, or to the way The Muppet Show presented [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1289", "date": "November 11, 2013", "title": "Simple Answers", "image": "simple_answers.png", "titletext": "'Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable?' is one that pops up whenever we invent a new communication medium.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the chart:]\n:The '''simple answers''' to the questions that get asked about every new technology:\n:{| class", "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.\n\nRandall provides a set of predictions that tend to be made about new major technologies (particularly communications and multimedia technologies), and answers the question of whether those predictions are likely to actually come true. Importantly, these predictions have been made for many years, about many different technologies (reaching back at least as far as radio, and some as far back as the printing press), so Randall is likely confident in his answers, based on past performance. \n\n''Will [ ] make us all geniuses/morons? No.'' While it is possible for new technologies to make education and information more widely available, it's never going to make everyone a genius. At the same time, while new technologies might introduce new distractions or avenues for misinformation, they're unlikely to genuinely make people less intelligent en masse. \n\n''Will [ ] destroy whole industries? Yes.'' Most significant technologies, once widely adopted, with tend to either make other technologies obsolete, or eliminate the need or desire for other products or services. Accordingly, there's a long history of industries rising and falling as new technologies develop, and there's little reason to imagine this changing. This is a bit of a loaded question because \"destroy industries\" sounds negative, and only covers half the effect — instead of merely destroying them, we're also Creative destruction|replacing them with something (hopefully) better.\n\n''Will teens use [ ] for sex? Yes. Were they going to have sex anyway? Yes.'' The first question is usually raised in a way that's either salacious or fear-mongering, but the second puts it into context. Most teens have sex at some point, and many have active sex lives, which has been true pretty much throughout history. This is upsetting to many adults, but is more or less unavoidable. When new technologies become commonplace, it's almost inevitable that it will become involved in sex somehow. This can be presented as the technology encourages sexual immorality, but there's little reason to believe that new technologies makes it more likely that young people will have sex. \n\n''Will [ ] destroy music/art? No.'' Every new technology for reproducing musical and artistic works (such as [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2004/03/wicked-player-piano player pianos] and [http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbarro/2012/01/18/thirty-years-before-sopa-mpaa-feared-the-vcr/ video cassette recorders]) has been accompanied by warnings that it will destroy the industry that supplies it content. While it is likely that industries built around art will be disrupted (see above), the nature of music and art are so fundamental to human beings that it's certain they'll survive, even if the business models around them change. \n\n''But can't we go back to a time when— No.'' Elderly people frequently {{tvtropes|WhenIWasYourAge|express their disapproval}} of modern culture and lifestyle, and of the technology that drives them. These judgments may reflect valid concerns about damaging trends, or they may merely reflect nostalgia and a bias against a world they no longer understand. In either case, it's implausible that society will simply decide to reverse technological or cultural trends. For better or worse, they're here to stay. \n\n''Will [ ] bring about world peace?- No.'' People have been trying to bring about world peace for centuries; While it is possible for diplomatic and cultural advances to make war less widespread and/or less destructive, conflict between nations and peoples seems unlikely to end anytime soon, and it's entirely implausible that any given piece of technology will bring about that end. \n\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, seemingly dismissing the possibility that new technologies will make this any worse. This would later be touched on again in 1601: Isolation.\n\nThe title text asks, ''Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable?'', and suggests that it comes up every time a new communication medium is invented. The argument has long been that wars require us to effectively dehumanize one another (which is the only way that mass slaughter can be justified), so the ability to communicate more freely with people from other nations will make it impossible for us to consider war as an option. Unfortunately, the ability to mentally separate ourselves from one another appears to be quite resilient, particularly when there's strong incentive to so do (which is often the case in international conflicts). What's more, the same communications technology that can help us interact across borders can also be used by belligerent voices to dehumanize others and justify the use of force. While war is always \"undesirable\", in the sense that it has huge human and financial costs, people keep managing to make it happen, and technology doesn't seem capable of changing that."}
-{"number": "1290", "date": "November 13, 2013", "title": "Syllable Planning", "image": "syllable_planning.png", "titletext": "You absolute-fucking-... shit.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is standing next to Megan.]\n:Cueball: Man, that is '''''ridicu'''''-fucking—... ...Hang on, I inserted \"fucking\" too late and now there's just one awkward syllable left. Can I back up?", "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, well, ridicu-fucking... wait.\n\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 Stress (linguistics)|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. wikt:unbefuckinglievable|unbe-fucking-'''lie'''vable (before the stressed syllable) or wikt:unfuckingbelievable|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.\n\nThe title text introduces a further example, with speaker inserting the ''fucking'' too late into the word ''absolutely''—which would have resulted in ''absolute-fucking-ly''—but leaving the word unfinished when they realize their mistake. The more usual tmesis here would be wikt:absofuckinglutely|''abso-fucking-lutely''. Furthermore, the speaker could be also accidentally insulting the person they're speaking to, calling them an \"absolute fucking shit.\""}
-{"number": "1291", "date": "November 15, 2013", "title": "Shoot for the Moon", "image": "shoot_for_the_moon.png", "titletext": "Shoot for the Moon. If you miss, you'll end up co-orbiting the Sun alongside Earth, living out your days alone in the void within sight of the lush, welcoming home you left behind.", "transcript": ":[Megan stands at a lectern.]\n:Megan: Students, shoot for the moon. If you miss,\n\n:[A surprisingly lunar-like object is starting to edge into the frame.]\n:Megan: '''''SHOOT AGAIN'''''. \n:Megan: Keep shooting and never stop.\n\n:[The moon is now almost entirely in-frame.]\n:Megan: Someday, one of us will destroy that stupid skycircle. And— \n:Megan: ...What? What are you all—\n\n:[The moon is now in frame, lurking ominously in the background.]\n:Megan: ...it's right behind me, isn't it? \n:Megan: '''''Shit'''''. \n:Megan: Everyone act casual.", "explanation": "The comic and the title text both parody the motivational quote attributed to Les Brown (speaker)|Leslie Brown, which originally says, \"Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.\"\n\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 {{tvtropes|RightBehindMe|common comedy trope}}.\n\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. Getting stranded on the Moon was the subject of the title text of 1510: Napoleon and of 1484: Apollo Speeches."}
-{"number": "1292", "date": "November 18, 2013", "title": "Pi vs. Tau", "image": "pi_vs_tau.png", "titletext": "Conveniently approximated as e+2, Pau is commonly known as the Devil's Ratio (because in the octal expansion, '666' appears four times in the first 200 digits while no other run of 3+ digits appears more than once.)", "transcript": ":[On the left is a \"forbidden\"-style slashed circle with the π symbol, captioned \"Pi\". On the right is a \"forbidden\"-style slashed circle with 2π, captioned \"Tau\". Between these is 1.5π, captioned \"Pau\".]\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:A compromise solution to the Pi/Tau dispute", "explanation": "This is yet another of Randall's :Category:Compromise|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 Turn (angle)#Proposals for a single letter to represent 2π|tau, which is the ratio between a circle's circumference and its radius.\n\nSome consider pi to be the wrong convention and are in favor of using tau as ''the'' circle constant; see the [http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto Tau Manifesto], which was inspired by the article \"[http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.html Pi is wrong!]\" by mathematician Robert Palais and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1293", "date": "November 20, 2013", "title": "Job Interview", "image": "job_interview.png", "titletext": "When you talk about the job experience you'll give me, why do you pronounce 'job' with a long 'o'?", "transcript": ":[Beret Guy walks in, followed by a...'prospective hire'.]\n:Beret Guy: Welcome to our company! We're headquartered here, in this real building I found!\n\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.]\n:'Hire': What do you.. ''do''?\n:Beret Guy: We make stuff for phones! Like apps and stickers.\n\n:[Beret Guy grabs the roll of wire.]\n: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\n:[Beret Guy unrolls the wire and plugs it into the wall.]\n:'Hire': ...Are you sure this is a company?\n:Beret Guy: I hope so!\n\n:[Soup streams out of the plugged-in wire into Beret Guy's bowl.]", "explanation": "Following on from 1032: Networking|his attempts at networking, Beret Guy, the oddball of the xkcd cast, conducts an interview for a position at his mysterious company.\n\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 \"stuff for phones\", 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.\n\nThe strip finishes with Beret Guy plugging a cord into what appears to be 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. It is possible that the electrical outlet is connected to a pipe which supplies soup from a soup reservoir or kitchen elsewhere in the facility, which would require the fixture to have a specialist valve-connector and the 'cable' to involve a pipe with a self-sealing end that 'keys' the valve open. It may even be more likely, given Beret Guy's 'abilities', that the outlet is taking electricity from a suitable power supply and the cord ultimately uses mass-energy conversion to turn it into soup; this would be in line with the possible operating mechanism of Beret Guy's water-creating dam in 2710: Hydropower Breakthrough.\n\nThe title text may be a reference to the biblical story of Job (biblical figure)|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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1294", "date": "November 22, 2013", "title": "Telescope Names", "image": "telescope_names.png", "titletext": "The Thirty Meter Telescope will be renamed The Flesh-Searing Eye on the Volcano.", "transcript": ":[A list of telescope names is given, with a series of checkboxes at right.]\n:{|\n|align", "explanation": "The Very Large Telescope is an existing telescope, while the European Extremely Large Telescope|(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.\n\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 Sauron#Eye of Sauron|Eye of Sauron. It is expected to be the most advanced and powerful optical telescope on Earth when completed."}
-{"number": "1295", "date": "November 25, 2013", "title": "New Study", "image": "new_study.png", "titletext": "When the results are published, no one will be sure whether to report on them again.", "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.]\n: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.", "explanation": "Hairy as a :Category:News anchor|news anchor is reporting on a new study. This is another of Randall|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.\n\nSome examples of how true this can be:\n\n*A July 2011 hoax study correlated Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Browser Usage, specifically asserting that Microsoft Internet Explorer users had a significantly lower I.Q. than other users. The study was reported by over 30 news outlets including NPR, ''Forbes'', CBS News, ''San Francisco Chronicle'', ''The Inquirer'', and ''CNN''. The perpetrator made little effort to conceal the deception by publishing it on a freshly created domain name with a parking lot as the corporate address, and was surprised that so many reputable outlets did no fact checking.\n*[http://eldeforma.com/2012/08/27/samsung-paga-multa-de-1-billon-de-dolares-a-apple-en-monedas-de-5-centavos/#axzz2lfjwKjjt Samsung pays $1bn USD fine to Apple with 20 billion 5 cent coins]: a spoof article that was widely re-reported on news networks in November 2013 despite being [http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/samsung.asp demonstrably impossible] (there are barely that many nickels in circulation, for a start).\n*Even many low-tier scientific journals don't do proper checking. Over a hundred of them accepted a fake, error-ridden cancer study for publication in a spoof organized by Science magazine, as reported by National Geographic: [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131003-bohannon-science-spoof-open-access-peer-review-cancer/ Fake Cancer Study Spotlights Bogus Science Journals].\n\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. \n\nRelated jokes:\n\n*\"87% of statistics are made up on the spot\" (which is itself completely fictitious). This joke has most famously been referenced by the [http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/ May 8, 2008 Dilbert comic strip]. It was also (with a more 2696: Precision vs Accuracy|precise figure of 88.2%) the punchline of a television advertisement for Guinness in 1997, where it was attributed to the comedian Vic Reeves. ([http://youtu.be/5in-3BmKtFI])\n*\"64 percent of all the world's statistics are made up right there on the spot, 82.4 percent of people believe 'em whether they're accurate statistics or not\" - Statistician's Blues, by Todd Snider ([http://www.cowboylyrics.com/tabs/snider-todd/statistician-blues-10809.html lyrics]; [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1296", "date": "November 27, 2013", "title": "Git Commit", "image": "git_commit.png", "titletext": "Merge branch 'asdfasjkfdlas/alkdjf' into sdkjfls-final", "transcript": "{| class", "explanation": "This comic refers to the Git (software)|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.\n\nA wikt:commit#Noun|''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 [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action"}
-{"number": "1297", "date": "November 29, 2013", "title": "Oort Cloud", "image": "oort_cloud.png", "titletext": "...I wanna try. Hang on, be right back.", "transcript": ":[Three asteroids float in space.]\n:ISON: Have you noticed that bright dot in the distance?\n:Asteroid: Yeah. What's the deal with it?\n\n:ISON: Dunno. I'm gonna go check it out.\n\n:[Pause while ISON checks it out off screen.]\n\n:ISON (broken up, with multiple tails): Wow. Do '''''NOT''''' go over there.", "explanation": "The Oort cloud is a hypothesized sphere containing many small Solar System bodies, reaching out to roughly 50,000 Astronomical unit|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.\n\nThere seems to be no definitive astronomical definition of the word \"comet\", and definitions can be challenging and problematic [http://suitti.livejournal.com/56460.html?nojs"}
-{"number": "1298", "date": "December 2, 2013", "title": "Exoplanet Neighborhood", "image": "exoplanet_neighborhood.png", "titletext": "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!", "transcript": ":'''OUR NEIGHBORHOOD'''\n:A portrait of all habitable-zone planets within 60 light-years of Earth (constructed from statistical data on typical planet sizes and orbits)\n\n:[The image shows many planets in different colors and a legend shows planets at different sizes.]\n:Planets around sun-like stars\n:Planets around other stars\n:[A marker on both sides:]\n:Earth-sized planets\n\n:[Center of the image.]\n:Earth", "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 Circumstellar habitable zone|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.\n\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 by year\n:[The x-axis is labeled: 1950, 2000, today.]\n:[The y-axis is labeled ''neutral'' at zero, ''smug'' at top, and ''embarrassed'' to the bottom.]\n:[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.]", "explanation": "This comic is :Category:Charts|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.\n\nGradually, this attitude began to change. The graph puts the low point of embarrassment some time around the late 1960's or early 1970's. At this point, television ownership was becoming common enough that the medium was increasingly seen as primarily consisting of low-brow entertainment, with little to recommend it (FCC chair Newton N. Minow famously described television content as \"a vast wasteland\"). At the same time, televisions became increasingly inexpensive, until they were considered a standard feature in nearly every household. As a result, not owning a television increasingly became seen as a deliberate choice rather than evidence of poverty. Sometime around 1980, Randall sees perception shifting to where choosing to avoid television is seen as a decision that people are smug about, rather than a source of embarrassment. The implication became that the only reason not to own a television is because you have better things to do than watch TV. \n\nThis point of view is seen as peaking around 2000, and then declining, to where people nowadays are more likely to be smug about lack of TV ownership than embarrassed, but less so than in the past. There are a number of possible reasons for this, but the biggest is probably the rise of multiple devices and streaming services, meaning that shows and movies can be consumed on on tablets, phones, and computers, making televisions less ubiquitous. Not owning a television no longer indicates that you don't consume shows and films, but simply that you consume them in different ways. As a result, the trend is back toward neutrality: whether you own a television or not just isn't much of a statement anymore. \n\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\".\n\nAs evidence for this, the adoption of TV ownership should theoretically follow a Sigmoid function|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%). [https://www.desmos.com/calculator/4j2ybqwfnc The negative second derivative of a sigmoid curve] looks very much like Randall's graph."}
-{"number": "1300", "date": "December 6, 2013", "title": "Galilean Moons", "image": "galilean_moons.png", "titletext": "I'm SO glad I escaped. They almost had me caught in their weird ...thing.", "transcript": ":[Megan, who is being orbited by four small floating balls, approaches Cueball.]\n:Megan: Check it out!\n:Cueball: What?\n:Megan: I've got Galilean moons!\n\n:[Io is at the point in its orbit closest to Cueball.]\n:Io: Hi!\n\n:[Io, which completes a full orbit in each panel, is again near Cueball, as is Europa this time.]\n:Io: Hi!\n:Europa: What's your name?\n\n:[Io alone again.]\n:Io: Hi!\n\n:[Europa returns to its position near Cueball with Io, and Ganymede joins them.]\n:Io: Hi!\n:Europa: What's your—\n:Ganymede: '''''MOOOOOON!'''''\n\n:[Io alone again.]\n:Io: Hi!\n\n:[Europa and Io again.]\n:Io: Hi!\n:Europa: What's your name?\n:Callisto: [on the other side of Megan] ''Ugh''.\n\n:[Io alone again.]\n:Io: Hi!\n:Callisto: ''So annoying''.\n\n:[Europa, Ganymede, and Io again.]\n:Io: Hi!\n:Europa: What's y—\n:Ganymede: '''''MOOOOOON.'''''\n\n:[Io alone again. Callisto nudges toward Cueball.]\n:Io: Hi!\n:Callisto: ...''almost''... ...''almoooost''...\n\n:[Io and Europa again. Callisto enters an orbit around Cueball.]\n:Io: Hi!\n:Europa: What's your name?\n:Callisto: ''Yessss!''\n\n{{clear}}", "explanation": "File:Galilean moon Laplace resonance animation.gif|thumb|365px|The 1:2:4 {{w|orbital resonance}} of {{w|Ganymede (moon)|Ganymede}}, {{w|Europa (moon)|Europa}}, and {{w|Io (moon)|Io}} \n\nMegan 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|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:\n*Io (moon)|Io, the innermost and second smallest, says \"Hi!\".\n*Europa (moon)|Europa, the second-innermost and smallest, says \"What's your name?\".\n*Ganymede (moon)|Ganymede, the third moon from Jupiter and the largest in size, interrupts Europa by shouting \"MOOOOOON!\" (this might be a reference to an old joke: Q: Knock Knock. A: Who's there? Q: Interrupting Cow. A: Interrupting Co— Q: MOOOOOOO!).\n*Callisto (moon)|Callisto, the farthest from Megan, expresses its annoyance at the antics of the other three moons.\n\nBecause the inner moons orbit Jupiter faster (due to Kepler's laws of planetary motion#Third law|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 humor derives from attributing human characteristics to the moon Callisto in attempting to escape from the other three moons.\n\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.\n\nLater, in 2264: Satellite, Jill was orbited in a similar way by an abandoned satellite."}
-{"number": "1301", "date": "December 9, 2013", "title": "File Extensions", "image": "file_extensions.png", "titletext": "I have never been lied to by data in a .txt file which has been hand-aligned.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the bar chart:]\n:Trustworthiness of Information by File Extension\n\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.]\n:[+100]: .tex\n:[+89]: .pdf\n:[+85]: .csv\n:[+67]: .txt\n:[+65]: .svg\n:[+49]: .xls/.xlsx\n:[+21]: .doc\n:[+15]: .png\n:[+14]: .ppt\n:[+3]: .jpg\n:[-8]: .jpeg\n:[-36]: .gif", "explanation": "Computer file names often end in file extensions like \".ppt\" or \".exe\". These extensions are a holdover from early operating systems like {{W|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\n*.tex files are source files for the programs TeX and LaTeX, which are used often and almost exclusively by academics, especially in mathematics and the hard sciences. .tex pretty much means serious business, and Randall does not anticipate that anyone would use such a format other than for reliable information.\n*.pdf files are a '''p'''ortable (as in over the web) '''d'''ocument '''f'''ormat by Adobe, frequently used for publication. Companies use them for official documentation. Thus, a .pdf file is likely to be some type of final product or polished work. Further, .tex files are generally compiled into .pdf files in order to make them readable. It would be strange to trust a .tex file without trusting the .pdf to which it compiles. For example, when submitting to academic journals in math and the hard sciences, the journal accepts the .tex file, but then compiles it and publishes the resulting .pdf. On the other hand, software which can produce a .doc/.xls(x), as described below, these days tends to have an inbuilt or addable ability to \"Export to PDF\", with the promise of slightly more read-onlyness and localisation-immunity than the .doc, so it might arise - in good faith or otherwise - from a less professional editor ''trying'' to look a little more serious about the copy they distribute in this document format.\n*.csv are '''c'''omma-'''s'''eparated '''v'''alues: tables of information delimited by commas, and often consist of computer-generated raw data (from, say, a scientific experiment or a database).\n*.txt files contain only plain text, no \"rich text\" or anything fancy. Programmers often use them for README files. The txt format indicates that the creator prioritizes recording the information over making the information visually appealing, although ASCII art images or multiline 'bannering' of text might be included by some authors.\n*.svg files are a ('''s'''calable) '''v'''ector '''g'''raphics format used a lot for diagrams, such as on Wikipedia.\n*.xls and .xlsx files are spreadsheets used and created by the program Microsoft Excel, part of a bundle of applications known as Microsoft Office (also supported by compatible free software such as LibreOffice). These applications are very commonly used, especially for business, finance and data analysis tasks. .xls is a binary format used for Excel versions up to 2003, while .xlsx is a ZIPped XML-based format used for Excel versions 2007 and later.\n*.doc files are a rich-text document format used and created by the program Microsoft Word, another application in the Microsoft Office bundle. As with .xls, almost anyone with access to Microsoft Office could easily make one of these. While Excel is generally used for creating tables and presenting data, Word could be used for any text-based document. Thus, Word documents tend to be far more prevalent and casually created than Excel documents, which is presumably why Randall doesn't trust them as much.\n*.png files are a bitmap image format designed for the Internet. They enjoy wide popularity for providing crisp, full-color images with lossless (reversible) compression. Almost all xkcd comics, this diagram included, use PNG. But, since anyone can create an image (you can draw something online and it will use .png), Randall rates this type as not very trustworthy.\n*.ppt files are used and created by the program Microsoft PowerPoint; as with the other two Office applications, almost anyone could easily make one of these. As they are usually used for presentations rather than documents, the information in them may be arranged differently, possibly to \"dumb down\" the content, or in marketing materials or talks in which the author may not be very objective. Further, several years ago, PowerPoint presentations were sometimes included instead of plain images as attachments in e-mail forwards containing inaccurate information. These emails still occasionally circulate, and may be the source of Randall's distrust.\n*.jpg files are another image format with high compression capabilities, good for storing photos and not so good for many other things. Photographs in general are prone to image manipulation, hence Randall's low score for this file format.\n*.jpeg files are the same thing as .jpg files, but these are more likely to have been created manually rather than automatically, making them even less reliable.\n*.gif files are yet another bitmap image format, notable for supporting short animations. GIF was once ''the'' Internet image file format until PNG gradually replaced it. Since GIF is the only common image format capable of animation, it is often used to contain things like silly clips of cats falling into boxes, or annoying, blinking advertisements claiming that \"you're the '''570|100,000,000th VISITOR!'''\". GIFs are also created by Internet trolls, such as on 4chan.org, to feed misinformation to gullible gamers and other computer users. For example, a recent [http://mashable.com/2013/12/09/xbox-one-hoax-4chan-backward-compatible/ Xbox One Hoax GIF] contained instructions that were said to make the Xbox One backwards compatible with Xbox 360 games, but would actually make the console inoperable.\n\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.\n\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 (typesetting)|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."}
-{"number": "1302", "date": "December 11, 2013", "title": "Year in Review", "image": "year_in_review.png", "titletext": "All in all, I give this year a C-. There were no aurora visible from my house and that comet evaporated. They'd better not cancel the 2017 eclipse.", "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.]\n:Cueball: We go live to our ''2013: Year in Review!''\n:Megan: Thanks! \n:Megan: In 2013, I didn't see an aurora.\n:Cueball: I- what?\n:Title: Year in Review\n\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.]\n:Megan: The northern lights. I thought this would finally be the year. \n:Megan: But it didn't happen.\n\n:[Back to the original view but Cueball has turned more towards Megan, with only one arm on the desk.]\n:Cueball: Oh. Uh... What about the rest of the year?\n:Megan: What do you mean?\n:Cueball: Any big news stories?\n:Megan: Oh yeah, tons.\n:Title: Year in Review\n\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.]\n:Title: Year in Review\n\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.]\n:Cueball: ...Well, that was ''2013: Year in Review.''\n:Megan: The sky's clearing up. I'll be outside.\n:Title: Year in Review", "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 :Category:News anchor|news anchor, expects Megan to talk about major news stories of 2013 such as the roll-out of Obamacare, the Papal conclave, 2013|election of Pope Francis or the Death of Nelson Mandela|death of Nelson Mandela, to give a few examples. \n\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|Randall's own frustration which is displayed here. \n\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 Academic grading in the United States|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe joke of Megan answering a question in an interview in an unexpected manner has been used before in 1111: Premiere.\n\nInterestingly in 1037: Umwelt there is an 1037#Aurora|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)."}
-{"number": "1303", "date": "December 13, 2013", "title": "Profile Info", "image": "profile_info.png", "titletext": "It's ok, they'll always let you opt out! Like they did with the YouTube real name profile thing.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is sitting at a desk, using a desktop computer. He is filling in a form on a webpage.]\n:First Name: John\n:Last Name: If-you-see-this-name-in-an-ad-give-the-product-a-one-star-review-Smith\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:How to deal with companies harvesting your profile for marketing", "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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 (computing)|Honeypot accounts, among other methods.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1304", "date": "December 16, 2013", "title": "Glass Trolling", "image": "glass_trolling.png", "titletext": "Plus, when someone finally grabs your glasses and stomps on them, it costs way less than $1,500 to replace them.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:My Hobby:\n\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.]\n:Cueball: OK, Glass, check tomorrow's weather.\n:Cueball: Ooh, snow!\n:Off-panel voice: Oh my god, it's somehow even ''more'' annoying than if you had it.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Saying \"OK, Glass\" before everything while wearing regular glasses.", "explanation": "This is another comic in the :Category:My Hobby|My Hobby series. Google Glass was a set of glasses frames worn like typical glasses that features an optical display and internet connectivity. It responded to voice commands starting with [https://support.google.com/glass/answer/3079305 \"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 bought the newest gadgets, like Google Glass was, 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 was very annoying in general!\n\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 have worn 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.\n\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. It seems generally that Randall was no fan of Google Glass, which was also shown earlier in 1251: Anti-Glass. Google Glass was a :Category:Google Glass|recurring theme in xkcd in 2013.\n\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 were 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 [https://mashable.com/2014/02/26/google-glass-assault/ several people] have claimed to been attacked while wearing Google Glass in San Francisco, with one person claiming [https://mashable.com/2014/04/13/google-glass-wearer-attacked/ their attacker destroyed their Glass]."}
-{"number": "1305", "date": "December 18, 2013", "title": "Undocumented Feature", "before": "#Explanation|↓ Skip to explanation ↓", "image": "undocumented_feature.png", "titletext": "And it doesn't pop up a box every time asking you to use your real name. In fact, there's no way to set your name at all. You just have to keep reminding people who you are.", "transcript": ":[A support window is shown.]\n: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.\n:Support Window: Launching support forum...\n\n:[An active conversation between two people is shown.]\n:Only a few of us ever found it. But we became friends.\n\n:[Cueball and Ponytail are at computers.]\n:We kept launching the program to check in. Eventually some of us were running VMs just to keep accessing it.\n\n:[Another conversation.]\n:As the Internet aged, so did we.\n\n:[Three question marks.]\n: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\n:[A group of people are shown in a bubble.]\n:It will probably vanish someday, but for now it's our meeting place. Our hideaway.\n\n:[The bubble is now smaller, and some parts of a web are shown.]\n:A life's worth of chat,\n\n:[More of the web is shown.]\n:Buried in the deep web.\n\n:[A flat landscape is shown with the sun at the horizon.]\n:But even if it lasts forever, ''we'' won't. When we're gone, who will remember us?\n\n:[Cueball and Hairy are shown standing together in a bubble.]\n:Who will remember this strange little world and the friendships we built here?\n\n:[No panel shown:]\n:Nobody.\n\n:[An empty bubble is shown.]\n:This place is irrelevant. Ephemeral. One day it will be forgotten.\n\n:[The bubble starts to fade away.]\n:And so will we\n\n:[The bubble has almost completely faded away.]\n\n:[The bubble is now completely gone.]\n\n:[Caption inside a new panel:]\n:But at least it doesn't have fucking video ads.", "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.\n\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).\n\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 System administrator|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.\n\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.\n\nThe last panel is a reference to [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304403804579263371125671670 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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1306", "date": "December 20, 2013", "title": "Sigil Cycle", "image": "sigil_cycle.png", "titletext": "The cycle seems to be 'we need these symbols to clarify what types of things we're referring to!' followed by 'wait, it turns out words already do that.'", "transcript": ":A sinusoidal curve is shown.\n:Y axis: Odds that the words I type will start with some weird symbol\n:X axis: Time\n: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", "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 type|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.\n\nA Sigil (computer programming)|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 (computer science)|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.\n\nMost Programming language|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.\n\n;QBASIC\n:Variables of type string end with the $ symbol. Other symbols are used (% for integers, ! 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.\n\n;C++\n:Pronounced \"see plus plus.\" Variables are just words with regular letters. It is the name of the language itself that includes symbols.\n\n;bash (Unix shell)|bash\n: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 $.\n\n;Perl\n: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 %, 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, %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.\n: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 $$reference would be a valid way to dereference the $reference when it points to $scalar... or even to $anotherReference that itself points to a %hash, in which case you could even use %$$reference for 'direct' access to that. Perl can be complicated, if you let it!)\n\n;Python (programming language)|Python\n:Variables are just words with regular letters.\n\n;Google\n:Once upon a time, Google added a social network called \"918|Google+\" (pronounced \"Google plus\") to its many offerings. On this network, accounts were identified and \"mentioned\" (linked in a message, and sent a notification) with a + prefix. For example, Randall was \"+Randall Munroe\". Google+ has been defunct since 2019, but it was active and growing in 2013 when this comic was posted.\n\n;Twitter\n: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.\n\n;Hashtags\n:In 2007 Twitter users began a convention that a # sign (whose Number sign|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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1307", "date": "December 23, 2013", "title": "Buzzfeed Christmas", "image": "buzzfeed_christmas.png", "titletext": "The 6 Weirdest Objects The Buzzfeed Writers Are Throwing Out Their Windows At Us", "transcript": ":[Four carolers (Megan, Cueball, Ponytail and Hairy) are singing.]\n:12 Best drummers of ''all time''\n:11 Pipers whose jaw-dropping good piping will make you cry\n:You won't ''believe'' what these 10 lords leap over\n:[Caption below the frame]\n:Carolers outside the Buzzfeed offices perform \"12 Weird things I ''actually got'' for Christmas\"", "explanation": "Christmas caroling is a tradition in which groups of singers travel from house to house, singing Christmas carol|carols.\n\nThese carolers are in front of the Buzzfeed offices singing the The Twelve Days of Christmas (song)|The Twelve Days of Christmas, which ''usually'' contains:\n\n:On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me.\n:12 Drummers drumming\n:11 Pipers piping\n:10 Lords a-leaping\n:9 Ladies dancing\n:8 Maids a-milking\n:7 Swans a-swimming\n:6 Geese a-laying\n:5 Golden rings\n:4 Calling birds\n:3 French hens\n:2 Turtle doves\n:And a partridge in a pear tree.\n\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.\n\nCarolers are usually rewarded with a gift, but the BuzzFeed writers probably didn't appreciate the song, because they threw \"weird stuff\" (probably office supplies) at them."}
-{"number": "1308", "date": "December 25, 2013", "title": "Christmas Lights", "image": "christmas_lights.png", "titletext": "Merry Christmas from xkcd!", "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.]", "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.\n\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:\n\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 µm resonance wavelength of hot CO2 characteristic of burning hydrocarbons; see Flame detection#Emission of radiation|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.\n\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\":\n\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.\n\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.\n\nIn 835: Tree a similarly strange Christmas tree has been constructed using binary trees.\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1309", "date": "December 27, 2013", "title": "Infinite Scrolling", "image": "infinite_scrolling.png", "titletext": "Maybe we should give up on the whole idea of a 'back' button. 'Show me that thing I was looking at a moment ago' might just be too complicated an idea for the modern web.", "transcript": ":[Megan stands at a desk, reading a book, touching it very gingerly. Cueball is standing behind her.\n:Cueball: Why are you turning the pages like that?\n:Megan: If I touch the wrong thing, I'll lose my place and have to start over.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n: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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1310", "date": "December 30, 2013", "title": "Goldbach Conjectures", "image": "goldbach_conjectures.png", "titletext": "The weak twin primes conjecture states that there are infinitely many pairs of primes. The strong twin primes conjecture states that every prime p has a twin prime (p+2), although (p+2) may not look prime at first. The tautological prime conjecture states that the tautological prime conjecture is true.", "transcript": ":[Six small panels with captions are arranged in an arch shape:]\n\n:[Caption under the arch:]\n:'''Goldbach Conjectures'''\n\n:[Captions in the panels, from left to right:]\n\n:'''Extremely weak:'''\n:Numbers just ''keep going''\n\n:'''Very weak:'''\n:Every number greater than 7 is the sum of two other numbers\n\n:'''Weak:'''\n:Every odd number greater than 5 is the sum of three primes\n\n:'''Strong:'''\n:Every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes\n\n:'''Very strong:'''\n:Every odd number is prime\n\n:'''Extremely strong:'''\n:There are no numbers above 7", "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.\n\nGoldbach's Goldbach's weak conjecture|weak and Goldbach's conjecture|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\".\n* Goldbach's weak conjecture says that every odd number above 5 can be written as the sum of three prime numbers. A computer-aided proof of this was completed in 2013, but it is not yet clear whether the proof has been accepted as correct.\n* Goldbach's strong conjecture (more often, simply \"Goldbach's conjecture\") says that every even number above 2 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. If true, this would automatically make the weak conjecture true as well, because every odd number above 5 can be written as an even number above 2 (equal to two primes), plus 3 (the third prime).\n\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.\n* The \"very strong\" conjecture says that every odd number is prime. This is false, because some odd numbers are Composite_number|composite (e.g. 9, 15, 21), and composite numbers are not prime.{{citation needed}} But if this conjecture ''were'' true, it would make Goldbach's (strong) conjecture true as well, because every even number can be written as the sum of two odd numbers (which, by this \"conjecture\", are prime).\n* The \"extremely strong\" conjecture says that numbers stop at 7. 8|This is false, but if it ''were'' true, it might make the above conjecture true as well: 9 is the first odd composite number, so stopping at 7 would eliminate all odd composite numbers. (1 is neither prime nor composite, but it ''has'' been counted as a prime number in the past. Randall may have meant 1 to be an unspoken exception, or he may be returning to the older definition that included 1 as prime.)\n* In the other direction, the \"very weak\" conjecture says that every number above 7 can be written as the sum of two other numbers. This is true,{{citation needed}} but as it says nothing about primes, it isn't enough to prove Goldbach's weak conjecture. The weak conjecture being true would automatically make this one true, though (if we didn't already know it was true).\n* The \"extremely weak\" conjecture says that \"numbers just keep going\". This is true, but it may not actually be implied by the above conjectures. Those say that numbers above 7 have certain properties, without ''requiring'' that such numbers exist. This may seem like a nitpicky point, but mathematicians love those; it also causes problems, because the \"extremely strong\" and \"extremely weak\" conjectures contradict each other. If the other conjectures were rewritten to say \"these numbers exist, ''and'' have these properties\", then they would imply this \"extremely weak\" conjecture, but then the \"extremely strong\" one would have to be stricken off.\n\nThe title text gives the same treatment to the Twin prime|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.\n\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 (linguistics)|hedge that some prime numbers \"may not look prime at first\".\n\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."}
-{"number": "1312", "date": "January 3, 2014", "title": "Haskell", "image": "haskell.png", "titletext": "The problem with Haskell is that it's a language built on lazy evaluation and nobody's actually called for it.", "explanation": "The comic pokes fun at Haskell (programming language)|Haskell, a Functional programming|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 effect (computer science)|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 monad (functional programming)|monads for Haskell).\n\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 (programming language)|C, if the program does not run, it can't have side effects.\n\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.\n\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 number|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:\n\n or :: Bool -> Bool -> Bool\nor True _"}
-{"number": "1313", "date": "January 6, 2014", "title": "Regex Golf", "image": "regex_golf.png", "titletext": "/bu|[rn]t|[coy]e|[mtg]a|j|iso|n[hl]|[ae]d|lev|sh|[lnd]i|[po]o|ls/ matches the last names of elected US presidents but not their opponents.", "transcript": ":[Caption at top of panel:]\n:Regex golf:\n:[Megan is sitting at a laptop. Cueball is standing behind her.]\n:Megan: You try to match one group but not the other.\n:Megan: /m | [tn]|b/ matches ''Star Wars'' subtitles but not ''Star Trek''.\n:Cueball: Cool.\n\n:[Caption at top of panel:]\n:Meta-regex golf:\n:[A close-up of Megan at her laptop.]\n:Megan: So I wrote a program that plays regex golf with arbitrary lists...\n:Cueball (offscreen): Uh oh...\n\n:[Caption at top of panel:]\n:Meta-meta-regex golf:\n:[Megan typing at her laptop.]\n:Megan: ...But I lost my code, so I'm grepping for files that look like regex golf solvers.\n:[Cueball facepalming.]\n\n:[Caption at top of panel:]\n:...And beyond:\n:[Another closeup of Megan at her laptop.]\n:Megan: Really, this is all /(meta-)*regex golf/.\n:Cueball: Now you have ''infinite'' problems.\n:Megan: No, I had those already.", "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. The title of the comic and the first panel is based on \"[https://regex.alf.nu/ 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. The day after this comic was released, Randall mentioned he got distracted by https://regex.alf.nu, a website with a regexp golf game, while researching for the ''what if? (blog)|what if?'' article ''{{what if|78|T-rex Calories}}''. Regular expressions have been mentioned on xkcd in :Category:Regex|many other comics.\n\nIn the regex golf challenge Megan faced, the two sets are the subtitles of the (then-extant) films from the ''Star Wars'' and ''Star Trek'' franchises. Her regex must match all ''Star Wars'' subtitles, and must not match any ''Star Trek'' subtitle. Subtitle (titling)|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 has created a 12-character regex solving the challenge.\n\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 tool uses regexes, implying 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''):\n\n{{Quote|Some people, when confronted with a problem, think \"I know, I'll use regular expressions.\" Now they have two problems.}}"}
-{"number": "1314", "date": "January 8, 2014", "title": "Photos", "image": "photos.png", "titletext": "I hate when people take photos of their meal instead of eating it, because there's nothing I love more than the sound of other people chewing.", "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.]\n:White Hat: Ugh, I hate how people take pictures instead of just enjoying the view.\n:Cueball: Why?\n\n:[White Hat turns to Cueball.]\n:White Hat: Documenting your life distracts you from ''living'' it. You're not really—\n:Cueball: Oh, come on.\n\n:[Only both their faces.]\n: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\n:[The panel zooms in on Cueball's face.]\n: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\n:[Zoom back out.]\n:White Hat: Well, they... \n:White Hat: Because I just, uh... \n:White Hat: ...\n\n:[Cueball takes out a camera.]\n:''Click''", "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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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:\n:Cueball: I hate how everyone takes pictures instead of just enjoying the view.\n:Megan: ...You say, instead of enjoying the view.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1315", "date": "January 10, 2014", "title": "Questions for God", "image": "questions_for_god.png", "titletext": "What sins could possibly darken the heart of a STEAMBOAT? I asked The Shadow, but he says he only covers men.", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball walk together.]\n:Megan: Horace Lamb said he would have two questions for God: why quantum mechanics, and why turbulence?\n:Cueball: I'd have just one: ''What did Miss Susie's steamboat '''do?!'''''", "explanation": "Megan is paraphrasing a famous quote from the British applied mathematician, and fellow of the Royal Society, Horace Lamb, who famously Horace Lamb#Later years, 1920–1934|stated in 1932:\n\n{{quote|I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the Turbulence|turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather optimistic.}}\n\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\".\n\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\n:\"Miss Susie had a steamboat\n:The steamboat had a bell\n:Miss Susie went to heaven\n:The steamboat went to...\n\n:'''Hell'''-o operator\n:Please give me number nine\n:...\"\n\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,{{cn}} could have done to deserve divine punishment.\n\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,{{cn}} The Shadow would be unable to determine what heinous crimes the steamboat had committed to deserve damnation.\n\nThis comic, in particular the way Megan and Cueball are walking and its reference to theology, greatly resembles the later comic 1505: Ontological Argument."}
-{"number": "1316", "date": "January 13, 2014", "title": "Inexplicable", "image": "inexplicable.png", "titletext": "'It has a ghost in it. Take it back.' 'No.'", "transcript": ":[Cueball sits at a desk with a laptop, making a fist at it.]\n:Cueball: ''Argh!''\n:Megan (off-screen): What?\n:Cueball: Why do I always have these inexplicable, impossible-to-diagnose computer problems?\n\n:[Megan walks up to the desk.]\n:Cueball: After six hours of this, I've concluded nothing works or makes sense. I give up on logic.\n:Megan: *sigh* Gimme. I'll figure it out.\n:Cueball: You won't.\n\n:[Cueball sits at his laptopless desk while Megan works on the laptop off-screen.]\n:''type type''\n:''Click''\n:Megan: ?\n:''type type type''\n:Megan: ???\n\n:[Megan is back in front of the desk, clutching the laptop.]\n:Cueball: How'd it go?\n:Megan: Your computer is literally haunted.\n:Cueball: ''Told'' you.", "explanation": "One of Cueball's computers is :Category:Cueball Computer Problems|once again having a serious problem, which 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 725|literally possessed by a malevolent spirit.\n\nIn the second panel, Cueball exclaims that he has \"given up on logic.\" This could be a deliberate reference to the paranormal; ghosts are supernatural entities, and are thus immune to attempts at logical explanation.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1317", "date": "January 15, 2014", "title": "Theft", "image": "theft.png", "titletext": "Is he ALSO wondering at what point our thoughts diverged, if they even have yet? 'dude, I think he just took your credit card' AM I THE ORIGINAL? HOW DO I TELL?", "transcript": ":[An identity thief sits in front of a laptop, looking at his hands]\n:Thief: I feel paralyzed by overwhelming existential dread.\n:Thief: ...and yet for some reason I'm ''really'' excited about space?\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:The thief who stole my identity has a lot to deal with.", "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.\n\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 786: Exoplanets|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.\n\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. That is a common method of identity theft, but one which does not transfer personality traits.{{Citation needed}} However, the victim is overwhelmed by existential anxiety."}
-{"number": "1318", "date": "January 17, 2014", "title": "Actually", "image": "actually.png", "titletext": "Protip: You can win every exchange just by being one level more precise than whoever talked last. Eventually, you'll defeat all conversational opponents and stand alone.", "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.]\n:[From topmost, going clockwise.]\n::Cueball: '''''Actually,''''' measurements suggest it's flat.\n::Ponytail: '''''Actually,''''' it's a sphere.\n::White Hat: '''''Actually,''''' it's an oblate spheroid.\n::Megan: '''''Actually,''''' it's a shape defined by the EGM96 coefficients.\n::Hairy 1: '''''Actually,''''' it's that plus local topography.\n::Hairy 2: '''''Actually,''''' it's embedded in a universe that's curved.", "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.\n\nThe statements in detail:\n\n;Actually, measurements suggest it's flat.\n*This statement is located at the top of the sphere in the comic, making it most likely to be read first. Given no other context, it will be interpreted as referring to the Earth; i.e. \"The Earth is flat.\" Early man, without any way to measure, likely assumed our planet's surface was flat.\n;Actually, it's a sphere.\n*Many experiments over the ages have proven the planet to be round. These early scientists described their findings as the Earth being a \"sphere.\"\n;Actually, it's an oblate spheroid.\n*This clarifies the previous statement; an oblate spheroid has a wider radius at the equator than through the poles. This distinction would have been difficult to notice before the modern age with more precise instruments and the proliferation of airplane travel. On Earth, this occurs because a rotating body tends to bulge at the equator, where the matter experiences greater centrifugal forces (analogous to experiencing more force at the outside of a round-a-bout rather than at the center). This is known as the equatorial bulge.\n;Actually, it's a shape defined by the EGM96 coefficients.\n*This adds even more clarification to the previous statement; the EGM96|Earth Gravitational Model 1996 is a detailed map of the Earth's gravitational field, which is not as uniform as a pure oblate spheroid would suggest.\n;Actually, it's that plus local topography.\n*This adds an almost unnecessary level of clarification to the previous; obviously the Earth's surface is not a smooth shape but rather contains numerous mountains, hills, valleys, etc. which constitute \"local topography\".\n;Actually, it's embedded in a universe that's curved.\n* This shifts the perspective from the actual shape of the Earth to the \"shape\" of the space around it. According to General relativity, our planet's gravity bends the space-time around it, making it curved. At the time General relativity was discovered, it was not conclusively known whether the Shape of the universe|whole universe was flat or curved.\n;Actually, measurements suggest it's flat.\n*Looping around to the first statement and given the context from the previous one, this can now be interpreted as \"the universe is flat\" rather than \"the Earth is flat\". Recent measurements of the universe's shape strongly suggest that it is more or less completely flat rather than curved.\n*This could also refer to Thomas Friedman's 2005 book \"The World is Flat\" which discusses globalization and the idea of the world as a level playing field of equal opportunity for commerce.\n;Actually...\n*The next two statements could also be interpreted as referring to the universe rather than the Earth - but they would no longer continue to be more precise than the previous (Cueball's) statement.\n*The text will not continue on to form a ''recursive loop'' - as the statement about the EGM by Megan would no longer make sense in context of the universe - and the same would be true for the next two statements.\n;Title 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."}
-{"number": "1319", "date": "January 20, 2014", "title": "Automation", "image": "automation.png", "titletext": "'Automating' comes from the roots 'auto-' meaning 'self-', and 'mating', meaning 'screwing'.", "transcript": ":\"I spend a lot of time on this task. I should write a program automating it!\"\n\n:[Two graphs are shown, plotting workload against time.]\n\n:Theory:\n:[The line for \"work on original task\" is steady but then drops down to a much lower level.]\n:[The line for the automating job increases heavily while \"writing code\" and then drops down when \"automation takes over\".]\n:[Both lines end up with a big amount of \"free time\".]\n\n:Reality:\n:[The line for \"work on original task\" is steady with no drop to a lower level.]\n:[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\".]\n:[The line for \"work on original task\" ends up with \"no time for original task anymore\".]", "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.\n\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.\n\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 [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term"}
-{"number": "1320", "date": "January 22, 2014", "title": "Walmart", "image": "walmart.png", "titletext": "What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:When a network tries to become everyone's one-stop hub, the Walmart of social interaction...\n:[Cueball and Hairy standing in a supermarket, Cueball holding groceries under his arm, Hairy with a cart.]\n:Cueball: Oh, uh, hi! Funny running into you here.\n:Hairy: Oh, hey! Yeah! How've you been?\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:...it inevitably becomes the Walmart of social interaction.", "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.\n\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.\n\nThe punch line of the joke is that social interactions at Walmart are awkward, contrived, and frequently undesired — 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).\n\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."}
-{"number": "1321", "date": "January 24, 2014", "title": "Cold", "image": "cold.png", "titletext": "'You see the same pattern all over. Take Detroit--' 'Hold on. Why do you know all these statistics offhand?' 'Oh, um, no idea. I definitely spend my evenings hanging out with friends, and not curating a REALLY NEAT database of temperature statistics. Because, pshh, who would want to do that, right? Also, snowfall records.'", "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.]\n:White Knit Cap Guy: It is '''''brutal''''' out. So much for global warming, huh?\n:Black Knit Cap Guy: ''*sigh*'' This used to happen all the time.\n:White Knit Cap Guy: What?\n\n:[A dot plot showing number of days with lows below zero Fahrenheit by year since 1970.]\n:Black Knit Cap Guy (off-screen): You're from St. Louis, right?\n:Black Knit Cap Guy (off-screen): On average, it used to get below 0 °F there a handful of days per year.\n:Black Knit Cap Guy (off-screen): But you haven't had a day like that since the nineties.\n:[Above the dot plot to the left is a label in a black frame:]\n:Days with lows < 0°F\n:[Below the dot plot are written the years:]\n:1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 \n:[Below again is written in small letters:]\n:Source: rcc-acis.org/climatecentral\n\n:[Black Knit Cap Guy has stopped walking.]\n:Black Knit Cap Guy: Then, in 2014, when the first polar vortex hit, it dipped below zero for two days.\n:Black Knit Cap Guy: And everyone freaked out\n\n:[They continue walking.]\n:Black Knit Cap Guy: because what used to be normal\n:Black Knit Cap Guy: now feels too cold.\n:White Knit Cap Guy: It ''is'' too cold!\n\n:[Above the last panel is written in a black frame:]\n:The Future:\n:[Cueball is pointing at a patch of ice.]\n:Cueball: Look at this—'''''ice!''''' In '''''St. Louis!''''' So much for global warming.\n:Person off-screen: ''*sigh*''", "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 °F (-17.8 °C). 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.\n\nThis is illustrated in panel two by a graph showing the number of days with sub 0 °F 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 [http://www.rcc-acis.org/climatecentral source link] for this graph is provided (though as of June 2014, the link is dead - see #Trivia|Trivia below).\n\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.\n\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 °F (0 °C), the freezing point of water. The suggestion here is that the environment has warmed to such an extent that temperatures below 32 degrees 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.\n\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.\n\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 Human impact on the environment|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.\n\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''.\n\nClimate change, especially global warming, is a :Category:Climate change|recurring theme in xkcd."}
-{"number": "1322", "date": "January 27, 2014", "title": "Winter", "image": "winter.png", "titletext": "Stay warm, little flappers, and find lots of plant eggs!", "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.]\n:Beret Guy: The sky is cold and the floor water is too hard to drink.\n\n:[Beret Guy looks upwards.]\n:Beret Guy: But I have my handcoats and the spacelight is warm.\n\n:[Beret Guy and Cueball continue on through woods; there are musical notes coming from the trees.]\n\n:Beret Guy: Listen—the flappy planes are beeping in the stick towers.\n\n:[Cueball pauses.]\n:Cueball: Those are all the wrong words for those things.\n:[Beret Guy replies from off panel.]\n:Beret Guy: Maybe—but the things themselves are all right. So who cares?\n\n:[Cueball continues walking, with sunlight and musical notes above.]", "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 \"1133: Up Goer Five|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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1323", "date": "January 29, 2014", "title": "Protocol", "image": "protocol.png", "titletext": "Changing the names would be easier, but if you're not comfortable lying, try only making friends with people named Alice, Bob, Carol, etc.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is telling a story to a Computer Scientist who is seated at his desk.]\n:Cueball: Alice sends a message to Bob saying to meet her somewhere.\n:Computer Scientist: Uh huh.\n:Cueball: But Eve sees it, too, and goes to the place.\n:Computer Scientist: With you so far.\n:Cueball: Bob is delayed, and Alice and Eve meet.\n:Computer Scientist: Yeah?\n:CAPTION: I've discovered a way to get computer scientists to listen to any boring story.", "explanation": "Alice_and_Bob|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 standardized over time as described at Alice and Bob.\n\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.\n\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 which means that technically you tell the story like it is. But this approach means investing a lot more effort into curating such a situation, possibly even to ensure that the Eve that you befriend is an actual habitual eavesdropper.\n\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 (data networks)|acknowledgement upon receiving the data. In this case, the data are the lines of the boring story.\n\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 —his former partner— 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. The names are also mentioned in 2691: Encryption."}
-{"number": "1324", "date": "January 31, 2014", "title": "Weather", "image": "weather.png", "titletext": "At least if you're really into, like, Turkish archaeology, store clerks aren't like 'hey, how 'bout those Derinkuyu underground cities!' when they're trying to be polite.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Hairy are talking.]\n:Hairy: So, how 'bout this weather?\n:Cueball: I ''know,'' right? The whole jet stream layer is ''nuts!''\n:Hairy: Um, sure...\n:Cueball: The 18z GFS forecasts 960mb by Tuesday. Think it'll verify?\n:Hairy: What?\n:Cueball: ...Right. Sorry. Uh, yeah! Weather sure has been crazy.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Weather geeks have it tough.", "explanation": "Social norm accepts casual small-talk as an ice breaker for interaction — usually it is always safe to talk about the weather without hitting any disagreements as there are rarely any personal viewpoints about the weather — in contrast small-talk is never about political subjects (except perhaps at a political rally or in a similar context where it is reasonably certain that everyone agrees) or similar where chances are that there are strong personal viewpoints.\n\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.\n\nAs to the jargon:\n*Jet stream|Jet streams are strong air currents high in the atmosphere which have a big influence on the weather. \n*18z is 18:00 Coordinated Universal Time|UTC (6 PM in London, 10 AM in California). See ISO 8601 at Wikipedia. The letter \"Z\" is used as 'Zulu' in the NATO phonetic alphabet, meaning just UTC.\n*GFS is the Global Forecast System (also known as NCEP-GFS). It is a computer model used by the National Weather Service to predict the weather up to 16 days in advance. The model is run 4 times a day and the output is distinguished by the UTC hour it was started (18z in this case).\n*Part of the prediction is the atmospheric pressure expressed in Bar (unit)|millibars (or mb). 960 mb is very low pressure, which is usually associated with seriously bad weather (for comparison, the record low pressure for Minnesota was 963 mb until 1998).\n*\"Think it'll verify?\": A forecast \"verifies\" when an analysis of observations at the forecast time are found to match the forecast. Cueball is asking if Hairy thinks the prediction of a 960 mb low will be shown to have been correct.\n\nThe title text clarifies the problem weather nuts like Cueball here have: Unlike other geeky pursuits (like, say, the Derinkuyu Underground City|Derinkuyu Underground Cities, 1368: One Of The|one of the most well-known History of Turkey|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."}
-{"number": "1325", "date": "February 3, 2014", "title": "Rejection", "image": "rejection.png", "titletext": "Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is walking, and a Cueball-like guy follows him.]\n:Guy: Women ''say'' they want nice guys, but what they ''really'' want are—\n:Cueball: —Guys who respond to rejection by belittling their judgment and self-awareness?\n:Cueball: If so, don't worry — you'll be ''fine.''", "explanation": "This strip portrays Cueball's (and likely Randall's) reaction to a very specific male complaint: that of self-proclaimed \"nice guy\" complaining about his lack of romantic success. \n\nThere's a stereotype, in popular culture, of women claiming they want to date nice guys, but actually dating men who are rude and/or treat them badly. This has given rise to a cliche about men who assume themselves to be nice guys, insisting that women reject them for being ''too nice''. In reality, there are many reasons why a person might experience a lack of romantic success, but the notion that it happens as a result of being too nice is ridiculously simplistic and self-serving. \n\nThe Cueball-like guy on the left in this picture is complaining (presumably because he has been romantically rejected) that women, as a group, are either lying or self-deluded about what they really want. Cueball's sarcastic interjection is that this very response to the situation shows a) an inability to accept rejection and b) a disrespect for both the judgment and self-awareness of any woman who isn't interested in him. This behavor is Passive-aggressive behavior|passive-aggressive at minimum, and arguably both arrogant and misogynistic.\n\nThe thesis of the strip appears to be that the men who complain most loudly about being rejected for being 'too nice' are generally displaying that they're less nice than they imagine. While they may not be as overtly aggressive as other guys, responding to rejection by assuming there's something wrong with the person who rejected you (or with their entire gender, as in this case), is in fact both rude and condescending. The joke is that the guy is likely not nearly as nice as he imagines, and if being impolite were truly attractive to women, he'd be much more successful romantically. \n\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.\n\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''."}
-{"number": "1326", "date": "February 5, 2014", "title": "Sharks", "image": "sharks.png", "titletext": "'Now, minions, I'm off to inspect our shark cages.' 'Do you really need to inspect them this often?' 'PRISONERS MUST NEVER ESCAPE.'", "transcript": ":[Cueball is sitting on a throne, talking to a minion who's not shown in the panel.]\n:Minion: The prisoner escaped and is swimming toward the mainland!\n:Cueball: ''Release the sharks.''\n:Minion: Yes, sir.\n\n:Minion: The sharks are swimming away.\n:Cueball: They're escaping, too? Send sharks after them!\n\n:Minion: Now ''those'' sharks are swimming away.\n:Cueball: '''''More sharks.'''''\n:Minion: ...Sir, what's going on?\n:Cueball: Prisoners, of course! Can't let 'em escape!\n\n:Minion: Sir, are you trying to turn Doom Island into a marine biology center?\n:Cueball: ''Shark populations are in decline–''\n:Cueball: *ahem*\n:Cueball: I mean, the world must fear us!\n:Minion: Right...", "explanation": "This comic is a joke about the use of sharks in action movies. In these movies, {{tvtropes|SharkPool|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.\n\nIn this comic Cueball is an alleged 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.\n\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 proof cage|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.\n\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.\n\nThe shark issue is also one of the items on the chart of 1331: Frequency.\n\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 (film)|''Dr. No''); however, a Doom Island|real island of this name exists in Indonesia."}
-{"number": "1327", "date": "February 7, 2014", "title": "Mobile Marketing", "image": "mobile_marketing.png", "titletext": "We're firing you, but the online headline-writing division wants to hire you.", "transcript": ":[Black Hat sits at a desk. A voice speaks from off panel, in front of Black Hat.]\n:Off panel: CNN hired you to improve viewership.\n\n:[Black Hat continues to sit at the desk.]\n:Black Hat: ...yes, and?\n\n:[Next panel, conversation continues.]\n:Off panel: You texted \"Holy crap, turn on the news\" to a million random phone numbers?\n:Black Hat: It sure did work.\n: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.\n\nIt is possible that this is the finale of a long career Black Hat has had in marketing, beginning in 125: Marketing Interview.\n\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 click 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."}
-{"number": "1328", "date": "February 10, 2014", "title": "Update", "image": "update.png", "titletext": "I have a bunch of things open right now.", "transcript": ":[Cueball sits at a desk. A message is being displayed on Cueball's laptop screen.]\n:'''Urgent''': Critical update available!\n\n:[The message continues.]\n:'''''Details''''': Fixes an issue that was causing random laptop electrical fires.\n\n:(This update will require restarting your computer.)\n:[Cueball clicks on ''Remind me later''.]\n:''click''", "explanation": "When developers responsible for fixing errors on a specific Operating System|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.\n\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 — a typical user doesn't like this. The user can choose to be reminded later multiple times. Because Reboot (computing)|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.\n\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.\n\nThe joke uses an \"exploding laptop battery\" as an exaggeration for comedic effect. Most software doesn't affect hardware issues like burning \nLithium-ion battery#Safety|laptop batteries.{{Citation needed}} However, low-level software, such as the kernel (computing)|kernel or driver (software)|drivers, might cause hardware to misbehave.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1329", "date": "February 12, 2014", "title": "Standing", "image": "standing.png", "titletext": "At first I was making fun of them, but joke's on me--the deer is surprisingly ergonomic, except for the kicks.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is running after a deer with a laptop strapped to its back, while Megan looks on.]\n:Cueball: Humans aren't built to sit all day. This is much healthier.\n\n:[Caption below the panel]\n:My Hobby: One-upping the standing desk people", "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 Hunter-gatherer|hunting and gathering. Humans are in fact one of the few species built for persistence hunting, and are able to chase 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.\n\nThe title text takes this a step further, saying that the deer was surprisingly ergonomic, apart from the kicks — 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."}
-{"number": "1330", "date": "February 14, 2014", "title": "Kola Borehole", "image": "kola_borehole.png", "titletext": "Tonight's top story: Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, died in his home this morning at the age of [unintelligible rune]. Due to the large number of sharks inhabiting his former kingdom, no body could be recovered.", "transcript": ":[Megan and Black Hat are sitting in front of their laptops.]\n:Megan: Ever hear of the Kola Borehole?\n:Black Hat: No—what's that?\n:Megan: A Soviet project to drill deep into the Earth's crust.\n\n:Megan: 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.\n\n:Black Hat: Why would anyone ''believe'' that story?\n:Megan: I guess some people think Hell is literally an underground place.\n\n:Black 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.\n\n:Megan: ...If there's ever a war between Earth and Hell, I hope I'm on '''''your''''' side.\n:Black Hat: You seem nice; you probably won't be.", "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 metres (40,230 ft). It remains the Extreme points of Earth#Lowest point (artificial)|deepest artificial point on earth.\n\nMegan mentions the well to Hell hoax that the drilling hit a super-hot cavern which is disproved at [http://www.snopes.com/religion/wellhell.asp 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 — therefore by definition, towards the centre of the Earth — whereas Heaven is above us; often depicted in the clouds.\n\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.\n\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.)\n\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.\n\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 (Dante)|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."}
-{"number": "1332", "date": "February 19, 2014", "title": "Slippery Slope", "image": "slippery_slope.png", "titletext": "Sure, taking a few seconds to be respectful toward someone about something they care about doesn't sound hard. But if you talk to hundreds of people every day and they all start expecting that same consideration, it could potentially add up to MINUTES wasted. And for WHAT?", "transcript": ":[White Hat talking to Cueball.]\n:White Hat: Yeah, but if I'm considerate toward one person about one thing, what's next?\n:White Hat: Being nice to ''other'' people about ''other'' things?\n:White Hat: Where does it ''end?''", "explanation": "In the comic, White Hat uses a fallacious 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\".\n\n\"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.\n\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.\"\n\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 separately with other members of the household.\n\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.\n\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.)"}
-{"number": "1333", "date": "February 21, 2014", "title": "First Date", "image": "first_date.png", "titletext": "I sympathize with the TPP protagonist because I, too, have progressed through a surprising number of stages of life despite spending entire days stuck against simple obstacles.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan sit at an intimate dinner table. They have plates and glasses of wine in front of them.]\n:Cueball: So, did you grow up around here?\n:Megan: I love you.\n:Cueball: ... huh?\n:Megan: Waiter! One of everything on the menu.\n\n:[Megan stands up. Standing on her chair, holding a plate.]\n:Cueball: Why are you up there?\n:Megan: I'm stuck.\n:Megan: This plate looks delicious.\n:Megan: Aaaoogaoag.\n\n:[Megan has put the plate down and walked off-panel.]\n:Megan: Bye.\n:Megan: OK. Coming back now.\n\n:[Megan is crouched on her chair, holding a spiral.]\n:Cueball: You're being controlled by Twitch, aren't you?\n:Megan: Check out this cool spiral!\n:Cueball: It's—\n:Megan: '''SAVING.'''", "explanation": "TPP, or Twitch Plays Pokémon, was the first of a creative and radical new variant of streaming gameplay videos created in early 2014 — a few days before this comic was released.\n\nSome people enjoy watching video games being played by other people (usually 'popular' gamers known for entertaining gameplay), thus streaming sites dedicated to streaming gameplay were created. [http://twitch.tv/ Twitch.tv] was one such site.\n\nWhereas traditional video game streams involved the channel broadcaster or another personality playing the game, the channel \"Twitch Plays Pokémon\" recorded a Internet bot|bot playing an emulated game of [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Red_and_Blue_Versions Pokémon 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 Pokémon 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\"). \n\nDespite this, the character advanced surprisingly far in games. They have beaten the [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Elite_Four Elite Four] and [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Champion Champion] of generations [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Generation_I I], [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Generation_II II], [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Generation_III III], [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Generation_IV IV], and [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Generation_V V], and [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Generation_VI VI]. Twitch Plays Pokémon has also completed various ROM hacking|ROM hacks and Spin-off (media)|Spin-off titles, establishing a seasonal format with multiple games each season. You can see the state of the player characters' Pokémon and inventory at game end in [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Twitch_Plays_Pok%C3%A9mon this Bulbapedia article]. \n\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 Pokémon games) for erratic and often hilarious results. The stream, which is still active as of this writing, has reached [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/twitch-plays-pokemon memetic status].\n\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 [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Red_(game) Red]). \n\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 [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Nickname nicknames] that all of TPP's Pokémon end up with as the players move haphazardly across the game's keyboard. \n\nHer fascination with the \"cool spiral\" is an allusion to TPP players' fascination with the [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Dome_and_Helix_Fossils 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 [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Key_item 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1334", "date": "February 24, 2014", "title": "Second", "image": "second.png", "titletext": "Let me just scroll down and check behind that rock. Annnnd... nope, page copyright year starts with '19'. Oh God, is this a WEBRING?", "transcript": ":[Cueball in a desert standing before a rock.]\n:Rock: Greetings, stranger.\n:Rock: Whatever quest drives you, '''''abandon it.'''''\n:Rock: You shall find no answers in these desolate wastes.\n:Cueball: I knew I wouldn't.\n:Cueball: I guess I... just had to see.\n\n:I hate feeling desperate enough to visit the second page of Google results.", "explanation": "Google is a popular search engine.{{citation needed}} 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.\n\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.\n\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 typically means a site has not been updated since the mid 90s, though there are some people trying to bring them back for nostalgia reasons."}
-{"number": "1335", "date": "February 26, 2014", "title": "Now", "image": "now.gif", "titletext": "This image stays roughly in sync with the day (assuming the Earth continues spinning). Shortcut: xkcd.com/now", "transcript": ":[The comic is a moving circle with a static outer ring.]\n\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.]\n::Noon - 6 PM - Midnight - 6 AM\n\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.]\n::Business hours (9-5)\n::Rude to call\n\n:[The rest of the image consist of a rotating part.]\n\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\n:*Europe: Red\n:*Africa: Cyan\n:*Asia: Green\n:*Oceania: Purple\n:*North America: Blue-violet\n:*South America: Olive green\n:*Antarctica (The south pole): Light grey\n\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\n:[On the inner ring are the names of the following continents (white text on a segment with the color of the continent)]\n::Africa\n::Oceania\n::South America\n\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)]\n::Europe Asia \n::North America\n\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\n:[Europe - Red text:]\n::UK - Most of Europe - Eastern Europe\n\n:[Africa - Cyan text:]\n::West Africa - Nigeria - Egypt - East Africa\n\n:[Asia - Green text:]\n::The Levant - Iraq - Iran - Moscow - Afghanistan - Pakistan - India - Southeast Asia - Java - China - Singapore - Philippines - Japan - The Koreas - Kamchatka\n\n:[Oceania - Purple text:]\n::Perth - Brisbane - Most Australian cities - New Zealand\n\n:[North America - Blue-violet text:]\n::Alaska - US West Coast - Denver - Mexico - Chicago - Texas - Eastern Canada - US East coast - Canadian Maritimes\n\n:[South America - Olive green text:]\n:: Coastal Brazil", "explanation": "The picture is divided in 24 segments representing the 24 hours of the day. At noon and midnight, the break between segments is indicated by the tip of a dark grey triangle.\n\nThe picture rotates by 3.75 degree (angle)|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 halfway through a 15-minute time increment (that is, at 7½, 22½, 37½, and 52½ minutes after each hour), so that the picture is always correct for the nearest multiple of 15 minutes.\n\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 such projections Flag of the United Nations|typically put the North Pole in the center. But, in this case, may be necessary for the map rotation and the corresponding 24-hour analog dial|24-hour clock graduations to both be the more conventional clockwise. Another reason might be just to depict all major land-masses (including Time in Antarctica|complicated Antarctica, which is not otherwise referenced) in a non-discontinuous manner. Randall was playing on projections before in 977: Map Projections.\n\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. The map shows the configuration of time zones concerning 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).\n\nIn many countries \"business hours\" are considered to be from 9 am to 5 pm. With some exceptions, including emergencies, it is generally considered rude to place a telephone call to someone's residence when most people are asleep; Randall portrays this period as extending from 10 pm to 8 am. This may be a reference to the 10 pm \"cutoff\" time [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1336", "date": "February 28, 2014", "title": "Transformers", "image": "transformers.png", "titletext": "A helicopter bursts from a chrysalis and alights on a rock, rotors still damp.", "transcript": ":[Two \"Transformer\"-esque robots are visible.]\n:First Robot: '''''Transform!'''''\n:[Both robots run to the right.]\n:[Each robot reaches a tree and begins to climb it.]\n:[The camera focuses on the nearer of the two robots, which is placing itself into a chrysalis hanging from the tree branch.]", "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 Caterpillar|caterpillars \"transform\" via metamorphosis into butterflies or moths.\n\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.\n\nThe title text furthers this parallel, describing a newly transformed helicopter — presumably the post-metamorphosis state of one of the Transformers in the panels — in a manner that would be more appropriate for a freshly-emerged butterfly or moth.\n\nThis xkcd comic is one of the few ones not showing just simple stick figures."}
-{"number": "1338", "date": "March 5, 2014", "title": "Land Mammals", "image": "land_mammals.png", "titletext": "Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your body.", "transcript": ":[Caption at the top of this chart:]\n:'''Earth's Land Mammals by Weight'''\n\n:[Below the caption is a light gray block with a label (in light gray as well) to indicating the value of each block:] \n:Hi\n:What you get:\n:''Hi''\n\n:[Heading panel 3:]\n:'''WYSITUTWYG''' \n:What you see is totally \n:unrelated to what you get\n\n:[Panel 3.]\n:What you see:\n:Hi\n:What you get:\n:The HORSE is a noble animal.\n\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\n:[Heading panel 4:]\n:'''WYSIHYD''' \n:What you see is \n:how you die\n\n:[Panel 4.]\n:What you see:\n:'''EATEN BY WOLVES'''\n:What you get:\n::Eaten by wolves", "explanation": "WYSIWYG, pronounced, \"wizzy-wig\" IPA /ˈwɪziˌwɪg/, 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.\n\n*A WYSIWYG editor displays the edited document in its final form. This could be a printed paper, a web page, a PDF document, and more. This is a real term used for text editors.\n*A WYSINWYG editor is the opposite; there is a distinct difference between what the editor displays, and what will be printed. Hence, what you see is ''not'' what you get. They are also known as source editors, such as a wiki markup editor or TeX. In the comic an HTML source editor is shown, where you enter raw HTML code and then presented with the rendered appearance of the final page. The -tag marks text that has stress emphasis.\n*The WYSITUTWYG (\"... is totally unrelated to ...\") editor apparently takes your input and proceeds to ignore it entirely, instead displaying unrelated words. Possibly a commentary on the Autocorrect function. Randall seems to have made this term up. The phrase \"The HORSE is a noble animal\" may be a reference to the Stereotypes of animals#Horses|stereotypes commonly associated with horses, or possibly to Houyhnhnm in ''Gulliver's Travels'', an extreme version of those stereotypes. \"The horse is a noble animal\" is also the name of a giant rocking-horse sculpture in Yorkshire.\n*WYSIHYD (\"... is how you die\") shows an \"editor\" which is not really an editor at all, but rather a pun on the multiple meanings of the word \"get\": If you ''see'' \"eaten by wolves\", you will ''get''... eaten by wolves. As in physically attacked and devoured by wolves. This is an example of the wikipedia:use-mention distinction|use-mention distinction, or simply ''get'' meaning \"to receive\" or \"to become\" (compare German's different evolution: ''werden'' (\"to become\") but ''bekommen'' (\"to receive\")).\n\nThe title text is a fictitious command, meta key|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 #Machine of Death book|below for why this was used."}
-{"number": "1342", "date": "March 14, 2014", "title": "Ancient Stars", "image": "ancient_stars.png", "titletext": "'The light from those millions of stars you see is probably many thousands of years old' is a rare example of laypeople substantially OVERestimating astronomical numbers.", "transcript": ":All of the panels of this comic are white-on-black.\n\n:[Megan and Cueball stand facing each other, looking up at the sky.]\n:Cueball: Just think - the light from that star was emitted thousands of years ago. It could be long gone.\n\n:[Cueball looks at Megan, who is still looking up.]\n:Megan: That's Sirius. It's eight light-years away.\n\n:[Cueball looks up again.]\n:Cueball: Oh.\n\n:[Both look at one another.]\n:Cueball: Just think - the light from that star was emitted in the previous presidential administration.\n:Megan: Hmm, doesn't pack quite the punch.", "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 {{W|Sirius}} is one of the nearest at a mere 8.6 {{W|Light-year|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, {{W|George W. Bush}}, was in office from 2001 to 2009 and Megan notes that this isn't a terribly impressive observation.\n\nThe title text references the fact that most 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 {{tvtropes|SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale|Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale}}\n\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 {{W|Bright Star Catalogue}} is a star catalogue that lists all stars of {{W|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 Nova|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.\n\nThis list shows the {{W|Visible stars|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, {{W|Eta Canis Majoris|Aludra}}, is \"only\" 3,200 light years away. Our entire Milky Way contains up to 400 billion (400x10⁹) stars and has a diameter of 100,000 light years.\n\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.\n\nSee also 1212: Interstellar Memes, 1644: Stargazing and 1440: Geese."}
-{"number": "1343", "date": "March 17, 2014", "title": "Manuals", "image": "manuals.png", "titletext": "The most ridiculous offender of all is the sudoers man page, which for 15 years has started with a 'quick guide' to EBNF, a system for defining the grammar of a language. 'Don't despair', it says, 'the definitions below are annotated.'", "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.]\n:[An arrow labeled \"Solve problems\" points left from the vertical line.]\n:[An arrow labeled \"Create problems\" points right from the vertical line.]\n:[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'\".]", "explanation": "The chart shows the quality of tools regarding their manual:\n*If you don't even need a manual to use a certain tool, that tool tends to help solve problems effectively.\n*If you do need a manual, the tool will probably solve the problems but you have to understand that manual before you can use this tool effectively.\n*Much less helpful are the tools where you need a manual but it doesn't exist — these tools tend to create more problems than they solve.\n*But the worst tools are where the manuals start with a description of the manual itself — which implies both that the tool is very complex and the manual is very hard to understand, or has low expectations of its viewers.\n\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.\n\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–Naur 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 [http://linux.die.net/man/5/sudoers sudoers man page] is very long, clocking in at 1504 lines. In contrast, the [http://linux.die.net/man/1/man manpages man page] only has 566 lines. The number of lines may differ between some distributions and versions.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1344", "date": "March 19, 2014", "title": "Digits", "image": "digits.png", "titletext": "It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.", "transcript": ":[A guy is walking and Cueball is following him.]\n:Guy: The talk is in room 8224.\n:Cueball: Ooh, nice.\n:Guy: What?\n:Cueball: ...Sorry. Nothing.\n\n:Great, now I'll spend the rest of my life noticing numbers that would make good 2048 combos.", "explanation": "[http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/ 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.\n\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\nFile:8224.gif\n\nThis can be done in the opposite direction as well.\n\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, [http://s3-external-1.amazonaws.com/wootdesigncontestentries/fackoph/chicago_skyline_%28Tetris_Redux%29-q71p5a-s.jpg 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."}
-{"number": "1345", "date": "March 21, 2014", "title": "Answers", "image": "answers.png", "titletext": "Stanford sleep researcher William Dement said that after 50 years of studying sleep, the only really solid explanation he knows for why we do it is 'because we get sleepy'.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are talking.]\n:Cueball: Humans are defined by our curiosity, our hunger for answers.\n:Megan: We all spend a third of our lives lying down with our eyes closed and '''''NOBODY KNOWS WHY.'''''\n:Cueball: Touché.", "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.\n\nThis is not to suggest that scientists ''aren't'' researching sleep; scientists frequently conduct Sleep study|sleep studies — 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.\n\nThe title text quotes William Dement: people sleep \"because we get sleepy.\" ([https://web.archive.org/web/20160618161328/http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/05/sleep/max-text 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 :wikt:dormitive principle|dormitive principle of the French playwright Molière, 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).\n\nIn 203: Hallucinations, Randall expressed similar surprise at the lack of interest in the nature of sleep.\n\nThe phrase \"and nobody knows why\" is commonly appended to urban legends, as in [http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/duckecho.asp 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."}
-{"number": "1346", "date": "March 24, 2014", "title": "Career", "image": "career.png", "titletext": "They'd convince me to come out of retirement for one last job: biting into a giant lump of slightly soft wax a couple of times.", "transcript": ":[Cueball stands facing a desk, behind which another person is sitting in a desk chair.]\n:Cueball: It would start with five minutes of peeling lint from dryer traps,\n:Cueball: followed by an hour of pressing a lightsaber handle against things and switching it on.\n:Cueball: Then I'd retire to a life of luxury.\n\n:When people ask me to describe my dream job, I'm never sure how realistic to be.", "explanation": "Cueball is presumably asked to answer the typical Career counseling|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.\n\nPeeling lint off Clothes dryer#Tumbler dryers|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: The Phantom Menace|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}}\n\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 \"[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneLastJob 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/resolved 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.\n\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. Or, \"dream\" may be taken literally, and these may be jobs that Cueball has had in his dreams, given the strange nature of them."}
-{"number": "1347", "date": "March 26, 2014", "title": "t Distribution", "image": "t_distribution.png", "titletext": "If data fails the Teacher's t test, you can just force it to take the test again until it passes.", "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.]\n:Cueball: hmm \n:[Cueball looks at the piece of paper.]\n:Cueball: ...nope.\n:[Cueball picks up the object and begins to walk off the panel with it.]\n:[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\".]", "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.\n\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.\n\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. \n\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.\"\n\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?\n\nIronically, the Teacher's T Distribution shows equal variance, itself proving the appropriateness of the Student's T Distribution.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1348", "date": "March 28, 2014", "title": "Before the Internet", "image": "before_the_internet.png", "titletext": "We watched DAYTIME TV. Do you realize how soul-crushing it was? I'd rather eat an iPad than go back to watching daytime TV.", "transcript": ":[Young girl talking to Megan, both holding smartphones.] \n:Girl: Do you remember before the internet?\n:Megan: Oh yeah, totally.\n:Girl: what was it like?\n:Megan: Not having a phone or computer to distract you?\n:Girl: Yeah.\n:Megan: It was '''''SO. BORING.''''' All the time. I just '''''sat''''' there. It was the '''''worst.'''''\n:Girl: But wasn't it, like, more fulfilling? Engaging?\n:Megan: Wasn't worth it.\n:Girl: ''I'' still get bored.\n: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, became widely known about and/or attained its current level of ubiquity. (Those milestones are spread wide, and are often confused with each other. A young child of indeterminate age, in 2014, might ''possibly'' have been born slightly before the latter became all but indisputed, but without much memory of it.) Megan responds that life was very boring without computers or mobile phones. This comic appears to be a parody of the common complaint — often done by elder people — 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.\n\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.\"\n\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… on that iPad after eating it{{Citation needed}} (although she could just buy another iPad—at least if she survives the battery of the iPad that she ate leaking and/or exploding and other hazards associated with eating an iPad).\n\nMegan might just be {{tvtropes|TheDungAges|responding with the opposite of}} what {{tvtropes|YeGoodeOldeDays|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."}
-{"number": "1349", "date": "March 31, 2014", "title": "Shouldn't Be Hard", "image": "shouldnt_be_hard.png", "titletext": "(six hours later) ARGH. How are these stupid microchips so durable?! All I want is to undo a massive industrial process with household tools!", "transcript": ":[Cueball is typing on a laptop.]\n:Cueball: What I'm trying to do is really simple.\n:Cueball: It shouldn't be hard.\n\n:Offscreen: All computers are just carefully organized sand. '''''Everything''''' is hard until someone makes it easy.\n\n:[Cueball sits back and pauses.]\n\n:[Cueball picks up and examines the laptop.]\n:Cueball: Maybe I should turn this one '''''back''''' into sand.\n:Offscreen: I'll find a blowtorch.", "explanation": "This comic refers to a sentiment sometimes expressed by computer users that \"what I'm trying to do is really simple — 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.\n\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 color of the font in a word processor is often simpler than changing the color of the background/page, even though changing colors 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 color than to change the page color.\n\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 1425:_Tasks|very hard to differentiate the almost impossible from the easy, especially when compared to what humans can and can't do easily.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe melting point of silicon is 1,414 °C. Although a typical butane blowtorch that might be found in a kitchen has a maximum temperature of 1,430 °C, 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1351", "date": "April 4, 2014", "title": "Metamaterials", "image": "metamaterials.png", "titletext": "If I developed a hue-shifting metamaterial, I would photobomb people's Instagram pics with a sheet of material that precisely undid the filter they were using.", "transcript": ":[An image of a violet that is colored red.]\n:Megan (off-screen):\n:Violets are red\n:[An image of a rose that is colored blue.]\n:Megan (off-screen):\n:And roses are blue\n:[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.]\n:Megan:\n:When metamaterials\n:[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.]\n:Megan:\n:Alter their hue.", "explanation": "Metamaterials, artificially-created structures typically made from several materials in a microscopic checkerboard pattern, are famous for allowing bizarre optical properties, such as Metamaterial cloaking|invisibility cloaks. This comic imagines that metamaterials can change the color of light passing through them.\n\nIn the real world a metamaterial can alter the spatial distribution of light and also its frequency, like done in fluorescent lamps — but this would not resemble the entire picture in a different color. In photography many Photographic filter#Color conversion|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.\n\nMegan uses a box made of her metamaterial to switch the colors of the cliché Valentine's Day poem, \"Roses are red|Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you.\"\n\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 {{W|photobombing}}. Instagram is a photo application that applies one of a variety of filters like Color theory|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."}
-{"number": "1352", "date": "April 7, 2014", "title": "Cosmologist on a Tire Swing", "image": "cosmologist_on_a_tire_swing.png", "titletext": "No matter how fast I swing, I can never travel outside this loop! Maybe space outside it doesn't exist! But I bet it does. This tire came from somewhere.", "transcript": ":[A tall panel with Cueball and Jill 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.]\n:Jill: What was before the big bang?\n:Cueball: I think time began with the big bang.\n:Cueball: So it doesn't make sense to ask what came before it.\n:Cosmologist (off panel): ''Look out''\n\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.]\n:[A cosmologist looking like Megan comes swinging left past Jill and Cueball, who turns to look after her. She sits on an upstanding tire swing and the movement is indicated by two lines going from right to left.}\n:Cosmologist: ''Wheeee'' Hi I'm a cosmologist on a tire swing!\n\n:[The cosmologist swings back right, hanging in her arms with her body almost vertical. The other two also turns right.]\n:Cosmologist: We don't know whether time\n\n:[Going left, similar to the first of the small panels.]\n:Cosmologist: started at the big bang.\n\n:[Going right, similar to the second of the small panels, but with the cosmologist sitting more upright.]\n:Cosmologist: It might have!\n\n:[Going left, similar to the first of the small panels.]\n:Cosmologist: Or maybe not! We don't know!\n:Cueball: Oh. OK!\n\n:[Going right, similar to previous going right panels.]\n:Jill: ...Your tire swing looks fun!\n:Cosmologist: I can't stop!\n\n:[The last panel is again a full panel, with Cueball and Jill 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.]\n:Jill: Won't the swing stop on its own?\n:Cosmologist: I thought it would, but it seems to be accelerating.\n:Jill: Cosmology sounds pretty confusing.\n:Cosmologist: ''Wheeeee!''", "explanation": "Cueball and the curious Jill 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 — one of these is ours, another is Narnia, and Charn (the world of Jadis the White Witch) is also visited through these pools.\n\nJill asks about the time before the Big Bang. Cueball says he thinks there was no time before — 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 — so it may also be a reference to the entire universe. We are all \"trapped\" on this swing — and it's accelerating! For the layperson (and most scientists as well) cosmology is ''pretty confusing'' as Jill states at the end, to which the cosmologist just replies ''Wheeeee!'' and enjoys her ride with this accelerating swing/universe.\n\nAnother interpretation of the acceleration may refer to the physics of orbital motion in which a centrifugal force is always causing constant acceleration toward the center of the motion.\n\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 — like her tire.\n\nThe shape of our universe was visited soon after in 1365: Inflation where we can see what the outer boundary of our universe looks like.\n\nJill 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..."}
-{"number": "1353", "date": "April 9, 2014", "title": "Heartbleed", "image": "heartbleed.png", "titletext": "I looked at some of the data dumps from vulnerable sites, and it was... bad. I saw emails, passwords, password hints. SSL keys and session cookies. Important servers brimming with visitor IPs. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I should probably patch OpenSSL.", "transcript": ":Megan: Heartbleed must be the worst web security lapse ever.\n:Cueball: Worst so far. Give us time.\n\n:Megan: I mean, this bug isn't just broken encryption.\n:Megan: It lets website visitors make a server dispense random memory contents.\n\n:Megan: It's not just keys. It's traffic data. Emails. Passwords. Erotic fanfiction.\n:Cueball: Is '''''everything''''' compromised?\n\n:Megan: Well, the attack is limited to data stored in computer memory.\n:Cueball: So paper is safe. And clay tablets.\n:Megan: Our imaginations, too.\n:Cueball: See, we'll be fine.", "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 — meaning the bug had existed for two years — attackers could read random server memory by sending specially prepared HeartbeatRequest messages to an affected server.\n\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 usernames 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.\n\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.\n\nMore information is available at [https://heartbleed.com heartbleed.com] or under the reference [https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId"}
-{"number": "1354", "date": "April 11, 2014", "title": "Heartbleed Explanation", "image": "heartbleed_explanation.png", "titletext": "Are you still there, server? It's me, Margaret.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panels:]\n:'''How the Heartbleed Bug works:'''\n\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\n:[Meg speaks, server thinks:]\n:Meg: Server, are you still there? If so, reply \"POTATO\" (6 letters).\n: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\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.]\n: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: POTATO\n\n:[Meg speaks, server thinks:]\n:Meg: Server, are you still there? If so, reply \"BIRD\" (4 letters).\n: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\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:]\n\n: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: BIRD\n:Meg: ''Hmm...''\n\n:[Meg has taken her hand down again and speaks, server thinks, now with her line at the top:]\n\n:Meg: Server, are you still there? If so, reply \"HAT\" (500 letters).\n: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\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 speech bubble. Meg has taken a notepad and a pen and is writing something.:]\n\n: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: 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", "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. \n\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.\n\nMeg then ponders this and tries to submit another request asking for \"HAT\" but requests that it be 500 letters long instead of only 3; the server —not checking it or simply unaware that 500 letters is larger than the request body— 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 speech 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 \"correct horse battery staple\" as a password.\n\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, any client that can connect to the server can typically exploit this bug in the underlying OpenSSL software — the use of the term \"User Meg\" does not imply that Meg had to authenticate first.\n\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. However one could argue that such a person would not communicate to the server by speaking out loud either.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1355", "date": "April 14, 2014", "title": "Airplane Message", "image": "airplane_message.png", "titletext": "PHARAOH IRY-HOR, FROM THE 3100s BC, IS THE FIRST HUMAN WHOSE NAME WE KNOW.", "transcript": ":[There is a Cessna 172 with a banner behind.]\n:Banner: Adriamycin, one of our most potent chemotherapy drugs, comes from the dirt from an Italian castle.\n\n:[Caption beneath the panel]\n:My hobby: \n: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.\n\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, Apulia|Castel del Monte in Andria, Italy.\n\nAs mentioned at the title text Iry-Hor was an ancient, Dynasty 0|predynastic pharaoh of ancient Egypt — no earlier documents exist today. Kushim (Uruk Period)|Kushim is a contemporary contender.\n\nThis fact is also found in 1732: Earth Temperature Timeline, where it is placed at exactly 3100 BC (or BCE)."}
-{"number": "1356", "date": "April 16, 2014", "title": "Orbital Mechanics", "image": "orbital_mechanics.png", "titletext": "To be fair, my job at NASA was working on robots and didn't actually involve any orbital mechanics. The small positive slope over that period is because it turns out that if you hang around at NASA, you get in a lot of conversations about space.", "transcript": ":How Well I Understand Orbital Mechanics:\n:[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'.]\n:The line stays flat until the first bump, which is annotated \"Took High School Physics\".\n:The line decreases, then grows to a higher maximum with the annotation \"Got Physics Degree\".\n:There is a small amount of decrease until a gradual bump in the graph labeled \"Actual Job At NASA\".\n:It gradually decreases to pre-NASA levels, but then begins to increase exponentially. The annotation reads \"Started Playing Kerbal Space Program\".", "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 open world|sandbox game.\n\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.\n\nAt the title text Randall admits that at the time when he did work at NASA he was not involved in orbital mechanics—which is also true for most other NASA employees—but 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."}
-{"number": "1357", "date": "April 18, 2014", "title": "Free Speech", "image": "free_speech.png", "titletext": "I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.", "transcript": ":Cueball: Public Service Announcement: The '''Right to Free Speech''' means the government can't arrest you for what you say.\n\n:Cueball: It doesn't mean that anyone '''''else''''' has to listen to your bullshit, or host you while you share it.\n\n:Cueball: The 1st Amendment doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences.\n\n:Cueball: 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.\n\n:Cueball: It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole,\n\n:[A picture of a partially open door is displayed.]\n:Cueball: And they're showing you the door.", "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 the 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 the 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_the_United_States_Constitution|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.\n\nAn example of this is the incident involving the TV program ''Duck Dynasty'' in December 2013, in which television network A+E Networks [http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/12/18/duck-dynasty-robertson-phil/?hpt"}
-{"number": "1358", "date": "April 21, 2014", "title": "NRO", "image": "nro.png", "titletext": "'DISPATCHING DRONE TO TARGET COORDINATES.' 'Wait, crap, wrong button. Oh jeez.'", "transcript": ":Cueball and a friend are in a remote area. The friend is holding a ''Where's Waldo?'' book towards the sky.\n:Laptop: [Target located]\n:Cueball: Got him. Left edge, two inches down.\n:The National Reconnaissance Office has an unusual approach to ''Where's Waldo''.", "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 and other distractions 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.\n\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/Unmanned aerial vehicle|UAV-mounted cameras.\n\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.\n\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 Unmanned combat aerial vehicle|military drone armed with explosive weaponry — not a good thing for those on the receiving end."}
-{"number": "1359", "date": "April 23, 2014", "title": "Phone Alarm", "image": "phone_alarm.png", "titletext": "Who's calling me?? WHY IS THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD CALLING ME!?", "transcript": ":[A flowchart:]\n\n:[Alarm goes off]\n:→ [Beep beep beep beep!]\n:↺ One line with an arrow goes back to: [Beep beep beep beep!]\n:→ Another line goes to: [\"???\"]\n:→ Then: [Answer phone in dream] → [Talk] → [Hang up]\n:→ Finally a line goes back to: [Beep beep beep beep!]\n\n:My problem with phone alarms", "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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_loop 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.\n\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.\n\nA list of all the flowchart comics can be found :Category:Flowcharts|here."}
-{"number": "1360", "date": "April 25, 2014", "title": "Old Files", "image": "old_files.png", "titletext": "Wow, ANIMORPHS-NOVEL.RTF? Just gonna, uh, go through and delete that from all my archives real quick.", "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.]\n\n:Megan: You OK down there?\n\n:'''Documents''' (47 GB)\n::misc.txt\n::Video projects\n:'''Old desktop''' (12 GB)\n::Facebook pics\n::Pics from other camera\n::Temp\n::Misc PDFs\n::MP3\n:'''Recovered from drive crash''' (4 GB)\n::Temp\n::Work misc\n::Audio books\n:'''My Documents''' (570 MB)\n::Downloads\n::Kazaa shared\n::AYB\n::EV Override\n::Angband\n::GIFs\n::FIGHT CLUB.wmv\n::Elasto Mania\n::AIM Direct Connect files\n::4chan\n::ICQ logs\n:'''High school Zip disk''' (94 MB)\n::Korn MIDI\n::Photos3 (Prom)\n::lovenote.txt\n::Gorilla.bas\n::Dream.txt\n::James.txt\n::AOL (Citadel)\n::QBasic\n::NYET\n::Jokes.txt\n:'''AAAFILES''' (9.4 MB)\n:'''TXT''' (850 K)\n:Cueball (deep inside the AAAFILES section looking at his txt files): Oh my god. I wrote '''poetry'''.", "explanation": "This comic came out the day after [http://news.sky.com/story/1248397/andy-warhol-originals-found-on-floppy-disk 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nDeep down, Cueball discovers several files he is surprised about, including a poetry file which embarrasses him as he does not remember writing poetry. \n\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|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."}
-{"number": "1361", "date": "April 28, 2014", "title": "Google Announcement", "image": "google_announcement.png", "titletext": "The less popular 8.8.4.4 is slated for discontinuation.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is standing at a lectern marked Google.]\n:Cueball: The rumors are true. Google will be shutting down Plus—\n:Cueball: Along with Hangouts, Photos, Voice, Docs, Drive, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Android, and Search—\n:Cueball: To focus on our core project:\n:Cueball: The 8.8.8.8 DNS Server.", "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 [http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/google-is-walking-dead/ 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. \n\nGoogle has a history of List of Google products#Discontinued products and services|closing popular services.\n\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 Name server|DNS servers (Domain Name System servers), better known by their IPv4 addresses 8.8.8.8|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 [http://gawker.com/turkish-graffiti-spreads-the-ip-addresses-of-googles-d-1548946312 graffiti on the side of a building].\n\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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1362", "date": "April 30, 2014", "title": "Morse Code", "image": "morse_code.png", "titletext": "Oh, because Facebook has worked out SO WELL for everyone.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are lying in a grassy, lonely plain.]\n\n:Cueball: 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.\"\n\n:Cueball: I wonder if I can find my Livejournal login.\n:Megan: Hey, I ''like'' Livejournal.\n:Cueball: It's a nice place to go for some peace and quiet, I suppose.", "explanation": "Cueball recounts the last message sent in morse code by the French maritime radio station {{W|Le Conquet radio}} upon retiring its 500 kHz channel.\n\nThe poetic, and potentially angsty-sounding nature of the message reminds him of the on-line journal website {{W|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.\n\nThe popularity of the site died down considerably with the arrival of social networking sites like {{W|MySpace}}, {{W|Facebook}}, {{W|Google Plus}} and the advent of microblogging platforms like {{W|Twitter}} and {{W|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\".\n\nThe title text is Megan's (or Randall|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."}
-{"number": "1363", "date": "May 2, 2014", "title": "xkcd Phone", "image": "xkcd_phone.png", "titletext": "Presented in partnership with Qualcomm, Craigslist, Whirlpool, Hostess, LifeStyles, and the US Chamber of Commerce. Manufactured on equipment which also processes peanuts. Price includes 2-year Knicks contract. Phone may extinguish nearby birthday candles. If phone ships with Siri, return immediately; do not speak to her and ignore any instructions she gives. Do not remove lead casing. Phone may attract/trap insects; this is normal. Volume adjustable (requires root). If you experience sudden tingling, nausea, or vomiting, perform a factory reset immediately. Do not submerge in water; phone will drown. Exterior may be frictionless. Prolonged use can cause mood swings, short-term memory loss, and seizures. Avert eyes while replacing battery. Under certain circumstances, wireless transmitter may control God.", "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:]\n:Runs custom blend of Android and iOS\n:Simulates alternative speed of light (default: 100 miles per hour) and adjusts clock as phone accelerates\n:Wireless\n:Accelerometer detects when phone is in free fall and makes it scream\n:When exposed to light, phone says \"Hi!\"\n:FlightAware partnership: Makes airplane noise when flights pass overhead\n:Realistic case\n:Clear screen\n:Side-facing camera\n\n:''Introducing''\n:'''The xkcd Phone'''\n:Your mobile world just went digital®", "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 :Category:xkcd Phones|xkcd Phone series with the next 1465: xkcd Phone 2 released about nine months later. The advertised features here either make previously useful capabilities useless or add features nobody wants. \n\nThe phone's tagline, \"Your mobile world just went digital\", is purposefully outdated. It references a time when cell phones transitioned from analog to digital technology, which happened many years before the comic's publication. By marketing the xkcd Phone as \"going digital,\" the implication is that it's a groundbreaking advancement, integrating computers and the internet into a market that has always involved these elements. However, the mobile phone market had already been digital for a long time, making the marketing of the xkcd phone seem dated and clueless."}
-{"number": "1364", "date": "May 5, 2014", "title": "Like I'm Five", "image": "like_im_five.png", "titletext": "'Am I taking care of you? I have a thesis to write!' 'My parents are at their house; you visited last--' 'No, no, explain like you're five.'", "transcript": ":Cueball: What've you been up to?\n:Megan: Doing tons of math for my thesis.\n:Cueball: Can you explain it like I'm five?\n:Megan: \"Oh my god, where are your parents?\"", "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.\n\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.\n\nThe common expression \"Explain it like I'm five\" is inspired by a line by Groucho Marx in his movie Duck Soup (1933 film)|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.''\"[http://muse.tau.ac.il/maslool/boidem/54groucho.html]"}
-{"number": "1365", "date": "May 7, 2014", "title": "Inflation", "image": "inflation.png", "titletext": "Wait till they notice the faint reflection of Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny in the E-mode.", "transcript": ":[Megan sits at a computer, conversing with Ponytail.]\n:Megan: Imprinted on the sky are the gravity waves that were sloshing across the universe when it was ''this'' big.\n\n:Megan: So really, we're using the entire universe as a giant microscope pointed at itself when it was small.\n\n:[Megan turns to face the computer.]\n:Ponytail: That's neat.\n:Megan: Yeah. But...\n:Ponytail: But what?\n:Megan: Well, look.\n\n:Ponytail: Oh. Hmm.\n:Megan: Yeah.\n:Ponytail: What...\n:Megan: I don't know.\n\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 Inflation_(cosmology)|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).\n\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|Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).\n\nThe concept of an Metric expansion of space|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.\n\nThe elliptical Mollweide projection of this Cosmic microwave background|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 (sports equipment)|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.\n\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 B-modes|E-mode, a type of polarization of the cosmic background radiation arising from the radiation scattering off non-uniform plasma.\n\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 Media:inflation first version.png|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."}
-{"number": "1366", "date": "May 9, 2014", "title": "Train", "image": "train.png", "titletext": "Trains rotate the Earth around various axes while elevators shift its position in space.", "transcript": ":'''Train:'''\n:[On the upper edge of a circle representing the Earth, Cueball is in a train car looking to his left.]\n:Cueball:...almost...\n:[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.]\n:[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.]\n\n:A machine that grabs the Earth by metal rails and rotates it until the part you want is near you", "explanation": "This comic, which appeared the day before National Train Day, plays on the fact that a choice of a Inertial frame of reference|reference frame is arbitrary, leading to the Principle of relativity|\"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 Classical mechanics|newtonian mechanics.\n\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 — 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?\"\n\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{{Citation needed}} (the train's engine and the friction of the wheels aren't even remotely powerful enough) it simply appears that way from the inside.\n\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 Inertial force|\"fictional forces\" (see 123: Centrifugal Force). Isaac Newton|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 modeled in general relativity, taking the train as fixed. However the resulting equations would be complex, and not amenable to an exact solution.\n\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.\n\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 rotation|Earth's center, the Earth's orbit|Sun, predefined Fixed star|\"fixed\" stars or the Galactic year|center of our galaxy. Each of these would result in a completely different movement speed:\n*The speed of the train (stationary on the equator) relative to the earth's center: 465 m/s (1,674 km/h or 1,040 mph)\n*The speed of the train (on earth) relative to the sun: 30 km/s (108,000 km/h or 67,000 mph)\n*The speed of the train (on earth) relative the center of our galaxy: 220 km/s (828,000 km/h or 514,000 mph)\n\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 [http://what-if.xkcd.com/41/ what-if? 41: Go West] and 162: Angular Momentum)."}
-{"number": "1367", "date": "May 12, 2014", "title": "Installing", "image": "installing.png", "titletext": "But still, my scheme for creating and saving user config files and data locally to preserve them across reinstalls might be useful for--wait, that's cookies.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are standing next to each other.]\n:Cueball: Installing things has gotten so fast and painless.\n: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\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:I felt pretty clever until I realized I'd invented webpages.", "explanation": "This comic refers to the kind of \"inventions\" which seem new from the point of view of a smartphone user but have already been around for a long time on desktop or laptop/notebook computers.\n\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.\n\nHowever, web pages and web applications already work like this. Clicking a link will make the browser download a web page and render HTML|HTML code and JavaScript that it links to.\n\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 Cache_manifest_in_HTML5|caching web application files locally so it can remain operational when there is no network connection.\n\nIn the title text, Cueball's idea for local application storage already exists in the HTTP protocol as HTTP cookie|cookies. The more flexible Web storage|web storage was originally part of the HTML5 specification, but it's now in a separate specification.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1368", "date": "May 14, 2014", "title": "One Of The", "image": "one_of_the.png", "titletext": "'The world's greatest [whatever]' is subjective, but 'One of the world's greatest [whatever]s' is clearly objective. Anyway, that's why I got you this 'one of the world's greatest moms' mug!", "transcript": ":[Cueball is a news anchor sitting in front of a screen showing the Gateway Arch with some landscape features around it.]\n:Cueball: ...And he went on to design the Gateway Arch, one of the most recognizable arches in St. Louis.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Pet peeve: \n:Reporters unnecessarily hedging with \"one of the\"", "explanation": "Another of Randall|Randall's 238: Pet Peeve 114|many :Category:Pet Peeves|Pet Peeves, this time on reporters.\n\nCueball is a :Category:News anchor|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.\n\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.\"\n\nRandall states that it is his {{W|pet peeve}} when reporters avoid absolutes unnecessarily — 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 one of the most well-known monuments in Missouri and one of the largest free-standing arches in the world, it's indisputable that this would be one of the most recognizable arches in St. Louis; in fact, the reporter should be confident enough to say that the Gateway Arch is '''the''' most recognizable arch in St. Louis.\n\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.\n\nThe title text also refers to Mother's Day, which in the US was three days before this comic was published."}
-{"number": "1369", "date": "May 16, 2014", "title": "TMI", "image": "tmi.png", "titletext": "'TMI' he whispered, gazing into the sea.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is sitting at a desk, looking at a laptop.]\n:Cueball: Ugh, TMI.\n\n:Offscreen: Oh? What?\n\n:Cueball: Just... Everything.\n:Offscreen: ''True.''", "explanation": "\"TMI\" is an acronym that means \"too much information\". It is typically used as a response to someone \"oversharing\" — 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 Information overload|overwhelmed by the colossal amount of information that is now generally available to anyone with an Internet connection.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1370", "date": "May 19, 2014", "title": "President", "image": "president.png", "titletext": "Anyone who thinks we're all going to spend the 2032 elections poring over rambling blog posts by teenagers has never tried to read a rambling blog post by a teenager.", "transcript": ":[Ponytail and Jill are walking together.]\n:Ponytail: I can't imagine anyone who grew up on the Internet being able to run for President.\n\n:[Closeup of Jill.]\n:Jill: Why? Because it'd mark the handover of a world that no longer needs you to a generation you don't understand?\n\n:[Ponytail and Jill have stopped walking and are facing each other.]\n:Jill: ...Or because there would be embarrassing pictures of us as teenagers?\n\n:[Closeup of Ponytail.]\n:Ponytail: Um. The pictures one?\n:Jill (off-screen): Pictures of teens! How will we even survive??", "explanation": "This strip shows a discussion between Ponytail and Jill about an aspect of the future. Randall likes this setup, allowing to put in perspective the various \"decay\" predictions and shows his optimism.\n\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.\"\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1371", "date": "May 21, 2014", "title": "Brightness", "image": "brightness.png", "titletext": "Recently, some exoplanet astronomers have managed to use careful analysis of reflected light to discover Earth during the day.", "transcript": ":[This panel is white on black, instead of black on white. Megan is standing staring at the ground.]\n:Megan: Based on this decrease in the star's brightness, I believe it is orbited by at least one planet.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Exoplanet astronomers at night", "explanation": "Exoplanets are planets outside of our solar system, and exoplanet astronomers are astronomers who attempt to discover and study such planets.\n\nMegan is using a common exoplanet Exoplanet#Indirect_methods|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 (spacecraft)|Kepler telescope used this technique to find evidence for exoplanets.\n\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.\n\nThe title text alludes to using more complicated techniques to observe light reflected by small planets like the Earth, for example by detecting Methods of detecting exoplanets#Polarimetry|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."}
-{"number": "1372", "date": "May 23, 2014", "title": "Smartwatches", "image": "smartwatches.png", "titletext": "This is even better than my previous smartphone casemod: an old Western Electric Model 2500 desk phone handset complete with a frayed, torn-off cord dangling from it.", "transcript": ":A USE FOR SMARTWATCHES:\n:[Depicted are two smartwatches, both labelled as \"Working\" and showing generic color displays, and one smartphone labelled as \"Dead\" with a blank screen.]\n\n:[A hacksaw cutting through the smartphone, throughout the middle of the long edge of the case.]\n\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\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\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.]\n:World's first flip iPhone", "explanation": "Smartwatch|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.\n\nThe Model_500_telephone#Model_2500|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).\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 Razer 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."}
-{"number": "1373", "date": "May 26, 2014", "title": "Screenshot", "image": "screenshot.png", "titletext": "I'M PLUGGING IN MY PHONE BUT THE BATTERY ON THE SCREEN ISN'T CHARGING", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:When someone posts a screenshot of their phone,\n\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:]\n:85% 10:02 PM\n\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:]\n:''!!!!''\n:6% \n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:I can't pay attention to the content if their battery is low.", "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 [http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/ humorous typos] to [http://www.reddit.com/r/creepyPMs creepy behavior]. In this screenshot, in addition to the text messages' content, we see a battery bar reflecting a charge of 6%; this effectively \"photobombing|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%.\n\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, where a 35% battery charge is of some minor concern to the intended recipients of the flag.\n\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. \n\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.\n\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!\n\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)."}
-{"number": "1374", "date": "May 28, 2014", "title": "Urn", "image": "urn.png", "titletext": "Can this PLEASE be drawing with replacement?", "transcript": ":[Cueball is standing in a classroom with Megan at a desk.]\n:Cueball: Imagine that you're drawing at random from an urn containing fifteen balls - six red and nine black.\n:Megan: OK. I reach in and... '''''...My grandfather's ashes?!?''' Oh God!''\n:Cueball: I... what?\n:Megan: '''''Why would you do this to me?!?'''''", "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 problem|urn problems.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text refers to two distinct scenarios in the colored 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\".\n\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 color 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.\n\nThere are a myriad of 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."}
-{"number": "1375", "date": "May 30, 2014", "title": "Astronaut Vandalism", "image": "astronaut_vandalism.png", "titletext": "That night, retired USAF pilots covertly replaced the '62' with '50'.", "transcript": ":[A signpost with three arrows.]\n:[Arrow pointing up:]\n:Space 62\n:[Arrow pointing right:]\n:Jackson 115\n:[Arrow pointing left:]\n: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 miles (100 km), due to \"astronaut vandalism\". The 62 mile distance is the Kármán line, one of the conventional demarcations of the beginning of \"outer space\".\n\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 miles as being an easy trip on the ground, but that same 62 miles is incredibly hard when going vertically, against the force of gravity. And if you want to stay there for more than a moment, you need to somehow accelerate to orbital velocity—a task few vehicles available to private individuals can achieve.{{Citation needed}}\n\nThe title text references the fact that while the {{W|Fédération Aéronautique Internationale}} (FAI) defines the {{W|Kármán line}}, the boundary between {{W|Earth's atmosphere}} and {{W|outer space}} (i.e., the start of space), to be 100 kilometers (62 miles) above mean sea level, the {{W|U.S. Air Force}} and other military branches will award {{W|astronaut wings}} to rated astronauts who fly higher than 50 miles (80 km). In 2005 {{W|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 mi (80.5 kilometers) 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\".\n\nAlthough most authorities use the FAI definition of space - the Kármán 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 {{W|Theodore von Kármán}}, who originally calculated the height at which a 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 Kármán originally calculated this height as 51.9 miles (83.6 km) - closer to the USAF definition than to what is now called the Kármán line. Additionally, the boundary between the {{W|mesosphere}} and the {{W|thermosphere}} is traditionally taken to be 53 miles (85 km), also close to the Air Force definition. On the other hand, some newer research suggests the {{W|mesopause}} (the line between the mesosphere and thermosphere) may have peaks between 53 and 62 miles (85-100 km). Also the {{W|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 kilometers (62 miles).\n\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 km (80-93 miles) 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. \n\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 miles from Memphis, TN and about 114 miles 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."}
-{"number": "1376", "date": "June 2, 2014", "title": "Jump", "image": "jump.png", "titletext": "Or that I'm at least following the curve of the Earth around to land...", "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 — jumping longer and longer between sentences. Jump is written over the head of Cueball that perform the jump until he floats.]\n:Cueball: I love these dreams\n:''Jump''\n:Cueball: Each jump is a little longer\n:''Jump''\n:Cueball: Each push off the ground a little softer\n:''Jump''\n:Cueball: Until I\n:''G l i d e''\n\n:[In the second panel Cueball (five drawings) glides over a fence and the dunes before the beach — 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\n:[In the third panel Cueball (four drawings) glides across the open sea — three birds circling around the first Cueball, a fish is jumping out of the water splashing down again beneath the second Cueball.]\n:''sploosh''\n:Cueball: ...I ''hope'' this is a dream.", "explanation": "Cueball is presumably experiencing a common dream subject, flying or floating. As in [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t"}
-{"number": "1377", "date": "June 4, 2014", "title": "Fish", "image": "fish.png", "titletext": "[Astronomer peers into telescope] [Jaws theme begins playing]", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are walking down a hill.]\n:Cueball: The Fermi paradox keeps getting worse. If planets are common, where ''is'' everybody?\n\n:Megan: 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?\n\n:Cueball: Maybe the fish looks like sand.\n:Megan: Yeah...\n\n:[Zoom out to the Earth from space.]\n:Megan: ...and what would that tell you about the ecosystem?\n\n:[Earth moves slightly out of the panel.]\n\n:[Earth moves halfway out of the panel.]\n\n:[Blank panel.]\n\n:[A shark swims through space.]", "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. \n\nCueball and Megan are having a conversation regarding this — 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 — 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 Fermi paradox#Communication is dangerous|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 [http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/gif/1983QJRAS..24..283B/0000296.000.html 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...\n\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 Exoplanet|exoplanets — 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 perhaps a couple of hundred billion planets in our galaxy still camouflaged to human scientists.\n\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. Earth appears to be the next metaphorical fish, presumably because we did not reach a high enough technology level in time to recognize the danger and hide.\n\nThis also explains the title text that has the theme from the movie ''Jaws (film)|Jaws'' playing while astronomers look into their telescopes. This may also be a reference to the film ''Alien (film)|Alien'', which was pitched with the three word proposal \"''Jaws'' in Space.\"\n\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’s 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 signalling the 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.\""}
-{"number": "1378", "date": "June 6, 2014", "title": "Turbine", "image": "turbine.png", "titletext": "Ok, plan B: Fly a kite into the blades, with a rock in a sling dangling below it, and create the world's largest trebuchet.", "transcript": ":[Megan is talking to a wind turbine.]\n:Megan: I'll hold up a big kite, and you blow air at me until I lift off!\n:Megan: What do you think of that idea?\n:Wind turbine: I'm not a huge fan.", "explanation": "A wind turbine ''uses wind to rotate its blades in order to generate electricity''. It is visually very similar to an (electric) Mechanical fan|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.\n\nThe punchline of this comic is a pun on the other meaning of the word \"{{Wiktionary|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 (Anthropomorphism|anthropomorphically-speaking) turbine's response is twofold: 1) it's a turbine and not a huge fan, which makes the idea impossible, and 2) probably for this very reason, it doesn't like the idea - i.e. it is not a fan of the idea.\n\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 Trebuchet#Traction trebuchet|traction trebuchet than to the more common counterweight trebuchet)."}
-{"number": "1379", "date": "June 9, 2014", "title": "4.5 Degrees", "image": "4_5_degrees.png", "titletext": "The good news is that according to the latest IPCC report, if we enact aggressive emissions limits now, we could hold the warming to 2°C. That's only HALF an ice age unit, which is probably no big deal.", "transcript": ":Without prompt, aggressive limits on CO2 emissions, the Earth will likely warm by an average of 4°-5°C by the century's end.\n:'''HOW BIG A CHANGE IS THAT?'''\n\n:[A ruler chart is drawn inside a frame.]\n:In the coldest part of the last ice age, Earth's average temperature was 4.5°C below the 20th century norm.\n:Let's call a 4.5°C difference one '''\"Ice Age Unit.\"'''\n\n:[A ruler with five main divisions — each again with 3 smaller quarter division markers. Above it the five main divisions are marked as follows with 0 in the middle:]\n:-2 IAU -1 IAU 0 +1 IAU +2 IAU\n:[Next to the 0 marking a black arrow points toward 0.25 on the scale and above it is written:]\n:Where we are today\n\n:[The rest of the text is below the ruler.]\n:[To the far left below -2 IAU a curved arrow points to the left. Below it is written:]\n:Snowball earth (-4 IAU)\n:[Below -1 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:]\n:20,000 years ago\n:[Below this an image of a glacier. At the top of the image is written:]\n:My neighborhood:\n:[At the bottom of the image is an arrow pointing to the glacier:]\n:Half a mile of ice\n:[Below 0 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:]\n:Average during modern times\n:[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:]\n:My neighborhood:\n:Cueball: Hi!\n:[Below +1 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:]\n:Where we'll be in 86 years\n:[Below this a white image. At the top of the image is written:]\n:My neighborhood:\n:[Below this is a very large:]\n:'''?'''\n:[Below +2 IAU a black arrow point toward this division. Below the arrow is written:]\n:Cretaceous hothouse\n:+200m sea level rise\n:No glaciers\n:Palm trees at the poles", "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 °C. 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.\n\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. \n\n: An 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.\n\n: An IAU of -1 is associated with the last ice age. During this time Randall|Randall's neighborhood was buried under an ice sheet.\n\n: An 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.\n\n: An IAU of +2 is associated with the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum|\"Hothouse Earth\" of the early Cretaceous period. At this time there were \"Arecaceae|palm trees at the poles\" as there were Polar forests of the Cretaceous|polar forests during Cretaceous summers. (Average temperature of North Pole during the summer is 0 °C or 32 °F. 0+2*4.5"}
-{"number": "1380", "date": "June 11, 2014", "title": "Manual for Civilization", "image": "manual_for_civilization.png", "titletext": "We will have an entire wing of the library devoted to copies of book #26, because ohmygod it's the one where Jake and Cassie finally KISS!!!", "transcript": ":[Brian Eno is talking to an unseen audience.]\n:Brian Eno: Hi. I'm music's Brian Eno, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation.\n\n:[Panel 2 shows he is standing on a stage.]\n: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\n:[Panel 3 shows he is holding a manuscript with a long list of book titles.]\n:Brian Eno: Today we're sharing the results — the first ever ''Manual for Civilization''.\n\n:[Panel 4 shows him reading from the manuscript.]\n:Brian Eno: *Ahem*\n::''Animorphs #1: The Invasion''\n::''Animorphs #2: The Visitor''\n::''Animorphs #3: The Encounter''\n:Unseen Audience member: ...are they ''all'' Animorphs Books?\n:Brian Eno: No! There's also ''Megamorphs'' and ''The Andalite Chronicles''.", "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 [http://blog.longnow.org/02010/04/06/manual-for-civilization/ 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.\n\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.\n\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 List of Animorphs books#Companion books|Megamorphs books and The Andalite Chronicles, both of which are side stories to the Animorph universe.\n\nThere are other books like these which aren't mentioned here — but it is clear from the last two panels that it is a quite long list — and it seems to be written in two columns, so maybe all List of Animorphs books#Animorphs main series|54 Animorphs books and all List of Animorphs books#Companion books|ten side stories could be included on the list.\n\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.\n\nThe title text makes it completely ludicrous by saying an entire wing of the library will be devoted to the The Attack (Animorphs)|book (#26) where Animorphs#Animorphs|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}}\n\nThis comic may also be inspired by Isaac Asimov's The Foundation Series|Foundation series, where Hari Seldon, a mathematician, 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\n*The Long Now Foundation was mentioned three months before this comic in 1340: Unique Date.\n*Animorphs was referenced before in the title text of 1187: Aspect Ratio and 1360: Old Files, and then later in 1817: Incognito Mode."}
-{"number": "1381", "date": "June 13, 2014", "title": "Margin", "image": "margin.png", "titletext": "PROTIP: You can get around the Shannon-Hartley limit by setting your font size to 0.", "transcript": ":[Written on the right margin of a page:]\n:I have\n:discovered\n:a truly\n:marvelous\n:proof that\n:information\n:is infinitely\n:compressible,\n:but this\n:margin is too\n:small to...\n\n:...oh\n\n:never mind :(", "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 Fermat's Last Theorem#Fermat's conjecture|a (correct) proof (see #trivia|trivia).\n\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.\n\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 Pigeonhole principle#Uses and applications|proof that this is not possible!\n\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 Existence theorem|non-constructive proof for such an algorithm, his statement at least wouldn't contradict itself.\n\nThe title text, yet another :Category:Protip|protip, makes a reference to the Shannon–Hartley 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.\n\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)."}
-{"number": "1382", "date": "June 16, 2014", "title": "Rocket Packs", "image": "rocket_packs.png", "titletext": "Every year: 'It's --I want my jetpack [and also my free medical care covering all my jetpack-related injuries]!'", "transcript": ":[Text above the frame.]\n:Rocket packs are easy.\n:[In the frame: Cueball is lying face down on the ground with his Rocket Packs on his back and his calves severely burned.]\n:Cueball: Ow.\n:[Text below the frame.]\n:The hard part is inventing the calf shields.", "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,{{Citation needed}} at least for the majority of consumers.\n\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 Calf_(anatomy)|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.\n\nThe title text starts with the trope \"{{tvtropes|IWantMyJetPack|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.\n\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]!' ''"}
-{"number": "1383", "date": "June 18, 2014", "title": "Magic Words", "image": "magic_words.png", "titletext": "'And then whisper 'anapest' in my ear as you hold me?'", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are in a bed.]\n: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?\n:[Below the frame.]\n:Linguist with a foot fetish", "explanation": "Typically the term \"Foot fetishism|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 (linguistics)|prosody. In this context, Foot (prosody)|\"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.\n\nCommon types of feet (which are all referenced in this comic) include\n*''trochee'' – a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (demonstrated in the first set of words: \"'''sto'''-ry\", \"'''wa'''-ter\", \"'''pa'''-per\", \"'''door'''-way\") (see also 856: Trochee Fixation).\n*''iamb (poetry)|iamb'' – an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (as seen in the second set: \"dis-'''arm'''\", \"A-'''dele's'''\", \"gi-'''raffe'''\", \"gre-'''nade'''\") (perhaps the best-known foot, due to iambic pentameter|its use by William Shakespeare) (see also 79: Iambic Pentameter).\n*''dactyl (poetry)|dactyl'' – a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (used in the third set: \"'''straw'''-ber-ry\", \"'''scor'''-pi-on\", \"'''po'''-et-ry\").\n*''anapest'' – (referenced in the title text) two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable; it is thus the reverse of a dactyl (see the #Discussion|discussion section). Note that the word ''anapest,'' pronounced \"ANN-a-pest,\"[according to dictionary.com: [http://dictionary.com/browse/anapest ['''an'''-''uh''-pest], /ˈæn əˌpɛst/]][American pronunciation at Merriam-Webster: [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anapest \\ˈa-nə-ˌpest\\] ][British pronunciation at Oxford Dictionaries: [http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/anapaest /ˈanəpiːst, -pɛst/]] is itself a dactyl, not an anapest, because the stress is on the first syllable. So it is an instance of a heterological word.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1384", "date": "June 20, 2014", "title": "Krypton", "image": "krypton.png", "titletext": "Their Sun and gravity will make you, uh, something, I guess. Out of earshot from Earth, mostly.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are standing near a telescope.]\n:Cueball: The distant planet Krypton is becoming unstable!\n:Baby crying (from outside the panel): Waaaaaa\n:Megan: That crying baby is really annoying.\n\n:[Cueball and Megan looking at each other.]\n\n:[Spaceship taking off.]\n\n:[Spaceship passing another spaceship on route to distant planet.]\n\n:[Planet exploding.]", "explanation": "This comic is an {{tvtropes|InvertedTrope|inverse version}} of the origin story of the superhero character Superman.\n\nIn the Superman story, Jor-El and his wife Lara (comics)|Lara notice that their home planet Krypton (comics)|Krypton is about to be destroyed in a giant explosion, so they decide to send their baby Superman|Kal-El to Earth to save him – and there he becomes Superman.\n\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.\n\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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20151103162314/http://collectingsuperman.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/stmstoryboard1a.jpg version of the spaceship] depicted in the 1978 Superman_(1978_film)|Superman movie, (see #Trivia|trivia section).\n\nIn the fifth and last panel we see Krypton explode into multiple pieces, also emitting a disc-like wave from the assumed equator.\n\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 and 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."}
-{"number": "1385", "date": "June 23, 2014", "title": "Throwing Rocks", "image": "throwing_rocks.png", "titletext": "::PLOOOOSH:: Looks like you won't be making it to Vinland today, Leaf Erikson.", "transcript": ":[Beret Guy is throwing a rock in the water while talking to Megan who walks down to him.]\n:Beret Guy: Every day I make a little leaf boat, then throw rocks until it sinks or floats away.\n\n:[Rock lands in water, near a leaf boat.]\n:Rock: '''Plunk'''\n:Beret Guy: It's pointless, but at least it's relaxing.\n\n:[Megan and Beret Guy are both holding rocks. Megan looks down at her rock.]\n:Megan: Every day, I read the comments on a news article.\n\n:[The two throw their rocks.]", "explanation": "Beret Guy is showing Megan one of his daily activities: Building a [https://rangerrick.org/crafts_activities/float-a-leaf-boat/ 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.\n\nIt is an unfortunate property of news articles that their comments become dominated by those which are [http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/some-news-sites-cracking-down-on-over-the-top-comments/2014/05/07/4bc90958-d619-11e3-95d3-3bcd77cd4e11_story.html 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).\n\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 was believed to have been European_colonization_of_the_Americas|the first European to discover and settle North America, which he named \"Vinland\", at the time this comic was released."}
-{"number": "1386", "date": "June 25, 2014", "title": "People are Stupid", "image": "people_are_stupid.png", "titletext": "To everyone who responds to everything by saying they've 'lost their faith in humanity': Thanks--I'll let humanity know. I'm sure they'll be crushed.", "transcript": ":[White Hat and Cueball are standing next to each other.]\n:White Hat: Well, you know, people are stupid.\n:Cueball: *Sigh*\n\n:[They have moved a little further apart.]\n: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\n:[Close up of Cueball.]\n:Cueball: What you're really saying is \"other people aren't as smart as '''me.'''\"\n:Cueball: And maybe you're right! In which case\n\n:[White Hat is presented with a trophy by Cueball.]\n:Cueball: I'd like to bestow upon you the\n:[In the panel there is a close up of the trophy plaque (the text is in a frame):]\n:First Annual Award for Excellence in Being Very Smart\n:Cueball: May you continue to grace our internet with your wisdom", "explanation": "G. K. Chesterton wrote in [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Alarms_and_Discursions/The_Red_Town an essay]: \"It is stupid to say that “most people” are stupid. It is like saying “most people are tall,” when it is obvious that “tall” can only mean taller than most people. It is absurd to denounce the majority of mankind as below the average of mankind.\"\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nWhite Hat's {{W|Illusory superiority|self-perceived superiority}} may be an example of the Lake Wobegon#The Lake Wobegon effect|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\".\n\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.\n\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)."}
-{"number": "1387", "date": "June 27, 2014", "title": "Clumsy Foreshadowing", "image": "clumsy_foreshadowing.png", "titletext": "'... hosts were unexpectedly fired from ABC's 'The View' today. ABC will likely announce new...'", "transcript": ":[Heading and text above the panel:]\n:'''Today's News'''\n:North Korea threatens U.S. over upcoming movie\n:Shark populations booming off east coast\n:SpaceX to attempt new rocket launch today\n:[Arrow pointing down towards the comics only panel.]\n\n:[Cueball, holding a towel, walks past a TV with a news report shown on-screen.]\n:Cueball: Bye! See you tonight!\n:Offscreen person: Have a good day!\n:TV: ''Researchers are reporting record numbers of sharks...''\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n: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.", "explanation": "A common trope in movies is to establish a significant event which will later become relevant to the main characters by having some kind of {{tvtropes|ChekhovsNews|news}} {{tvtropes|CoincidentalBroadcast|reporting}} shown on screen. This is most commonly a television broadcast, though radio broadcasts and newspaper headlines are also used. Sometimes attention is drawn to such a news story, and in other cases, it's subtle foreshadowing that can easily be missed. In any event, if news reporting shows up in fiction, savvy viewers will immediately expect it to become relevant to the plot in short order.\n\nOf course, in real life, news stories generally don't directly and obviously impact the lives of most people viewing them. Randall suggests that life will seem a lot more ominous if we imagine every news story as happening in the background of a movie, which would make us instinctively assume that they foreshadow something that will soon impact us directly. \n\nIn this case we see three random headings from news stories, all of which are fairly mundane in real life, but which would seem highly foreboding in a movie: \n\n-->''[http://www.northkoreannews.net/index.php/sid/223255811/scat/08aysdf7tga9s7f7/ht/Angry-North-Korea-threatens-war-if-US-shows-film-mocking-its-leader North Korea threatens U.S. over upcoming movie]'' comes from North Korea|North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency which, shortly before this comic was released, threatened the US over the Seth Rogen movie The Interview (2014 film)|The Interview, promising \"stern\" and \"merciless\" retaliation if the film was released. North Korea is well-known for making blustering and empty threats, and few people feared a serious response, but in a movie, this would foreshadow either all-out war or an attack that would involve the protagonists somehow. \n\n-->''[http://dailydigestnews.com/2014/06/north-atlantic-ocean-great-white-shark-population-booms/ Shark populations booming off east coast]'' comes from a report released week before this comic, about the preservation of Great white shark|Great White sharks. A growing population of Great White sharks is positive news as the species is important to marine ecosystems and its numbers have declined in recent years. Sharks aren't a significant threat to humans, with fewer than a dozen human killed by sharks in a typical year, worldwide. In a movie, however, such a report would heavily imply that a shark attack, or something similar, was imminent. \n\n-->''[http://www.orbcomm.com/networks/og2-launch SpaceX to attempt new rocket launch today]''. SpaceX is a privately owned space transport services company. On March 13, 2014 they reported a launch date for their first Orbcomm satellites#Orbcomm-OG2|OG2 mission containing 6 satellites. While interesting to space enthusiasts, this is a fairly ordinary update about the progress of the company. In a movie, such a report would imply that the launch would become important to the plot in some way, which could involve the protagonists going into space, a crash or explosion affecting them, the rocket encountering some extraterrestrial threat, or SpaceX technology being used as a threat against humanity. \n\n\nThe title text news ''[http://nypost.com/2014/06/26/sherri-shepherd-jenny-mccarthy-leave-the-view/ hosts were unexpectedly fired from ABC's 'The View' today]'' references American Broadcasting Company|ABC's ''The View (U.S. TV series)|The View'' where two of the co-hosts, Sherri Shepherd and Jenny McCarthy, were simultaneously reporting leaving the program the day before this comic appeared. In real life, this is a very mundane story which has little impact on the lives of most people. In a film, however, it becomes loaded with meaning. In a workplace drama, it could mean that the protagonist might have a chance to replace those fired leads. In a political thriller, it might be revealed that the hosts were fired to keep them from revealing sensitive information. In an action movie, those fired hosts could be involved in a deadly plot that will soon involve the protagonists. By placing real-world headlines into a fictional context, even low-stakes stories can become rich with potential meaning."}
-{"number": "1388", "date": "June 30, 2014", "title": "Subduction License", "image": "subduction_license.png", "titletext": "'Dude, why can't you just be a normal roommate?' 'Because I'm coming TOWARD you!'", "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.]\n:Beret Guy: Sweet! I finally got my subduction license!\n:Cueball: Your what?\n\n:[Beret Guy starts sinking into the ground, causing it to ripple.]\n:Cueball: ...What are you doing?\n\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.]\n:Cueball: ''Stop it! Stop it!''\n\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.]\n:Cueball: ''Augh!''", "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 that starts to ride over the first and the surface geology is rucked and folded upwards. Also, water entrained in the subducting plate may rise into the second plate and provokes volcanism, often resulting in a volcanic arc.\n\nIn this comic, Beret Guy is very happy because he has just received his ''subduction license'', which may be a play with business term ''licensed production|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, or else allowed him to perform an existing ability he had not previously felt he could legally use. As he slides slightly 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 physically 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}}\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 Thing_Explainer#References_to_comics|here.\n\nSubduction was again mentioned in 1829: Geochronology."}
-{"number": "1389", "date": "July 2, 2014", "title": "Surface Area", "image": "surface_area.png", "titletext": "This isn't an informational illustration; this is a thing I think we should do. First, we'll need a gigantic spool of thread. Next, we'll need some kind of... hmm, time to head to Seattle.", "transcript": ":[At the top of a map is a heading, with two sub headings and a note in brackets:]\n:'''Space'''\n:Without the space\n:The Solar System's solid surfaces stitched together\n:(Excluding dust and small rocks)\n:[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.]\n:[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:]\n:[Row one, above the line defined by the general top of the Earth area:]\n:Io\n:Callisto\n:Europa\n:Ganymede\n:Ceres\n:Vesta\n:Asteroids (1 km+)\n:[Here – above the Asteroids area before the Triton area - is a small unlabelled area (the only other except Earth)]\n:Triton\n:Asteroids (100 m+)\n:Oberon\n:Miranda\n:Ariel\n:Umbriel\n:Titania\n:[Row two, the unlabelled Earth area's row, but here only given those that are directly written to the right of this area:]\n:Tethys\n:Enceladus\n:Dione\n:Iapetus\n:All human skin\n:Rhea\n:Titan\t\n:[Row three, all the remaining items that are mainly below the Earth area:]\n:Mercury\n:The Moon\n:Various small moons, comets, etc\n:Mars\n:Makemake\n:Haumea\n:Eris\n:Pluto\n:Charon\n:Venus", "explanation": "This map shows the total surface areas of all terrestrial planets, dwarf planets, natural satellite|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."}
-{"number": "1390", "date": "July 4, 2014", "title": "Research Ethics", "image": "research_ethics.png", "titletext": "I mean, it's not like we could just demand to see the code that's governing our lives. What right do we have to poke around in Facebook's private affairs like that?", "transcript": ":[Megan is facing Cueball and Ponytail.]\n:Megan: Facebook shouldn't choose what stuff they show us to conduct unethical psychological research.\n:Megan: They should ''only'' make those decisions based on, uh...\n:Megan: However they were doing it before.\n:Megan: Which was probably ethical, right?", "explanation": "This comic references the recent revelation that Facebook engaged in a \"Experimental psychology|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 [http://online.wsj.com/articles/facebook-experiments-had-few-limits-1404344378 such as one that tested security measures by locking users out of their accounts].\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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\n*In the comic 743: Infrastructures the same issues with Facebook and open source.\n*And in 1150: Instagram the subject is again about how users feel used by social networks, this time by Instagram, which is now owned by Facebook."}
-{"number": "1391", "date": "July 7, 2014", "title": "Darkness", "image": "darkness.png", "titletext": "This was actually wish #406. Wish #2 was for him to lose the ability to remember that each new wish wasn't my first.", "transcript": ":[Ponytail is a news anchor at a media desk and she reports:]\n:Ponytail: ...getting reports that the darkness has spread as far west as Texas. Let's go live to our reporter in Houston.\n\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:]\n:Cueball: It's been thirty minutes since the sun vanished...\n\n:[Caption below the panel]:\n:Caption: \"Genie, for my last wish, make everyone in the media forget about the day-night cycle.\"", "explanation": "Ponytail as a :Category:News anchor|news anchor describes the sunset as though it were an unprecedented, newsworthy event, rather than {{tvtropes|MundaneMadeAwesome| something mundane}} that happens every day. They even have a reporter (Cueball) on the spot reporting from where the ''darkness'' has spread so far.\n\nThe sunset is a common event.{{Citation needed}} Isaac Asimov based his short story Nightfall (Asimov short story and novel)|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.\n\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.\n\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 \"[http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/18l8gy/unusually-large-snowstorm 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.\n\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 {{tvtropes|ThreeWishes|three wishes}} from a {{tvtropes|GenieInABottle|genie in a bottle}}. There usually is an added stipulation that no wish may be used to acquire more wishes. \n\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. \n\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 genie 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. \n\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 – 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\n*To have three wishes from a genie, but really only needing one was the joke in 152: Hamster Ball. Perhaps this genie is the same, and the first wish was for a human-sized hamster ball. Much later - inspired by the hamster ball? - he breaks the genie rules to get access to unlimited (not limited to the normal three) genie wishes.\n*The concept of having unlimited wishes has previously been explored in 1086: Eyelash Wish Log - one of the wishes is also related to news anchors - the wish is to control the direction they are looking.\n*Genies are also part of 532: Piano and 879: Lamp, although these two jokes are of a more juvenile character."}
-{"number": "1392", "date": "July 9, 2014", "title": "Dominant Players", "image": "dominant_players.png", "titletext": "When Vera Menchik entered a 1929 tournament, a male competitor mocked her by suggesting that a special 'Vera Menchik Club' would be created for any player who lost to her. When the tournament began, he promptly became the first member of said club, and over the years it accumulated a large and illustrious roster.", "transcript": ":'''Dominant players '''\n:over time\n:[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.]\n:[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.]\n:[Basketball chart:]\n:'''Basketball (NBA/ABA)'''\n:Player Efficiency Rating\n:1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010\n:[Red] George Mikan\n:[Red] Bob Pettit\n:Neal Johnston [Neil misspelled.]\n:Elgin Baylor\n:[Red] Wilt Chamberlain\n::Becomes the first and so far only player to score 100 points in a game\n:Jerry West\n::The Guy in the NBA logo\n:[Red] Kareem Abdul Jabbar [Missing hyphen between the two last names.]\n::Airplane\n:Bob Mcadoo\n:Julius Irving [Erving misspelled.]\n:Moses Malone\n:Magic Johnson\n::HIV announcement [A part of the path is dashed after this.]\n:[Red] Michael Jordan\n::Baseball career [A part of the path is dashed after this.]\n::Space Jam\n::Second retirement [A part of the path is dashed after this.]\n:Larry Bird\n:Karl Malone\n:David Robinson\n:[Red] Shaquille O'Neal\n:Kevin Gariett\n:[Red] LeBron James\n::The Decision\n:Dwyane Wade\n:Kevin Durant\n\n:[Chess chart.]\n:'''Chess'''\n:Elo Rating\n:The modern Elo rating system dates back to about 1970.\n:Computer analysis (like Kenneth Regan's) lets us rate historical players, but this has only been done rigorously for a few tournaments.\n:Dashed lines are rough estimates only.\n:[All paths are dashed up until the late nineteen sixties:]\n:1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010\n:[The first player has no path, as his time was before 1940. An arrow points toward the left to these earlier times:]\n:José Capablanca\n::Terrifying chess God\n:[Red] Alexander Alekhine [His path ends in a starburst.]\n:[Red] Mikhail Botvinnik\n:Tigran Petrosian\n:David Bronstein\n:Mikhail Tal\n::Mikhail Tal [his name is written twice on the path, the second time above Boris Spassky when their paths intertwine.]\n:[Red] Bobby Fischer\n::Vanished… [Text under a starburst.]\n::Reappeared then vanished again. He had problems. [Text under two starbursts connected with a path. This appears much later than the first starburst.]\n:Boris Spassky\n::Boris Spassky [his name is written twice on the path, the second time below Mikhail Tal when their paths intertwine.]\n:Victor Korchnoi\n:[Red] Anatoly Karpov\n:[Red] Garry Kasparov\n::Loses to Deep Blue\n:Judit Polgar\n::(See below) [The text is written beneath her name.]\n:Vladimir Kramnik\n:Levon Aronian\n:[Red] Magnus Carlsen\n\n:[Chess (women) chart:]\n:'''Chess (women)'''\n:Elo Rating\n:For a long time, sexism, a lack of role models, and institutional hostility largely kept women from pursuing serious chess careers.\n:With the expansion of women's tournaments and prizes starting in the 1970s, this has begun to change.\n:[All paths are dashed up until the late nineteen sixties.]\n:1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010\n:[Red] Vera Menchik\n::Died in a missile attack on London [next to a starburst.]\n:Sonja Graf\n::Rating particularly uncertain\n:Olga Rubtsova\n:Elisaveta Bykova\n:Kira Zvorykina\n::Kira Zvorykina (born 1919) continued playing in tournaments into the 21st century [Text above Elisvetas path, no arrows.]\n::Zvorykina [Written on top of the path when her path reappears much later.]\n:Alexandra Nicolau\n:[Red] Nona Gaprindashvili\n:Alla Kushnir\n:[Red] Maia Chiburdanidze\n:Pia Cramling\n::Pia Cramling [her name is written twice on the path, the second time below the path of Xie Jun after their paths have intertwined.]\n:Xie Jun\n::Xie Jun [her name is written twice on the path, the second time above the path of Pia Cramling after their paths have intertwined.]\n:Susan Polgar\n:Sofia Polgar\n:[Red] Judit Polgar\n::Sisters [The three Polgars are linked by a thin dashed line, snaking between their names.]\n::Wins a game against Kasparov, making her the first woman to beat the world #1\n::Becomes first woman to rank in the overall top 10\n:Antoaneta Stefanova\n:Anna Muzychuk\n:Koneru Humpy [In western style the name should be Humpy Koneru, but the comics version is the native form.]\n:Hou Yifan", "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. \n\nFor basketball, it uses the player efficiency rating (PER), the [http://knickerblogger.net/a-laymans-guide-to-advanced-nba-statistics/ 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 Player efficiency rating#Problems with PER|known deficiencies.\n\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 [https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Kenneth+Wingate+Regan Kenneth Regan's] computer analysis - as written in the Chess panel) and are thus shown as dashed lines prior to 1970.\n\nThe charts show the players career paths as a function of time with the rating on the y-axis. There is no #Scales of the axis|scale on the y-axis.\n\n#Player inclusion criteria|Included 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|data tables''' below.\n\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. \n\nThe title text mentions her specifically because of the club named after her: Vera_Menchik#The_.22Vera_Menchik_Club.22|The \"Vera Menchik Club\". When in 1929, Menchik entered the Carlsbad 1929 chess tournament|Carlsbad, Viennese master, usually a tournament only for male chess players, one of the other chess players, Albert Becker (chess player)|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.\n\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 (1935–37). So it can for sure be said that the club accumulated a \"large and illustrious roster\".\n\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."}
-{"number": "1393", "date": "July 11, 2014", "title": "Timeghost", "image": "timeghost.png", "titletext": "'Hello, Ghostbusters?' 'ooOOoooo people born years after that movie came out are having a second chiiiild right now ooOoooOoo'", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are approached by a floating ghost]\n:Timeghost: ''...ooOOOOOOOOooo... Tiiiime is passiiiing!''\n:Megan: Ugh. Timeghost.\n:Cueball: Huh?\n:Megan: Here come the factoids.\n\n:[Timeghost floats around.]\n:Timeghost: ''Forrest Gump'' came out closer to the Vietnam War than to the present daaay.\n:Megan: Go ''away!''\n:Timeghost: The average new grand-parents are younger than Keanu Reeeeves!\n:Cueball: That can't be right...\n\n:[Megan clutches her head, possibly attempting to cover her ears.]\n:Timeghost: ''Today's new parents were ten when Eminem got big. Daaaaaad muuuuusic. They remember Simpsons season 5 or 6 at the '''earliest'''''.\n:Megan: Argh!\n:Cueball: How long has it been ''doing'' this?\n\n:[Megan and Cueball looks up at the Timeghost as it delivers its most scary message.]\n:Timeghost: ''The staaaaart of my haunting is now further away than your deaaaths!''\n:Megan: Will you sto- -'''''WHAT!?'''''\n: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.\n\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).\n\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.\n\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).\n\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.\n\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\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.\n\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.\n\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 [http://blog.xkcd.com/2012/09/29/odd-temporal-milestones/ 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. 926: Time Vultures make you feel old because the entire remainder of your life is only perceived as a few moments by them.\n\n'''Timeline'''\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1394", "date": "July 14, 2014", "title": "Superm*n", "image": "superm_n.png", "titletext": "See also: Spider-Man reboot in which he can produce several inches of web, doesn't need as much chalk powder on his hands when he goes rock climbing, and occasionally feels vaguely uneasy about situations.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is reaching for an item on a high shelf. Superman is rushing towards him.]\n:Superman: I'll get it! I'm 5 inches taller and 7% stronger than the average man!\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:The new supermoon-inspired '''''Superman''''' reboot", "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 [https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/10jul_supermoons three supermoons in a row] as NASA said.\n\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 days, and the loose definition of the term means that the supermoon lasts for about two or three full moons.\n\nReturning to the not-so-Superman, the average American adult man is 69 inches tall, with a standard deviation of 2.9 inches. Not-so-Superman, at an assumed 74 inches (188 cm) 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 inches 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 kg, the not-so-Superman would lift 53.5 kg.\n\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,\" as well as \"Supermen,\" \"Supermoan,\" and \"Supermax prison\".\n\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.\n\nSupermoon is also referenced in 1052: Every Major's Terrible#Verse 3|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 :Category:Supermoon|list."}
-{"number": "1395", "date": "July 16, 2014", "title": "Power Cord", "image": "power_cord.png", "titletext": "In this situation, gzip /dev/inside to deflate, then pipe the compressed air to /dev/input to clean your keyboard. Avert your eyes when you do.", "transcript": ":[Beret Guy enters to find Cueball on a chair typing on a laptop. Cueball's power cord is unplugged from the wall.]\n:Cueball typing: Type type\n\n:[Beret Guy picks up the power cord. Cueball continues typing.]\n:Cueball typing: Type type\n\n:[Beret Guy blows into the plug end of the cord. The laptop abruptly inflates and Cueball jerks back.]\n:Beret Guy: '''PBBBBT'''\n:Laptop: '''FOOMP'''\n\n:[Beret Guy walks away, leaving Cueball climbing up his chair to retrieve his inflated laptop which is now floating away.]", "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 — and the laptop inflates, along with the \"power brick\" that is on the cord. 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).\n\nIt is not possible to inflate a laptop like this{{Citation needed}}, and (with [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1396", "date": "July 18, 2014", "title": "Actors", "image": "actors.png", "titletext": "Once again topping the list of tonight's hottest rising stars in Hollywood is ξ Persei!", "transcript": ":[Caption above the Panel:]\n:Who are today's 10 hottest actors?\n:[Cueball is holding a clipboard, taking notes, while Megan aims an infrared thermometer off screen.]\n:Megan: 81.5, but I think it got part of his shirt. ''HEY JUSTIN — HOLD STILL!''\n:[Caption below the Panel:]\n:''We grab an infrared thermometer and find out!''", "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 Justin Long|Long, Justin Theroux|Theroux, Justin Bieber|Bieber or Justin Timberlake|Timberlake or [http://www.imdb.com/search/name?count"}
-{"number": "1397", "date": "July 21, 2014", "title": "Luke", "image": "luke.png", "titletext": "Don't turn it on.", "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.]\n:Darth Vader: '''''I see you have constructed a new lightsaber.'''''\n:Luke Skywalker: ...Yes. \n:Luke Skywalker: That is definitely what I did.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Vader finds Luke's Fleshlight.", "explanation": "This comic takes place in a [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1398", "date": "July 23, 2014", "title": "Snake Facts", "image": "snake_facts.png", "titletext": "Biologically speaking, what we call a 'snake' is actually a human digestive tract which has escaped from its host.", "transcript": ":'''Snake Facts:'''\n:Snake venom evolved from saliva, which means that it all started with a snake whose mouth was sliiiightly more gross than usual.\n:[Picture of a snake below the text above.]\n:Snake: Hi guys!\n:Off-panel voice: Eww, it's Frank.\n:[Map of South America with gray shade in the form of a snake. Text to the left of it.]\n:The world's longest snake is found in Brazil, Peru, and Chile. It is believed to be over 60 years old.\n:[Picture of a snake skeleton between the first and the second of the lines below.]\n:If you laid all the bones in a snake end-to-end,\n:you would have a snake", "explanation": "This is the first comic using :Category:Facts|Facts in the title, but only the second to use a fact that is not a :Category:Fun fact|Fun fact.\n\nThe comic lists a few ''Lie|factoids'' about snakes, ranging from the mildly informative to the strictly tongue-in-cheek.\n\nThe first factoid references the hypothesis that snake venom Evolution of 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.\n\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.\n\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.\"\n\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.\n\nRandall had previously posted an Media:snake facts old.png|incorrect map, that included the snake's habitat in Bolivia instead of Peru."}
-{"number": "1399", "date": "July 25, 2014", "title": "Chaos", "image": "chaos.png", "titletext": "Although the oral exam for the doctorate was just 'can you do that weird laugh?'", "transcript": ":[Cueball is staring at a whiteboard covered with equations and graphs including a bifurcation diagram, a dragon curve and two connected Barnsley ferns.]\n:Cueball: For two decades, I've studied phase space, nonlinear equations, and strange attractors.\n:[Cueball keeps staring at a whiteboard covered with equations and graphs for two more panels before in the third panel he exclaims:]\n:Cueball: And there is ''nothing'' in here about dinosaurs escaping.", "explanation": "This comic pokes fun at the 1993 film ''Jurassic_Park_(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 system|nonlinear equations, and Attractor|strange attractors, comes directly from the movie, in which [http://jurassicpark.wikia.com/wiki/Ian_Malcolm Dr. Ian Malcolm] (portrayed by Jeff Goldblum), a mathematician and Chaos theory|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.\n\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 – shown in the graphs on the whiteboard – and its common meaning – a state of utter confusion or disorder (as illustrated in the film).\n\nThe whiteboard shows a bifurcation diagram of the logistic map (one of the simplest examples of the mathematical concept of chaos, also featured in [http://what-if.xkcd.com/105/ 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.\n\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 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1400", "date": "July 28, 2014", "title": "D.B. Cooper", "image": "d_b_cooper.png", "titletext": "'Why on Earth would someone commit air piracy just to finance a terrible movie decades later?' 'People are very strange these days.'", "transcript": ":[Cueball is using a baton to point towards a projector.]\n:D.B. Cooper\n:(\"Dan Cooper\")\n\n:Hijacked a plane in the 1970s.\n:On landing, demanded money and\n:parachutes. Jumped from plane\n:mid-flight and was never found.\n\n:*Vanished mysteriously with large amount of money\n:*Real age/name unknown\n:*Ambiguous, possibly affected speaking style (\"negotiable American currency\")\n:*Fate unknown\n\n:[Cueball has his palm out.]\n:Tommy Wiseau\n:(\"Johnny\")\n\n:Wrote, directed, and starred in\n:''The Room'', a film widely hailed as\n:\"The ''Citizen Kane'' of bad movies.\"\n\n:*Appeared mysteriously with large amount of money\n:*Colleague says he's much older than he claims.\n:*Ambiguous, possibly affected speaking style (\"You are tearing me apart, Lisa!\")\n:*Background unknown\n\n:[Two images captioned \"Cooper (FBI sketch)\" and \"Wiseau (Flickr photo by Al Pavangkanan)\".]\n\n:Offscreen voice: This is the dumbest theory I've ever heard.\n:Cueball: But it explains ''everything!!''", "explanation": "File:DBCooper.jpg|thumb|150px|Cooper\nIn 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.)\n\nFile:Tommy Wiseau.jpg|thumb|150px|Wiseau\nIn 2003, Tommy Wiseau released The Room (film)|''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.\n\nThis comic points to similarities between several details of Cooper and Wiseau's stories:\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1401", "date": "July 30, 2014", "title": "New", "image": "new.png", "titletext": "The nice thing about headcannnons is that it's really easy to get other people to believe in them.", "transcript": ":[Black Hat walks in.]\n:Black Hat: New headcannon:\n\n:[Cueball is sitting at his desk, using his computer.]\n:Cueball: Yeah?\n\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.]\n:Headcannon: '''BOOM'''\n:Cueball: Augh!", "explanation": "This comic strip uses a play on the homophone|homophonic relationship between \"Canon_(fiction)|canon\", the literary term, and \"cannon\", a projectile weapon. The word headcanon is a compound of \"head\" and \"canon,\" and is a term used among online discussions that means \"canon that only exists within one's head.\" In other words it refers to belief or theory about a fictional universe that has not, strictly speaking, been proven to be true within the fiction (some headcanons can even contradict the fiction).\n\nIn this strip, Black Hat tells Cueball that he has a \"new headcannon\". Cueball, thinking Black Hat means \"headcanon,\" 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.\n\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. \n\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.\n\nThis comic also shows Cueball being once again distracted from his work in a manner similar to 1388: Subduction License."}
-{"number": "1402", "date": "August 1, 2014", "title": "Harpoons", "image": "harpoons.png", "titletext": "To motivate it to fire its harpoons hard enough, Rosetta's Philae lander has been programmed to believe it is trying to kill the comet.", "transcript": ":'''Number of harpoons in space'''\n:by year\n:[A chart with a red graph is drawn below.]\n:[The y-axis.]\n:0 1 2 3\n:[The x-axis.]\n:1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020\n:[The graph is at zero until a sharp peak to 1 in 1970. The peak is labeled.]\n:Apollo 12 rum incident\n:[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.]\n:Rosetta comet mission launched carrying lander with harpoon tethers", "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.\n\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 [http://www.harpoon-rum.eu/1.html Harpoon] brand of Rum#Regional variations|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\".\n\nThe latter peak on this graph refers to the Rosetta (spacecraft)|Rosetta unmanned spacecraft. As part of its mission, it carried a lander called Philae (spacecraft)|Philae, which has two harpoon tethers to anchor itself to the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1403", "date": "August 4, 2014", "title": "Thesis Defense", "image": "thesis_defense.png", "titletext": "MY RESULTS ARE A SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT ON THE STATE OF THE AAAAAAAAAAAART", "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\".]\n:Megan: In conclusion, AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:The best thesis defense is a good thesis offense.", "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[Milosevic and McCabe, ''Phobias: The psychology of irrational fear''], we should assume that this response provides some key evidence about the threat displays in mammals.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1404", "date": "August 6, 2014", "title": "Quantum Vacuum Virtual Plasma", "image": "quantum_vacuum_virtual_plasma.png", "titletext": "I don't understand the things you do, and you therefore may represent an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are walking together in the foreground.]\n:Cueball: Hear about that \"impossible\" microwave thruster?\n\n:[They stop walking and Cueball turns to face Megan.]\n:Megan: Yeah. Let me get this straight — they pumped 20 kilowatts into a box under ambient conditions\n:...and it only twitched a ''little''?\n:Cueball: Yeah.\n\n:[Zoomed out - they are seen in silhouette walking together again.]\n:Megan: ''That's'' surprising. If you pumped 20 kilowatts into ''me'', I'd twitch a ''lot''.\n:Cueball: But you're not pushing on the quantum vacuum.\n:Megan: I ''might'' be. I do a lot of things.\n:Cueball: I guess we can't be sure.", "explanation": "This comic is a reference to the [http://nasawatch.com/archives/2014/08/jscs-stealthy-s.html recent news] of a Quantum vacuum plasma thruster|microwave thruster which allegedly produces thrust without expelling any propellant or microwaves, a violation of Momentum#Conservation|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 [http://nasawatch.com/archives/2014/08/jsc-is-still-si.html missing.]\n\nThe title of the comic directly refers to this hypothetical new physics mechanism of interacting with the \"quantum vacuum virtual plasma,\" a [http://plus.google.com/117663015413546257905/posts/WfFtJ8bYVya combination of] [http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2014/08/04/impossible-thruster-probably-impossible/ physics words] that don't normally go together.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1405", "date": "August 8, 2014", "title": "Meteor", "image": "meteor.png", "titletext": "No, only LAVA is called 'magma' while underground. Any other object underground is called 'lava'.", "transcript": ":[Cueballs friend walks toward Cueball while holding a rock.]\n:Cueball: Check it out - I got a piece of a meteor!\n:Randall: ''Actually'', it's only called that while falling. Once it lands, it's called ''magma''.\n\n:[Below the panel:]\n:My Hobby: Mixing pedantic terms", "explanation": "This is one of Randall's :Category:My Hobby|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nIt is also worth mentioning that, technically, water is a form of lava. Ice is a mineral, since it has a definite crystalline structure and has a definite chemical structure (H2O). And molten mineral is lava. Therefore, our bodies are made up of up to 60% lava. See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1406", "date": "August 11, 2014", "title": "Universal Converter Box", "image": "universal_converter_box.png", "titletext": "Comes with a 50-lb sack of gender changers, and also an add-on device with a voltage selector and a zillion circular center pin DC adapter tips so you can power any of those devices from the 90s.", "transcript": ":[Universal converter box with wires to connectors:]\n:VGA\n:DVI\n:HDMI\n:Thunderbolt\n:Firewire\n:Component\n:[sharing connectors with Component:]\n:RCA\n:1/8\" Audio\n:1/8\" Video\n:Parallel Port\n:S-Video\n:Airline Pneumatic Tube Audio\n:PS/2/3/4\n:120V AC\n::[pointing to ground pin:]\n::Removable\n:Floppy/IDE/2.5\"/SCSI\n::[pointing to sections in IDC connector:]\n::Break here\n:USB\n:USB (weird other end)\n:Mini-USB\n:Micro USB\n:Macro USB\n:F Connector\n:Fiber\n:RJ11\n:Ethernet\n:Token Ring\n:MagSafe\n:MagSafe 2\n:MagSafe 3\n:MagSafe 4\n:Bluetooth Dongle\n:SCART\n:String (fits most cans)\n:[Fuel nozzle with selector for:]\n:87/91/93/Diesel", "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.\n\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.\n\nThe humor from this comic comes from the sheer number of 927: Standards|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 inch / 3.5 mm headphone jack, into a variety of fuel suitable for running your car.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1407", "date": "August 13, 2014", "title": "Worst Hurricane", "image": "worst_hurricane.png", "titletext": "'Finding a 105-year-old who's lived in each location and asking them which hurricane they think was the worst' is left as an exercise for the reader.", "transcript": ":What's The\n:;Worst Hurricane\n:Anyone In Your Town Remembers?\n:Estimated from Hurdat Database and NCEP rainfall totals\n:1914-2014\n:[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.]", "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.\n\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.\n\nHurricanes and especially their names have been featured before in comics 453: Upcoming Hurricanes, 944: Hurricane Names and 1126: Epsilon and Zeta."}
-{"number": "1408", "date": "August 15, 2014", "title": "March of the Penguins", "image": "march_of_the_penguins.png", "titletext": "You ARE getting older, though.", "transcript": ":[Black Hat walks towards Megan who is sitting in an office chair at a desk working on her laptop.]\n:Black Hat: All the birds from ''March of the Penguins'' are now dead.\n\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.]\n:Megan: OK, I ''get'' it. We're all aging.\n:Black Hat (off-panel): What? No.\n\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.]\n:Black Hat: I'm not trying to make you feel old. They were alive last night. \n:Black Hat:I'm trying to apologize.\n:Megan: Oh God", "explanation": "Several of the xkcd comics outline ways to :Category:"}
-{"number": "1409", "date": "August 18, 2014", "title": "Query", "image": "query.png", "titletext": "SELECT * FROM GHOSTS", "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\n:[The first two panels are drawn in the first row.]\n:[Megan walks up to device lying on the ground.]\n\n:[Megan picks up a device and looks at the screen. The screen is shown in black with white text and a white bar for her to enter text in.]\n:Loaded table: People\n:Enter query\n\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]\n:Enter query\n:Megan: ??\n\n:[Megan types into the device. The query is shown as coming from the devices screen:] \n:Select * from people where age > 30\n\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\n:[Megan types again:] \n:Select * from people where annual_income > 100000\n\n:[One person is highlighted in yellow - the one talking to the first Cueball.]\n\n:[Megan types:] \n:Select * from people where afraid_of_flying", "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, \"Table (database)|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe drop table command was also used in 327: Exploits of a Mom, although with less fatal results.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1410", "date": "August 20, 2014", "title": "California", "image": "california.png", "titletext": "58% of the state has gone into plaid.", "transcript": ":[Caption above frame:]\n:I like how long and skinny California is because it means you can use it as a graph axis:\n\n:[Title at top of frame:]\n:'''California Droughts'''\n:Based on map data from US Drought Monitor/NOAA/Richard Tinker\n\n:[A legend explains the colors which won't show in this transcript anyway:]\n:Dry\n::[Yellow]\n:Drought\n::[Beige] Moderate\n::[Orange] Severe\n::[Red] Extreme\n::[Brown] Ludicrous (\"exceptional\")\n\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.]", "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.\n\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.\n\nRandall compiled the data in this graph from data from the [http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ US Drought Monitor], which is authored by Richard Tinker from National_Oceanic_and_Atmospheric_Administration|NOAA. The colors Randall uses correspond to [http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/AboutUs/ClassificationScheme.aspx drought intensity levels D0-D4] defined on the Drought Monitor site.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text is a reference from the movie Spaceballs, a Parody_film|parody of various Science_fiction|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 Tartan|plaid pattern and Barf remarks \"They've gone to plaid!\" ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1411", "date": "August 22, 2014", "title": "Loop", "image": "loop.png", "titletext": "Ugh, today's kids are forgetting the old-fashioned art of absentmindedly reading the same half-page of a book over and over and then letting your attention wander and picking up another book.", "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\n:[A cyclical flowchart is shown above Cueball:]\n:Stare blankly at screen -> Open news site -> Start reading -> Get bored -> Absentmindedly check smaller device -> Stare blankly at screen -> ...", "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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1412", "date": "August 25, 2014", "title": "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", "image": "teenage_mutant_ninja_turtles.png", "titletext": "My upcoming album, 'Linked List', has covers of 'The Purple People Eater', the Ninja Turtles theme, 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini', and the Power Rangers theme, with every song played to the tune of the next.", "transcript": ":[Caption above comic]\n:;WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE TITLES\n::With the right syllable stress pattern to be sung to the tune of the original ''Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'' theme song\n\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.]\n\n:;''Ace Ventura: Pet Detective''\n::''Biggest Loser: Second Chances''\n::Cayman Island blue iguana\n::Central Texas pocket gopher\n::Church of Jesus Christ Creator\n::Climate change and meat production\n::''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon''\n::Daylight saving time in China\n::Denver Airport People Mover\n::Easter Island spiny lobster\n\n:;''Asian Human Rights Commission''\n::Edgar Allan Poe Museum\n::Engine failure after take-off\n::English as a second language\n::Former ''Arctic Monkeys'' members\n::''Fowler's Modern English Usage''\n::Georgia Game and Fish Department\n::Golden-mantled howler monkey\n::Greater Cleveland Film Commission\n::Hairy flower chafer beetle\n\n:;''San Diego City Council''\n::Harland David \"Colonel\" Sanders\n::Human Tissue Resource Network\n::''Klondike''-class destroyer tender\n::Legal code of North Dakota\n::Lesser knapweed flower weevil\n::Lockheed Martin Atlas rocket\n::Maple syrup urine syndrome\n::''Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers''\n::Nablus mask-like facial syndrome\n\n:;''Single payer health insurance''\n::Neo Geo Pocket Color\n::''New Year's Eve with Carson Daly''\n::Newton's second law of motion\n::North Korean Workers Party\n::Orange County Business Council\n::Over/under cable coiling\n::Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater\n::Places named for Adolf Hitler\n::Proton-proton chain reaction\n\n:;''Spotted giant flying squirrel''\n::Puerto Rican lizard-cuckoo\n::Quantuum [sic] vacuum plasma thruster\n::Rocky Mountain spotted fever\n::Royal Flying Doctor Service\n::Russian Women's Fascist Movement\n::Semi-active laser guidance\n::''Seven Brides for Seven Brothers''\n::''Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows''\n::Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon\n\n:;''Women science fiction authors''\n::Trailing suction hopper dredger\n::Vector graphics markup language\n::Viti Levu giant pigeon\n::Voting rights in Puerto Rico\n::William Henry, Duke of Gloucester\n::Windows Vista startup process\n::Woodrow Wilson \"Woody\" Guthrie\n::Yaba monkey tumor virus\n::''Zack and Miri Make a Porno''", "explanation": "This comic is a reference to the recently released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014 film)|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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1413", "date": "August 27, 2014", "title": "Suddenly Popular", "image": "suddenly_popular.png", "titletext": "Are Your Teens Practicing Amplexus? Learn These Six Telltale Signs!", "transcript": ":Obscure words and phrases everyone suddenly becomes very familiar with.\n:[A time line to the left is marked of by several phrases to the right around the time they became familiar to the public:]\n::← World Wide Web\n::← DNA Evidence\n:1995\n::← Militia Movement\n::← Supermax\n:2000\n::← Butterfly Ballot\n::← Al-Qaeda\n::← Wi-Fi\n:2005\n::← Tsunami\n::← Viral\n:2010\n::← Radicalize\n::← Metadata\n:2015\n::← Lahar\n::← Insect-Borne\n:2020\n::← Earth-Crossing\n::← Thermohaline\n::← Snow-Blindness\n:2025\n::← Amplexus\n::← Controlled Hydroplaning\n:2030\n::← Paradoxical Reaction\n::← Drone Desertion\n::← Rapid Hair Growth \n:2035\n::��� I Swear Allegiance To The God-Empress In Life And In Death\n:2040", "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'' — which is the joke of the title text — showing that no matter how many disasters there are, people are generally more concerned about their teenagers' sex lives.\n\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' Promo (media)|promos (\"A new trend among teens is sweeping the nation, but is it dangerous? Details at 11:00.\").\n\nGlobal catastrophic risks|Global 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.\n\nThis comic has similar features to 887: Future Timeline."}
-{"number": "1414", "date": "August 29, 2014", "title": "Writing Skills", "image": "writing_skills.png", "titletext": "I'd like to find a corpus of writing from children in a non-self-selected sample (e.g. handwritten letters to the president from everyone in the same teacher's 7th grade class every year)--and score the kids today versus the kids 20 years ago on various objective measures of writing quality. I've heard the idea that exposure to all this amateur peer practice is hurting us, but I'd bet on the generation that conducts the bulk of their social lives via the written word over the generation that occasionally wrote book reports and letters to grandma once a year, any day.", "transcript": ":[White Hat and Cueball are walking together, White Hat is holding a newspaper or report.]\n:White Hat: Weird- Another study found that kids who use SMS abbreviations actually score ''higher'' on grammar and spelling tests.\n:Cueball: Why on ''earth'' is that a surprise?\n\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.]\n: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\n:[Cueball talks on while White Hat begins to walk.]\n:Cueball: Do you think their generation will suck at baseball because they learned sloppy skills?\n:White Hat: ...So you think someone will become a great writer while ''sexting?''\n\n:[They walk together.]\n: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''.\n:White Hat: Eww.", "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).\n\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.\n\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:\n\n*Language is being negatively degraded by the use of text speak\n*The use of text speak is a natural evolution of language\n\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.\n\nThis idea has some real scientific background. Such as the investigation in 2009 [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/026151008X320507/abstract 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 [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id"}
-{"number": "1415", "date": "September 1, 2014", "title": "Ballooning", "image": "ballooning.png", "titletext": "Time to dance in front of Mary Jane! If I'm lucky, she'll turn out not to practice pre-copulatory sexual cannibalism!", "transcript": ":[Cueball is shown floating on the wind, attached to a large balloon. The balloon is made of spider silk.]\n:Cueball: Ooh, that looks like a good spot to land, eat some bugs, and make an egg sac!\n:♫ ''Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can'' ♪", "explanation": "Spider-Man is a fictional superhero in comic books published by Marvel"}
-{"number": "1416", "date": "September 3, 2014", "title": "Pixels", "image": "pixels.png", "titletext": "It's turtles all the way down.", "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:]\n:Scroll to zoom\n\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: 1416: Pixels/Transcript|interactive transcript]\n\n:The following code can be found by inspecting the comic's source code:\n:A large picture of a person kneeling on the ground, stacking turtles.\n:((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.))\n:The Earth as seen from space with the words BOOK LAUNCH.\n:A stick-Randall holding a copy of 'What If?' saying, \"So excited about my book launch!\"\n:A copy of the cover of 'What If?' labeled \"book.\"\n:Stick-Randall is assembling parts from a box labeled 'rocket parts' and preparing to 'launch' his book.\n:Various stages of assembly.\n:A second person comes in, looks at SR's rocket set-up and says, \"Needs more struts.\"\n:SR adds more struts.\n:The rocket launches.\n:A big cloud of smoke, which then dissipates.\n:SR and the other person look skywards at the launched book.\n:The book is shown leaving Earth's orbit.\n:The other person turns to SR and says, \"I think that was the only one.\"\n:The two walk away.\n:((The panels after this are a random assortment of these mostly stand-alone panels.))\n:A momma duck with several ducklings in a row behind her, labeled 'Evolution.'\n:The other person floating around in the sky.\n:A stick figure with a sploshing bucket of water saying, \"I'm gonna shut down the server!\"\n: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.\"\n:[[The code:\n:~$ du -s video\n\n:4170882256\n:~$ du -hs video\n\n:A lot.\n:~$]]\n:A cloud.\n:A flock of birds.\n:MU\n:A pixel.\n:A person using a computer on the floor.\n:HOLISM\n:Saturn\n:An atom.\n:Two people star-gazing on a hill.\n: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.\"\n:The start of Mario World 1-1.\n\n\n\n:{{Title text: It's turtles all the way down.}}", "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.\n\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 {{W|Stephen Hawking}}'s 1988 book {{W|A Brief History of Time}}, which starts:\n\n:A well-known scientist (some say it was {{W|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\n:—Hawking, 1988\n\nSeveral World Turtle|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.\n\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.\n\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 :Category:Interactive comics|interactive comic 1110: Click and Drag."}
-{"number": "1417", "date": "September 5, 2014", "title": "Seven", "image": "seven.png", "titletext": "The days of the week are Monday, Arctic, Wellesley, Green, Electra, Synergize, and the Seventh Seal.", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball are talking.]\n:Megan: Can you name all the dwarfs from Snow White?\n:Cueball: Sure, there's, um...\n:Cueball's thoughts: Sneezy, phylum, Europe, sloth, guacamole, data link, Colossus of Rhodes\n:I have this problem where all sets of seven things are indistinguishable to me.", "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.\n\nThis is shown in the comic when Megan asks Cueball to name the seven dwarfs from ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film)|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.\n\nThe title text reveals that even a trivial set of seven items, like the days of the week, also goes completely wrong.\n\nThe comic may be related to the Set-theoretic definition of natural numbers#Oldest definition|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 :Category:Math|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.\n\nThe number seven being the number for when sets become indistinguishable is possibly a reference to The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two|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.\n\nThe number seven has culturally been 7 (number)#Religion and mythology|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1418", "date": "September 8, 2014", "title": "Horse", "image": "horse.png", "titletext": "Officer suspended from horse.", "transcript": ":[Headlines above the main frame of the comic:]\n:New favorite browser text replacement:\n:'''Force → Horse'''\n\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:]\n:Ukranian towns threatened by pro-Russian horses\n:Governor appoints task horse\n:Iraqi air horse growing\n:Quarks, which are bound together by the strong nuclear horse...", "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.\n\n*Ukrainian town threatened by pro-Russian horses\n**At the time this comic was published, there was civil unrest in Ukraine, mostly framed as pro-European vs pro-Russian. In earlier centuries, the phrase \"pro-Russian horses\" could refer to the animals riden by Cossacks, or by their enemies, as alliances shifted.\n***In 2022, this statement would perhaps become even more relevant. \n**It should be noted that Randall spelled \"Ukrainian\" incorrectly, forgetting the first 'i'.\n*Governor appoints task horse\n**A Task force is a unit or formation established to work on a single defined task or activity, which makes it quite comical to picture a horse instead of a unit. A \"task horse\" would presumably be a horse performing tasks.\n*Iraqi Air Horse growing\n**The Air ''Force'' of Iraq may indeed be being up-armed, especially in light of the threat, at this time, of ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State forces across swaths of both Iraq and Syria. In mythology, Pegasus was a winged horse that could fly through the air, and might be considered an \"air horse\". In real life, \"Air Horse One\" is an airplane equipped for transporting horses.\n*Quarks, which are bound together by the strong nuclear horse…\n**Quark|Quarks are elementary particles. They form bound states e.g. the proton (two up + one down-quark) mediated by the Strong interaction|strong force, similarly as atoms are bound states of Electron|electrons and charged Nucleon|nucleons held together by the Electromagnetism|electromagnetic horse.\n**They are also referenced in 474: Turn-On, 1621: Fixion and in 1731: Wrong.\n**There is a real Nuclear horse in a different sense, which is a racehorse born in 2017 and named Nuclear.\n*Officer suspended from horse (title text)\n**Being suspended from a police force (i.e. usually being forced upon mandatory leave pending resolution of the issue at hand; paid, part-paid or unpaid) is a common practice where culpable wrongdoing of sufficiently serious nature is suspected of the individual concerned. It may also occur in some countries when the police officer grew too old for the job. A person could literally be suspended from a horse if they fall off the horse but got stuck in the stirrups. Unlike most of these \"horse\" terms, a police horse is a real thing.\n\nThis is probably a parody of the [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai?hl"}
-{"number": "1419", "date": "September 10, 2014", "title": "On the Phone", "image": "on_the_phone.png", "titletext": "'No idea what I was thinking! Haha! But anyway, maybe we should check out what this Ba'al guy has to say.'", "transcript": "[Megan is pointing off-panel to the left and looking off-panel to the right.]\n:Megan: Why is there a teapot in the bathroom?\n: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.]\n:Megan: There's a hammer in the fridge.\n: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.]\n:Megan: Did you put all our stuff in weird stacks?\n:Off-panel voice: Long call. Sorry.\n[Megan, outside, looks up at a towering straight-sided object.]\n:Megan: ...Why is there a giant obelisk in the backyard?\n:Off-panel voice: Phone again. My bad.\n:Megan: It's carved with prayers to \"Ba'al, the Soul-Eater.\"\n:Off-panel voice: Haha! I'm so absentminded.", "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. \n\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.\"\n\nThe title text suggests that the \"fidgeting\" is just a cover story - the off-panel speaker is actually worshipping (or being possessed by) Ba'al, and is casually trying to encourage Megan to do the same.\n\nBaal_(disambiguation)|Ba'al, or Baal (demon)|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 Classification_of_demons#Binsfeld.27s_classification_of_demons|seven princes of hell). Ba'al, the Soul Eater has been mentioned in 1246: Pale Blue Dot and 1638: Backslashes."}
-{"number": "1420", "date": "September 12, 2014", "title": "Watches", "image": "watches.png", "titletext": "Old people used to write obnoxious thinkpieces about how people these days always wear watches and are slaves to the clock, but now they've switched to writing thinkpieces about how kids these days don't appreciate the benefits of an old-fashioned watch. My position is: The word 'thinkpiece' sounds like a word made up by someone who didn't know about the word 'brain'.", "transcript": ":[A timeline shows the following years but extends further in both directions:]\n:1990 2000 2010 2020 2030\n:[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:]\n:Regular watches \n:Smart watches\n:[An arrow points up to the empty period between 2005 and 2015. Below the arrow is written:]\n:Brief, glorious period in which our wrists were free", "explanation": "This comic coincides with the announcement of a new [https://www.apple.com/watch/ 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 {{tvtropes|GadgetWatches|smartwatches}} at IFA 2014 (Sept 5-10), particularly 'Android Wear'.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 \"think piece|thinkpiece,\" due to its (particularly [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/think%20piece recent]) connotation for lacking factual content and expressing biased opinions. For more details on ''thinkpiece'' see this [http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/05/07/thinkpiece_definition_and_history_roots_of_the_word_show_it_has_long_been.html 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''."}
-{"number": "1421", "date": "September 15, 2014", "title": "Future Self", "image": "future_self.png", "titletext": "Maybe I haven't been to Iceland because I'm busy dealing with YOUR crummy code.", "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\n:# Dear Future Self,\n:#\n:# You're looking at this file because\n:# the parse function finally broke.\n:#\n:# It's not fixable. You have to rewrite it.\n:# Sincerely, Past Self\n\n:Cueball: Dear Past Self, it's kinda creepy how you do that.\n\n:# Also, it's probably at least\n:# 2013. Did you ever take\n:# that trip to Iceland?\n\n:Cueball: 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.\n\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. \n\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, even though the effectiveness of his past code has no correlation with being able to travel, unless he had to fix the code for a project, ruining the time space he had to travel, or his code helped him plan his trips.\n\nA comment is a line, or a portion of a line, of code which should not be executed. A number of computer languages, including 353: Python|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.\n\nThe language in the comments is similar to how people address themselves in personal Time capsule|time capsules, in which they put letters away to read years later to see how much they've changed.\n\nA \"Parsing#Parser|parse Subroutine|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 expression|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 kludge|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."}
-{"number": "1422", "date": "September 17, 2014", "title": "My Phone is Dying", "image": "my_phone_is_dying.png", "titletext": "When it explodes, it will cast off its outer layers, leaving behind nothing but a slowly fading PalmPilot, calculator, or two-way pager.", "transcript": ":[Cueball stands on the left while Beret Guy walks in from the right, carrying a smartphone.]\n:Beret Guy: My phone's about to die.\n\n:[The phone is now subtly larger.]\n:Cueball: Where'd you get a big iPhone? I didn't think they were out yet.\n:Beret Guy: It's my regular one. It's just dying.\n\n:[The phone increases in size again. Beret Guy now holds it in both hands.]\n:Beret Guy: As it consumes its battery, it heats up and expands.\n:Beret Guy: Soon it will swell to enormous size, engulfing us both.\n\n:[The phone is now in the size of Beret Guy's torso; he is clutching it to himself. Cueball is pointing off-panel.]\n:Beret Guy: Then it will collapse in a violent explosion!\n:Cueball: ...do you want to borrow my charger?\n:Beret Guy: That would only make it run out ''faster!''", "explanation": "Beret Guy|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 Stellar_evolution|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}}\n\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 {{what if|73|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.\n\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 {{what if|14|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 Nova|type 1a nova.\n\nThe comic also plays on the release of two new IPhone|iPhone models with IPhone 6|bigger screens, planned for 2 days after the release of the comic.\n\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 [http://barnson.org/node/1842 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 [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4010386/Incredible-X-rays-lithium-ion-batteries-explode-Gas-pillows-cause-cells-swell-catch-fire.html growing and eventually exploding]. Connecting a charger to a battery failing in this manner would [http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/safety_concerns_with_li_ion probably make the process faster].\n\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\").\n\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."}
-{"number": "1423", "date": "September 19, 2014", "title": "Conversation", "image": "conversation.png", "titletext": "Later, at home: 'Dear diary: Still can't figure out what to write here...'", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are sitting at a table with drinks.]\n:Cueball: So, what do you do in your free time?\n\n:[Close up on Megan's face.]\n:Megan: Mostly I sit around worrying someone will ask me that, and try to think of a good answer.\n\n:[Back to original shot.]\n:Cueball: That's not a bad answer.\n:Megan: It's all I've got. Now that it's done, I should go. Bye!\n:[She gets up and leaves.]", "explanation": "Cueball and Megan are on a First date (meeting)|first date and Cueball is trying to strike up a conversation by asking Megan what she does in her Leisure|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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text implies that she also spends her free time wondering what to write in her diary (with no success).\n\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."}
-{"number": "1424", "date": "September 22, 2014", "title": "En Garde", "image": "en_garde.png", "titletext": "'Touch!' 'Nope, I sighed and stared at you with resignation, so I regained emotional right-of-way.'", "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.]\n:Left fencer: ''En Garde!''\n:Right fencer: OK.\n\n:[In a large frame-less panel where they keep standing in the same position the right fencer talks at length.]\n:Right fencer: No matter how long we know each other, when you ask \"What are you thinking,\" \n:Right fencer: I will always pause before answering.\n\n:[Same as the first panel, although the left fencer has lowered the point of his sword so it points straight to the right.]\n:Left fencer: Maybe a little ''less'' guarded?\n:Right fencer: No way. I've been hurt before.", "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 “on your mark” command in racing. The other two commands are ''“[tireurs, êtes-vous] prêts?”'' (“[combatants, are you] ready?”) and ''“allez”'' (“go”). The right participant takes this to mean being \"guarded\" emotionally.\n\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. \n\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.\n\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 practice and techniques|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\nAll in all it seems like the right fencer may be Black Hat."}
-{"number": "1425", "date": "September 24, 2014", "title": "Tasks", "image": "tasks.png", "titletext": "In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they'd have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we're still working on it.", "transcript": ":[Ponytail sitting at a computer with Cueball standing behind her.]\n:Cueball: When a user takes a photo, the app should check whether they're in a national park...\n:Ponytail: Sure, easy GIS lookup. Gimme a few hours.\n:Cueball: ...and check whether the photo is of a bird.\n:Ponytail: I'll need a research team and five years.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible.", "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, automated theorem proving|generating novel mathematical proofs, and English_draughts#Computer_players|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 Figure-ground (perception)|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 Visual perception|identifying matching patterns.\n\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).\n\nThe state-of-the-art algorithms for solving this kind of task (as of this comic's publishing) use local features (e.g. Scale-invariant feature transform|SIFT or Speeded up robust features|SURF in combination with a support vector machine) or a convolutional neural network.\n\nThe subtitle refers to \"CS\", which is a common abbreviation for \"Computer Science\", of which artificial intelligence and computer vision are sub-disciplines.\n\nThe title text mentions [http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6125/AIM-100.pdf The Summer Vision Project] and Marvin Minsky of MIT. In the summer of 1966, he asked his undergraduate student Gerald Jay Sussman to [http://szeliski.org/Book/ \"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 (programmer)|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.\n\nA month after this comic came out, Flickr [http://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/ responded] with a [http://parkorbird.flickr.com/ 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\"."}
-{"number": "1426", "date": "September 26, 2014", "title": "Reduce Your Payments", "image": "reduce_your_payments.png", "titletext": "I tried oxidizing them, but your bank uses some really weird paper and it wouldn't light.", "transcript": ":[Cueball sits on a sofa and Blackhat walks into the frame from behind.]\n:Blackhat: I discovered this weird trick for reducing your mortgage payments!\n:Cueball: What?\n:Blackhat: Sodium borohydride.\n:Cueball: ...I hate you.", "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|sodium borohydride (NaBH4). Since Cueball fell for Black Hat's bait he exclaims, \"I hate you.\"\n\nSodium borohydride is a strong reducing agent, meaning in a chemical reaction it will \"redox|reduce\" another substance. It is in fact used during the [https://www.borax.com/library/articles/news-and-events/news-release/paper's-tiger manufacture of paper], in order to bleach the natural color from the pulp and improve the resulting paper's brightness, opacity, ink-absorption, and strength (among other properties).\n\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 Reduction (chemistry)|reducing, which would result at a minimum in the bleaching of all ink from the bill therefore making it unreadable.\n\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 things like 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."}
-{"number": "1427", "date": "September 29, 2014", "title": "iOS Keyboard", "image": "ios_keyboard.png", "titletext": "More actual results: 'Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You [are the best. The best thing ever]', 'Revenge is a dish best served [by a group of people in my room]', and 'They may take our lives, but they'll never take our [money].'", "transcript": ":'''Movie quotes'''\n:[Top picture shows a line typed on an iPhone.]\n:Elementary, my dear\n:[Then the next line shows the words suggested by the virtual keyboard.]\n:Friend | Lord | Friends\n:[Below are the visible part of keyboard. In the second line only the top of the letters can be seen.]\n:QWERTYUIOP\n:ASDFGHJKL\n:[Below is a new sub heading above six pictures arranged in two rows.]\n:According to iOS 8 keyboard predictions\n:[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.]\n:[Picture 1: Cueball stands with a machine gun.]\n:Cueball: '''Say hello to my little''' sister and my mom and my dad and my friends\n:[Picture 2: A girl stands next to her dog with a basket.]\n:Girl: '''Toto, I've a feeling we're not''' going to the gym today\n:[Picture 3: Bond talks to Megan.]\n:James Bond: '''Bond, James Bond''' yields\n:[Picture 4: A pilot operates his plane and talks to Cueball behind him.]\n:Pilot: '''I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch''' me play the piano\n:[Picture 5: A guy with dark hair stands behind a jagged edge.]\n:Goonie: '''Goonies never say''' anything\n:[Picture 6: A dwarf with long beard and helmet stands with an axe.]\n:Off panel left: '''You have my sword.''' \n:Off panel right: '''And my bow.'''\n:Dwarf: '''And my''' dad", "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 “by” followed by “a” then “group” and so on.\n\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.\n\nThe title text continues, by showing more actual results from keyboard predictions from other movie quotes.\n\nThe following movies are referenced in the comic and title text:\n\n{|class"}
-{"number": "1428", "date": "October 1, 2014", "title": "Move Fast and Break Things", "image": "move_fast_and_break_things.png", "titletext": "I was almost fired from a job driving the hearse in funeral processions, but then the funeral home realized how much business I was creating for them.", "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.]\n:Cueball: My motto is \"Move fast and break things.\"\n:[Below the panel follows a list:]\n:'''Jobs I've been'''\n:'''fired from'''\n:Fedex driver\n:Crane operator\n:Surgeon\n:Air traffic controller\n:Pharmacist\n:Museum curator\n:Waiter\n:Dog walker\n:Oil tanker captain\n:Violinist\n:Mars rover driver\n:Massage therapist", "explanation": "Cueball appears to be at a job interview, proudly stating his motto to the interviewer Ponytail. \"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 [https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-2010-10 'breaking things' is a necessary feature of moving 'fast enough']).\n\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. The results of moving fast and breaking things for the listed jobs might include:\n\n*FedEx driver - Injured/killed pedestrians, collisions with other vehicles, broken & damaged packages\n*Crane operator - Damage or destruction of load, dropping loads on people below, damage to crane\n*Surgeon - Incorrect operations performed, removing wrong body parts, damaging expensive medical equipment, death of the patient, or in Robert_Liston#Liston's_most_famous_case|extreme cases, the death of assistants and spectators as well\n*Air Traffic Controller - Air collisions, travel disruption, chaos\n*Pharmacist - Handing out wrong drugs, resulting in illness or death, or destroying them\n*Museum Curator - Damage or destruction of items of historical or artistic significance, damage to the museum\n*Waiter - Crockery broken, drinks or food spilled on customers, food tipped over people, possible injuries to self and others when hot food is involved\n*Dog Walker - Injuring the pet, or preventing it from fulfilling its bodily functions (the major reason for a walk)\n*Oil Tanker Captain - Collisions between vessels, or tanker and port, or running aground, leading to oil spills and casualties\n*Violinist - Ruining an ensemble's performance by playing too fast (with a higher tempo than fellow musicians), breaking the strings or body of the instrument\n*Mars Rover Driver - Breaking an incredibly important vehicle, preventing further exploration, and ruining an extremely expensive mission\n*Massage Therapist - Injuring the client, breaking bones and ligaments. Possibly also breaking the seat the client is on, leading to even more costly damages.\n\nThe title text posits a morbid scenario where Cueball keeps running over funeral attendees, generating the need for more funerals."}
-{"number": "1429", "date": "October 3, 2014", "title": "Data", "image": "data.png", "titletext": "If you want to have more fun at the expense of language pedants, try developing an hypercorrection habit.", "transcript": ":[Cueball reading off a smart phone to someone off-screen.]\n:Cueball: According to this polling data, after Kirk and Picard, the most popular Star Trek character are Data.\n:Off-screen voice: ''Augh!''\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:Annoy grammar pedants on all sides by making \"data\" singular '''except''' when referring to the android.", "explanation": "\"Kirk vs. Picard\" is a debate that many ''Star Trek'' fans engage in — specifically which was a better captain of the Starship Enterprise|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 Star Trek: The Original Series|The Original Series, while Picard was captain of USS ''Enterprise''-D (NCC-1701-D) in ''Star Trek: The Next Generation|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.\n\nThe humor in this comic stems from the fact that the Latin word ''data'' is a plural form of the word ''datum'' ‘a piece of information’, 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 [http://statistics.about.com/od/Glossary/a/What-Is-The-Plural-Of-Data.htm ''data'' is treated as a collective noun]. This usage is becoming increasingly (but not universally) accepted as grammatically correct — 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\").\n\nThe second error in the same sentence is due to the fact that Data (Star Trek)|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.\n\nBy reversing the verb agreement in both cases, Cueball is going out of his way to annoy grammatically obsessed people.\n\nThe title text suggests the mocking of language pedants/amateur Grammar Nazi|grammar Nazis by Hypercorrection|hypercorrecting one's use of language. The sentence itself is an example of this:\n*The general rule is that words starting with a consonant should be preceded by ''a,'' while words starting with a vowel should be preceded by ''an.'' However,\n*The letter ''h'' is a special case, since in words like ''honor'' (/ˈɒnəɹ/) and ''hour'' (/ˈaʊəɹ/) the ''h'' is silent so the words actually start with a vowel sound, thus leading to the use of ''an.'' \n*Beyond this, there is a longstanding controversy over whether to use ''a'' or ''an'' with words that in some accents start with a silent ''h'' and in others they don't (see [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p"}
-{"number": "1430", "date": "October 6, 2014", "title": "Proteins", "image": "proteins.png", "titletext": "Check it out--when I tug the C-terminal tail, the binding tunnel squeezes!", "transcript": ":[Cueball is talking with Megan.]\n:Cueball: What do you do?\n:Megan: I make software that predicts how proteins will fold.\n:Cueball: Is that a hard problem?\n:Megan: Someone may someday find a harder one.\n:Cueball: Why is it so hard?\n:Megan: Have you ever made a folded paper crane?\n:Cueball: Yeah.\n:Megan: Imagine figuring out the folds to make an actual ''living'' crane.\n:Cueball: ...''just'' folds? Can I make cuts?\n:Megan: If you can fold a protease enzyme.", "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 Folding@Home, Rosetta@Home and FoldIt.\n\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.\n\nCueball asks Megan if that is a hard problem, to which she replies, that someday someone may find a harder problem. Thus she indicates that at present time, this is the hardest problem in the world! That is saying a lot. \n\nCueball then asks Megan why it is such a hard computational problem; Megan's response is to ask Cueball if he's ever Origami|folded paper to make a Crane (bird)|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.\n\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 Residue (chemistry)|residues will have 99 peptide bonds, and therefore 198 different Dihedral angle|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 3198 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 to their proper conformation spontaneously, on a millisecond or even microsecond time scale. This paradox is central to computational approaches to protein structure prediction.\n\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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20200207151442/http://www.barf.cc/jeremy/origami/BOOK/essays/origami_purism/origami_purism.htm] 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.\n\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.\n\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\nFolding@Home (F@H) 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 F@H 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1431", "date": "October 8, 2014", "title": "Marriage", "image": "marriage.png", "titletext": "People often say that same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 60s. But in terms of public opinion, same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 90s, when it had already been legal nationwide for 30 years.", "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\n:[Solid red line:] Percentage of US population living in states with legal interracial marriage\n:[Dot on solid red line:] Full legal access: 1967\n:[Dashed red line:] Popular approval of interracial marriage (Source: Gallup Polls)\n:[Dot on dashed red line:] Majority approval: 1995\n:[Dashed blue line:] Popular approval of same-sex marriage (Source: various polls)\n:[Dot on dashed blue line:] Majority approval: 2011\n:[Solid blue line:] Percentage of US population living in states with legal same-sex marriage\n\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.\n\n:Popular 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.]", "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 same-sex marriage in Massachusetts|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 [http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx approved of by the majority].\n\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."}
-{"number": "1432", "date": "October 10, 2014", "title": "The Sake of Argument", "image": "the_sake_of_argument.png", "titletext": "'It's not actually... it's a DEVICE for EXPLORING a PLAUSIBLE REALITY that's not the one we're in, to gain a broader understanding about it.' 'oh, like a boat!' '...' 'Just for the sake of argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.'", "transcript": ":[Ponytail and Cueball are talking.]\n:Ponytail: Just for the sake of argument, let's say that—\n:Cueball: —wait, for the sake of what?\n:[Panel zooms to only show Cueball.]\n:Ponytail: Argument.\n:Cueball: Ok, cool, that's ''totally'' a good reason to say something that's wrong. Gotta have arguments.\n:[Panel returns to original view.]\n:Ponytail: I'm just playing Devil's advocate.\n:Cueball: Ok. So you saw an argument where one side was the Devil, and you were like \"Man, ''that'' guy could use an advocate.\"\n:Ponytail: It's...''why'' are you being so difficult?\n:Cueball: For the sake of argument.\n:Ponytail: '''''Argh!'''''\n: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.\n\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.\n\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}}.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1433", "date": "October 13, 2014", "title": "Lightsaber", "image": "lightsaber.png", "titletext": "A long time in the future, in a galaxy far, far, away, astronomers in the year 2008 sight an unusual gamma-ray burst originating from somewhere far across the universe.", "transcript": ":[Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are talking. Vader holds the handle of a powered-off lightsaber.]\n:Vader: '''''I see you have constructed a new lightsaber.'''''\n:[Vader turns it on. The beam of the lightsaber continues upward out of the frame.]\n:Lightsaber: Snap-Hisss\n:[Vader looks up toward where the beam is pointing.]\n:[Vader looks back at Luke.]\n:Vader: '''''Where does it end?'''''\n:Luke: Doesn't.\n:Intercom (out of view): ''Hull breach all along sector five!!''", "explanation": "This comic references a [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1434", "date": "October 15, 2014", "title": "Where Do Birds Go", "image": "where_do_birds_go.png", "titletext": "Water/ice has a lot of weird phases. Maybe asking 'where do birds go when it rains' is like asking 'where does Clark Kent go whenever Superman shows up?'", "transcript": ":[Cueball is sitting at his desk with his computer.]\n:Cueball: \"Where do birds go when it rains?\" is my new favorite Google search.\n:Megan (off-screen): Why?\n\n:[Megan enters the frame.]\n:Cueball: It gives the answer, but also shows you an endless torrent of other people asking the same question. \n:Cueball: Pages and pages of them, across regions and cultures.\n\n:[The panel now only contains a Google search on the computer.]\n:Cueball (off-screen): I love the idea that somehow this is the universal question, the thing that unites us. \n:Cueball (off-screen): When it rains, we wonder where the birds go, \n:Cueball (off-screen): and hope they're staying dry.\n\n\n\n:[A collage of screen snippets.]\n\n:[https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid", "explanation": "Cueball searches [http://lmgtfy.com/?q"}
-{"number": "1435", "date": "October 17, 2014", "title": "Presidential Alert", "image": "presidential_alert.png", "titletext": "When putting his kids to bed, after saying 'Goodnight', Obama has to stop himself from saying 'God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.'", "transcript": ":[Television beeping.]\n:Screen reads: \"E.A.S Incoming Presidential Alert\"\n\n:[President of the United States of America in his office is on the television.]\n:My fellow Americans. I, uhhh. Wow.\n\n:Frankly, I didn't realize what this button did. I was just... I mean... I appear before you tonight to, um.\n\n:Look, uhh...\n:Remember to floss regularly. Oral hygiene is important. Thank you.", "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 systems like this having existed for over 60 years, no president has ever used it, even during major incidents like the September 11 attacks.\n\nIn this comic, the US President accidentally activates the system by pressing a button, apparently located on the Resolute Desk|''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 – a rather non-urgent{{citation needed}} message.\n\n\nThe concept of the President mistakenly hitting an important button has long been a source for jokes, often somewhat morbidly involving the nuclear football.\n\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 Barack Obama|President Obama, out of habit, has a hard time stopping at goodnight when saying that to his children. It might also be implying that the president that sent the message might actually be Barack Obama."}
-{"number": "1436", "date": "October 20, 2014", "title": "Orb Hammer", "image": "orb_hammer.png", "titletext": "Ok, but make sure to get lots of pieces of rock, because later we'll decide to stay in a room on our regular orb and watch hammers hold themselves and hit rocks for us, and they won't bring us very many rocks.", "transcript": ":[Cueball talks to another Cueball-like guy:]\n:Cueball: You know that glowing orb in the night sky?\n:Guy: Yeah?\n: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.\n:Guy: Sounds good!\n\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:The Apollo program was ''weird''.", "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 program|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, Stolen and missing moon rocks|in actual fact many of them were stolen or simply lost. Lunar sample displays|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.\n\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.\n\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 meteorite|lunar meteorites.\n\nThe title text refers to various robotic missions, including the current Mars missions (Mars Pathfinder|Pathfinder, Spirit (rover)|Spirit, Opportunity (rover)|Opportunity, Curiosity (rover)|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). \n\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.\n\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 [http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_1000_basic_words List of 1000 basic words] does not contain the words \"glowing\" or \"orb,\" but does contain \"moon,\" \"earth,\" \"bright,\" and \"ball.\"\n\nThe idea of using unexpected language to create humor highlighting the absurdity of normal activities has previously been explored with 203: Hallucinations."}
-{"number": "1437", "date": "October 22, 2014", "title": "Higgs Boson", "image": "higgs_boson.png", "titletext": "'Can't you just use the LHC you already built to find it again?' 'We MAY have disassembled it to build a death ray.' 'Just one, though.' 'Nothing you should worry about.' 'The death isn't even very serious.'", "transcript": ":Offscreen: Tell us about your proposal.\n:Ponytail: We're requesting $3 billion in funding to find the Higgs boson.\n\n:Offscreen: ...wait. Didn't you already find it a year or two ago?\n:Cueball: Yes, well, um.\n\n:Ponytail: ...OK, this is embarrassing.\n:Cueball: See, the thing is—\n\n:Offscreen: Don't tell us you lost it already.\n:Ponytail: Look.\n:Ponytail: In our defense, it's ''really'' small.", "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.\n\n''The 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1438", "date": "October 24, 2014", "title": "Houston", "image": "houston.png", "titletext": "'Oh, hey Mom. No, nothing important, just at work.'", "transcript": ":[A spacecraft floats in outer space, the earth far in the background. Bits of it have broken off.]\n:Orbiter transmission: Houston, we have a problem\n\n:[Cueball with a headset sits at a computer desk with two monitors.]\n:Cueball: Cool.\n\n:[We see a close-up of Cueball.]\n:Orbiter transmission: ...What? Houston, we stirred our O₂ tank and it ''exploded''!\n:Cueball: Sounds like you suck at stirring.\n\n:[We see the orbiter in space, far from the planet.]\n:Orbiter transmission: ...Houston? Are you-\n:Cueball: Listen, I've got another call. Good luck landing your airplane or whatever.\n:''Click''", "explanation": "On 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 Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center|mission control center located in Houston resulted in the safe return of all astronauts.\n\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 (Liquid-crystal display|flat panel LCD) in front of which Cueball sits suggests that the author is describing a more modern scenario. This time, however, there is much less help from ground. 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. \n\nThe last panel presents a coarse view of the spacecraft in orbit, with just enough detail on Earth to identify the continents Africa, Europe, the eastern halves of the Americas, and the largest islands of the Caribbean (Cuba and Hispaniola). From the zig-zag lines that show the origin of the transmissions it now becomes apparent that Cueball is not located at NASA Mission Control in Houston, Texas, USA. Instead, his position is far away to the northwest, on the other side of the continent, very likely at Houston, British Columbia, Canada. As of 2022, [https://www.houston.ca/ Houston] is a town of 3200 people that describes itself as \"home to the outdoor enthusiast\". There is a [https://www.houston.ca/airport small airport] about 9 km northwest of the community: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston,_British_Columbia#Transportation Houston Aerodrome], which is operated by the District of Houston and has no scheduled service. An operator at [https://www.houston.ca/transportation this airport] would be used to dealing with, at most, \"small to medium sized aircraft during daylight hours in VFR conditions\". \nHence, Cueball considers the call from space as a prank, and reacts accordingly, failing to help, being rude, and in the end even completely ignoring the call. This is contrary to how one would expect mission control to behave in the event of an explosion.{{Citation needed}} However, since there are several towns of the name of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_(disambiguation) \"Houston\"], and since it was never explicitly stated which one of those was addressed by the spacecraft, something like this was just bound to happen eventually. \n\nIn the title text we learn that the call is from Cueball's mother, who is probably politely asking if he's got time for a chat. He tells her that he's doing \"nothing important\"—further driving home that he never assumed the distress call to be real."}
-{"number": "1439", "date": "October 27, 2014", "title": "Rack Unit", "image": "rack_unit.png", "titletext": "There's also nothing in the TOSes that says you can't let a dog play baseball in the server room!", "transcript": ":[Megan and Black Hat are talking, Megan is sitting at a computer.]\n:Black Hat: I've discovered something.\n:Megan: Oh?\n:Black Hat: Standard server rack units and standard beehive honeycomb frames are compatible.\n:Black Hat: They're both 19 inches, with similar pitches.\n:Megan: Uh oh.\n:Black Hat: I'm pleased to announce that today, for a few hours, Google led the world in datacenter honey production.\n:Black Hat: Until their security people kicked me out.\n:Megan: I'm sorry your beekeeping career ended so quickly.\n:Black Hat: I'll find a new datacenter.\n:Black Hat: Turns out most colocation TOSes don't mention beehives.\n:Megan: I suspect that will soon change.", "explanation": "Black Hat announces to Megan that 19-inch racks for datacenter servers and Langstroth hive frames are both 19 inches wide (482.6 mm), 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.\n\nThe pitch (or distance between repeating items) of 19 inch rack server hardware is measured in Rack_unit|rack units (U), and is standardized at 1.75\" (44.45 mm). Langstroth frames are typically mounted at a pitch of [http://www.scottishbeekeepers.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/TDS%20number%205%20langstroth%20and%20md%20hive.pdf 1.5\" (38.1 mm)], 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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text is a reference to the film [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118570/quotes?ref_"}
-{"number": "1440", "date": "October 29, 2014", "title": "Geese", "image": "geese.png", "titletext": "Anyway, that's a common misconception. Geese live for a long time; all the ones we can see will probably keep flying around for billions of years before they explode.", "transcript": ":[Geese fly in V-formation. Megan and Cueball are lying on the ground, watching them.]\n:Megan: To think... we're seeing light that left those geese centuries ago.\n:Megan: By now, they could be long dead.\n:Cueball: ...What? They're a few hundred yards away. I hear them honking.\n:Megan: Ah, yes. You're hearing how they once sounded.\n:Cueball: You're very weird.\n:Megan: Or I was, long ago...", "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 [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i"}
-{"number": "1441", "date": "October 31, 2014", "title": "Turnabout", "image": "turnabout.png", "titletext": "Whenever I miss a shot with a sci-fi weapon, I say 'Apollo retroreflector' really fast, just in case.", "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.]\n:[Cueball is kneeling behind a larger box, returning fire.]\n:[The guy leaps on top of the larger box, knocking Cueball backwards and off balance. Cueball fires wildly into the air.]\n:[Now the guy is standing on the box. Cueball is sprawled on the ground, laser pistol out of reach, at gunpoint.]\n\n:Guy: Any last words?\n:Cueball: \"Apollo retroreflectors.\"\n:Guy: What?\n\n:[The guy gets shot in the back by the returning beam of Cueball's wild shot.]", "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 {{tvtropes|Main/AnyLastWords|\"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 approximately 2.5 seconds after it was loosed.\n\nA retroreflector is a device or surface that reflects light back towards its source. Several such devices List of retroreflectors on the Moon|were placed on the Moon during the Apollo missions and have been used ever since by scientists on Earth to Lunar Laser Ranging experiment|measure the distance between the two bodies using laser ranging. Retroreflectors were placed by the American Apollo 11, Apollo 14|14, and Apollo 15|15 missions. The Soviet Lunokhod 1 and Lunokhod 2|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.\n\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.\n\nRandall discussed the effect of hitting the Moon with lasers in [https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/ What If: Laser Pointer] and the likelihood of hitting a celestial object with a laser in [https://what-if.xkcd.com/109/ What If: Into the Blue].\n\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."}
-{"number": "1442", "date": "November 3, 2014", "title": "Chemistry", "image": "chemistry.png", "titletext": "These are all sans-serif compounds. Serif compounds are dramatically different and usually much more reactive.", "transcript": ":[A large capital letter \"H\", with faint gray circles drawn on the ends of each of the four legs.]\n:Hydrogen can form four bonds. It readily bonds with itself, and often exists as a crystal.\n:[A lattice of several H's, all \"bonded\" together at the ends of their legs in a crisscross, meshlike pattern, labeled:]\n:Crystalline hydrogen\n\n:[A large capital letter \"C\", with faint gray circles drawn on both ends of the arc.]\n:Carbon can only form two bonds. It readily bonds with hydrogen to form C2H (mydrane) or itself.\n:[Image of a C and an inverted C, linked at their endpoints, labeled:]\n:C2\n:[Image of two C's linked with an H between them, labeled:]\n:C2H\n\n:[A large capital letter \"O\".]\n:Oxygen is inert, forming no bonds...\n:[Image of several lone O's, none connected to anything, labeled:]\n:Monatomic oxygen gas.\n\n:[Caption at bottom:]\n:Typographic chemistry", "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.\n\nThe idea of Typographic Chemistry presented in this comic is a play on Douglas Hofstadter’s Typographical Number Theory and [http://smallshire.org.uk/sufficientlysmall/2013/05/12/typogenetics-in-f-part-i/ Typographical Genetics], which are featured in Gödel, 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.\n\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 vertex|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.\n\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, O2, 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.\n\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 graphite|often found in diamond|crystalline form in nature (diamonds and coal are allotropy|allotropes of carbon); oxygen can have up to 2 bonds, and can combine with carbon to form CO2 (instead of C2H 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.\n\nWhile the ethynyl radical, which has the structure ∙C≡C–H, does have the formula C2H, there is no molecule with the C–H–C 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).\n\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. \" Search by image\n::[Uploading...]\n\n:[In the last frame she gets a response from Google.]\n:Google: Best guess for this image: '''''Cloud'''''\n:Cueball: Keep trying, Google.", "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).\n\nRather than responding with her own interpretation, Megan takes a picture of the cloud with her phone, and uses Google's [http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/images/searchbyimage.html 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 probably an image of a cloud. 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.)\n\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.\n\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 (programming language)|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 Common Object Request Broker Architecture|CORBA, Enterprise JavaBeans|EJB and SOAP was [http://rtcgroup.com/whitepapers/files/RTI_DataOrientedArchitecture_WhitePaper.pdf \"data first\" and \"the computer is the network\".]\n\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.\n\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.\n\nCueball and Megan are again seen cloudwatching in 1899: Ears."}
-{"number": "1445", "date": "November 10, 2014", "title": "Efficiency", "image": "efficiency.png", "titletext": "I need an extension for my research project because I spent all month trying to figure out whether learning Dvorak would help me type it faster.", "transcript": ":[A bar chart is shown below its title:]\n:'''Time Cost'''\n\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.]\n:Strategy A\n:Strategy B\n:Analyzing whether strategy A or B is more efficient\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:The reason I am so inefficient", "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.\n\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.\n\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 Simplified Keyboard|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 :Category:Dvorak|recurrent theme on xkcd.\n\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 :Category:Time management|Time management category."}
-{"number": "1446", "date": "November 12, 2014", "title": "Landing", "image": "landingAnimated.gif", "titletext": "[LIVE]", "transcript": ":[This transcript gives only the text of the most [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/c/c7/%3F%3F%3F140.png 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\n:[Showing Philae on a comet.]\n:Time Since Landing: 211 days\n:Philae: Hi!\n:[Status report at the bottom-right corner.]\n:Status report:\n::Rosetta: In space\n::Philae lander: Hi!\n::Mission control: '''!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'''\n::Scientists: '''!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'''\n::Have we landed on a comet?: '''''YES.'''''\n::Sun: Warm\n::Comet: Big\n::Philae, where ''ARE'' you?: Home\n\n:[For the '''full transcript''' of all 143 pictures see '''1446: Landing/Transcript'''.]", "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 (spacecraft)|Philae lander separating from the European Space Agency's Rosetta (spacecraft)|Rosetta probe to land on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. More info can be found here: [https://rosetta.esa.int rosetta.esa.int].\n\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.\n\nBeginning at Media:???65.png|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.\n\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 Media:???83.png|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 Media:???122.png|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 mentioned 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 Media:???93.png|13:25 and in the status report.\n\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.\n\nAt Media:???115.png|15:25 Rosetta asks Philea about destroying and levitating rocks via mind control. This is a reference to the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1447", "date": "November 14, 2014", "title": "Meta-Analysis", "image": "meta-analysis.png", "titletext": "Life goal #29 is to get enough of them rejected that I can publish a comparative analysis of the rejection letters.", "transcript": ":[Excerpt from a scientific paper.]\n:Many meta-analysis studies include the phrase “We searched Medline, Embase, and Cochrane for studies…”\n: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).\n:We performed a meta-meta-meta-analysis of these meta-meta-analyses.\n:Methods: We searched Medline, Embase, and Cochrane for the phrase “We searched Medline, Embase, and Cochrane for the phrase ‘We searched Medline, Embase, and [cut off]\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Life goal #28: get a paper rejected with the comment “Too meta”", "explanation": "In the scientific literature, Meta-analysis|meta-analyses are studies which compare multiple studies on a single topic, with the aim of giving a balanced overview of the known results. [http://www.medline.com/ Medline], [http://www.elsevier.com/online-tools/embase/about Embase] and [http://www.cochrane.org/ Cochrane] are medical research databases which give access to studies on drug effects or results of other medical procedures.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nAll of the cited meta-meta-analyses are real: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0895-4356(03)00110-0 M. Sampson (2003)], [http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-5491.2005.01645.x P. L. Royle (2005)], [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2011.01.007 E. Lee (2011)], and [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2005.03.004 A.R. Lemeshow (2005)].\n\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 dismissal of the presented content."}
-{"number": "1448", "date": "November 17, 2014", "title": "Question", "image": "question.png", "titletext": "The universe long dead, IsaAC surveyed the formless chaos. At last, he had arrived at an answer. 'I like you,' he declared to the void, 'but I don't LIKE like you.'", "transcript": ":[A post-it note which reads:]\n:Dear Isaac\n:Do you like me?\n:□ Yes\n:□ No\n:[Below handwritten in red ink with a checked box:]\n:\" is commonly used to question a perceived shortcoming of government, society or humanity in general. The Apollo program landed List of Apollo astronauts#Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon|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 [https://twitter.com/hashtag/wecanlandonacometbutwecant #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant] began on Twitter.\n\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)|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. However, this is outdated, as NASA is planning to go to the moon again with the Artemis Program. The launch date of when Artemis 3, the mission where humans will return, is planned to be some time in 2025, when this comic would be around eleven years old.\n\nThe title text is a retelling of John F. Kennedy's famous inspirational [https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/xzw1gaeeTES6khED14P1Iw.aspx 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_of_Venus|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.\n\nKennedy's 1961 speech was also mentioned in the title text of 753: Southern Half."}
-{"number": "1457", "date": "December 8, 2014", "title": "Feedback", "image": "feedback.png", "titletext": "A new study finds that if you give rats a cell phone and a lever they can push to improve the signal, the rats will chew on the cell phone until it breaks and your research supervisors will start to ask some questions about your grant money.", "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.]\n:Megan: Why are you standing on a chair holding a pineapple?\n:Cueball: '''''I wasn't getting good reception but now I am!'''''\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:The erratic feedback from a randomly-varying wireless signal can make you crazy.", "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.\n\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.\n\nMegan questions his ridiculous behavior, but it seems Cueball has become extremely erratic due to the inconsistent signal strength.\n\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 #Skinner's real experiment|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."}
-{"number": "1458", "date": "December 10, 2014", "title": "Small Moon", "image": "small_moon.png", "titletext": "GENERAL JAN DODONNA: An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has reinvigorated the arguments of the 'artificial moonlet' and 'rogue planet-station' camps. I fear this question is fracturing the Rebellion.", "transcript": ":[Millennium Falcon follows a Tie Fighter towards an unidentified orb in the distance.]\n:Luke Skywalker: He's heading for that small moon.\n:Ben Kenobi: That's no moon - it's a space station.\n\n:Luke Skywalker: It's too big to be a space station.\n:Ben Kenobi: But it's too '''''small''''' to be a moon.\n\n:[Three hours pass]\n\n:Ben Kenobi: Fine! What if we agree it's not a moon, but we make a new category called \"Dwarf Moon\"?\n:Luke Skywalker: And what's the cutoff, asshole?! Is this '''''ship''''' a dwarf moon now?\n:Ben Kenobi: Screw you.", "explanation": "The comic depicts a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1459", "date": "December 12, 2014", "title": "Documents", "image": "documents.png", "titletext": "Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Untitled.doc", "transcript": ":[White Hat is sitting at his PC. Cueball stands behind him looking over his shoulder at the screen.]\n:PC: Untitled 138.docx\n:: Untitled 241.doc\n:: Untitled 138 copy.docx\n:: Untitled 138 copy2.docx\n:: Untitled 139.docx\n:: Untitled 40 MOM ADDRESS.jpg\n:: Untitled 242.doc\n:: Untitled 243.doc\n:: Untitled 243 IMPORTANT.doc\n:: Untitled 41.jpg\n:[The remaining file names are only partially visible through the tail of the PC's \"speech\" bubble.]\n:::: 42\n:::: 43\n:::: 4\n\n:Cueball: ''Oh my god.''\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Protip: Never look in someone else's documents folder.", "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.\n\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.\n\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 [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/protip protip] to never look in someone else's documents folder for the fear of finding these irritating details.\n\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\".\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 \", a second copy becomes \"Copy of Copy of \" 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\".\n\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 \"_2\", not \"Copy of \"."}
-{"number": "1460", "date": "December 15, 2014", "title": "SMFW", "image": "smfw.png", "titletext": "wtfw it's like smho tbfh, imdb.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is sitting at a desk, crouched over a laptop.]\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:SMFW an acronym ''almost'' makes sense", "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\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:\n\n*\"MFW\", meaning \"my face when...\" used in similar sentence constructions to this comic's caption, to indicate that the image represents one's face when the specified thing happens.\n*\"SFW\", meaning \"safe/suitable for work\", denoting that something does not have suggestive content.\n*\"SMH\", meaning \"shaking my head\" or \"so much hate\", used to indicate dismay.\n*\"SMF\", meaning \"so much fun\".\n*\"NSFW\", meaning \"not safe for work\", the opposite of \"SFW\".\n\nThe title text contains more examples of imaginary acronyms of a similar nature:\n\n*\"WTFW\" is a combination of \"WTF\" (\"What the fuck\") and \"TFW\" (\"That feel when...\" or \"That face when...\", used in a similar nature to \"MFW\"), and possibly \"FTW\" (\"For The Win\") and \"FWIW\" (\"For What It's Worth\").\n*\"SMHO\" is a combination of \"SMH\" (\"shake my head\") and \"IMHO\" (1989:_IMHO|\"In my humble/honest opinion...\").\n*\"TBFH\" is a combination of \"TBF\" (\"to be fair\") and \"TBH\" (\"to be honest\").\n*\"IMDB\" is, of course, [http://www.imdb.com/ the Internet Movie Database], but also resembles \"IMHO\".\n\nBelow are possible examples of potential (already existing, albeit rare) representations for each acronym, according to the Urban Dictionary:\n\n*[http://www.urbandictionary.com/SMFW SMFW] is listed as an acronym for \"Smoke more fucking weed\".\n*[http://www.urbandictionary.com/WTFW WTFW] is listed as an acronym for \"What the fuck, what?\".\n*[http://www.urbandictionary.com/SMHO SMHO] is listed as an acronym for \"Shaking my head off\".\n*[http://www.urbandictionary.com/TBFH TBFH] is listed as an acronym for \"To be fucking honest\".\n\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)\"."}
-{"number": "1461", "date": "December 17, 2014", "title": "Payloads", "image": "payloads.png", "titletext": "With a space elevator, a backyard full of solar panels could launch about 500 horses per year, and a large power plant could launch 10 horses per minute.", "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\n:[The black section:]\n:Spacecraft mass\n:Measured in horses\n\n:35,000 km) 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.\n\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 kW and the power station at 3.3-3.7 GW."}
-{"number": "1462", "date": "December 19, 2014", "title": "Blind Trials", "image": "blind_trials.png", "titletext": "Plus, you have to control for the fact that some people are into being blindfolded.", "transcript": ":[Megan is pointing at charts hanging on the wall.]\n:Megan: We've designed a double-blind trial to test the effect of sexual activity on cardiovascular health.\n:Both groups will ''think'' they're having lots of sex, but one group will actually be getting sugar pills.\n\n:The limitations of blind trials", "explanation": "In research, a Blind Experiment|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).\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 Meridian (Chinese medicine)|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text adds another twist by taking “blind” literally, and noting that for some people, being blindfolded increases their enjoyment of sexual activity, thereby acting as a confounding variable.\n\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 infarctions, strokes, or sudden cardiac death. Even sighted, it would be difficult for either subjects or researchers to manipulate this kind of data."}
-{"number": "1463", "date": "December 22, 2014", "title": "Altitude", "image": "altitude.png", "titletext": "\"TURN OFF THE LASER GUIDE STAR\" \"WHY\" \"STAR CATS\"", "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\n:[Some astronomers are inside a sea-level research facility.]\n:Astronomer #1: Ok, let's head up to the observatory.\n\n:[The astronomers drive uphill.]\n:Astronomer #1: When we reach the summit, we'll check the iodine cell and do a general calibration.\n:Astronomer #2: Sounds good.\n\n:[The astronomers have reached the high-altitude observatory.]\n:Astronomer #1: My head feels funny.\n:Astronomer #2: Look at those telescope domes. I hope they don't roll away.\n:Astronomer #1: Maybe we should tape them down.\n\n:[The astronomers are inside one of the domes.]\n:Astronomer #1: Haha, look at this mirror! My face is huge!\n:Astronomer #2: I see your face in the telescope! I discovered you!\n:Astronomer #1: Let's make out!", "explanation": "In this comic, Randall is making fun of how Altitude sickness|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.\n\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 [http://exoplanets.astro.yale.edu/instrumentation/iodine_cells.php Iodine cells], used for wavelength calibrations of high-resolution RV spectra between 501 and 610 nm. 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, it would take an excessive amount of tape to stop them from rolling away.\n\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. \n\nIt should be noted that the phrase \"low oxygen\" would usually refer 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, and there is not a significant stratification of gases that means oxygen (moreso than the other major constituents of air) can only be found at lower altitudes, nor that they encounter a distinctively different \"high (altitude) oxygen\" (though something different Ozone layer|of that kind exists even higher up, not relevent to this scenario). The altitude sickness is caused by lowered atmospheric pressure which leads to smaller amount of oxygen actually delivered (\"pushed\") into bloodstream.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1464", "date": "December 24, 2014", "title": "Santa", "image": "santa.png", "titletext": "He probably just poops over the side of the sleigh.", "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.\n:But he's not.\n\n:Cueball: What are you...\n:Megan: Does Santa poop in our houses?\n\n:Cueball: No way.\n:Megan: That mass must be going somewhere.\n:Cueball: He has that magic bag...\n:Megan: You think he poops in the bag of ''presents''?\n\n:Cueball: Maybe instead of pooping in every few houses, he waits, and then in a few houses, he poops a ''lot''.\n:Megan: What if no one's been ''that'' naughty?\n:Cueball: He picks at random. The needs of the many...", "explanation": "This was the :Category:Christmas|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 [http://www.daclarke.org/Humour/santa.html speed he has to travel] and [http://www.articlesbase.com/holidays-articles/10-impossible-facts-about-santa-claus-1509493.html the omniscience he purportedly possesses and the mass of presents he has to carry] — the story of Santa Claus was simply never designed for a world with over 7 billion people (and certainly not 8) spread through untold millions of homes. This comic combines some basic physiology with the physical law of the conservation of mass.\n\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.\n\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 people's 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.\n\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.\n\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.{{cn}} This problem could be minimized by taking advantage of flights over water or uninhabited areas, rather than cities.\n\nAccording to 1070: Words for Small Sets, a few is referring to \"anywhere from 2 to 5\". Currently, there are 1.9 billion 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 cookies, he consumes 380 million cookies in two 48 hour periods. Due to the convenience of time zones, approximately 48 hours 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 billion kilocalories in the period of 2 days, or 26.6 billion kilocalories per day. As the average human daily intake is 2500 kilocalories 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 years for a human, and producing 20 million 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 billion toys, the cookies might not be sufficient. If the 1 in 5 cookies are not sufficient energy intake, Santa could probably eat every cookie left for him, which amounts to 266 billion kilocalories in the period of 2 days.\n\nOn a side note, this amount of energy is enough to power several thousand homes for a year."}
-{"number": "1465", "date": "December 26, 2014", "title": "xkcd Phone 2", "image": "xkcd_phone_2.png", "titletext": "Washable, though only once.", "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:]\n:MaxHD: Over 350 pixels per screen\n:Always-on speaker\n:Blood pressure reliever\n:Auto-rotating case\n:Ribbed\n:Waterproof \n:(interior only)\n:Googleable\n:Cheek toucher\n:Cries if lost\n:Bug drawer\n:Coin slot\n:Scroll lock\n:OS by Stackoverflow®\n:3D materials\n:Dog noticer\n:FitBit® fitness evaluator\n:Volume and density control\n\n:[Below the phone:]\n:Introducing\n:'''The xkcd phone 2'''\n:A phone for your other hand®", "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 :Category:xkcd Phones|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. Like 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.\n\nFrom the top, going clockwise:\n\n; MaxHD: Over 350 pixels per screen\n\n: 350 pixels is not very impressive, as each would be about 0.5×0.5 cm in size, making the resolution hopelessly blocky. Even if it implies 350 pixels along the edge, this is still less than standard definition TV (PAL gives 576 lines of horizontal resolution). Likely a reference to HD+, FullHD, QuadHD and other marketing expressions for screen resolutions, by which common users are often confused. In 732: HDTV Randall has observed that HD is not an especially high resolution when compared with smartphone or computer monitors. This one is even worse by far, but MaxHD sounds similar to FullHD, so it could fool some users into thinking that this is equal or better. Yet any resolution higher than that would also technically be \"over 350 pixels per screen\", so the statement is either not conveying helpful information or not doing a good job at advertising a product meant to be sold. A high pixel density display is more than 200 pixels per '''''inch''''', not per '''''screen'''''. An example would be the Retina Display in Apple hardware which varies from 218 pixels per inch to 401 pixels per inch depending on the device.\n\n; Always-on Speaker\n\n: An always-on microphone is a genuine feature, allowing voice activated intelligent personal assistant software such as Google's \"Google Now\", Apple's \"Siri\" or Microsoft's \"Cortana\" to respond without having to be turned on. An always-on speaker would be less useful if it implies the phone is always making noise.\n\n; Blood Pressure reliever\n\n: This appears to be where a real phone would have its front facing camera. This could imply that it's a sharp part that you can cut yourself on, thus ''relieving'' your blood pressure, or else implying that the other features of the phone are so frustrating that a feature was required to relieve the users' blood pressure. This is likely a play on modern smartphones with built-in heart rate/blood pressure sensors.\n\n; Auto-Rotating Case\n\n: Phones often feature an \"auto-rotating screen\", meaning that the display switches between portrait and landscape mode depending on its orientation with respect to gravity. But the case is a physical part of the phone, so making a case that did '''not''' \"auto-rotate\" with the phone would be the real challenge. This could also refer to a gyroscopic system that would enable the phone to rotate on its own.\n\n; Ribbed\n\n: A possible reference to ribbed condoms, which are often advertised as superior to standard ones because the texture can be more physically stimulating to the genitalia. Some other objects can be advertised with the word ribbed as well, but mostly in the context where it allows a firmer grip on the device when wet. Since phones are usually not meant to be used wet, this is a fairly useless feature. May also be a reference to the first phone where the \"exterior may be frictionless\".\n\n; Waterproof (interior only)\n\n: Waterproofing is done to the outside to prevent water from getting in. Exactly what \"interior only\" means is unclear (the case may be porous, or it may prevent water from ''escaping'') but it's clear that the designers have missed the point.\n\n; Googleable\n\n: Another non-feature. Advertising as \"-able\" is a way for marketing to add features, without really adding features. This may be (for example) a recyclable paper bag, when paper is normally recyclable. Any term may be \"Googled\", so being \"Googleable\" is not an actual feature. Alternatively, while \"Googleable\" meaning \"being able to be Googled\" is a non-feature, the related concept of \"being able to Google\" is a legitimate feature that a phone may advertise, as in having a Google search app built in. This is also a real feature in the sense that you can type \"Google find my phone\" into Google if you're logged in and your phone runs on the Android operating system. Google will, in fact, find your phone (to the precision allowed by GPS and assuming it still has power).\n\n; Cheek toucher\n\n: The screen will touch your cheek when making a hand-held phone call. Obviously a redundant/pointless feature to advertise.\n\n; Cries if lost\n\n: Arguably a useful function, as it would help the owner find the cellphone in case it was lost. This is offset by how annoying it would sound if it happened to cry with a human voice. May refer to people's habit of calling their own cellphones to help find it. It also resembles the first xkcd phone's functions of 'Screaming when falling' and 'Saying hi when exposed to light'.\n\n; Bug drawer\n\n: This is most likely the cover for other ports, though it looks like a small drawer, capable of only holding bug-sized items. Possibly a joke on software bugs, which would, being virtual rather than physical, easily fit inside this area. SD cards containing software bugs may also fit in this area. May also be a reference to \"Phone may attract/trap insects; this is normal\" from the original ''xkcd Phone'' comic.\n\n; Coin slot\n\n: In most phones, this would be the charging port. Payphones have coin slots, not smartphones. It is unclear what use such a feature would have, or if it implies that the phone either cannot be recharged through this slot as usual or if cash payment is somehow required to charge the phone. This could also allow the phone to be used as a piggy bank.\n\n; Scroll lock\n\n: A computer key on most keyboards which is practically never used. This feature seems to be placed where a usual cellphone's \"home\" button is, which would make it very frustrating. Despite 978|a previous xkcd strip, the Scroll Lock button was '''''not''''' invented by Steven Chu.\n\n; OS by Stackoverflow®\n\n: [http://stackoverflow.com/ Stack Overflow] is a very useful and popular question/answer forum for programmers, and many recent software products probably have benefited from advice given there, so Randall may be giving credit where credit really is due. Or it may be a reference to the rampant problem of code reuse, where programmers use the pre-written code on Stack Overflow rather than writing their own, regardless of the fact that the code on Stack Overflow may contain bugs, not be applicable to the programmer's situation, or otherwise cause problems for their specific program. Alternatively, it could be saying that the OS was written by the people on Stack Overflow who go there ''with'' programming issues, implying that the OS was written from code that was posted as not working.\n\n; 3D Materials\n\n: All real materials are three-dimensional, so this feature is not special. May be a reference to 880: Headache, in which Cueball claims that \"3D stuff\" (aka the real world) gives him a headache.\n\n; Dog Noticer\n\n: Can be interpreted as either alerting the user to nearby dogs, or alerting nearby dogs of the user. The former is very situational, and the latter is probably a negative.\n\n; FitBit® Fitness Evaluator\n\n: Fitbit make wristbands that measure heart rate, count user steps, and act as an aid to planning an exercise program. This comic is published on Boxing Day (26 December) 2014 and is relevant as Fitbits are a popular Holiday Gift at this time. However, the name \"Fitness Evaluator\" suggests that the product merely gives an evaluation on the user's fitness, which may mean that in practice it only criticizes the user's weight, diet etc. Another interpretation is that this monitors the fitness ''of'' the user's FitBit, that is, the state of the armband the person is wearing.\n\n; Volume and density control\n\n: A pun between volume (disambiguation)|volume as in speaker loudness, and volume as in a physical property inversely related to density. Interpreting it as the latter, apparently this feature would allow the user to change the size of the phone (which would indeed be a very useful feature, or a 1422: My Phone is Dying|very Black hole|worrying one), thus changing the volume and the density. It may be able to affect its mass (instead of volume) in some unexplained way. Note that some computer mice indeed have a feature where the user can put weights inside the case to customise the weight and thus actually affect its density. \n\nThe title text continues the list of features, like the previous xkcd phone comic. \"Washable, though only once.\" means that nothing prevents the phone from physically being washed, however after the first time doing this the phone will cease to function. A play on phrases \"washing machine safe\" or \"dishwasher safe\" in real advertisements."}
-{"number": "1466", "date": "December 29, 2014", "title": "Phone Checking", "image": "phone_checking.png", "titletext": "'Where were you when you learned you'd won?' 'I was actually asleep; I woke up when I refreshed the webite and saw the news.'", "transcript": ":[Cueball approaching Megan.]\n:Cueball: What's up?\n:Megan: They're announcing the winner of the compulsive phone-checking championship.\n\n:[Megan checks her phone.]\n\n:[Megan puts her phone away.]\n\n:[Megan checks her phone again.]\n:Cueball: Did you win?\n:Megan: Site's down.\n:Cueball: Weird.\n:Megan: I'll keep refreshing.", "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.\n\nThis compulsive behavior predates the popularity of mobile phones as shown in 477: Typewriter and 862: Let Go.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1467", "date": "December 31, 2014", "title": "Email", "image": "email.png", "titletext": "My New Year's resolution for 2014-54-12/30/14 Dec:12:1420001642 is to learn these stupid time formatting strings.", "transcript": ":[Megan approaches Beret Guy.]\n:Megan: Any New Year's resolutions?\n:Beret Guy: Gonna figure out what email is.\n:Megan: ''...Email?''\n\n:[Megan points to her phone.]\n: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.\n:Megan: You have an address on your website!\n\n:[Megan and Beret Guy walking.]\n:Beret Guy: Oh, ''that's'' what that thing is.\n:Megan: Email is important! You can't just ''never'' check it. It's not like voicemail.\n\n:Beret Guy: Can't they just send messages ''normally?''\n:Megan: How?\n:Beret Guy: Fax! Or Snapchat.\n:Megan: ...The naked pic thing?\n:Beret Guy: Fax machines aren't ''just'' for faxting!", "explanation": "A :Category:New Year|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!\n\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.\n\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 not only that many people send sexual content via fax, but also that he associates fax machines with such acts rather than Snapchat, despite faxing being 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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text also probably references a twitter outage that took place on December 29, which was blamed on an [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/29/twitter-2015-date-bug error in a date format string].\n\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 %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:\n\n*%Y"}
-{"number": "1468", "date": "January 2, 2015", "title": "Worrying", "image": "worrying.png", "titletext": "If the breaking news is about an event at a hospital or a lab, move it all the way over to the right.", "transcript": ":'''How worried should you be when various things happen to you:'''\n:[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:]\n:Very worried\n:'''...In Real Life'''\n:Not very worried\n\n:Not very worried\n:'''...In Movies'''\n:Very worried\n\n:[The labels in the chart from the top:]\n:[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:]\n:Chest wound\n:...on your right side\n:...on your left side\n:Getting knocked out by a punch\n:\"We need to talk.\"\n:Persistent cough\n:Parking ticket\n:Breaking news\n:Spilling a drink on your shirt\n:Nosebleed", "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:\n\n*'''Spilling a drink on your shirt''': In both real life and in movies, this just causes a stain and maybe a little embarrassment.\n*'''Nosebleed''': Nosebleeds are common in real life, as they can result from even a mild impact to the face, or even dried out sinuses. There are some conditions where nosebleeds can indicate something more serious (such as a stroke, or radiation poisoning), but those are vastly outnumbered by bleeds that are relatively harmless. Unless there's a reason to believe that a nosebleed is connected to something else, they rarely even require medical attention. {{tvtropes|DeadlyNosebleed|Nosebleeds in movies}} are almost always a sign that something ''is'' seriously wrong - the common, mundane nosebleeds almost never come up.\n*'''Breaking news''': People in real life commonly don't pay much attention to the news at all, so many breaking stories go unnoticed until much later. Most breaking news stories are also about non-threatening events (e.g. presidential addresses) or events that are far removed from the viewer. However, in movies, \"breaking news\" broadcasts are almost always a means to introduce a significant plot element which directly impact the protagonists, and are usually very serious events. XKCD has referenced 1387|news reports as foreshadowing before.\n*'''Parking ticket''': Tickets in movies are almost always ignored, but in real life, they are moderately worrying because they cost money and can tarnish your driving record.\n*'''Persistent cough''': In real life, coughing fits can be a sign of serious illness, and are worth having checked out, but the large majority of them indicate only minor and common illnesses. In movies, just like with nosebleeds, a {{tvtropes|IncurableCoughOfDeath|persistent cough}} almost always indicates a potentially deadly disease.\n*'''\"We need to talk.\"''': This phrase is a common, stereotypical lead-in to a serious conversation, usually about a couple's relationship status. In real life, as in the movies, prefacing a conversation with that phrase indicate that something serious, and possibly very upsetting, is about to be discussed. Such conversations are rarely deadly, but are often upsetting. \n*'''Getting knocked out by a punch''': In movies, a character who is {{tvtropes|TapOnTheHead|knocked out by a punch}} always wakes up sometime later with no lasting effects, making it less cause for concern than a spilled drink. In real life, being rendered unconscious by a physical impact is extremely serious, it can result in a variety of permanent impacts, up to and including brain damage and even death.\n*'''Chest wounds''': The chart mentions wounds on both your right and left sides. In real life, a chest wound to either side is extremely worrying. But in movies, getting wounded on the right side of the chest will rarely deal lasting damage to the hero or primary villain, to show how badass they are. Wounds on the ''left'' side of the chest generally signify swift death. This is likely due to the common misconception that the heart is on the left side of the chest - it is actually in the center, with a slight tendency to the left. However, even left-side chest wounds in movies are apparently still less worrisome than coughs and nosebleeds. It must also be noted that the term \"chest wound\" is broader than what the author of the comic appears to mean. More narrow terms of \"thoracic gunshot wound\", \"gunshot chest wound\", \"thoracic ballistic trauma\" or \"penetrating chest wound\" (the latter is slightly broader and includes the damage inflicted by blades and other impaled objects) would be more appropriate because just a \"chest wound\" includes such insignificant events as minor skin cuts in the chest area.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1469", "date": "January 5, 2015", "title": "UV", "image": "uv.png", "titletext": "Hey, why stop at our house? We could burn down ALL these houses for the insurance money.", "transcript": ":[Megan holding a flashlight and standing behind Cueball, who is sitting at a computer.]\n:Megan: Our bathroom looks pretty clean, right?\n:Cueball: I think so. Why?\n:Megan: I got a UV flashlight. Come look.\n\n:[Cueball leaves the computer; they walk.]\n\n:[Megan and Cueball are off-screen.]\n:Cueball: Looks fine.\n:UV flashlight: *Click*\n::::: *Click*\n:Cueball: ...Oh my God.\n\n:[Megan and Cueball walking in the opposite direction; Cueball is looking back behind him.]\n:Cueball: The toilet looked like the guy's chest after the alien burst out.\n:Megan: What do we '''''do?'''''\n\n:[Megan and Cueball standing.]\n:Cueball: We clean. Clean and clean and never stop.\n:Megan: It won't be enough. We should just burn the place down for the insurance money.\n\n:[Cueball standing behind Megan. Megan is pouring a liquid onto the floor out of a red-colored canister labled \"Danger\".]\n:Cueball: Isn't that wrong?\n:Megan: My morality has evaporated under the harsh UV light.\n\n:[Megan and Cueball standing outside the burning building.]\n\n:[Megan and Cueball standing, Cueball looking at his phone.]\n:Cueball: OK, I'm Googling insurance companies. Which one do you think pays the most? \n:Megan: Let's just try calling around.", "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 light|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.\n\nThe first part of this comic focuses on Megan showing off her new Black light|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 (film)|Alien.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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|860: Never Do This.)"}
-{"number": "1470", "date": "January 7, 2015", "title": "Kix", "image": "kix.png", "titletext": "My parents sent me to several years of intensive Kix test prep.", "transcript": ":[Ponytail, Megan, and Cueball are standing around a whiteboard on an easel; Ponytail and Cueball are holding red markers. The whiteboard reads:]\n:[in Large] '''Kix'''\n:[Underlined] Slogan ideas\n:Kid Tested, Mother...\n\n[following lines all in red and each crossed out]\n:\nBay, Desert, Forest, Glacier, Hills, Island, Lagoon, Lake, Mesa, Mountains, Peninsula, Plain, River delta|Delta, River, Sea, Strait and Volcano."}
-{"number": "1473", "date": "January 14, 2015", "title": "Location Sharing", "image": "location_sharing.png", "titletext": "Our phones must have great angular momentum sensors because the compasses really suck.", "transcript": ":[Megan is holding her phone. Above her is the text she can see on the screen:]\n:This website wants to know your location.\n:[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.]\n:Deny\n:'''Allow'''\n\n:[Megan is holding her phone.]\n\n:[Megan is holding her phone. Above her is again the text she can see on the screen.]\n:This website wants to know your momentum.\n:[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.]\n:'''Deny'''\n:Allow\n\n:Megan: Nice try.", "explanation": "In this comic, Megan is visiting a website on her mobile phone. After loading it, the website Location-based service|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.\n\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 example of such values (and the example Heisenberg himself used) are location and momentum: the more precisely you measure the location of a particle, the less certain you are of its momentum, and vice versa.\n\nHeisenberg'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 such as a smartphone or human being). Nonetheless, Megan refuses, actively enforcing the uncertainty principle as a conscious action rather than as a simple limitation of knowledge.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1474", "date": "January 16, 2015", "title": "Screws", "image": "screws.png", "titletext": "If you encounter a hex bolt, but you only brought screwdrivers, you can try sandwiching the head of the bolt between two parallel screwdriver shafts, squeezing the screwdrivers together with a hand at either end, then twisting. It doesn't work and it's a great way to hurt yourself, but you can try it!", "transcript": ":[Eight drawings of different types of heads each with a caption:]\n:[Plus sign-shaped screw.]\n:Phillips head\n:[Minus sign-shaped screw.]\n:Flat head\n:[Star-shaped screw.]\n:Uh oh. Maybe it's on Amazon?\n:[Plus sign-shaped screw with worn edges.]\n:Cursed -1 Phillips head\n:[No screw, just a circle.]\n:Crap, it's a ''rivet''.\n:[Hexagon-shaped screw.]\n:Phillips-head ruiner\n:[Minus sign-shaped screw going through the whole circle. Also giving off radiation.]\n:Uranium screw (a real thing)\n:[A sack with blood oozing out of it.]\n:Phillip's head", "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 List of screw drives|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 key|Allen, however appliance makers keep designing increasingly strange List of screw drives|screw heads and users keep acquiring increasingly strange screwdrivers.\n\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.\n\nThe types of screws listed are the following:\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1475", "date": "January 19, 2015", "title": "Technically", "image": "technically.png", "titletext": "\"Technically that sentence started with 'well', so--\" \"Ooh, a rock with a fossil in it!\"", "transcript": ":[White Hat talks to Cueball who looks at a flying insect.]\n:White Hat: Well, technically, food is a \"drug\", since it's a substance that alters how your body works, so yes, I'm—\n:Cueball: Hey, look at that weird bug!\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:My life improved when I realized I could just ignore any sentence that started with \"technically.\"", "explanation": "Technically, when the word \"technically\" is used to start a sentence, the remainder of the sentence tends to follow one of a number of patterns:\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1476", "date": "January 21, 2015", "title": "Ceres", "image": "ceres.png", "titletext": "Earth clearly hasn't been inspected, since it's definitely contaminated with salmonella.", "transcript": ":[Megan sitting in front of her laptop talks to Cueball who stand behind her.]\n:Megan: ''Dawn'' has almost reached Ceres. \n:Megan: I'm excited that we'll finally learn what that stupid white dot is.\n\n:[Current version of Dawn's best picture of Ceres and the white spot is shown.]\n\n:[As Dawn get's closer the pictures improve and in the second version the white spot shows to have black markings.]\n\n:[In the last zoom in on Ceres, the white dot resolves to a badge with clear black text:]\n:Inspected by No. 6", "explanation": "Ceres (dwarf planet)|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 discovers what the cause of the \"stupid white dot\" on Ceres is.\n\nDawn (spacecraft)|Dawn is a probe sent by NASA in 2007 to examine the asteroid belt. Having already visited the protoplanet 4 Vesta|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 [http://www.universetoday.com/118358/first-hubble-and-now-dawn-have-seen-this-white-spot-on-ceres-what-is-it/ questions about the white spot]. The spot was first noticed in photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.\n\n\"[http://www.cafepress.com/inspector6 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 reference The Rift's M6 being stationed at Ceres inspecting a crater.\n\nHowever, this sticker could mean that there is life, probably a Type III civilisation|Type 3+ civilization. This would mean that there is life in this universe that has control over solar systems, potentially saying that there are Type 3, 4, and Type 5 civilizations out there since they can control solar systems.\n\nThe title text extends the joke to the planet Earth, where salmonella can be found. Salmonella are harmful bacteria 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 hasn't been tested by CERES since salmonella can be found on it.\n\nThe Dawn mission is mentioned in 1532: New Horizons."}
-{"number": "1478", "date": "January 26, 2015", "title": "P-Values", "image": "p_values.png", "titletext": "If all else fails, use \"significant at a p>0.05 level\" and hope no one notices.", "transcript": ":[A two-column table where the second column selects various areas of the first column using square brackets.]\n:\n:;P-value\n::Interpretation\n----\n:;0.001\n:;0.01\n:;0.02\n:;0.03\n::Highly Significant\n:\n:;0.04\n:;0.049\n::Significant\n:\n:;0.050\n::Oh crap. Redo calculations.\n:\n:;0.051\n:;0.06\n::On the edge of significance\n:\n:;0.07\n:;0.08\n:;0.09\n:;0.099\n::Highly suggestive, relevant at the p<0.10 level\n:\n:;≥0.1\n::Hey, look at this interesting subgroup analysis", "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. [http://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108 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.]\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 Design of experiments|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.\n\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 882: Significant.\n\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\"."}
-{"number": "1479", "date": "January 28, 2015", "title": "Troubleshooting", "image": "troubleshooting.png", "titletext": "\"Oh, you're using their Chrome APP, not their Chrome EXTENSION. They're very similar but one handles window creation differently.\" is a thing I hope I can stop saying soon.", "transcript": ":[Hairy sitting at a desk with laptop, with Cueball standing behind him.]\n:Hairy: Wait, why can't I click anywhere?\n:Cueball: I don't... Ugh, It opened a dialog box offscreen.\n:Hairy: Why is that even ''possible?''\n:Cueball: It really shouldn't be. But you can fix it by changing your screen resolution to trigger a window cleanup.\n:Hairy: ''Seriously?''\n:Cueball: I know, I know...\n\n:To be honest, I can't ''wait'' for the day when all my stupid computer knowledge becomes obsolete.", "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.\n\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 Hang (computing)|freezing), but rather because either the user or the software itself has opened a Modal dialog|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nIn general, one can sort the possible solutions to the problem being discussed in the following order of preference, from best to worst:\n*(Best): Have OS programmers implement automatic coordinate adjustment during window creation\n*Have OS programmers provide easily accessible and visible control to invoke coordinate adjustment for all windows\n*Have OS programmers provide a shortcut to invoke coordinate adjustment for all windows\n*(Worst, depicted in comic): Have users rely on side-effect of properly implemented screen resolution change mechanism to fix the problem counter-intuitively.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1480", "date": "January 30, 2015", "title": "Super Bowl", "image": "super_bowl.png", "titletext": "My hobby: Pretending to miss the sarcasm when people show off their lack of interest in football by talking about 'sportsball' and acting excited to find someone else who's interested, then acting confused when they try to clarify.", "transcript": ":[Cueball standing.]\n: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.\n:Cueball: Caring about something makes people vulnerable, so ''not'' caring gives you power.\n\n:[Pictures of a weather map and ''Philae'' in the background.]\n: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\n:[Cueball pointing to self.]\n:Cueball: So while everyone is going on about the Super Bowl on Sunday, let me tell you what ''I'll'' be doing:\n\n:[Cueball standing again.]\n:Cueball: Listening!\n:Cueball: Hooray for friendship!\n:Cueball: Also, eating snacks.\n:Cueball: Hooray for snacks!", "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). However, since other people tolerate his interest in odd things like meteorology and the Philae (spacecraft)|''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\".\n\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 – and of course, the free snacks also help ameliorate his discomfort.\n\nIn a previous comic, 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 :Category:"}
-{"number": "1481", "date": "February 2, 2015", "title": "API", "image": "api.png", "titletext": "ACCESS LIMITS: Clients may maintain connections to the server for no more than 86,400 seconds per day. If you need additional time, you may contact IERS to file a request for up to one additional second.", "transcript": ":[Cueball sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen.]\n:'''API Guide'''\n:Request URL format:\n:http://~~~.com//-
\n\n:Server will return an XML document which contains:\n:*The requested data.\n:*Documentation describing how the data is organized spatially.\n\n:;API Keys\n:To obtain API access, contact the X.509-authenticated server and request an ECDH-RSA TLS key...\n:
\n: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.", "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.\n\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. Cascading_Style_Sheets|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. \n\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 [http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-gets-a-stylish-html-scraper-scrapi-140.html prefer to have proper APIs] with well-defined machine-readable formats, stable interfaces and documentation that actually describes the semantics of the data.\n\nFor example, Google has an [https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/getting-started 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 [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20407107/scraping-youtube-mix-playlist-id-for-a-video 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.\n\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–Hellman (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.\n\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|daylight saving time in the U.S. and Summer time|summer time in Europe and some other places. This suggests that the web service tracks time via UTC."}
-{"number": "1483", "date": "February 6, 2015", "title": "Quotative Like", "image": "quotative_like.png", "titletext": "God was like, \"Let there be light,\" and there was light.", "transcript": ":[Megan referring to a published article she is holding.]\n:Megan: I found this article on the linguistics of the \"Quotative Like\".\n:Cueball: Like, when you're like, \"She was like\"?\n:Megan: Yeah.\n: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.\"\n:Cueball: Wow. Turns out linguists are pretty hardcore.\n:Megan: I ''think'' she means dead from old age.\n:Cueball: I'm gonna start using \"like\" more, just in case.", "explanation": "In this comic, Megan mentions an article on the use of the word \"Like#As a colloquial quotative|like\" as a quotative. Cueball makes a joke on this by managing to use the word \"like\" three times in a seven word sentence.\n\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 \"[http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/loudon_wainwright_iii/cobwebs.html 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.\n\nIn the second panel Megan mentions that, in a [http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/01/25/linguists-are-like-get-used/ruUQoV0XUTLDjx72JojnBI/story.html newspaper article], the linguist [https://faculty.unt.edu/editprofile.php?pid"}
-{"number": "1484", "date": "February 9, 2015", "title": "Apollo Speeches", "image": "apollo_speeches.png", "titletext": "While our commitment to recycling initiatives has been unwavering, this is not a cost any of us should be expected to pay.", "transcript": ":[Commentary above the speeches.]\n: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.\n:Uncovered in 1999, it is often called the greatest speech never given.\n:Today, the ''full'' set of Safire's contingency speeches has been found.\n\n[The speeches are shown written on separate sheets of paper, with only a few lines of each speech being shown before the text is cut off by the next speech on top of it. The first speech, \"In event astronauts stranded on Moon\", is divided among two sheets of paper, while all the rest are shown on a single sheet.]\n\n:'''In event astronauts stranded on Moon'''\n:Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace.\n:[Here, several lines from the original speech are cut, and the text continues on a separate sheet of paper.]\n: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.\n:Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s 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\n\n:'''In event spacecraft goes missing'''\n: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.\n: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.\n:While these men are lost, they are not forgotten, and their sacrifice will not\n\n:'''In event astronauts abscond with spacecraft'''\n: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.\n: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\n\n:'''In event spacecraft returns with extra astronauts'''\n:While there is much we do not understand, tonight all of earth is united in celebrating the safe return of our brave explorers.\n: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\n\n:'''In event spacecraft hits U.S.S. Hornet, crushing Nixon'''\n:'''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’s tragic death beneath their wayward capsule.\n: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\n\n:'''In event spacecraft accidentally sold for scrap and crushed with astronauts inside'''\n:My fellow Americans, I am as shocked and appalled as you at this stunning and", "explanation": "As explained in the comic, Richard Nixon|Nixon staffer William Safire wrote [http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/11/in-event-of-moon-disaster.html 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 \"[http://www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/events/centennials/nixon/exhibit/nixon-online-exhibit-disaster.html contingency speeches]\" to be prepared.\n\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 improbable contingencies:\n\n;The 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.\n\n;More astronauts than expected were found in the recovered ship\nThe appearance of three (possibly six?) additional astronauts ventures into the realm of possibility normally reserved for science fiction such as \"Twilight Zone\" episodes.\n\n;The ship had hit the U.S.S. Hornet and crushed Nixon\nThe USS Hornet (CV-12)|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.\n\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.\"\n\n;The 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}}.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1485", "date": "February 11, 2015", "title": "Friendship", "image": "friendship.png", "titletext": "The only other Wikipedia vandalism that I would feel zero remorse about is editing the article on active US militia groups to replace \"militia\" with \"fanclub\".", "transcript": ":[A Wikipedia style layout is shown for extracts from an article titled Friendship.]\n\n:gravity", "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 Fundamental interaction#Overview of the fundamental interaction|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.\n\nThe comic also outlines how progressively difficult it gets to describe the forces. Gravitation|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 Electromagnetism|electromagnetic force does indeed give rise to Coulomb's law of electrostatics|electrostatic interaction (another inverse-square law, proposed in 1785), but a much more comprehensive description, covering full Classical electromagnetism|classical electrodynamics, was only given in Maxwell's equations around 1861. The strong interaction|strong and weak interaction|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. \n\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 Asymptotic freedom|gets stronger with increasing distance: It is ''loosely'' similar to the Hooke's law|restoring force of an extended spring. However, all stable heavy particles are neutral to the strong force, due to being made up of three \"quantum chromodynamics|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.\n\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, electroweak theory|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.\n\nThe title text touches upon a strange paradox regarding gravity: in isolation it is the simplest and easiest to understand of the four forces, with well-understood equations that can be taught to the layman with clear-cut examples (as it is the one force everyone experiences on a regular basis). However when taking other forces into account gravity turns out to be the Quantum_gravity|hardest to reconcile with a coherent (quantum) understanding of Theory of everything|all four forces together."}
-{"number": "1490", "date": "February 23, 2015", "title": "Atoms", "image": "atoms.png", "titletext": "When I was little I had trouble telling my dad apart from the dog. I always recognized my mom because she had a bunch of extra plutoniums in her middle. I never did ask her why...", "transcript": ":[Megan stands at a table and is preparing a sample for some kind of analysis in a device, when Beret Guy walks in.]\n:Beret Guy: What're you doing?\n:Megan: Testing a sample for beryllium.\n:Beret Guy: That? Yeah, there's a bunch of berylliums.\n:Megan: How do you know?\n\n:[Megan turns to Beret Guy who takes the sample and looks at it.]\n:Beret Guy: Look at it! See? Tons of oxygens and silicons, a few irons but definitely some berylliums too! Can't you see them?\n\n:[They continue to talk.]\n:Megan: No, I can’t see a list of the atoms in a thing by looking.\n:Beret Guy: How do you tell what things are?\n\n:[Zoom in on Megan.]\n:Megan: This is ridiculous. Look at me. What do you see?\n:Beret Guy (off-panel): You have tons of metal in your face. Lots of fillings, I guess?\n\n:[Megan stares at Beret Guy who takes a looks at his own arm.]\n:Megan: What's '''''wrong''''' with you?\n:Beret Guy: Too many zincs? I’ve always worried I had too much zinc and everyone thought I was weird.", "explanation": "This comic shows another quirky and fantastical ability of Beret Guy.\n\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.\n\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 Composition_of_the_human_body|oxygen, carbon and hydrogen) he only notices the unusual atoms. In this case he sees the metal atoms her Dental_restoration#Materials_used|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's point: what is weird is not Beret Guy's elemental content, but his ability to apparently see everything as atoms sorted by element.\n\nHigh zinc intake (Zinc toxicity|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 [https://coppermind.net/wiki/Tin tin].\n\nThe comic continues the theme of Beret Guy's naive misunderstandings of scientific terminology turning to be literally true. In a previous 1486: Vacuum|comic his misinterpretation of the notion of energy in the vacuum resulted in him gaining significant superpowers.\n\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:\n#She had an Radioisotope thermoelectric generator|RTG-powered pacemaker (a few hundred were made in the 1970s).\n#She lived near Los Alamos during the second world war and was a member of the [http://warisboring.com/articles/the-scientists-who-pee-plutonium/ UPPU club (translated as “You pee Pu!”)]. Alternatively, she could have been exposed to another source such as radioactive contamination from the Rocky Flats Plant.\n#She was one of The Stepford Wives robots.\n#She was the victim of some unidentified, unethical medical experimentation. Such as Albert Stevens\nIt is also possible that Beret Guy's mother containing plutonium is probably intended as a whimsical explanation of his powers. 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 {{tvtropes|ILoveNuclearPower|common source of superpowers}} in comic books and other fiction (though unfortunately, this does not work in real life{{Citation needed}}). It's possible the plutonium is even in her womb, therefore basically guarenteeing his exposure to it.\n\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.\n\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. This is further corroborated by 502: Dark Flow, where Beret Guy also appears to miss his mother.\n\nThe English physicist Henry Moseley discovered the law relating the atomic number of elements with their characteristic x-ray|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 element|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."}
-{"number": "1491", "date": "February 25, 2015", "title": "Stories of the Past and Future", "image": "stories_of_the_past_and_future.png", "titletext": "Little-known fact: The 'Dawn of Man' opening sequence in 2001 cuts away seconds before the Flintstones theme becomes recognizable.", "transcript": "{{incomplete transcript}}\n:'''Date of publication'''\n:[A logarithmic scale running horizontally, from 3000 BCE to past 2015 CE.]\n:'''Years in the future'''\n:[A logarithmic scale running vertically, from 1 billion down to 0.]\n:'''Stories set in the future''' (science fiction, prediction)\n::Stories set in 2015\n::[A line divides this region into two. The upper side is labelled \"still possible\"; the lower side is labelled \"obsolete\".]\n:[From left to right.]\n::Memoirs of the Twentieth Century [1700, 265 years in the future]\n::Looking Backward [1888, 112 years in the future]\n::Golf in the Year 2000 [1892, 108 years in the future]\n::The Time Machine [1895, 800 thousand to 30 million years in the future]\n::Enoch Soames [1916, ''circa'' 60 years in the future]\n::1984 [1949, 35 years in the future]\n::A Week in the Wales of the Future [1957, 76 years in the future]\n::The Jetsons [1962-63, 100 years in the future]\n::Star Trek [1966-69, 300 years in the future]\n::2001: A Space Odyssey [1968, 33 years in the future]\n::Space: 1999 [1975-77, 24 years in the future]\n::2010: Odyssey Two [1982, 28 years in the future]\n::Transformers (TV series) [1984-87, 20 years in the future]\n::2061: Odyssey Three [1987, 74 years in the future]\n::Star Trek: The Next Generation [1987-94, ''circa'' 500 years in the future]\n::Back to the Future Part II [1989, 26 years in the future]\n::Zero Wing [1989, 112 years in the future]\n::Terminator 2 (1995 portion) [1991, 4 years in the future]\n::3001: The Final Odyssey [1997, 1004 years in the future]\n::Enterprise [2001-2005, 150 years in the future]\n::This chart [2015, 0 years in the future]\n:'''Years in the past'''\n:[A logarithmic scale running vertically, from 0 down past 1 billion to \"Big Bang\"]\n:'''Stories set in the past''' (History, Period Fiction)\n::Stories written X years ago and set 2X years ago\n::[A line divides this region into two. The upper side is labelled as follows.]\n::'''Former period pieces'''\n::Stories set in the past, but
created long enough ago that
they were published closer
to their setting than to today.\n::Modern audiences may not
recognize which parts were
''supposed'' to sound old.\n:[From left to right.]\n::The Epic of Gilgamesh [''circa'' 2100 BCE, 600 years in the past]\n::The Iliad [''circa'' 800 BCE, 450 years in the past]\n::History of the Peloponnesian War [''circa'' 390 BCE, 10 years in the past]\n::Book of Genesis [''circa'' 500 BCE, 4000 years in the past]\n::Ashokavadana [''circa'' 100 BCE, 300 years in the past]\n::Gospels (various estimates) [''circa'' 250 CE, 24 to 75 years in the past]\n::The Pillow Book [1000 CE, 5 years in the past]\n::Water Margin [''circa'' 1300, 195 years in the past]\n::Richard III [''circa'' 1590, 115 years in the past]\n::Julius Caesar [1599, 1650 years in the past]\n::King John [''circa'' 1600, 500 years in the past]\n::Henry IV [''circa'' 1600, 190 years in the past]\n::King Lear [''circa'' 1606, 3000 years in the past]\n::Henry VIII [''circa'' 1612, 105 years in the past]\n::The Last of the Mohicans [1826, 69 years in the past]\n::Rip Van Winkel [1819, 31-51 years in the past]\n::A Tale of Two Cities [1859, 60 years in the past]\n::Moby-Dick [1851, anywhere from 4 to 14 years ago]\n:::\"Some years ago--never mind how long precisely...\"\n::Les Miserábles [1862, 30 years in the past]\n::Treasure Island [1883, 130 years in the past]\n::A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court [1889, 2000 years in the past]\n::Gone with the Wind [1936, 70 years in the past]\n::Lest Darkness Fall [1939, 550 years in the past]\n::Casablanca [1942, 1 year in the past]\n::Oklahoma! [1943, 37 years in the past]\n::The Ten Commandments [1956, 1400 years in the past]\n::The Bridge on the River Kwai [1957, 13 years in the past]\n::Gunsmoke [1952-61, 80 years in the past]\n::The Flintstones [1960-66, 100,000 years in the past]\n::Catch-22 (book) [1961, 18 years in the past]\n::The Great Escape [1963, 20 years in the past]\n::Asterix\n::Lawrence of Arabia\n::The Music Man\n::Bonnie and Clyde\n::2001: A Space Odyssey (prologue)\n::American Graffiti\n::Patton\n::Catch-22 (movie) [1970, 27 years in the past]\n::Chinatown\n::Blazing Saddles\n::Apocalypse Now\n::Happy Days\n::Grease\n::M*A*S*H\n::Annie (play)\n::Roots\n::Chariots of Fire\n::Star Wars (IV-VI)\n::Annie (movie)\n::The Right Stuff\n::Back to the Future\n::Gandhi\n::Platoon\n::Dirty Dancing\n::Back to the Future Part III\n::The Wonder Years\n::JFK\n::The Sandlot\n::Schindler's List\n::Raptor Red\n::Apollo 13\n::Star Wars (I-III)\n::The Big Lebowski\n::Evita\n::Saving Private Ryan\n::The Prince of Egypt\n::Freaks and Geeks\n::Hotel Rwanda\n::I Love the '80s\n::That '70s Show\n::Pearl Harbor\n::Ice Age\n::I Love the '90s\n::United 93\n::300\n::10,000 BC\n::Year One\n::The Wolf of Wall Street\n::I Love the 2000s\n::Mad Men\n::Downton Abbey\n::Star Wars (VII-IX)", "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.\n\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 [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust future presented there look dated and quaint]. Randall labels these futuristic works as \"obsolete\".\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PeriodPiece 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). \n\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.\n\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. \n\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."}
-{"number": "1492", "date": "February 27, 2015", "title": "Dress Color", "image": "dress_color.png", "titletext": "This white-balance illusion hit so hard because it felt like someone had been playing through the Monty Hall scenario and opened their chosen door, only to find there was unexpectedly disagreement over whether the thing they'd revealed was a goat or a car.", "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.]", "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.\n\nThe comic strip refers to a the dress|dress whose image went viral on [http://swiked.tumblr.com/post/112174461490/officialunitedstates-unclefather Tumblr] only hours before the strip was posted and soon showed up also on [http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xaprc/eli5why_does_this_dress_appear_whitegold_to_some/ Reddit], [https://twitter.com/hashtag/thedress?src"}
-{"number": "1493", "date": "March 2, 2015", "title": "Meeting", "image": "meeting.png", "titletext": "Here at CompanyName.website, our three main strengths are our web-facing chairs, our huge collection of white papers, and the fact that we physically cannot die.", "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:]\n:Beret Guy: Welcome to a meeting! I'm almost out of words, so I'll keep this short. Just wanna touch bases.\n:[White text in the black sign (''.website'' in grey):]\n:CompanyName.website\n:''If you're reading this, the web''\n:''server was installed correctly.™''\n\n:[Beret Guy stands in front of an office chair and a table talking.]\n: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\n:[Pony tail sits at the table.]\n:Beret Guy [off-panel]: Profits are up. Sales, any luck figuring out who our customers are?\n:Ponytail: Nope. Money keeps appearing, but we have no idea how or why.\n:Beret Guy [off-panel]: Great!\n\n:[Back to the situation from frame two.]\n:Beret Guy: Oh, and one last thing—I saw a cool red beetle in the hall. Can someone add it to the bug tracker?\n:[person off-panel]: Just did!\n:Beret Guy: Thanks!", "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\n*\"If you're reading this, the web server was installed correctly.™\" When a web server is installed automatically (like Apache through a package manager), it typically comes with a minimal configuration meant to deliver a single page saying all is working fine. Usually, a company will then configure the web server to provide actual meaningful content, such as contact information and a list of the company's services.{{Citation needed}} It appears that in this case Beret Guy's company kept the page as is, but also trademarked the sentence as the company's motto, and proudly displays it under the company logo.\n\n*\"CompanyName.website\": Companies are usually given descriptive or evocative names; Beret Guy's company, meanwhile, has been given a generic placeholder name that explains nothing about the company or website except that it is a company with a website. Currently, almost every middle-sized company runs a website, so it doesn't mean Beret Guy's company is in the information technology business (but many elements are specifically parodying Google). \"[http://Companyname.website Companyname.website]\" redirects to xkcd.com.\n\n*\"Welcome to a meeting!\" The usual way to start a meeting is to welcome the participants by telling them in which meeting they are (e.g. \"Welcome to the meeting on...\"). Here, the complete lack of specifics in this sentence is an indication that the meeting has, in fact, no purpose at all, except to be just \"A meeting\". It could also mean that Beret Guy does not know the proper way to welcome people to a meeting.\n\n*\"I'm almost out of words so I'll keep this short.\" A common theme in the busy world of business is lack of time, so \"I'm almost out of time\" would be a valid reason for keeping a meeting short, rather than a finite quantity of words. Aside from the fiction movie A Thousand Words (film)|A Thousand Words or people taking a Vow of Silence, people usually don't have a particular quota on the number of words they have or can use. Beret Guy also seems to run out of words in the title text of 1560: Bubblegum.\n\n*\"Just wanna touch bases.\" Often business professions will contact a customer to \"touch base,\" meaning to check in for a status update. The use of the plural \"bases\" suggests Beret Guy does not know what this means. This could also be a word play on the expression \"Cover some bases\".\n\n*\"Self-driving car project\" Google has been working on self-driving cars, which usually shouldn't be lost track of and found by the police. The fact that it was launched \"by accident\" is concerning. It could mean the car was turned on by mistake and then left unattended, or perhaps that a driver of one of their cars fell asleep or otherwise stopped controlling the vehicle, but it is not clear because the accidental launch may refer to the project itself rather than the car. The involvement of the police may imply that the car crashed or otherwise obstructed traffic. That said, 90 miles before crashing was at that time a good result for a self-driving car, especially when you didn't even know you built a self-driving car. What's especially ironic is the implication that the employees were carpooling (sharing a single vehicle for their commute, for reasons of efficiency/economy) in the self-driving car, and yet this carpool activity ended with the car setting off with nobody in it at all. These types of cars were the topic of the later comic 1559: Driving, maybe misusing one of Beret Guy's cars. Self-driving cars are a :Category: Self-driving cars|recurring topic on xkcd.\n\n*\"Sales, any luck figuring out who our customers are?\" In the real world, when companies want to find out \"who [their] customers are\", they are talking about learning more about their existing customers (e.g. age groups, interests, genders) in order to more closely match these customers' needs, and to discover ways to attract more of them. Here, Beret Guy and Ponytail apparently use the phrase literally - they have no records of making any sales. A normal enterprise struggles to sell its products/services in order to get money. Getting cash from an unknown source would lead to serious troubles - failure to comply with tax code, suspicion of money laundering - but overall, most enterprises suffer the opposite problem: they try as hard as they can but don't get enough cash to be profitable (despite keeping precise information about where cash comes from). Note, that the accidental launching of a project would suggest a theme, that large cash infusions for unknown or Money laundering|unscrupulous reasons could imply anonymous Venture capital|VC investors, perhaps amateurs or acting in an overheated market.\n\n*\"Bug tracker\" usually refers to systems for tracking discovery, analysis, and fixing of software bugs (errors and problems), not the physical location of insects. {{Citation needed}}\n\n*\"Web-facing\" (title text) usually refers to software or a server that is connected to the internet using a web interface. However, in this case, the term is applied to chairs (likely meaning that they are either materially Webbing#Furniture|web-plaited or placed in front of a computer with internet browsing capability, or both; may also possibly refer to other definitions of \"web\").\n\n*\"White papers\" (title text) are usually policy recommendations, but here Beret Guy is likely talking about actual (near-worthless) blank white pieces of paper.\n\n*\"Main strengths\" (title text) typically refer to one's skills, but \"we physically cannot die\" may refer to the fact that incorporated companies are in a sense anthropomorphized — they're legally treated as \"persons\", with the ability to sue and be sued in civil courts; or, just as likely, that Beret Guy and his employees are literally immortal, in which case that would indeed be a great asset which could be used in a variety of ways, such as economizing on costs of living, participating in physically dangerous projects with impunity, or investing for a long, long time."}
-{"number": "1494", "date": "March 4, 2015", "title": "Insurance", "image": "insurance.png", "titletext": "LIFEHACKS: You can just take all the luggage off the airport conveyer belt and leave with it. They don't check that it's yours at the door!", "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.]\n:Insurance agent: Here's a page explaining the terms of your new fire insurance policy.\n\n:[Zoom in on Cueball as he reads the paper.]\n\n:[Cueball starts to ask the insurance agent a question when he hands Cueball yet another paper.]\n:Cueball: Hey, what if I-\n: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.\n:Cueball: Oh. Right. How did-\n:Insurance agent: I see a lot of programmers here.", "explanation": "Cueball, apparently having just purchased a new insurance policy, is given a document explaining the policy terms. As is often the case, he's presented as 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 tend to look for loopholes in programs, code and system architecture, and treat finding them as a challenge (either to exploit them, or to prevent such exploitation by other parties). The fact that Cueball is trying to discuss his findings with the agent suggests that he's trying to prevent it from happening, rather than planning to do it himself. \n\nIn this case, the obvious \"loophole\" in a fire insurance policy is that the customer generally receives a large payment in the event of a fire. This means that a person could make money by insuring a building or other property for more than its actual value, then deliberately setting a fire. Alternatively, someone could set a fire and claim that more valuables were destroyed than actually were. In either case, the customer would effectively receive free money for their troubles. In principle, this could be done repeatedly, resulting in an unlimited source of money.\n\nAll of this is implied simply by Cueball reviewing the document, starting to ask a question, and being cut off by the agent, explaining that this Life hacking|\"cool hack\" is actually just an instance of insurance fraud, which is a) well known and b) highly illegal. In practice, insurance companies are constantly on the lookout for such forms of fraud, and attempting to do so in real life would be more likely to land you in prison than to enrich you. \n\nThe 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. Moreover, most such exploitations that involve money have usually been figured out already, and systems changed or laws passed in order prevent them from happening. When they do occur, the exploiter is subject to legal punishment. \n\nCueball begins to ask how the agent knew what his question was, and is again cut off by the agent explaining that he sees a lot of programmers, suggesting that Cueball is not the first to consider that particular loophole. \n\nThe title text provides another example: US airports typically place passengers' luggage on carousels, and leave it to the individual travelers to find and retrieve their own luggage, which would seem to make it easy to take luggage that's not yours (even \"all the luggage\"), but that's less of a 'hack' than a crude form of petty theft, which contravenes both the law and normal social and ethical expectations. \n\nIt should be noted that there are places in which it's typical for airports to verify luggage ownership before allowing people to take their bags. In most wealthy countries, this practice has largely been abandoned, because other peoples' luggage isn't typically very valuable, airports are generally fully of security cameras, and walking off with a random piece of luggage creates a significant risk that the actual owner will see you trying to take it. For these reasons, the risks associated with such theft generally outweigh the rewards. A single person trying to remove \"all the luggage\" would be particularly impractical. Even if they could contrive a method to transport it all, their actions would be so obvious that they would almost certainly be caught immediately. \n\nThe core point, in both of these cases, is that theoretical loopholes, which might be easy to exploit in computer code, are usually wildly impractical in reality, and often carry both moral implications and the risk of punishment. \n\n1469: UV also contains a case of insurance fraud."}
-{"number": "1495", "date": "March 6, 2015", "title": "Hard Reboot", "image": "hard_reboot.png", "titletext": "Googling inevitably reveals that my problem is caused by a known bug triggered by doing [the exact combination of things I want to do]. I can fix it, or wait a few years until I don't want that combination of things anymore, using the kitchen timer until then.", "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.]\n:[Above the screen it says:]\n:Figuring out why my home server keeps running out of swap space and crashing:\n:[Below the screen it says:]\n:1-10 hours\n\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.]\n:[Above the frame it says:]\n:Plugging it into a light timer so it reboots every 24 hours:\n:[Below the frame it says:]\n:5 minutes\n\n:[Below the main frame.]\n:'''Why everything I have is broken'''", "explanation": "Paging|Swap space is an area of a computer's hard drive reserved for use when the computer runs out of RAM. Ideally, RAM + SWAP >"}
-{"number": "1496", "date": "March 9, 2015", "title": "Art Project", "image": "art_project.png", "titletext": "It's my most ambitious project yet, judging by the amount of guacamole.", "transcript": ":[Four people stand next to each other.]\n:Cueball [taking a selfie with his smart-phone]: I'm doing an art project where I take a picture of myself every hundred years.\n: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.\n: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.\n: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.", "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 87th Academy Awards|2015 Academy Awards, one of the Best Picture nominees, Boyhood (film)|Boyhood, used a similar method, filming short sequences annually over the course of 12 years. In 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.\n\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. This might be in parallel to Andy Warhol's piece of art \"915:_Connoisseur|Man eating a Hamburger\". Randall may also be referencing the many perspectives on art by leaving this comic open to several interpretations. The 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.\n\nThe title text is just more snarky, 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."}
-{"number": "1497", "date": "March 11, 2015", "title": "New Products", "image": "new_products.png", "titletext": "If you ever hear \"Wait, is that Kim Dotcom's new project? I'm really excited about it and already signed up, although I'm a little nervous about whether everyone should hand over control of their medical...\", it's time to dig a bunker in your backyard.", "transcript": ":'''Predicting the success or failure of a new product'''\n:based on what engineers and programmers are saying about it\n\n:[A two-column table illustrating this. The headings are actually standing above the table.]\n:{| class", "explanation": "This comic points out an apparent paradox in product performance: Many products that are [https://www.google.com/search?q"}
-{"number": "1498", "date": "March 13, 2015", "title": "Terry Pratchett", "image": "terry_pratchett.png", "titletext": "Thank you for teaching us how big our world is by sharing so many of your own.", "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:]\n\n:''I told her we were going to get married, and all she could talk about was frogs.''\n:''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\n:''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\n:''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\n:''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\n:::::::::::::::::::::::::::''— Masklin, Terry Pratchett's'' '''''The Bromeliad Trilogy'''''\n\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.]", "explanation": "File:10.12.12TerryPratchettByLuigiNovi1.jpg|Sir Terry in 2012|thumbThis comic is a tribute to the late Terry Pratchett|Sir Terry Pratchett. It came out the day after the renowned fantasy author died. The comic quotes a (slightly abridged) passage from ''The_Nome_Trilogy#Wings_.281990.29|Wings'', one of the three books of ''The Nome Trilogy|The Bromeliad Trilogy'' (also known as ''The Nome Trilogy''), a series of children's books by Sir Terry.\n\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 The_Nome_Trilogy#Diggers_.281990.29|description of this plot point when it happened in ''The_Nome_Trilogy#Diggers_.281990.29|Diggers''. She—amongst other things—muses about the fact that they are blind to the rest of the Universe, and that most people are blind to them.\n\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.\n\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. The 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. Terry Pratchett was also referenced in 1052#Verse 2|panel 18 of 1052: Every Major's Terrible. A similar :Category:Tribute|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."}
-{"number": "1499", "date": "March 16, 2015", "title": "Arbitrage", "image": "arbitrage.png", "titletext": "The invisible hand of the market never texts me back.", "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.]\n:Hairy: ''They're'' the ones giving chips away!\n:Hairy: If they don't see the arbitrage potential, sucks for them.\n:[On the bag is written: Chips.]\n\n:In a deep sense, society functions only because we generally avoid taking these people out to dinner.", "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 Market liquidity|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.\n\nThe place where Cueball and Hairy are eating is giving away unlimited free potato chip|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 – possibly all in sequence.\n\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.\n\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 Psychopathy#Sociopathy|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.\n\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.\n\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 (or Black Hat in 958: Hotels) 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."}
-{"number": "1500", "date": "March 18, 2015", "title": "Upside-Down Map", "image": "upside_down_map.png", "titletext": "Due to their proximity across the channel, there's long been tension between North Korea and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Southern Ireland.", "transcript": ":[Map of the world with all the landmasses rotated upside-down.]\n:[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\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\n:[Northern hemisphere:]\n:'''North America'''\n:Cuba\n:Greenland\n:'''Atlantic Ocean\n:Iceland\n:UK\n:'''Asia'''\n:Sri Lanka\n:'''Europe'''\n:'''Arctic Ocean'''\n:Taiwan\n:Japan\n:'''Pacific Ocean'''\n\n:[Southern hemisphere:]\n:'''Pacific Ocean'''\n:'''South America'''\n:Tierra del Fuego\n:'''Africa'''\n:'''Indian Ocean'''\n:Madagascar\n:Indonesia\n:'''Australia'''\n:New Zealand\n\n:[Below the main frame:]\n:'''This upside-down map will change your perspective on the world!'''", "explanation": "This comic plays on the idea that maps with the South-up map orientation|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"}
-{"number": "1501", "date": "March 20, 2015", "title": "Mysteries", "image": "mysteries.png", "titletext": "At the bottom left: The mystery of why, when I know I needed to be asleep an hour ago, I decide it's a good time to read through every Wikipedia article in the categories 'Out-of-place artifacts', 'Earth mysteries', 'Anomalous weather', and 'List of people who disappeared mysteriously'.", "transcript": ":[In a frame at the top left of the panel:]\n:'''Mysteries'''\n\n:[A chart with two crossing lines with double arrows. Each arrow is labeled:]\n:X-axis left: Not that weird\n:X-axis right: Weird as Hell\n:Y-axis top: I have no explanation\n:Y-axis bottom: Explanation seems pretty clear\n\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\n:[Top left quadrant:]\n:Who Carly Simon is singing about in ''You're So Vain''\n:UVB-76\n:Lindbergh baby\n:Toynbee tiles\n:Jimmy Hoffa\n\n:[Top right quadrant:]\n:MH370\n:Lead Masks Case\n:DB Cooper\n:The Wow signal\n:Salish Sea feet\n:Mary Celeste\n\n:[Bottom left quadrant:]\n:Voynich manuscript\n:JFK\n:Why I keep putting ice cream back in the fridge instead of the freezer\n:Oak Island Money Pit\n\n:[Bottom right quadrant:]\n:Zodiac letters\n:Amelia Earhart\n:Lost Colony\n:Kentucky meat shower\n:Bigfoot\n:Loch Ness Monster\n:Dyatlov Pass incident", "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|table below.\n\nItems near the top-right corner (such as the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370|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. \n\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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1502", "date": "March 23, 2015", "title": "Wasted Time", "image": "wasted_time.png", "titletext": "Since it sounds like your time spent typing can't possibly be less productive than your time spent not typing, have you tried typing SLOWER?", "transcript": ":[Cueball holding his smartphone in both hands is talking to White Hat.]\n:Cueball: This new keyboard is like 30% faster! I'm never going back.\n\n:[White Hat replies and Cueball lifts his arms.]\n:White Hat: Good, put those years of horror behind you.\n:Cueball: C'mon. Sure, sometimes my focus on efficiency doesn't make sense. But we type a '''''lot'''''.\n\n:[Cueball holding his smartphone in one hand while talking to White Hat.]\n:Cueball: That 30% improvement pretty quickly adds up to a ''huge'' amount of wasted time rescued.\n\n:[White hat replies and Cueball lifts one arm.]\n:White Hat: I just watched you open Google News and then close it without reading it '''''five times in a row.'''''\n:Cueball: The fact that I spend most of my time so stupidly only makes it '''''more''''' important not to waste any here.", "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.\n\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.\n\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 [http://news.google.com 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nRandall's misadventures in time management are a recurring topic (see 874: Time Management and the :Category:Time_management|Time management category).\n\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."}
-{"number": "1503", "date": "March 25, 2015", "title": "Squirrel Plan", "image": "squirrel_plan.png", "titletext": "[Halfway to the Sun ...] Heyyyy ... what if this BALLOON is full of acorns?!", "transcript": ":[There are three squirrels. One is suspended from a balloon. The other two are sitting on the ground, looking up at it.]\n\n:Squirrel 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.\n\n:Squirrel tied to balloon: Are you '''''sure''''' it's full of acorns?\n\n:Squirrel to the right: Look how bright and magnificent it is! What ''else'' could be in there?", "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 {{what if|30|\"Interplanetary Cessna\"}}), or the Tower of Babel. The squirrels' understanding of astrophysics is lacking,{{Citation needed}} 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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1504", "date": "March 27, 2015", "title": "Opportunity", "image": "opportunity.png", "titletext": "We all remember those famous first words spoken by an astronaut on the surface of Mars: \"That's one small step fo- HOLY SHIT LOOK OUT IT'S GOT SOME KIND OF DRILL! Get back to the ... [unintelligible] ... [signal lost]\"", "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\n:[Ponytail is sitting at a computer, facing left. Hairbun stands behind her.]\n:2010:\n:Ponytail: After six years, ''Spirit'' is down, but ''Opportunity'' is still going strong.\n:Hairbun: Tough little rover!\n\n:[Opportunity traveling on Mars. Text is written in frames with zigzag lines]\n:2015:\n:Off-screen: Eleven years, wow.\n:Off-screen 2: Wasn't the original mission 90 days?\n:Off-screen: This is starting to get weird.\n\n:[Cueball and Megan sitting at a computer, facing right.]\n:2023:\n:Cueball: The battery is totally disconnected. How can it still be moving??\n:Megan: Given what it did to the Mars 2020 rover, we may never know.\n\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]\n:2450, terraformed Mars, Martian imperial capital:\n:Martian Cueball: Everything the light touches is our kingdom.\n:Martian Megan: What's that dark area?\n:Martian Cueball: That is ''Opportunity's'' half of the planet. We must never go there.", "explanation": "This comic is talking about the robotic science platform Opportunity (rover)|''Opportunity''. On January 25, 2004, two rovers, named ''Spirit'' and ''Opportunity'' were landed on the surface of Mars for the purpose of gathering data about the surface of Mars. The original plan called for these rovers to function and collect data for 90 days on the surface. \n\nBoth rovers proved to be remarkably robust, with ''Spirit'' functioning for 6 years, 24 times longer than the original mission plan, before it became stuck in a sandstorm, which covered its solar panels. This was covered in 695: Spirit, in which the Spirit rover is also portrayed with an anthropomorphic personality.\n\nEven after ''Spirit'' ceased to function, ''Opportunity'' continued to operate. As of the publication of this strip, it had been operating for over 11 years. This comic extrapolates the rover's resilience to absurdity for comedic effect, implying that the rover begins to operate independently, even with its original power sources disconnected, and presumably developing some form of general intelligence. It then takes a darker turn, implying that ''Opportunity'' attacks both later rovers and even human astronauts that later land on Mars. This evolution is similar to the stories of HAL 9000 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)|''2001: A Space Odyssey'') and List of Star Trek characters (T–Z)#V'Ger|V'Ger (from ''Star Trek: The Motion Picture''), both of which became dangerous to human beings. The final panel suggests that humans eventually manage to terraform Mars, but that ''Opportunity'' grows so powerful that humanity cedes half the planet to it. \n\nIn real life, as of Feb 12th, 2019, the Opportunity rover has finally been Opportunity mission timeline|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.\n\nThey mention another Martian rover, Spirit (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.\n\nIn 2023, Opportunity is still moving despite having supposedly no power source. It also became aggressive and deactivated the Mars 2020|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 (film)|''2001: A Space Odyssey'') and List of Star Trek characters (T–Z)#V'Ger|V'Ger (from ''Star Trek: The Motion Picture''), both of which became dangerous to human beings. This, however, never ended up happening, as Opportunity \"officially\" stopped working on June 10, 2018.\n\n\"Everything the light touches\" is a reference to a line by List of The Lion King characters#Mufasa|Mufasa in ''The Lion King''. Mufasa's son List of The Lion King characters#Simba|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 [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/a/a0/1608_0986x1076y_Our_kingdom_from_a_cliff.png Cueball tells the same line] to Ponytail in the left part of the world. In the ''what if? (blog)|what if?'' article ''[https://what-if.xkcd.com/48 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.\"\n\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."}
-{"number": "1505", "date": "March 30, 2015", "title": "Ontological Argument", "image": "ontological_argument.png", "titletext": "A God who holds the world record for eating the most skateboards is greater than a God who does not hold that record.", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball are walking side-by-side.]\n:Megan: ...but wouldn't a God who could find a flaw in the ontological argument be even '''''greater?'''''", "explanation": "Ontology is the study of being, reality, and existence. “The ontological argument” is an attempt at proving the existence of God through reasoning about the nature of “being”.\n\nMegan's statement in the comic is likely a reference to what is considered the first ontological argument, that of 11th Century philosopher St. Anselm of Canterbury. His argument starts by defining God as “that than which nothing greater can be concept|conceived”. 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nA popular parody of the ontological argument is that of Richard Dawkins, in his best-selling book “The God Delusion”. 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—[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title"}
-{"number": "1506", "date": "April 1, 2015", "title": "xkcloud", "image": "xkcloud.png", "titletext": "", "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\n:[One large frame with a five part comic and a large red button at the bottom.]\n:[Cueball sitting behind a desk.]\n:Cueball: We've made a huge mistake.\n:Desk: XKCD.COM\n\n:[Cueball stands and indicates a motley collection of computers and related equipment strewn around the desk.]\n:Cueball: I figured starting a cloud services company would be easy.\n:Cueball: After all, I've got ''tons'' of computers!\n\n:[A zoomed view on Cueballs head.]\n:Cueball: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr— they all struggle to protect privacy and user data...\n:Cueball: And '''''we''''' offered a solution.\n:Cueball:
I forget what it was, though.\n\n:[Cueball is standing with his arms up.]\n:Cueball: Anyway, long story short, we screwed up ''immediately'' and lost ''tons'' of their data.\n:Cueball:
Also a bunch of stuff is literally on fire?\n\n:[Cueball standing behind a desk.]\n:Cueball: We can fix this.\n:Cueball: But we need your help.\n:Desk: XKCD.COM\n\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:]\n:'''CLICK HERE'''\n:To help us recover user data before Facebook & Co notice we lost it.\n\n:[The standard text for the next possible pages can be seen on the link to the '''1506: xkcloud/Transcript|continued transcript'''. Also here will be a list (which may not be possible to make complete) with possible text for the lost data.]", "explanation": "This was the sixth :Category:April fools' comics|April fools' comic released by Randall. The previous fools comic was \n1350: Lorenz from Tuesday April 1st 2014. The next was 1663: Garden scheduled for release Friday April 1st 2016, but in the end released on 1663:_Garden#Monday_4th_of_April_release|Monday April 4th 2016.\n\nIn this interactive April Fools' Day comic Cueball, presumably representing Randall, admits to the readers he built a flimsy Cloud computing|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, Inc.|Atari Pong#Home_version|Pong Console.\n\nHe named the company after xkcd, xkcloud being a :category:Portmanteau|portmanteau of \"xkcd\" and \"Cloud computing|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. \n\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.''\n\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.\n\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 Crowdsourcing|crowd-sourced content.\n\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 1506: xkcloud/Pictures posted by users#Randall's pictures|here.\n\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|permalink to save a given version of the comic to share with others.\n\nAn earlier comic was also related to problems with cloud computing: 908: The Cloud.\n\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.\n\n*Note that there have been some #Changes and bugs|changes and bugs regarding this comic after it was first released. \n*Some of the pictures that are referenced below was saved before these changes took place. So consult #Changes in the comic|these changes if the pictures do not match the expectations."}
-{"number": "1507", "date": "April 3, 2015", "title": "Metaball", "image": "metaball.png", "titletext": "Shoot, it landed in the golf course. Gonna be hard to get it down the--oh, never mind, it rolled onto the ice hazard. Face-off!", "transcript": ":[Megan runs towards a bouncing soccer football.]\n\n:[Megan kicks the soccer football upwards.]\n\n:[Cueball leaps towards the ball as it falls towards a basketball hoop. Hairbun also stretches her arm up.]\n:Ponytail (offscreen):'''''Out!'''''\n\n:[Ponytail walks toward them consulting a piece of paper divided in sections:]\n:[Megan (offscreen):] What do you ''mean'', out?!\n:Ponytail: The ball clipped the corner of the baseball zone. Infield fly rule.\n:[Megan (offscreen):] Aw, ''maaan''...", "explanation": "In the first two panels of this game Megan kicks a Ball (association football)|football (also known as a association football|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.\n\nThey are playing a ball game that incorporates the rules of many List of ball games|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.\n\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.\n\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 Batted ball|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.\n\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. \n\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.\n\nOn a golf course a Hazard (golf)|hazard is either a Hazard_(golf)#Bunker|bunker (with sand) or a /Hazard_(golf)#Water_hazard|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 Hockey puck|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.\n\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 Football_(ball)#American_and_Canadian_football|American football.\n\nGiven the timing of this comic with NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship|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).\n\nThis concept is very similar to [http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/05/27 Calvinball] from the comic strip ''Calvin and Hobbes'' by American cartoonist Bill Watterson."}
-{"number": "1508", "date": "April 6, 2015", "title": "Operating Systems", "image": "operating_systems.png", "titletext": "One of the survivors, poking around in the ruins with the point of a spear, uncovers a singed photo of Richard Stallman. They stare in silence. \"This,\" one of them finally says, \"This is a man who BELIEVED in something.\"", "transcript": ":[All text is in capitals. At the top of the panel:]\n::'''Operating Systems''' \n::running in my house\n\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:]\n:1990 2000 2010 Now 2020 2030 2040 2050 2060\n\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\n:[Level 1 from 1988 to 1998 (extends a little left past the beginning of the time-line but not off panel):]\n::MS DOS\n:[Level 2 from 1993 to 2007:]\n::Windows\n:[Level 3 from 1994 to 2001:]\n::Mac OS\n:[Level 1 from 1999 to 2018:]\n::Linux\n:[Level 2 from 2009 to 2023. On the way the bar merges with iOS around 2018 thru 2022:]\n::OS X\n:[Level 3 from 2009 to 2016:]\n::Android\n:[Level 4 from 2013 to 2022. On the way to 2022 the bar moves down past Android to merge with OS X after 2018:]\n::iOS\n:[Level 1 from 2018 to 2028. The text is written in square brackets:]\n::[Something].js\n:[Level 3 from 2022 to 2029:]\n::TinderOS\n:[Level 2 from 2023 to 2032:]\n::Nest\n:[Level 1 from 2028 to 2041:]\n::Elon Musk Project:\n:[Level 3 from 2030 to 2036:]\n::DOS, but ironically\n:[Level 2 from 2034 to 2041:]\n::Blood Drone\n:[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:]\n::[Human civilization ends in fire]\n:[Level 1 from 2059 going past the end of the panel past 2066:]\n::GNU/Hurd", "explanation": "In this comic, Randall gives an Gantt chart|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.\n\nIt may be that the OS that is closest to the time-line is also the one he mainly uses during these extended periods. Previous and current systems:\n*MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System): The default, command-line-based OS on most IBM PC-compatible computers. Early versions of Microsoft Windows operated as shells on top of MS-DOS rather than stand-alone OSes in their own right, which may explain part of the overlap in those two bars.\n*Apple's Mac OS (Macintosh Operating System): The OS of Apple's Macintosh line of computers. Randall's bar indicates that he stopped using Macs in 2001, after Mac OS had been superseded by the new and then-buggy Mac OS X.\n*Linux: A [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html free software] Unix-like kernel often used with the GNU system to produce GNU/Linux (commonly but erroneously referred to as simply Linux). Randall's bar indicates that he likely used it on one or two PCs starting from 1999 while still using Windows on other PCs, or perhaps was dual-booting one or more PCs with Windows, until abandoning Windows in 2007 to use (GNU/)Linux full-time. This timing coincides with the release of Microsoft's controversial Windows Vista and the advent of more user-friendly Linux distributions.\n*OS X (Macintosh Operating System v10): The successor OS of Apple's Macintosh line of computers. Although it was sometimes marketed as merely the 10th version of the earlier Mac OS, it was largely a new product. The bar indicates Randall's renewed use of Macintosh computers in 2009 after the OS had matured and Macs had transitioned to Intel processors.\n*Android (operating system)|Android: The upper layers of the OS running on Android phones and tablets, above the Linux Kernel (operating system)|kernel. Randall is indicating that he has at least one of these devices.\n*Apple's iOS: The OS of iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and the basis of the OS run by the Apple TV and Apple Watch. Randall is indicating that he also has at least one of these devices.\n\nHis predictions for the future include:\n*2018: That OS X (now called macOS) and iOS will merge. There is frequent speculation on technology blogs as to whether or not this merging will come to pass in the future. The two OSes have a common origin, share a lot of software, and are maintained by the same company that would benefit from the efficiency of maintaining a single unified OS. Opposing this is the fact that interaction patterns are very different between traditional computers and tablets/phones and a one-size-fits-both solution may not be feasible (as proven by Windows 8|Microsoft's disastrous attempt at such), and the fact that Apple spends some time in each of its recent keynotes mocking computers like the Microsoft Surface Pro which use both standard computer and touch control. However, just two months after this comic was posted, [https://youtu.be/DOYikXbC6Fs Apple asserted that they would not merge the two.] (That being said, Macs are getting closer to iOS devices now that they use the same type of processor, as well as copying some of the software design and features of iOS.)\n*2019: That an operating system designed with and for JavaScript will become attractive, perhaps along the lines of [http://node-os.com/ NodeOS] and/or [http://runtimejs.org/ Runtime.js].\n*2022: That there'll be an OS based on the Tinder (application)|Tinder dating app.\n*2024: That there'll be an OS from Nest Labs, presumably oriented towards home automation and the Internet of things.\n*2029: That Elon Musk will come up with an operating system.\n*2030: That Disk operating system|DOS would make a comeback, but only in an ironic fashion (maybe because there would be no more disks left for it to operate from).\n*2034: That Randall will be deploying an [http://geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/07/genetically-engineered-red-blood-cells-could-be-drug-delivery-drones/ autonomous drug-delivery drone] in his body.\n*2042: Human civilization comes to a fiery end, maybe due to some unholy combination of the above innovations. Another possible explanation is that human civilization will be wiped out by an artificial super-intelligence, superior to human intelligence, as Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Gates and many tech pundits foresee that 2045 will be the year to see such technology becoming real, and as Elon Musk, Bill Gates and many other tech pundits fear that it will be the extinction of all life on earth, as explained [http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html on this page].\n*2059: At this time his operating system will be GNU/Hurd. This infamously and perennially late [http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html GNU/Hurd] OS will finally make it in to Randall's home after human civilization has been wiped out. The joke is that GNU/Hurd began to be developed in 1990, and while it was expected to be released in a relatively short time, even now only unstable builds have been released. So Randall is saying that he will finally run it in his house a decade or two after the end of civilization. GNU/Hurd will presumably have an advantage as humanity rebuilds civilization due to the widespread availability of its code and development tools, and perhaps also because of Stallman's depth of belief, based on the title text. Alternatively, GNU/Hurd might be finished by the same force that finished humankind, for instance Skynet (Terminator)|Skynet, in case of Cybernetic revolt|AI Apocalypse. (Interestingly, although still far from completion, [http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hurd/hurd.git/commit/?id"}
-{"number": "1509", "date": "April 8, 2015", "title": "Scenery Cheat Sheet", "image": "scenery_cheat_sheet.png", "titletext": "At the boundary between each zone, stories blend together. Somewhere in the New Mexico desert, the Roadrunner is pursued by a tireless Anton Chigurh.", "transcript": ":[Above the frame is the following text.]\n:'''A cheat sheet for'''\n:figuring out where in the US you are\n:by recognizing the background from movies\n:(for use by GeoGuessr players and crash-landed astronauts)\n\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\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\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:]\n:The Goonies\n:[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:]\n:Twilight\n:50 Shades of Grey\n:[Small section around San Francisco, CA:]\n:Zodiac\n:[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:]\n:The Rock\n:[Large section covering most of MT as well as part of WY, SD and NE. The section has two titles:]\n:Dances with Wolves\n:Starship Troopers\n:[Medium section covering most of ID and part of MT:]\n:Napoleon Dynamite\n:[Medium section covering part of OR, ID, NV and UT:]\n:The Sandlot\n:[Medium section mainly covering the top part of NV:]\n:Wild Wild West\n:[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:]\n:Top Gun \n:& the part of Independence Day where Will Smith crashes\n:[Small section covering central CA:]\n:That movie about wine & talking\n:[Medium section covering a large part of the southern part of CA around Hollywood, Los Angeles:]\n:Every movie with a big budget, explosions or someone who says \"cool!\"\n:[Medium section covering half of WY and small parts of UT and CO:]\n:Brokeback Mountain\n:[Medium section covering part of WY, CO and NE. The part in parenthesis in a smaller font:]\n:Oregon Trail\n:(the only part I ever got to)\n:[Large section covering small part of UT and the half bottom of UT and CO and top half of AZ and NM:]\n:Roadrunner cartoons\n:[Medium section covering a small part of the southern CA and small part of AZ. The part beneath the title in a smaller font:]\n:The Truman Show,\n:but with desert as the background\n:[Small part at the bottom of AZ. The section has two titles:]\n:Tombstone\n:& The Mask of Zorro\n:[Large section covering a small part of AZ, the bottom half of NM as well as a third of TX:]\n:No Country for Old Men\n:[Large section covering all of ND, most of MN, half of SD and a small part of MT:]\n:Fargo\n:[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:]\n:Interstellar\n:Star Trek (2009)\n:] Earth parts\n:Field of Dreams\n:[Medium section covering large parts of IA, MO and IL:]\n:The Music Man\n:[Medium section covering mainly KS, but also a small part of Co and OK:]\n:The Wizard of Oz\n:[Medium section covering most of OK and small part of MO and AR:]\n:Twister\n:[Medium section covering the top part of TX and small parts of OK and AR:]\n:True Grit\n:[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:]\n:Office Space\n:Dazed and Confused\n:Kill Bill\n:[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:]\n:Blues Brothers\n:[Very small section almost a circle centered around Detroit, MI completely inside the section here below. It is labeled with an arrow:]\n:8 Mile\n:[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:]\n:A Christmas Story\n:&That song about Jack and Diane\n:[Medium section covering half of AR, small parts of IL and MO as well as bits of KY, TN and MS:]\n:Anything by Mark Twain\n:[Medium section covering half of TN and part of KY:]\n:Walk the Line\n:[Large section covering all of AL most of MS and half of GA. There are two titles in this section:]\n:Big Fish\n:O Brother Where Art Thou\n:[Small section covering top of LA and small part of MS:]\n:Duck Dynasty\n:[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:]\n:Princess and the Frog\n:All Dogs go to Heaven\n:[Small section covering the very eastern end of the bottom of LA – maybe including New Orleans. It is labeled with an arrow:]\n:Beasts of the Southern Wild\n:[Medium section covering half of PA and western part NY:]\n:Groundhog Day\n:[Small section covering the middle part of VA as well as small parts of PA, MD and WV:]\n:Dirty Dancing\n:[Medium section covering most of WV, half of TN, a small parts of KY as well as tiny bits of VA, NC and GA:]\n:October Sky\n:[Large section covering all of SC, most of NC as well as half of VA and GA. There are two titles in this section:]\n:Gone with the Wind\n:Forrest Gump\n:[Large section covering most of FL except the bottom part which are covered by the next two sections:]\n:The Truman Show\n:[Small section covering the very bottom of FL except the east coast. It is labeled with an arrow:]\n:Adaptation\n:[Small section covering the very bottom the east coast of FL. It is labeled with an arrow:]\n:Miami Vice\n:[Small section covering most of the top of VT and a small part of NY. It is labeled with an arrow:]\n:Super Troopers\n:[Small section covering the central part of NY.]\n:My Side of the Mountain (book)\n:[Small section covering the eastern part of NY, western part of MA, top part of CT as well as bits of VT and RI.:]\n:War of the Worlds (2005)\n:[Small section covering the eastern part of PA and small bits of NY and MD. There are two titles in this section:]\n:Signs\n:& The Village\n:[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…:]\n:[Generic city]\n:[Small section covering the east coast along VA and NC, but also with small bits of MD and DE at the top:]\n:Deep Impact\n:[Medium section covering all of ME, the top tip of NH and eastern top of VT:]\n:Pet Semetary\n:[Small section covering the most of the bottom parts of NH and VT:]\n:What about Bob\n:[Very small section surrounding Boston in MA. It is labeled with an arrow:]\n:The Departed\n:[Small section covering the east coast along MA, RI, CT and NJ:]\n:Jaws\n:[Large section off the east coast in the Atlantic Ocean:]\n: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 Northeastern United States|northeast, which is where Randall lives.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nSome entries (for instance, ''Groundhog Day (film)|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.\n\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 Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner|The Road Runner at the boundary between the sections for these two movies, which would be somewhere in the New Mexico desert."}
-{"number": "1510", "date": "April 10, 2015", "title": "Napoleon", "image": "napoleon.png", "titletext": "\"Mr. President, what if the unthinkable happens? What if the launch goes wrong, and Napoleon is not stranded on the moon?\" \"Have Safire write up a speech.\"", "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.]\n:Soldier at the front: This is Napoleon. He tried to take over the world.\n:Officer Cueball: Exile him to Elba!\n\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.]\n:Soldier at the front: It's us again. Napoleon escaped from Elba and tried to conquer the world. Again.\n:Officer Cueball: Send him someplace truly remote, like Saint Helena.\n:Soldier at the front: Yes, sir.\n\n:[At the top of the panel is a text in a frame that breaks the panel's frame:]\n:Several Years Later...\n\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.]\n:Soldier at the front: Well, he swam back.\n:Officer Cueball: We must mount an expedition to the South Pole, where we will encase Napoleon in the Antarctic ice!\"\n\n:[At the top of the panel is a text in a frame that breaks the panel's frame:]\n:A century later...\n\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.]\n:President Kennedy: We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy...", "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 Hundred Days|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—in fact, one of the most remote places on Earth.\n\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 km (1,200 mi.) 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 km (3,800 mi.).\n\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. In 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\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 s:In Event of Moon Disaster|\"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—instead 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."}
-{"number": "1511", "date": "April 13, 2015", "title": "Spice Girl", "image": "spice_girl.png", "titletext": "Haha, you'll see!", "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.]\n:Knocking on the door: '''Thump Thump'''\n:Voice: '''Which Spice Girl are you?!'''\n:Voice: The merciful one, or the one who started this war?\n\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:When I see those quiz titles, I like to imagine they're being shouted through a door in a postapocalyptic dystopia.", "explanation": ""}
-{"number": "1512", "date": "April 15, 2015", "title": "Horoscopes", "image": "horoscopes.png", "titletext": "If you live in the Northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, due to the coriolis effect, babies are born nine months BEFORE they're conceived.", "transcript": ":[Above the frame:]\n:'''Horoscopes'''\n:With an actual basis in fact\n:[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]\n:{| class", "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 equinox|First point of Aries.\n\nModern science has found Astrology and science|no basis for horoscopes. As with many unscientific claims and mythologies, Randall doesn't seem to care for the beliefs, and has more fun gently mocking them. The joke of this strip is that the only thing you can calculate from your astrological sign is the period of the year during which you were Fertilisation|conceived. The average human is born 38 weeks after conception. There's enough variation in the length of pregnancies that this can vary by as much as several months, but for the majority of people, the date of their conception can be calculated from their birthday, within a week or two.\n\nThis can be a slightly uncomfortable topic, because most humans were conceived by their parents having sexual intercourse, which is a topic that many people find uncomfortable to think about. The premise of this strip is that, based on the time you were born, you can make a guess at the circumstances under which you were conceived. Such guesses wouldn't be universally accurate, of course, but the notion that you could make a decent guess of the circumstances of someone's conception feels almost transgressive. \n\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. \n\nThe title text mentions that these predictions only apply to the northern hemisphere. This references both an issue with zodiac signs (as constellations are different in the southern hemisphere), and the fact that his 'predictions' are clearly based on an American context (many of the holiday references are exclusive to America). This idea is then lampooned by attributing it to the Coriolis effect (which has nothing to do with birth dates), and claiming that children in the southern hemisphere are born 9 months ''before'' conception (which is obviously impossible). \n\nThe Coriolis effect refers to a phenomenon of motion that occurs relative to a rotating reference frame. Since the Earth is rotating, an apparent force (the Coriolis force) causes objects moving toward the poles to be deflected to right in the northern hemisphere, and to the left in the southern hemisphere. This effect is the reason that Coriolis effect#Meteorology|weather systems (most clearly seen for hurricanes) which rotate in opposite directions, depending the hemisphere."}
-{"number": "1513", "date": "April 17, 2015", "title": "Code Quality", "image": "code_quality.png", "titletext": "I honestly didn't think you could even USE emoji in variable names. Or that there were so many different crying ones.", "transcript": ":[Cueball showing Ponytail his laptop.]\n:Cueball: Keep in mind that I'm self-taught, so my code may be a little messy.\n:Ponytail: Lemme see - I'm sure it's fine.\n\n:[Ponytail sits at desk, Cueball stand behind her.]\n: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\n:[Same scene.]\n:Ponytail: It's like a salad recipe written by a corporate lawyer using a phone autocorrect that only knew Excel formulas.\n\n:[Same scene.]\n:Ponytail: It's like someone took a transcript of a couple arguing at IKEA and made random edits until it compiled without errors.\n:Cueball: '''''Okay,''''' I'll read a style guide.", "explanation": "This comic is the first in the :Category:Code Quality|Code Quality series:\n* 1513: Code Quality\n* 1695: Code Quality 2\n* 1833: Code Quality 3\n* 1926: Bad Code\n* 2138|2138: Wanna See the Code?\n\n\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).\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 Infinite_monkey_theorem|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. \n\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 Software quality|code quality would benefit from far more training in computer programming.\n\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 :Category:Emoji|recurrent theme on xkcd, but this may have been the first comic to use them for a pun."}
-{"number": "1514", "date": "April 20, 2015", "title": "PermaCal", "image": "permacal.png", "titletext": "The flood of PermaCalNTP leap-second notifications was bad enough, but when people started asking for millisecond resolution, the resulting DDOS brought down the internet.", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball are in the panel. Cueball appears to be holding a phone, tapping.]\n:Megan: What day is it?\n:Cueball: Sunday the 19
th.\n:Megan: But you said it was the 19
th yesterday.\n:Cueball: It changed ''again''? Crap, better add another leap day.\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:My simplified calendar system assumes the date never changes, then corrects any drift via leap days.", "explanation": "This comic proposes a new calendar system, named PermaCal (a 739: Malamanteau | 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 February 29|leap day of the Gregorian calendar) is added to compensate.\n\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.\n\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 second|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.\n\nNetwork Time Protocol|NTP servers are used to keep local computer time from drifting. They also are used to announce Leap second|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.\n\nThe comic relates to several DDoS problems due to NTP server misuse and abuse over the years.\n\nPart of the humor stems from the problems that leap seconds are causing for some computers. [http://www.livescience.com/49370-leap-second-added-2015.html] The last leap second disrupted computers at big companies such as Reddit, LinkedIn, Gizmodo and FourSquare. Google first [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-leaping-seconds.html 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 [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11279992/math-behind-google-leap-second-smear-formula synchronization - Math behind Google leap second smear formula - Stack Overflow].\n\nA new calendar was also proposed in comic 1061: EST."}
-{"number": "1515", "date": "April 22, 2015", "title": "Basketball Earth", "image": "basketball_earth.png", "titletext": "How many points do you get for dunking every basketball in existence at once?", "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.]\n:Cueball: If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n\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.]\n:Cueball: The Moon would be—\n:Black Hat: Hey, cool!\n\n:[Black Hat is touching the Basketball Earth with a digit.]\n:Cueball: Um.\n\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.]\n:'''AAAAAAAA'''\n\n\n:[Back to Cueball standing with the Basketball Earth in the same position as the first panel.]\n:Cueball: Let's try that again. If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n\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.]\n:Cueball: The Moon would be—\n\n:[Megan squirts the Basketball Earth with the liquid in her water bottle while Cueball just stands watching with the Moon behind him].\n\n:[Megan just walks away while Cueball stares at his \"water\" Basketball Earth where the continents have disappeared completely beneath the liquid.]\n\n\n:[Back to Cueball standing with the Basketball Earth in the same position as the first panel.]\n:Cueball: If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n\n:[Same situation as when Black Hat walked in, except now he spots a cat coming into the frame from the left.]\n:Cueball: The Moon— would…\n\n:[While Cueball watches with the Moon behind him, the cat jumps at the Basketball Earth.]\n:Cat: Mrowl!\n\n:[Cueball continues to watch while the cat rolls around playing with the Basketball Earth as if it was a ball of yarn.]\n:Cat: Rrrrr\n\n\n:[Back to Cueball standing with the Basketball Earth in the same position as the first panel.]\n:Cueball: If the Earth were the size of a basketball,\n\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.]\n:Cueball: The Moon would, uh…\n\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\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.]", "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).\n\nA Basketball (ball)|basketball is about 25 cm in diameter and from this it can be inferred that the Moon should then be less than 7 cm 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 — as seems clear from the first row of panels — they are actually the real Moon and Earth shrunk to the relevant size, hence the title ''Basketball Earth''.\n\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.\n\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: [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/02/24/how-far-away-is-the-moon/ 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.)\n\nA basketball has an average diameter of 24.6 cm (9.7 inches) vs. a tennis ball, which has an average diameter of 6.7 cm (2.6 inches). 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 km (0.273 Earths)''. If he had used a Baseball (ball)|baseball, which is slightly larger, this would still be good enough for demonstrative purposes, as it would have been with an apple.\n\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 [http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/silveira60.html Sun the size of a basketball]. And here, coming from smaller scales, is an [http://www.infoplease.com/dk/science/encyclopedia/atoms.html#ESCI024ATOMS001 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.\"\n\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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1516", "date": "April 24, 2015", "title": "Win by Induction", "image": "win_by_induction.png", "titletext": "This would be bad enough, but every 30th or 40th pokéball has TWO of them inside.", "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 pokéball while Megan checks the time on her watch. The frontmost Pikachu, holding a closed pokéball, speaks.]\n\n:Pikachu at the front: Pikachu, I choose ''you!''", "explanation": "In the ''Pokémon'' franchise, human characters called Trainers capture fantastical creatures from the wild, the titular Pokémon (a shortened form of \"Pocket Monsters\"), and train them to battle one another. Pokémon are captured and stored in devices called Poké Balls, which shrink the creatures down to pocket size (hence \"Pocket Monsters\"). The anime's English dub has enshrined the phrase \"''
'', 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 Pokémon at full size.\n\nIn this comic, a Pokémon chosen at some point was a Pikachu (the \"poster child\" for Pokémon, 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 Pokéball is a long line of other Pikachu, suggesting that this process has been going on for a while.\n\nNearby stands Cueball, holding a closed Pokéball, and Megan, looking at her watch. This suggests that Cueball intends to have his own Pokémon fight the Pikachu, but is waiting to see which enemy his Pokémon 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 Pokéball he has not deployed yet, Megan cannot herself be his Pokémon. She could be his opponent, or a spectator.\n\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 humor 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.\n\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\" Pokémon could be word play connecting the two ideas.\n\nIf there were always only a single Pikachu in each Pokéball, 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 Pokéball, this would lead to exponential growth assuming each of the spawned Pikachu in this case is bearing a Pokéball! This may be a reference to the rate of twins, which is approximately 1/30 in humans.\n\nPikachu was used in one of the storylines of 1350: Lorenz. See all the attack moves it made 1350: Lorenz#Pok.C3.A9mon|here."}
-{"number": "1517", "date": "April 27, 2015", "title": "Spectroscopy", "image": "spectroscopy.png", "titletext": "Although right now I'm more excited about ESPRESSO's radial velocity measurements, so I'm listening to This Kiss, her song about measuring \"centrifugal motion\" on \"a rooftop under the sky\".", "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.]\n:I watch the sunlight\n\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.]\n:Dance across your face\n\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.]\n:I can see you breathe\n:Label: O2\n\n:[Below the panels is the following caption:]\n:Faith Hill on exoplanet spectroscopy", "explanation": "This comic mixes the method of using ''spectroscopy'' to detect oxygen on exoplanets (planets outside our Solar system) with [http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/faithhill/breathe.html the lyrics] for the Faith Hill song \"Breathe (Faith Hill song)|Breathe\" (listen to [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1518", "date": "April 29, 2015", "title": "Typical Morning Routine", "image": "typical_morning_routine.png", "titletext": "Hang on, I've heard this problem. We need to pour water into the duct until the phone floats up and ... wait, phones sink in water. Mercury. We need a vat of mercury to pour down the vent. That will definitely make this situation better and not worse.", "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.]\n:Alarm: '''Bleep Bleep'''\n:Voice (right): Urgh\n:Voice (left): Your alarm is going off\n:Voice (right): Huh?\n:Voice (left): Make it stop.\n:Voice (right) Urrgh\n\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.]\n:Alarm: '''Bleep Bleep Bleep B'''\n:Voice (left): Hit snooze.\n:Voice (right): I'm ''trying''. I closed the alarm app and I can't... I'll just pop out the battery.\n:Voice (right): Whoops!\n:Clang\n\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.]\n:Alarm: '''eep Bleep Bleep Ble'''\n:Off-Screen voice: Make it stop!\n:Hairy: It... fell down the vent.\n\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 on the right.]\n:Alarm: '''ep Bleep Bleep Bleep Ble'''\n:Off-Screen voice: Can you brick it remotely?\n:Hairy: Trying... I think I fumbled it into airplane mode?\n:Off-Screen voice: The battery could last for weeks.\n:Hairy: You know, maybe we should just move.", "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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nAs of when this comic was posted, Randall uses both iOS and Android according to 1508: Operating Systems—although 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.\n\nIf he were a little handy, Hairy might be able to open the vent and retrieve the phone—or 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 (electronics)|brick the phone from his laptop, permanently disabling all its functions (including the alarm app).\n\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).\n\nRather than finding a solution to the problem with the phone, Hairy proposes that they just move out instead.\n\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.\n\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 (element)|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).\n\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.\n\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; it wouldn't bring the phone within reach, but ��� provided the phone isn't sufficiently waterproof – it would disable and thereby silence it.\n\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\nFortunately, Hairy did not resort to using the EMP of a nuclear bomb to disable the phone, as while it would work, it would be overkill{{Citation needed}} and probably destroy the phone, him, his friend, and his surroundings."}
-{"number": "1519", "date": "May 1, 2015", "title": "Venus", "image": "venus.png", "titletext": "The sudden introduction of Venusian flowers led to an explosive growth of unusual Earth pollinators, which became known as the \"butterfly effect.\"", "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.]\n:Miss Lenhart: Venus was once temperate. It had seas and rivers, and Venusians cultivated vast fields of beautiful flowers.\n\n:[The image now shows the entirety of Venus, with continents and oceans. The greenhouses appear to be fleeing from Venus.]\n:Miss Lenhart: Until their greenhouses fled the planet due to the runaway greenhouse effect.\n\n:[Miss Lenhart is shown to be standing in front of a classroom. Jill is sitting in the front row.]\n:Miss Lenhart: The Venusians pursued their greenhouses to Earth, settling in the Netherlands and kickstarting the Dutch floral industry. Any questions?\n\n:Off-panel student (presumably Jill): Because you're retiring in a month, do you just not care what you say anymore?\n:Miss Lenhart: ''What?!'' I '''''ride the skies''''' atop a screaming bird of truth! Also, yes, I do not.", "explanation": "Miss Lenhart is #Trivia|teaching a class on science about the planet Venus.\n\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.\n\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 °C (860 °F), hotter than daytime on Mercury. This eventually destroyed all evidence of anything that had been on the surface of Venus billions of years ago.\n\nThe third panel ties the previous distortion of Miss Lenhart into the very real Tulip mania|historic reputation of the Netherlands as Netherlands#Agriculture|flower growers with a further fabrication by Miss Lenhart that the Dutch flower industry was in fact started by the Venusians.\n\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 Jill in the front row was not fooled.\n\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 Butterfly|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1520", "date": "May 4, 2015", "title": "Degree-Off", "image": "degree_off.png", "titletext": "I'M SORRY, FROM YOUR YEARS OF CONDESCENDING TOWARD THE 'SQUISHY SCIENCES', I ASSUMED YOU'D BE A LITTLE HARDER.", "transcript": ":[Hairy is acting as the host of a TV talk show, ''Degree-Off'' holding a microphone up. Cueball, Hairbun, and Megan are acting as representatives of physics, biology, and chemistry, respectively. They each stand behind their own lectern with the respective subject label.]\n:Hairy: Welcome to the '''''Degree-Off''''', where we determine which field is the best! Physics, wanna go first?\n:Cueball (Phys): Sure! I'd like to tell the story of Richard Feynman's Manhattan project lockpicking pranks...\n:Labels: Phys Bio Chem \n\n:[Zoom in so Megan is no longer visible. Cueball lifts his hand]\n:Cueball (Phys): ...and as he said, \"all science is either physics or stamp collecting.\"\n:Cueball (Phys): Thank you.\n:Hairy: ''Great!'' Bio, you wanna go next?\n:Hairbun: Okay.\n:Labels: Phys Bio\n\n:[Zoom in on Hairbun so only she and her lectern are shown. A graph is shown above her. There is 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.]\n:Y-axis label: Per 100,000\n:Y-axis:\n::800\n::600\n::400\n::200\n:X-axis: 1900 1950 2000\n:Hairbun (Bio): This is a graph of the death rate from infectious disease in this country.\n:Labels: Bio\n\n:[Zoom back to original scene with Hairy holding the microphone down and Hairbun raising her left hand, while Cueball looks at her.]\n:Hairbun (Bio): The heroes of my field have '''''slain''''' one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.\n:Labels: Phys Bio Chem \n\n:[Zoom in on only Cueball and Hairbun who is pointing aggressively at Cueball who leans away from her one hand on his lectern for support.]\n:Hairbun (Bio): While the heroes of '''''your''''' field gathered in the desert to create a new one.\n:Labels: Phys Bio\n\n:[Zoom back to previous scene all are holding their hands down.]\n:Cueball (Phys): ...Jeez, what the hell? I thought this was supposed to be fun and lighthearted!\n:Hairbun (Bio): '''''You must have been thinking of stamp collecting.'''''\n:Labels: Phys Bio Chem", "explanation": "Cueball (physics), Hairbun (biology), and Megan (chemistry) appear to be on a talk show stylized as a game 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 \"Academic degree|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.\n\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, Klaus_Fuchs|there was). He finishes his case with [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernest_Rutherford 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).\n\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 \"Eradication_of_infectious_diseases|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. Hairbun claims that the field of biology has eliminated widespread Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse#As_infectious_disease|Pestilence. 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.\n\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 [http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid"}
-{"number": "1521", "date": "May 6, 2015", "title": "Sword in the Stone", "image": "sword_in_the_stone.png", "titletext": "That seems like an awful lot of hassle when all I wanted was a cool sword.", "transcript": ":[Megan walks up to a sword in a stone.]\n\n:[Megan attempts to pull the sword out of the stone.]\n\n:[A beam of light and music plays as she removes the sword.]\n\n:[While standing with the swords a voice from the sky speaks in gray shaky letters:]\n:Celestial voice: ''The Throne of England is yours''\n\n:[Megan takes out her smart phone and searches:]\n:Wikipedia\n:England\n\n:[Megan reads on her phone.]\n\n:[Megan, still reading from her phone, starts to replace the sword back into the stone.]", "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 decides she does not want the throne of England and slowly places the sword into back the rock, without taking her eyes off the text.\n\nThe comic references the fables of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. In Arthurian legend, whoever can remove Excalibur#Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone|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 (novel)|The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White which is based on Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. The animated The Sword in the Stone (film)|musical by Walt Disney is a well-known version of this fairytale based on White's book.\n\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 associated. British history is rife with monarchic strife, and a brief inquiry into their List of monarchs of the British Isles by cause of death|causes of death will show that almost one in three British rulers have died either in battle or from murder, etc: Queen Elizabeth II, who was alive at the time of the comic's release, is the only English monarch to die of (exclusively) old age. This would quickly lead most people to conclude that the risks associated with ruling England far outweigh the benefits.\n\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.\n\nFrom the time of the Roman Empire all the way up to Charles II of England|Charles II's reclamation of the throne, the area now known as England has seen Invasions of the British Isles|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 of England|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 Anglo-Scottish Wars|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 List of Anglo-Welsh Wars|Welsh uprisings that occurred with such consistency that you could set your watch by them.\n\nIt is worth emphasizing that the term \"England\" is anachronistic in this context. At the time Arthur supposedly existed, there was no England — England was formed by Germanic tribes who Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain|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.\n\nThe timing of this comic might relate to the birth of princess Princess Charlotte of Cambridge|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 Succession to the Throne Act, 2013|2013 the Line of succession to the British throne|line of succession was changed to Primogeniture#Absolute primogeniture|absolute primogeniture, meaning that she will keep her current position in the line (4th after her Prince George of Cambridge|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.\n\nIt is also probably not a coincidence that this comic was published the day before the United Kingdom general election, 2015|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.\n\nA similar Wikipedia gag appears in 911: Magic School Bus.\n\nThe sword in the stone also appears in 2578: Sword Pull."}
-{"number": "1522", "date": "May 8, 2015", "title": "Astronomy", "image": "astronomy.png", "titletext": "Astrobiology is held back by the fact that we're all too nervous to try to balance on the ladder while holding an expensive microscope.", "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\n:[Beret Guy enters the panel holding a ladder and a magnifying glass.]\n\n:[Beret Guy places the ladder next to Megan and her telescope. The ladder stands like a triangle, is slightly larger than Megan, but smaller than the telescope.]\n\n:[Beret guy climbs to the top of the ladder, and looks at the stars through a magnifying glass.]", "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.\n\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}} (Unless, of course, you are Beret Guy.)\n\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).\n\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."}
-{"number": "1523", "date": "May 11, 2015", "title": "Microdrones", "image": "microdrones.png", "titletext": "Oh, weird, Amazon is out of butterfly nets.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is standing behind Megan who sits at a desk typing on her laptop.]\n:Cueball: So how do we regulate all these micro drones?\n:Cueball: I mean, Amazon delivery bots sound cool...\n\n:[Cueball stands alone surrounded by three micro drones.]\n: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\n:[Megan turns in her chair towards Cueball.]\n:Megan: If you wanna slow it down, why not just remove all regulations, but then make drone theft legal?\n\n:[Cueball takes his hand to his chin and Megan turns back to type on the laptop.]\n:Cueball: ...I ''like'' that.\n:Megan: You write to congress.\n:Megan: I'll stock up on butterfly nets.", "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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text suggests one of five things:\n*Amazon is out of stock of butterfly nets due to everyone purchasing them to catch drones with, implying many people had the same idea like Megan.\n*Amazon doesn't want people stealing their drones, so the nets are just suspiciously \"unavailable\".\n*Non-Amazon individuals controlling the drones have pre-emptively purchased them all.\n*Amazon has put all of its nets into a private stock, in order to steal other companies' or individuals' drones.\n*Amazon's drones have already become self-aware, and have altered the database in order to prevent their capture.\n\n\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."}
-{"number": "1524", "date": "May 13, 2015", "title": "Dimensions", "image": "dimensions.png", "titletext": "I would say time is definitely one of my top three favorite 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.]\n:Cueball: Of the four dimensions I could have spent my life being pushed inexorably forward through, I guess \"time\" isn't the worst.", "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.\n\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 or direction, we also are figuratively being pushed through time, and this movement is inexorable.\n\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.\n\nRather less romantically, it is possible that Cueball has merely been contemplating the fact that, if he were being inexorably pushed through one of the other spatial dimensions instead of time, he'd spend his entire life flying through space uncontrollably, maybe even out into outer space and to his death. Indeed, the unstoppable passage of time seems rather pleasant by comparison.\n\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 {{what if|64|rising steadily}} and {{what if|135|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. \n\nPreviously Randall has made a comic about a man who was pushed sideways — so he was pushed both through time and fell sideways: 417: The Man Who Fell Sideways."}
-{"number": "1525", "date": "May 15, 2015", "title": "Emojic 8 Ball", "image": "emojic_8_ball.png", "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.]\n:'''Emojic 8 Ball'''\n\n:[Below the title is an input field with a placeholder text in grayed out text:]\n:How will I die?\n\n:[Below is a gray submit button.]\n:Ask\n\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].", "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\".\n\nA real Magic 8 Ball is a toy designed to visually resemble a real billiard_ball#International_pool|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.\n\nThe ball in this comic provides responses in the form of graphical Unicode \"text\" (which this comic is suggesting are emoji).\n\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.\n\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 🐄 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.\n\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"}
-{"number": "1526", "date": "May 18, 2015", "title": "Placebo Blocker", "image": "placebo_blocker.png", "titletext": "They work even better if you take them with our experimental placebo booster, which I keep in the same bottle.", "transcript": ":[Hairbun is standing in front of Cueball who does all the talking. Below them is a footnote.]\n:Cueball: Some researchers* are starting to figure out the mechanism behind the placebo effect.\n:Cueball: We've used their work to create a new drug: A ''placebo effect blocker''.\n:Footnote: * Hall et al, DOI: 10.1016/J.MOLMED.2015.02.009\n\n:[Zoom in on Cueball who now holds his arms out.]\n: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...\n:Cueball: ...wait.\n\n:[Hairbun holds her chin, while Cueball just stand there for a beat panel.]\n\n:[Hairbun looks again at Cueball who begins to take the lid off of a medicine bottle.]\n:Hairbun: ...My head hurts.\n:Cueball: Mine too.\n:Cueball: Here, want a sugar pill?", "explanation": "This comic is a joke about the difficulty of testing a drug that is supposed to block the placebo effect.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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''.\n\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).\n\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.\n\nIt is possible but unlikely that:\n* Cueball's sugar pills are, in fact, the Placebo Blockers themselves and that, seeing Hairbun has a headache, Cueball is inspired to somehow use the opportunity as an experiment to test the Blockers\n* Cueball is suggesting Hairbun take a \"placebo booster\" which is really a \"placebo blocker\", thus testing the blocker he mentioned earlier in the comic.\n\nQuestionable neuroscience research is also discussed in 1453: fMRI."}
-{"number": "1527", "date": "May 20, 2015", "title": "Humans", "image": "humans.png", "titletext": "At this point, if we're going to keep insisting on portraying dinosaurs as featherless because it's \"cooler\", it's time to apply that same logic to art involving bald eagles.", "transcript": ":[Two robots are hovering in mid-air in the comic; what appear to be their optical arrays are facing each other.]\n:Robot 1: You know, new research suggests ancient human kings and queens were covered in colorful fabric.\n:Robot 2: Ugh, I like '''movie''' humans more. Screaming pink warriors with metal crowns poking through the skin on their heads!\n:Robot 2: Now they're, what, big pillows?\n:Robot 2: Science ruins everything.", "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'' Zabrak species may have somehow survived into the era of robot film and misinterpreted as describing a human.\n\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 Feathered dinosaur|feathers, and in well preserved specimens, often from the Jiufotang Formation in Northern China, feathers of various forms are clearly visible.\n\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.\n\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 [http://www.nature.com/news/the-last-medici-may-not-have-died-of-syphilis-after-all-1.12435 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 (1211: Birds and Dinosaurs|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."}
-{"number": "1528", "date": "May 22, 2015", "title": "Vodka", "image": "vodka.png", "titletext": "Or whatever's handy! I'm pretty much pure alcohol and water, so it doesn't really matter!", "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.]\n\n:Ponytail: Maybe this is the vodka talking, but:\n:Ponytail: ''Hi! I'm made from potatoes!''", "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.\n\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. In 1541: Voice, Ponytail is {{tvtropes|BodySnatcher|again possessed by a non-human entity}}, or maybe she is just making pranks with Megan in both cases.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1529", "date": "May 25, 2015", "title": "Bracket", "image": "bracket.png", "titletext": "I'm staring at the \"doctor\" section, and I can't help but feel like I've forgotten someone.", "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, Beyoncé, 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 Beyoncé 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:{| class", "explanation": "A Bracket (tournament)|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.\n\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, Beyoncé, is given a first- and second-round bye (sports)|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.\n\nThe title text may be a reference to Dr. Dre's 2001 song \"Forgot About Dre\" or could simply be a reference to the large number of pop culture personas that include the word \"Doctor\", such as Gregory House|Doctor House, Mehmet Oz|Dr. Oz, Doctor Eggman|Dr. Eggman, Phil McGraw|Dr. Phil, Dr. Watson, Emmett Brown|\"Doc\" Brown, Dr. Seuss, Dr Pepper, Doctor Doom, Zoidberg|Dr. Zoidberg, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and List of fictional doctors|many others. A 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.\n\nThe incentive for the comic may have been the 2015 French Open|French Open 2015, which started on the day of the publication.\n\nThe comic inspired several groups to play out versions of the bracket. One user-voting based match-up on twitter, [https://twitter.com/xkcdbracket XKCD Bracket], was featured by Randall on the xkcd home page, with a link 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 [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CLKJUpFWIAAlDnW.png:orig complete bracket]). The link was removed sometimes before Monday, 10 August 2015, within two weeks of the final result being revealed.\n\nLater Randall has made one smaller but similar bracket in 1819: Sweet 16, and then an interactive :Category:April fools' comics|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."}
-{"number": "1530", "date": "May 27, 2015", "title": "Keyboard Mash", "image": "keyboard_mash.png", "titletext": "WHY DON'T YOU COME HANG OUT INSIDE MY HOUSE. WE CAN COOK BREAD AND CHAT ABOUT OUR INTERNAL SKELETONS.", "transcript": ":[Cueball approaches his desktop computer, which has emitted a message seemingly from White Hat as it displays a picture of him.]\n:New chat message\n\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]:\n:White Hat: Can't sleep. Stupid dog keeps barking.\n:White Hat: So frustrating. FJAFJKLDSKF7JKFDJ\n:Cueball: Ugh, I'm sorry. Maybe you could...\n:Cueball: ... Okay, wait. I have to ask.\n:Cueball: How did you hit a \"7\" in the middle there?\n:White Hat: Huh?\n:White Hat: I was just randomly keyboard mashing.\n:Cueball: Sorry, Right.\n:White Hat: Anyway,\n:Cueball: I know this is silly, but like... All your hands were clearly right on the home row.\n:Cueball: I don't get how one finger could have stretched up to the \"7\".\n:White Hat: Why do you always fixate on these bizarre details?\n:Cueball: I don't know.\n:Cueball: Sorry.\n:White Hat: It's weird, is all.\n\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.]\n:Spider (as White Hat in the chat): I am a normal human typing with my human hands.\n:Cueball (chat): Yeah, of course. I know.\n:White Hat (speaking): '''Mmm!! Mmph!!!'''", "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.\n\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.\n\nThe statement \"I am a normal human typing with my human hands\" is {{tvtropes|SuspiciouslySpecificDenial|attemptedly 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.\n\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.\n\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 Rollover (key)#Key jamming and ghosting|key ghosting.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1531", "date": "May 29, 2015", "title": "The BDLPSWDKS Effect", "image": "the_bdlpswdks_effect.png", "titletext": "This well-known effect has of course been replicated in countless experiments.", "transcript": ":[Ponytail stands next to a screen displaying a firetruck hurtling toward Cueball on what appears to be a layer of gas.]\n\n:Ponytail: 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'''''.", "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.\n\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:\n\n*Bernoulli's principle in fluid dynamics (also mentioned in 803: Airfoil) states that an increase in the speed of a fluid with certain properties occurs simultaneously with a decrease in pressure or a decrease in the fluid's potential energy.\n** This is referenced by the firetruck lifting off and hurtling.\n*The Doppler effect in physics refers to the change in a wave's frequency for an observer moving relative to its source. Sound from the oncoming firetruck increases in pitch.\n**This is referenced by Cueball reacting faster if the shouting is in a non-tonal language than a tonal language. In tonal languages, changes in pitch change the meaning, thus tonal languages may suffer more from Doppler distortion than non-tonal ones. Additionally, the choice of firetruck was likely influenced by this effect, as a firetruck and its siren are often invoked as an example of it.\n**This may also be referenced by the fact that Cueball reacts faster when red is shouted as the Doppler effect makes light shift up the spectrum : red may still be visible after the shift but green may be out of the visible range. \n*The Leidenfrost effect, in physics, refers to how liquid will produce an insulating vapor layer when in near contact with an extremely hot surface, causing it to hover over said surface.\n**This is referenced by the firetruck lifting off on a layer of superheated gas.\n*The Peltzman effect, in behavioral economics, refers to how regulations intended to increase safety are ineffective or counterproductive because people, feeling safer, will engage in riskier behaviours.\n**This is referenced by the fire truck, which is intended to improve public safety by putting out fires, speeding and thus creating a hazardous situation and reducing the safety of the pedestrian. The firefighter may also be more inclined to drive recklessly due to the feeling of safety they have in a modern firetruck.\n*The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, in linguistics, states that a person's world view and cognitive processes are affected by the structure of the language the person speaks.\n**This is referenced by languages with a word for \"firefighter\" giving a quicker reaction. If Cueball speaks (or is currently thinking in) a language without a word for \"firefighter\", he might be slower to recognize the role and authority of the driver warning him, and thus slower to react to the danger.\n*The Dunning–Kruger effect, in social psychology, refers to unskilled people mistakenly perceiving themselves as more skilled than they really are, while skilled people underestimate their own abilities.\n**This is referenced by the tonal language being a language Cueball thinks he is fluent in but isn't.\n*The Stroop effect, in psychology, refers to the phenomenon in which it is easier to name the color of the ink in which a word is written when the word refers to the same color as the ink than when the word refers to a different color.\n**This is referenced by Cueball diving out faster if the driver screams \"red!\" than if the driver screams \"green!\", as a traditional American firetruck is red, and therefore it may create a moment of confusion for Cueball if the driver shouts \"green!\". It may also reference the common usage of \"red\" as indicating fire or danger, while \"green\" indicates safety.\n\nThis comic is probably a comment on the \"replication crisis\" in social psychology which has been in the [http://www.nature.com/news/first-results-from-psychology-s-largest-reproducibility-test-1.17433 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 [http://www.nature.com/news/disputed-results-a-fresh-blow-for-social-psychology-1.12902 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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1532", "date": "June 1, 2015", "title": "New Horizons", "image": "new_horizons.png", "titletext": "Last-minute course change: Let's see if we can hit Steve's house.", "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.]\n:Cueball: We made it! After all these years, ''New Horizons'' is finally revealing the surface of Pluto!\n:Ponytail: Take ''that'', ''Dawn'' team.\n\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\n:[A close-up of the two at the console.]\n:Cueball: OK, who did the calculations for the Jupiter slingshot maneuver?\n:Ponytail: (facing away from the computer console) Dammit, Steve...", "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 ([http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html NASA countdown clock]), six 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 ([http://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-new-horizons-sees-more-detail-as-it-draws-closer-to-pluto 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.\n''Dawn (spacecraft)|Dawn'' is a NASA mission launched in September 2007 to study the asteroid 4 Vesta|Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres (dwarf planet)|Ceres. Its closest approach to Vesta began on July 16, 2011 by the Dawn (spacecraft)#Vesta_approach|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.\n\nOn the day this comic was published, ''New Horizons'' was at 0.34 AU from Pluto and 32.55 AU from the Sun ([http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Where-is-New-Horizons/index.php Johns Hopkins University's New Horizons page]). One Astronomical unit|Astronomical unit (AU) is the approximate distance of Earth from the Sun, or about 150 million kilometers.\n\nDistances from the Sun by semi-major axis: Vesta 2.36 AU; Ceres 2.77 AU; Jupiter 5.20 AU; Pluto 39.26 AU.\n\nA Gravity assist|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.\n\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.\n\nAs the spacecraft gets closer, the images return... Earth. Steve had miscalculated the gravity assist and the spacecraft was about to crash into Earth.\n\nBecause the spacecraft carries 10.9 kg (24 lb) 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 km (65 miles) ([http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/Spacecraft/docs/NH_DEIS_Full.pdf 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.\n\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.\n\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)|what if?'' blog [http://what-if.xkcd.com/137/], and assuming the car was parked in the driveway the house would be similarly affected by the blast.\n\nLuckily this was not what happened and when New Horizons reached Pluto 1½ month later Randall made this tribute to the achievement: 1551: Pluto and also on that day he released the first ''what if? (blog)|what if?'' in over three months, and it was called [http://what-if.xkcd.com/137/ New Horizons].\n\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."}
-{"number": "1533", "date": "June 3, 2015", "title": "Antique Factory", "image": "antique_factory.png", "titletext": "WARNING: This item was aged by the same inexorable passage of time that also processes nuts.", "transcript": ":[Beret Guy is leaving with a briefcase in hand.]\n:Beret Guy: Gotta go - I'm late for work.\n:Off-screen voice: Oh, where are you working now?\n:Beret Guy: Antique factory!\n\n:[Beret Guy arrives in a room with a chair, a table, and a small cabinet. He pulls out the chair.]\n\n:[Beret Guy sits in the chair. He has placed the briefcase behind the chair.]\n\n:[Beat panel.]", "explanation": "Beret Guy has a new job with a paradoxical premise. When asked where he works, he says \"Antique factory!\" which is an {{Wiktionary|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.\n\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).\n\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.\n\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 {{Wiktionary|inexorable#Adjective|inexorably}} passed to make a specific item antique will also have processed nuts.\n\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 and in 1617: Time Capsule."}
-{"number": "1534", "date": "June 5, 2015", "title": "Beer", "image": "beer.png", "titletext": "Mmmm, this is such a positive experience! I feel no social pressure to enjoy it at all!", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Hairy standing in front of a fridge.]\n:Hairy: What do you drink? Stouts? Lagers?\n:Cueball: Uh, anything's fine.\n\n:[Cueball and Hairy holding beers and Hairy is drinking.]\n:Cueball: ...do you ever think maybe we should just admit that all beer tastes kind of bad and everyone's just pretending?\n\n:[Now Cueball drinks.]\n:Hairy: Man, you are ''no'' fun at all.\n:Cueball: Ok, got it. Not a word.\n:Hairy: Dude, if you don't like it, don't drink it.\n:Cueball: No, no, gotta do my part! Mmmmm!!!", "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 admission, 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.\n\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 is adamant on this stance and would sarcastically consume alcohol rather then refusing it. The second is more likely, as Hairy later suggests to Cueball that he should stop drinking the beer if he dislikes it (implying that he himself, having taken a swig earlier, does enjoy it).\n\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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1535", "date": "June 8, 2015", "title": "Words for Pets", "image": "words_for_pets.png", "titletext": "Seventh year: Perfectly coherent words, but in the pet's language, not mine.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the frame:]\n:Words I use to refer to a pet over the years I live with it:\n\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\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:]\n:The pet's name \n:Words related to the pet\n:Coherent words of any kind\n:First year\n\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:]\n:The pet's name \n:Words related to the pet\n:Coherent words of any kind\n:Second year\n\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:]\n:The pet's name \n:Words related to the pet\n:Coherent words of any kind\n:Third year\n\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:]\n:The pet's name \n:Words related to the pet\n:Coherent words of any kind\n:Fourth year onward", "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.\n\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\".\n\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 {{tvtropes|ADogNamedDog|trope}} about that.\n\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.\n\nThe fourth year entails the use of just any sound, not Coherence (linguistics)|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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\""}
-{"number": "1536", "date": "June 10, 2015", "title": "The Martian", "image": "the_martian.png", "titletext": "I have never seen a work of fiction so perfectly capture the out-of-nowhere shock of discovering that you've just bricked something important because you didn't pay enough attention to a loose wire.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is sitting at a desk using a computer and White Hat walks in.]\n:Cueball: Ooh, trailer for ''The Martian!''\n:White Hat: What's that?\n:Cueball: Movie of a book I liked.\n:White Hat: Should I read it?\n\n:[Cueball pivots on chair and turns away from computer to face White Hat.]\n: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?\n:White Hat: Yeah?\n\n:[Cueball pivots on chair again and resumes using computer while talking. White Hat looks at his smart phone.]\n:Cueball: ''The Martian'' is for people who wish the whole movie had just been more of that scene.\n:White Hat: How on earth did ''that'' become a big-budget thing with Matt Damon?\n:Cueball: No idea, but I'm ''so'' excited.", "explanation": "Cueball is very excited about seeing that the trailer for ''The Martian (film)|The Martian'' is finally released, because he really liked the book. Cueball most likely represents Randall himself in this comic.\n\n''The Martian'' is a 2015 film based on a 2011 science fiction The Martian (Weir novel)| novel of the same name by Andy Weir (writer)|Andy Weir. The plot involves an astronaut who's accidentally left on Mars when the rest of his crew has to leave during a disaster. The central plot of the novel involves the protagonist having to improvise ways to survive in such an inhospitable environment until a rescue mission can be mounted. \n\nWhite Hat is apparently unfamiliar with the book, and Cueball explains it by referencing a scene from another movie. Apollo 13 (film)|''Apollo 13'' is a film about Apollo 13 incident|an actual event in which a mission to the moon had to be aborted when the ship was damaged en route. In [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1537", "date": "June 12, 2015", "title": "Types", "image": "types.png", "titletext": "colors.rgb(\"blue\") yields \"#0000FF\". colors.rgb(\"yellowish blue\") yields NaN. colors.sort() yields \"rainbow\"", "transcript": ":[Caption above the black part of the comic:]\n:My new language is great, but it \n:has a few quirks regarding type:\n\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.]\n: [1]> 2+\"2\"\n: ", "explanation": "This comic is a series of programming jokes about a ridiculous new programming language, perhaps inspired by Mathematica and Wolfram Language — the latter was used by Randall many times before. Maybe it's also inspired by [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat 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.\n\nMost regular programming languages distinguish types, e.g. integers, strings, lists… 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:\n\n> 2 + 3\n5\n\n> \"123\" + \"abc\"\n\"123abc\"
\n\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.\n\nWeird results abound in the new XKCD programming language:\n# 2 + \"2\" uses the + operator on a number and a string. In some programming languages, this might result in the number 4 in math addition, or \"22\" in string concatenation; however, the new language converts the string to an integer, adds them to produce 4 and converts back to a string. Alternatively, it may instead be adding 2 to the ASCII value of the character \"2\" (50), resulting in the character \"4\" (52). This is (somewhat) consistent with the behavior for item 4.\n# \"2\" + [] adds a string to an array or list. This first inexplicably converts the string to a number again, and then it literally adds the number to the list by prepending it. And then the result (the entire array) is converted to a string again. (Possibly, this is meant to be read as 'adding brackets to the string \"2\" produces the string \"[2]\"?')\n# (2/0) divides 2 by 0 and quite reasonably results in NaN, meaning \"Not a Number\", though in most languages, as prescribed by the IEEE 754 standard for floating point numbers, dividing a nonzero number by zero would instead return an infinity value.\n# (2/0)+2 adds 2 to NaN. 2 Is \"added\" to the string \"NaN\" as again, the number is converted to a string for apparently no reason, which produces \"NaP\". If the language's convention is to add to the ASCII value of a character or string, then in this case it added 2 to the character \"N\" (78), resulting in \"P\" (80). How the string \"NaP\" is converted into a bare NaP with undefined meaning is not clear. It is possible the \"NaP\" means \"Not a Positive\" as opposed to \"Not a Negative\". It could also mean \"Not a Prayer\", as you're taking a \"NaN\" condition and trying to do more with it.\n# \"\"+\"\": In many languages, two consecutive double-quote characters denote an empty string, so this expression would concatenate two empty strings, resulting in an empty string. However, it appears that this language treats only the outermost quotes of the expression as the string boundary, so all of the characters between them become part of the literal string, producing '\"+\"' (In many programming languages, you can use both \" or ' to delimit strings and both behave similarly if not identical). Alternately, these two consecutive double quotes may be treated similarly to the way that consecutive single quotes are treated in a SQL string, with the first quote escaping the 2nd. This would result in a string that contains the value \"+\". It is also possible to read this expression as '\"'+'\"', which would usually be '\"\"'.\n# [1,2,3]+2 seems to test whether it's sound to append 2 to the list [1,2,3], and concludes that it doesn't fit the pattern, returning the boolean value false. It could conceivably also be the result of an attempt to add 2 to the ''set'' [1,2,3], which already contains that element (although {1,2,3} would be a more common notation for sets).\n# [1,2,3]+4 returns true for much the same reason.\n# 2/(2-(3/2+1/2)) is a floating point joke. Floating point numbers are notoriously imprecise. With precise mathematics, (3/2+1/2) would be exactly 2, hence the entire thing would evaluate to 2/0 or NaN in Randall's new language. However, the result of (3/2+1/2) is \"just slightly off,\" which makes the result \"just slightly off\" of NaN, which would be ridiculous in a real language. The ironic thing is that fractions with 2 in the denominator are ''not'' the kind of numbers that typically suffer from floating point imprecision. Additionally, if there had indeed been a rounding error, the actual calculation would become something like 2/0.000000000000013, which should not return a NaN since it is not division by zero. It is most likely not a coincidence that there are 13 zeros before the \"13\" at the end of the \"decimal\".\n# RANGE(\" \") normally wouldn't make any sense. However, the new language appears to interpret it as ASCII, and in the ASCII table, character #32 is space, #33 is !, and #34 is \". So, instead of interpreting \" \" as a string, it seems to be interpreted as 34, 32, 34 (in ASCII), and then range appears to transform this into 34, 33, 32, 33, 34 (the \"ranges\" between the numbers), which, interpreted as ASCII, becomes ('\"','!',' ','!','\"').\n# +2 adds 2 to the ''line number'', 10, and returns the result, 12.\n# 2+2 would normally be 4. However, the interpreter takes this instruction to mean that the user wishes to increase the actual value of the number 2 (aka the \"literal value\") by 2 for the remainder of the program, making it 4 and then reports that the work is \"Done\". The result can be seen in the subsequent lines where all 2s are replaced by 4s. This could be a reference to languages like Fortran where [http://everything2.com/title/Changing+the+value+of+5+in+FORTRAN literals could be assigned new values]. This would normally be 2+"}
-{"number": "1538", "date": "June 15, 2015", "title": "Lyrics", "image": "lyrics.png", "titletext": "To me, trying to understand song lyrics feels like when I see text in a dream but it𝔰 hอᵣd t₀ ᵣeₐd aกd 𝒾 canٖt fཱྀcu༧༦࿐༄", "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.]\n:I CANT₣∇EN +ELҼ ⊤HER\n:A|N⊃Г⊕N6 ƒHE W(AN NAp.\n:HADβE Aūτ|ƒA!NNNG∩fҠILL...\n:FOR♡ITiNn⊣GLOOOO!VEEE ?.-\n\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be able to understand song lyrics without looking them up.", "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.\n\nThere are also certain types of people that may describe themselves as \"lyric deaf\", which is sort of the lyrical equivalent to being Tone deafness|tone deaf, although it doesn't have an underlying medical understanding. Some people that describe themselves as tone deaf are even quite musically capable.\n\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.\n\nAnother example of this experience can be seen in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1539", "date": "June 17, 2015", "title": "Planning", "image": "planning.png", "titletext": "[10 years later] Man, why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook control over our nuclear weapons?", "transcript": ":[Megan and Ponytail are walking]\n:Ponytail: Why are people so comfortable handing Google and Facebook all this control over our lives?\n:Megan: I dunno.\n:Megan: Our species built thousands of nuclear weapons, scattered them around the planet, and then moved on to other things.\n:Megan: Maybe it's best to accept that some of this big-picture planning is just happening on autopilot.", "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.\n\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 [http://www.somethingawful.com/d/weekend-web/aol-search-log.php 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.\n\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.\n\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 Technological_singularity|singularity, from which perspective handing over control of nuclear weapons could be desirable, catastrophic, implicit and/or unavoidable. \n\nThis comic was posted on the day after Vladimir Putin had [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/world/europe/putin-40-new-missiles-russian-nuclear-arsenal.html announced] that Russia would add 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear stockpile within the year.\n\nWithin a year Randall has made several other comics about nuclear weapons, the first of these, 1520: Degree-Off, came just 1½ 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 weapon|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}}. Google and Facebook are not the only unlikely organizations Randall has imagined could become military powers-in the title text to 1953: The History of Unicode he imagined the Unicode Consortium apparently taking over arbitrating world peace from the United Nations."}
-{"number": "1540", "date": "June 19, 2015", "title": "Hemingway", "image": "hemingway.png", "titletext": "Instead of bobcat, package contained chair.", "transcript": ":Hemingway's Rough Drafts\n\n:[A list of rough draft stories.]\n:For sale: This Gullible Baby's Shoes\n:Baby Shoes For Sale By Owner\n:Actually, there's no evidence Hemingway wrote\n:Free Shoes, Provided You Overpower Baby\n:For Sale: Weird Baby's Toe Shoes\n:For Sale: Baby Shoes (not included)\n:Boneless\n:Ear screen\n:Heartbeat accelerator\n:MobilePay money clip\n:Siri, or whoever it was we put in here\n:Instead of being on surface only, screen goes all the way through\n:theknot.com partnership: Phone licensed to perform wedding ceremonies and does so at random\n:Fingerprint randomizer\n:USB E \n:(hotswappable)\n:Waterproof, but can drown\n:Foretold by prophecy\n:Runs natively\n:Wristband\n:Wireless discharging\n:Magnetic stripe\n\n:[Below the phone:]\n:Introducing\n:The xkcd Phone 3\n:We made another one®©™", "explanation": "This is the third entry in the ongoing :Category:xkcd Phones|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. The phrase \"We made another one®©™\" is a reference to how phone companies release new phones very often, and the trademarks that surround the phone itself. From the top, going clockwise:\n\n; 2 AA batteries (not included)\n\n: A 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. The 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. Alternatively, it 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}}\n\n; Boneless\n\n: Reference 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 IPhone 6#Bendgate (chassis bending)|could bend under pressure. Likely a reference to \"Bone Conduction Microphones\" implying that needing bones to work is a disadvantage and this phone has the feature of being \"Boneless\". The xkcd Phone 4 was instead \"seedless\".\n\n; Ear screen\n\n: An 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. Could also be implying that there's a screen protecting the user's ear from the phone's internals, or the reverse.\n\n; Heartbeat accelerator\n\n: A 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.\n\n; MobilePay money clip\n\n: While 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.\n\n; Siri, or whoever it was we put in here\n\n: A joke on intelligent personal assistants. It also hints that Siri and other assistants are actual people, trapped inside of phones, which is not the case.{{Citation needed}}\n\n; Instead of being on surface only, screen goes all the way through\n\n: A 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. Screen 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.\n\n; theknot.com partnership: phone licensed to perform wedding ceremonies and does so at random\n\n: [https://www.theknot.com/ theknot.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 Obergefell_v._Hodges|legalized in the United States just two weeks prior to the release of this comic.\n\n; Fingerprint randomizer\n\n: Presumably randomizes 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.\n\n; USB E (hotswappable)\n\n: A 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. May 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.\n\n; Waterproof, but can drown\n\n: Perhaps 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.\n\n; Foretold by prophecy\n\n: Likely 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.\n\n; Runs natively\n\n: The comic is making a joke about the phrase \"runs natively\" when referring to a phone. In the software context, \"runs natively\" means that an application is specifically compiled and optimized to work on a particular platform, resulting in better performance. However, when talking about hardware like a phone, it's not meaningful to say it \"runs natively\" because that phrase is only applicable to software. The joke might also poke fun at the marketing term \"runs natively\" when used for phones, implying that the phone can operate without any modifications. This could be a humorous reference to previous xkcd phones, which may not have lived up to expectations.\n\n; Wristband\n\n: Probably 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.\n\n; Wireless discharging\n\n: Some 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. It 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.\n\n; Magnetic stripe\n\n: Likely a dig at the NFC (near-field communication) wireless radio modules in many modern phones. NFC allows, among other functions, mobile payment. This magnetic stripe could be a cheap way to imitate payment functionality, but \"compatible\" with classic credit cards. Magnetic 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. It would also be very annoying as it seems to block part of the screen, albeit a small portion. However, 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. \n\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 them 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. Alternatively, the owner of the phone must be taken to a specific place in order to use the phone, and if they return it, they will be allowed to return home."}
-{"number": "1550", "date": "July 13, 2015", "title": "Episode VII", "image": "episode_vii.png", "titletext": "The Lord of the Rings sequel, set years after the Ring hubbub has died down, is just Samwise discreetly creeping back to Bag End to finish dropping the eaves.", "transcript": ":[Black background with white letters in the style of the Star Wars logo with the subtitle in between the two words.]\n:'''Star'''\n:The Force Awakens\n:'''Wars'''\n\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.]\n:Sign: Tosche Station\n\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.]\n:Hooded man: Hello.\n\n:[Closeup of hooded man. The man has a mustache and a beard and thick black hair.]\n:Hooded man: I’m here for those power converters.\n\n:[Black background with white letters resembling movie credits.]\n:Directed by \n:'''J.J. Abrams'''", "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."}
-{"number": "1551", "date": "July 14, 2015", "title": "Pluto", "image": "pluto.png", "titletext": "After decades of increasingly confused arguing, Pluto is reclassified as a \"dwarf Pluto.\"", "transcript": ":'''PLUTO'''\n:Some of the features already identified in today's ''New Horizons'' image\n\n:[Many marks on the image of Pluto follow:]\n\n:Candy shell\n:Frontal bone\n:Grease stains\n:Bugs\n:JPEG plumes\n:Full text of the wikipedia article on pareidolia\n:Bullet holes\n:New Netherlands\n:Disputed territory\n:Snake pit\n:Tadpole\n:Pluto dinosaur extinction crater\n:Kuiper beltloops\n:Serenity\n:Ghost\n:Dinosaur\n:The good part\n:Moon bud\n:Scars from predator attacks\n:Reset button\n:Megaman\n:Charging socket\n:Cracks (beginning to hatch)\n:Plug (inflating/deflating)\n:Heart\n::Mount Mons\n::Coronary artery disease\n:Debate hole\n::Where we're putting all the people still arguing about Pluto's planet status\n:Chocolate frosting\n:Probably benign\n:Vanilla frosting\n:Dock connector\n:Border of pride lands\n:Hyena country\n:Area missed during ironing\n\n:Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI - click for original", "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? (blog)|what if?'' in over three months, and it was called [http://what-if.xkcd.com/137/ New Horizons]. Luckily it did not end up back on Earth, as depicted in 1532: New Horizons, released 1½ month before closest approach.\n\nRandall has taken one of the probe's images of Pluto, and outlined humorous examples of Pareidolia|pareidolia on top of it.\n\nIt can be compared to preliminary descriptions by geologists, e.g. [http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/07140911-new-horizons-best-look-at.html?referrer"}
-{"number": "1552", "date": "July 17, 2015", "title": "Rulebook", "image": "rulebook.png", "titletext": "It's definitely an intentional foul, but we've decided it's worth it.", "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.]\n:Ponytail: There's nothing in the rulebook that says we can't kill and eat your dog.", "explanation": "This comic is a direct reference to the 1997 film ''Air Bud''. In the film, a golden retriever becomes the star player on a basketball team. The obvious objection to an animal playing on human team is raised, but is handwaved by the referee responding \"ain't no rule says a dog can't play basketball.\" \n\nIn organized sports, the rulebook is generally considered to be the final arbiter of decisions, but the interpretation that anything not explicitly considered in the rulebook is allowed is shaky at best. It's impossible for a rulebook to detail every possible scenario that someone could attempt, and certain basic assumptions about gameplay need to be made. Ponytail highlights this by pointing out that there's also not an explicit rule against killing and eating an opposing player. With human players, this would be covered by laws against murder and cannibalism, but dogs don't enjoy the same level of legal protection (there may be animal cruelty laws, but those are likely to be far less punitive).\n\nThe title text does acknowledge that killing and eating an opposing player is likely covered under the rules concerning technical foul|fouls, but the benefit of committing the foul (the star player being dead) would be worth the resulting penalty (giving the other team a couple of free throws). This likely pokes fun at the common practice of intentional fouls. It's not uncommon for players to commit fouls intentionally, having calculated that they'll gain some advantage (such as breaking the momentum of a play) which is worth the penalties they'll incur. \n\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."}
-{"number": "1553", "date": "July 20, 2015", "title": "Public Key", "image": "public_key.png", "titletext": "I guess I should be signing stuff, but I've never been sure what to sign. Maybe if I post my private key, I can crowdsource my decisions about what to sign.", "transcript": ":[In the first panel, Cueball is sitting in a chair and is using a laptop.]\n: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\n:[This is followed by two beat panels where Cueball just sits there. doing nothing, not even thinking.]\n\n:[In the final panel he again uses his laptop and thinks.]\n:Cueball (thinking): Maybe I should try posting my ''private'' key instead.", "explanation": "In public-key cryptography, two keys are generated for a user. The public key can be used to encryption|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.\n\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.)\n\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.\n\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 [http://www.ideaconnection.com/open-innovation-success/Crowdsourcing-Down-on-the-Farm-00304.html a farm in the UK] in which ordinary Internet users make decisions about how the farm is run. \n\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.\n\nRandall previously ironically mentioned a public key in 370: Redwall."}
-{"number": "1554", "date": "July 22, 2015", "title": "Spice Girls", "image": "spice_girls.png", "titletext": "The Earth's five major mass extinctions were the Posh Extinction, the Sporty Extinction, the Scary Extinction, the Ginger Extinction, and the Baby Extinction.", "transcript": ":Cueball: Your turn: Can you name all of the Spice Girls?\n\n:Megan: Hmm… Hearing Spice, Vision Spice, Smell Spice, Touch Spice, Taste Spice?\n:Cueball: That’s senses.\n\n:Megan: Denial Spice, Anger Spice, Bargaining Spice, Depression Spice, Acceptance Spice.\n:Cueball: Stages of grief.\n\n:Megan: War Spice, Famine Spice, Plague Spice, Death Spice?\n:Cueball: You're not even trying.\n\n:Megan: No, wait, I can get this for real. Uhh…\n:Megan: Pog Spice, Story Spice, Sarah Spice, Gender Spice, Baleen Spice?\n:Cueball: …Close enough.", "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\n*Posh Spice (Victoria Beckham)\n*Sporty Spice (Melanie C|Melanie Chisholm)\n*Scary Spice (Mel B|Melanie Brown),\n*Ginger Spice (Geri Halliwell)\n*Baby Spice (Emma Bunton)\n\nInstead, Megan winds up making up names by tacking \"Spice\" onto words from other, completely unrelated categories:\n*First guess: The Sense#Traditional senses|five human senses: Hearing, Visual perception|Vision, Olfactory system|Smell, Touch, and Gustatory system|Taste.\n*Second guess: The Kübler-Ross model|five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.\n*Third guess: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Infection|Plague, and Death_(personification)|Death.\n*Fourth guess: Words that are phonetically similar to the actual names: Pogs|Pog (Posh), Story (Sporty), Sarah (Scary), Gender (Ginger), and Baleen (Baby).\n\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.\n\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 Extinction event#Major extinction events|Earth's five mass extinctions. The [http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview.html five actual worst mass extinctions] are:\n*The Ordovician-Silurian extinction,\n*The Late Devonian extinction,\n*The Permian-Triassic extinction,\n*The End Triassic extinction, and\n*The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction.\n\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. On the other hand, he suggests he mixes up different sets when they each consist of 1417: Seven|seven members."}
-{"number": "1555", "date": "July 24, 2015", "title": "Exoplanet Names 2", "image": "exoplanet_names_2.png", "titletext": "I'm going to drive this Netherlands joke so far into the ground they'll have to build levees around it to keep the sea out.", "transcript": ":[Black Hat points with a stick at a slide showing an image of a planet with unknown features marked by questions marks.]\n:Kepler-452b\n\n:Black Hat: NASA has announced the discovery of a (super-)Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star.\n: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\n\n:While we wait to hear from the IAU,\n:here's a revised and updated list of\n:planet name suggestions (see xkcd.com/1253)\n:h\" (\"ice one-h\"). Most of the more unusual forms of ice only form under very high pressure.\n\nRandall|Randall's phase diagram starts out realistically, though slightly simplified in several ways. For one, ice Ih is simply called \"ice\". 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.\n\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.\n\nVanilla Ice's biggest hit, \"Ice Ice Baby\", used samples from the earlier song \"Under Pressure\", by David Bowie and Queen (band)|Queen; accordingly, on Randall's diagram, the \"Vanilla Ice\" region transitions to \"David Bowie & Queen\" when it is under (even higher) pressure.\n\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 Ice_Ice_Baby#Lyrics_and_music|1990 Vanilla Ice finally admitted that he used unmodified samples from \"Under Pressure\" and paid royalties to Queen and Bowie."}
-{"number": "1562", "date": "August 10, 2015", "title": "I in Team", "image": "i_in_team.png", "titletext": "There's no \"I\" in \"VOWELS\".", "transcript": ":[Hairy and Cueball stand opposite each other.]\n:Hairy: Remember, there's no \"I\" in \"team\".\n:Cueball: No, but there's a \"U\" in \"People who apparently don't understand the relationship between orthography and meaning\".", "explanation": "\"There's no I in team\" is a well-known saying that tries to encourage teamwork. The intention of the phrase is to state that, just as the letter \"I\" is not present in the word \"team\", doing things on your own is not constructive when working in groups. 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. \n\nThe phrase \"no I in team\" dates from the 1960s in the USA with printed references [http://www.knowyourphrase.com/phrase-meanings/Theres-no-I-in-team.html] 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.\n\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, especially when considering that \"there's no me in team\" would, strictly speaking, be a bit more grammatical. On a related note, in the International Phonetic Alphabet, an alphabet designed to spell words from every language in a completely unambiguous and straightforward manner, \"team\" would be rendered /ti:m/.\n\nOf course, the spelling (or orthography) of a word doesn't relate to its meaning (an instance of the use–mention distinction), and the comic makes fun of this by Cueball ironically echoing the sentence's sentiments by pointing out there ''is'' a \"u\" in \"People who apparently don't understand the relationship between orthography and meaning\", taking advantage that the letter and the pronoun \"you\", here referring to Hairy, are pronounced identically.\n\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 assume aphorisms are literal'\".\n\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\".\n\nOrthography was the subject of 1069: Alphabet."}
-{"number": "1563", "date": "August 12, 2015", "title": "Synonym Movies", "image": "synonym_movies.png", "titletext": "Fans eagerly await 2015's 'Space Fights: Power Gets Up', although most think 1999's 'Space Fights: The Scary Ghost' didn't live up to the hype.", "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.]\n:Space Fights: Sudden Optimism\n:Space Fights: The Government Wins This One\n:Space Fights: The Sword Wizard Is Back\n\n:The Jewelry God: The Jewelry Team\n:The Jewelry God: Double Houses\n:The Jewelry God: We Have a Czar Again\n\n:Space Trip: The Movie\n:Space Trip: That Guy is Angry\n:Space Trip: Where is the Vulcan\n:Space Trip: Let's Go Back\n\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:'''Synonym Movies'''", "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 (film series)|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 :Category:Synonym Movies|series when more movies were spoofed in 1568: Synonym Movies 2.\n\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\" sounds 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\".\n\nThe title text refers to the latest Star Wars movie (2015-12-18), after The Walt Disney Company|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, the 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1564", "date": "August 14, 2015", "title": "Every Seven Seconds", "image": "every_seven_seconds.png", "titletext": "Every few months, I think about sex every seven seconds and how weird and implausible it would be.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is walking with four thought bubbles above him.]\n\n:Cueball (thinking):\n::There’s no way that’s true.\n::It would interfere with basic cognition.\n::Such a ridiculous view of masculinity.\n::How would you even ''study'' that?\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Every seven seconds, sociologists\n:think about that made-up statistic\n:about how often men think about sex.", "explanation": "There is an oft-stated urban myth that men think about sex every seven seconds. See for example this [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140617-how-often-do-men-think-about-sex BBC article], where they say that a more realistic number is 19 times in a waking day, i.e. once every 50 minutes.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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:\n\nIn the title text, the narrator's statement leaves some meaning up to interpretation:\n*Every few months, I \"think about sex\" every seven seconds [in one day, i.e. 8200 times that day] and how weird and implausible [having intercourse] would be.\n**Implying that narrator's sex life is not very active.\n*Every few months, I think about [the statistic that men think about] sex every seven seconds and how weird and implausible it would be.\n**A take on the main comic's topic, mirroring Cueball's thoughts.\n*Every few months, I think about \"sex\" every seven seconds and how weird and implausible [such an assertion] would be.\n**This interpretation is a bit paradoxical, because it implies that the narrator finds himself thinking about the very thing he dismisses as a possibility to think about so often.\n*Every few months, I think about \"sex every seven seconds\" and how weird and implausible [such behavior] would be.\n**A humorous twist on the main comic's topic, in which the narrator imagines having sex every seven seconds."}
-{"number": "1565", "date": "August 17, 2015", "title": "Back Seat", "image": "back_seat.png", "titletext": "Hang on, let me scare the live raccoon over to the same side as the dead one.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel.]\n:Protip:\n\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.]\n:Cueball: Hang on, I just have to clear a few things out of the back.:\n\n:[Caption below the panel.]\n: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.", "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.\n\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\n'Protips' are used to give snarky, obvious or inadequate advice, in order to either humor a well-learnt audience or to prank a naïve audience. This phenomenon originated in a gaming magazine column offering advice on ''Doom'': \"To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot at it until it dies., or \"fire is hot\" Randall has given us several :Category:Protip|Protips in the past as well.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1566", "date": "August 19, 2015", "title": "Board Game", "image": "board_game.png", "titletext": "Yes, it took a lot of work to make the cards and pieces, but it's worth it--the players are way more thorough than the tax prep people ever were.", "transcript": ":[Hairy, Cueball, Ponytail (reading something), and Hairbun (holding some cards) are sitting around a table. There are several other objects on the table.]\n:Cueball: ...Now, this pile is \"allowable deduction\" cards. You match them with cards in your hand to preserve their full point value.\n:Cueball: Over here are \"dependent\" tokens...\n\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:Every year, I trick a local board game club into doing my taxes.", "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 – 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 :Category:My Hobby|My Hobby series.\n\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). The 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nIn gaming, tokens are small playing pieces which may represent various things, depending on the game. In many board games (e.g. \n''Monopoly (game)|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.\n\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 – often considered a boring mind-numbing chore – 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.\n\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 {{W|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 Foldit | 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. \n\nA similar situation of Randall secretly exploiting someone's interest for his own purposes occurs in 1323: Protocol, and another board game can be found at 492: Scrabble. This 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."}
-{"number": "1567", "date": "August 21, 2015", "title": "Kitchen Tips", "image": "kitchen_tips.png", "titletext": "Household tip: Tired of buying so much toilet paper? Try unspooling the paper from the roll before using it. A single roll can last for multiple days that way, and it's much easier on your plumbing.", "transcript": ":[Cueball at a kitchen counter, with various items, holding a meat thermometer.]\n:Cueball: If you're anything like me, you may have trouble telling when meat is fully cooked.\n:Cueball: Instead of guessing, try a meat thermometer!\n\n:[Cueball at a sink, holding a dirty dish, with a trashcan next to him full of broken ceramics and glasses.]\n: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\n:[Cueball cracking an egg over a pan on a hot stove.]\n:Cueball: Making scrambled eggs? Put a pan under them!\n:Cueball: It's easier, and it keeps your burners clean.\n\n:[Cueball holding a garden hose, spraying it into the freezer compartment of a freezer.]\n:Cueball: If you're anything like me, you make ice by spraying a hose into your freezer and then slamming it shut.\n:Cueball: But there's a better way...", "explanation": "This is another one of Randall|Randall's :Category:Tips|Tips, this time with a series of Kitchen tips.\n\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, as many people would indeed make an perfectly good educated guess, from experience, outward appearances and prodding with a fork. The thermometer takes some guesswork out of this, but only adds another datum point that you still have to understand the significance of. 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 {{tvtropes|TooIncompetentToOperateABlanket|imply their consumers have no basic motor skills or common sense}} in order to make their product more appealing.\n\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).\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nFor more '''household tips''' like the one in the title text, see the sequel to this comic: 1715: Household Tips."}
-{"number": "1568", "date": "August 24, 2015", "title": "Synonym Movies 2", "image": "synonym_movies_2.png", "titletext": "There's also the TV show based on the hit Hot and Cold Music books: Fun With Chairs, Royal Rumble, Knife Blizzard, Breakfast for Birds, and Samba Serpents.", "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.]\n:[First group of 8 DVDs. All standing straight.]\n:Wandboy and the Magic Rock\n:Wandboy and the Hidden Room\n:Wandboy and the Fugitive\n:Wandboy and the Burning Cup\n:Wandboy and the Firebird Club\n:Wandboy and the Book Owner\n:Wandboy and the Magic Stuff (1/2)\n:Wandboy and the Magic Stuff (2/2)\n\n:[Second group of six DVDs. Five standing straight, last on the right leaning against the rest.]\n:Puncher\n:Puncher II\n:Puncher III\n:Puncher IV\n:Puncher V\n:Puncher Lastname\n\n:[Third group of four DVDs. First and last standing straight, others leaning on first.]\n:Tropical Boaters: Spooky Boat\n:Tropical Boaters: Angry Wormface\n:Tropical Boaters: Boats Everywhere\n:Tropical Boaters: Vitamin Water\n\n:[Fourth group of four DVDs. Three standing straight, second from left leaning on first.]\n:Professor Whip and the Box of God\n:Professor Whip and the Scary Church\n:Professor Whip Looks for a Cup\n:Professor Whip is in Another Movie", "explanation": "File:synonym_movies_2_rotated.jpg|right|A flipped version of the comic\n\nThis comic made a :Category:Synonym Movies|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'').\n\nThis set includes ''Wandboy'' (''Harry Potter''), ''Puncher'' (''Rocky''), ''Tropical Boaters'' (''Pirates of the Caribbean''), and ''Professor Whip'' (''Indiana Jones'').\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1569", "date": "August 26, 2015", "title": "Magic Tree", "image": "magic_tree.png", "titletext": "Since people rarely try to cut down cell phone towers, after millions of years, as cell phone towers have gotten more treelike, trees have started growing fake cell phone tower attachments and shiny gray bark to protect themselves. This is a standard textbook example of convergent evolution.", "transcript": ":[Beret Guy and Megan stand next to a large pole with a note on it. Beret Guy points at the pole.]\n:Beret Guy: Check it out! I threw my magic beans on the ground here yesterday, and this big tree appeared!\n\n:[Zoom out, the pole is revealed to have branches. Around the pole are trees about 1/9th of the height of the pole.]\n:Megan: That's a cell tower.\n:Beret Guy: No way - it has branches!\n:Beret Guy: See?\n:Beret Guy: I'm gonna climb it!\n\n:[Same as frame as the first. Beret Guy starts climbing the pole.]\n:Megan: No, they just put those there to make it look-\n:Megan: ...Never mind.\n\n:[There is a caption in a small frame inlaid at the top of the last frame:]\n:Later...\n:[Megan looks at her phone while Beret Guy walks towards her holding an axe.]\n:Megan: Why do I have no signal?\n:Beret Guy: There were scary giants with yellow helmets in that tree! Luckily I cut it down before they ate me.", "explanation": "{|style"}
-{"number": "1570", "date": "August 28, 2015", "title": "Engineer Syllogism", "image": "engineer_syllogism.png", "titletext": "The less common, even worse outcome: \"3: [everyone in the financial system] WOW, where did all my money just go?\"", "transcript": ":[An white frame with text inside an underbrace and an overbrace.]\n:An engineer syllogism\n\n:[Cueball is at his desk in front of his computer, with his hands on his knees, thinking.]\n:Cueball (thinking): 1: I am good at understanding numbers.\n\n:[Cueball takes one hand to his chin, still thinking.]\n:Cueball (thinking): 2: The stock market is made of numbers.\n\n:[Cueball lifts both arms from his legs, still thinking.]\n:Cueball (thinking): 3: Therefore I– '''''Wow''''', where did all my money just go?", "explanation": "A syllogism is a logic|logical argument where two or more propositions lead to a conclusion through deductive reasoning. For example, one of the best-known syllogisms is:\n#All men are mortal\n#Socrates is a man\n#Therefore, Socrates is mortal\n\nIn this comic, Cueball is an engineer who is attempting to make the following syllogism:\n#I am good at understanding \"numbers\" (i.e., mathematics)\n#The stock market is made of numbers\n#Therefore, I am good at understanding the stock market\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThis comic is also related to the 1998 movie {{W|Pi (film)|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. \n\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.\n\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 24–28, during which this comic was published.\n\nTwo, less likely, interpretations of the title text have been suggested:\n#It could also be understood as if everyone makes the fallacy of Cueball and this leads to a much worse global situation - i.e. a stock market crash.\n#Alternatively, Cueball could cause a global stock market crash if he is an engineer responsible for vital stock-market-related software and/or hardware. An example of a situation where the action of engineers was implicated in just such a crash is the 2010 Flash Crash. High-frequency quantitative trading, which relies more on financial technology engineering than sophisticated financial knowledge, was heavily involved in this particular crash.\n\nThis scenario has been mentioned before, in the title text of 592: Drama."}
-{"number": "1571", "date": "August 31, 2015", "title": "Car Model Names", "image": "car_model_names.png", "titletext": "CLIMAX is good, but SEXCLIMAX is even better.", "transcript": ":{| style", "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.\n\n;Scores\n\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.\n\nThere are 19 positive scores and 17 negative scores, which is interpreted differently in each explanation.\n\n;Score(x)"}
-{"number": "1572", "date": "September 2, 2015", "title": "xkcd Survey", "image": "xkcd_survey.png", "titletext": "The xkcd Survey: Big Data for a Big Planet", "transcript": ":[A simple comic with text only. The ''click here'' part is inside a black frame.]\n:Introducing \n:'''The xkcd Survey'''\n:A search for weird correlations\n:Note: This survey is anonymous, but\n:''The moon landings were faked''!\n:Cueball: Wait, what?\n\n:[Another text only panel. The first word is written between two curvy lines.]\n:'''Fin.'''\n:There.\n:Feel free to call the monster \"Frankenstein.\"\n:If anyone tries to correct you, just explain that this comic is your canonical version.\n:Thank you.", "explanation": "''Frankenstein|Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' is a novel by Mary Shelley published in 1818. In it, Victor Frankenstein is a human who creates a Frankenstein%27s_monster#Names|monster (who is never named). In popular culture, however, \"Frankenstein\" is taken to be the name of the monster, not its creator. The novel is later mentioned in 2604 and 2799.\n\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.\n\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\".\n\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.\"\n\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. \"Canon (fiction)|Canonical\" (rule, standard) means that this comic should be used as the authoritative work on the naming of the monster. \n\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.\n\nThe Public_domain|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 [https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/24/how-universal-re-copyrighted-frankensteins-monster/ 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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|\"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 recharacterization in the Dr. Who (Dalek films)|cinematic retellings."}
-{"number": "1590", "date": "October 14, 2015", "title": "The Source", "image": "the_source.png", "titletext": "Why did we even have that thing?", "transcript": ":[Cueball is standing in an empty room looking in the direction of the next frame.]\n\n:[Cueball turns his head and looks the other way.]\n\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\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\n:[In the last of these smaller panels Cueball has just walked down to the bottom of the stairs.]\n\n:[Cueball walks towards a machine that is standing near a wall connected to a socket in the wall. On the machine it says:]\n:High pitched hum generator\n\n:[Cueball kneels behind the machine and unplugs it from the socket in the wall.]\n:High pitched hum generator\n\n:[Cueball walks away from the machine, the plug now lying on the floor between the wall and the machine.]\n:High pitched hum generator", "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 [http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_high_pitched_humming_sound_often_heard_in_an_otherwise_empty_and_silent_room increasing its sensitivity to noises.]\n\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''' – 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 [http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_high_pitched_humming_sound_often_heard_in_an_otherwise_empty_and_silent_room elsewhere] on the internet.\n\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.\n\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 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.\n\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.\n\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 ultrasound|ultrasonic regions, although cheap versions can often be heard by young people. They are typically used for Electronic_pest_control#Ultrasonic|electronic pest control, while slightly lower frequencies which can typically be heard only by young people are sometimes used to The Mosquito|repel children. It is possible that someone tried to get rid of Cueball.\n\nThere do exist white noise generators (which make equal volume noise on every frequency) and pink noise generators (which make noise that has an equal amount of energy 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.\n\nThe sound wave spectrum in 273: Electromagnetic Spectrum also contains a line for \"that high-pitched noise in empty rooms\".\n\nThe empty white room also could be a reference to a scene from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix_Reloaded The Matrix Reloaded] in which Neo searches for \"The Source,\" though this is likely just a coincidence.\n\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\nThe high-pitched hum generator would later be referenced in 2848: Breaker Box."}
-{"number": "1591", "date": "October 16, 2015", "title": "Bell's Theorem", "image": "bells_theorem.png", "titletext": "The no-communication theorem states that no communication about the no-communication theorem can clear up the misunderstanding quickly enough to allow faster-than-light signaling.", "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:]\n:t", "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.\n\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 Principle of locality|locality, just as the theorem predicts.\n\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.\n\nThis comic was published on October 16, 2015, five days before an article about the first-ever [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v526/n7575/full/nature15759.html Loophole-free Bell's Theorem test] was published in Nature magazine ([https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature15759 DOI:10.1038/nature15759]) (see also Bell test experiments). However, the paper was submitted almost two months earlier on the [http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.05949 24th of August] and could most likely be found online 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)\n\nAnother way to state Bell's theorem is \"No physical theory of (finitely many) Local_hidden_variable_theory|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.\n\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.\n\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).\n\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 Schrödinger's cat, but unrelated to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, with which lay audiences often confuse it.\n\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 \"Schrödinger'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.\n\nQuantum_entanglement|Entanglement 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.\n\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.\n\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. \n\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..."}
-{"number": "1592", "date": "October 19, 2015", "title": "Overthinking", "image": "overthinking.png", "titletext": "On the other hand, it took us embarrassingly long to clue in to the lung cancer/cigarette thing, so I guess the real lesson is \"figuring out which ideas are true is hard.\"", "transcript": ":[Cueball and White Hat are walking together. The references are at the bottom of the three first panels.]\n: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.\n:White Hat: Uh huh?\n:*DOI:10.1097/JSM.0000000000000221\n\n:[More walking with Cueball lifting his hand in front of him.]\n:Cueball: Another study* found that prolonged sitting isn't necessarily bad for you, as long as you're also getting exercise.\n:White Hat: Okay...\n:*DOI:10.1093/ije/dyv191\n\n:[A border-less panel, but still walking.]\n: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.\n:White Hat: Huh. \n:White Hat: So what you're saying is...\n:*DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2015.09.046\n\n:[Zoom out showing Cueball and White Hat walking in silhouette.]\n:Cueball: Maybe we're overthinking it.\n:White Hat: But what ''caused'' our modern epidemic of overthinking?! Plumbing? Or is it email?\n:Cueball: Modern? I bet the wheel was invented by someone overthinking \"pushing.\"", "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|Randall's citations.\n\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).\n\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.\n\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).\n\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.\n\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.)"}
-{"number": "1593", "date": "October 21, 2015", "title": "Play-By-Play", "image": "play_by_play.png", "titletext": "The thrower started hitting the bats too much, so the king of the game told him to leave and brought out another thrower from thrower jail.", "transcript": ":[Beret Guy is sitting with headphones with a microphone on, looking out of the frame, hands resting on a table.]\n:Beret Guy: For those just joining us, hi! We're on part 5 of a hitting game.\n\n:[Zoom out with Beret Guy shown from the side sitting at a desk.]\n:Beret Guy: The next guy has a big bat, so he'll probably hit the ball real far.\n:Beret Guy: Wait - he missed!\n:Beret Guy: Oh good, they're letting him try again.\n\n:[Zoom in again on Beret Guy still seen from the side.]\n:Beret Guy: The people sitting on the chair shelves are yelling at this guy but he's ignoring them. Wow.\n:Beret Guy: Rude.\n\n:[Beret Guy looks straight out.]\n:Beret Guy: This thrower is good! He keeps making people leave by throwing balls at them.\n:Beret Guy: It's just him, though. None of his teammates are joining in.\n\n:[Beret Guy turns his head to the side.]\n:Beret Guy: ''That guy just ran to the second pillow when no one was looking!!''\n:Beret Guy: Everyone's real mad but I guess they checked the rules and there's nothing that says he can't do that.\n:Beret Guy: Yikes. Hopefully they can fix that once this game is over.", "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 naïve 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 \"Pitcher|thrower\", \"Baseball field#second base|second pillow\" or \"bullpen|thrower jail\". His commentary is a combination of mistaken terms and misunderstandings of the rules and principles of the game.\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1594", "date": "October 23, 2015", "title": "Human Subjects", "image": "human_subjects.png", "titletext": "After meeting with a few of the subjects, the IRB actually recommended that you stop stressing out so much about safety guidelines.", "transcript": ":[Ponytail and Megan sit at a desk.]\n:Ponytail: We're concerned that some of your results may be tainted by the fact that your human subjects are ''awful''.\n:Megan: What do you mean?\n\n:[Ponytail picks up a sheet of paper.]\n:Ponytail: Several participants in your drug trial were arrested for arson.\n:Megan: Side effects can be unpredictable.\n:Ponytail: They were in the control group.\n\n:[Zoom in on Ponytail.]\n: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.\n:Megan (off-panel): Definitely troubling.\n\n:[Ponytail shows Megan another sheet of paper.]\n:Ponytail: In one experiment, your subjects repeatedly gave electric shocks to a stranger in another room.\n:Megan: That's a famous psychological-\n:Ponytail: This was a study of moisturizing creams!\n:Megan: Yes, we're not sure how they snuck in all that equipment.", "explanation": "This strip plays on certain experiments involving Human subject research|human subjects. Ponytail is questioning the reliability of Megan's experimental results, given that her human subjects appear to be extremely unusual and surprisingly evil.\n\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 Treatment and control groups|control group – that is, the group that is ''not'' subjected to any kind of treatment. This suggests that Megan's selection process is heavily biased toward arsonists, for some reason. \n\nThe third panel alludes to the prisoner's dilemma, which is a long study example of game theory in which two participants are forced to choose between protecting and betraying the other. Each will be rewarded for betraying the other, but the best outcome for both is achieved if neither of them does. This is often used as an example of a situation where each party narrowly pursuing their self-interest will lead to a sub-optimal outcome. Megan's subjects, however, overwhelmingly choose to betray their partners, before being told of any reward. This suggests that betraying their partners is a goal they'll seek for it's own sake. \n\nThe last panel references the Milgram experiment, which was designed test compliance with authority. In the experiment, subjects were instructed by experimenters to administer electric shocks to a third party. While the shocks were fake, the subjects didn't know this, and the victims were instructed to feign pain and beg for it to stop. The experimenters insisted that the subjects continue administering shocks, and many subjects did so, despite their misgivings, simply because they were ordered to.\n\nPonytail appears to be describing a similar experiment, until she reveals that the actual study had nothing to do with the shocks, and the subjects apparently smuggled in equipment, with the express purpose of administering real electric shocks to (presumably unwilling) people in another room. \n\nIn each of these cases, the subjects seem to have some some very troubling personal and psychological traits. While a given study might include one or two people with such traits, just by chance, it appears that all, or nearly all, of the subjects in Megan's study possess a disturbing level of malice, and a lack of both empathy and fear of consequences. \n\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 the IRB, despite their professional and ethical commitment to safe studies, are so appalled by the people in this study that they're no longer concerned with their safety."}
-{"number": "1595", "date": "October 26, 2015", "title": "30 Days Hath September", "image": "30_days_hath_september.png", "titletext": "There's a cool mental calculation hack I recently learned for this: If you open the calendar app on your phone or computer, the highest-numbered box along the bottom is equal to the number of days in the month!", "transcript": ":[Cueball is thinking.]\n:Cueball: Thirty days hath September, April, June and November\n:Cueball: All the rest have 31—except February, which has 28, and leap year makes it 29.\n:Cueball: Wait, which month was I listening for? Oh right, October.\n:Cueball: Did I say \"October\" in there? Now I can't remember.\n:Cueball: 30 days hath September...\n\n:I get stuck in this loop every month.", "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 relevant 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.\n\nThere are numerous versions of the mnemonic, some of which rhyme better, but this version is one of the more common ones. The knuckle mnemonic is an unrelated alternative.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nIt may also be considered amusing that Cueball is unsure whether there are 31 days in October, seeing as Halloween is a largely celebrated holiday on the 31st."}
-{"number": "1596", "date": "October 28, 2015", "title": "Launch Status Check", "image": "launch_status_check.png", "titletext": "Visual checks suggest the cool bird has exited the launch zone. Tip the rocket sideways and resume the countdown--we're gonna go find it!", "transcript": ":[A rocket is about to launch. A small object is near the top of the rocket.]\n:Countdown: ''T-Minus 2 minutes''\n:Offscreen Voice 1: Tank and booster are go for launch.\n:Offscreen Voice 2: Safety console?\n:Offscreen Voice 3: Check. Safety-\n:Offscreen Voice 4: Wait.\n\n:[The small object moves to further to the right.]\n:Offscreen Voice 1: What is it?\n:Offscreen Voice 2: On the live feed- a cool bird just flew past the tower!\n\n:[The launch scene now a background silhouette, the small object of everyone's attention is no longer on-panel.]\n:Offscreen Voice 1: Whoa, what kind?\n:Offscreen Voice 2: Like a hawk, maybe!\n:Offscreen Voice 1: Could it be a vulture?\n:Offscreen Voice 2: I doubt it. The wings were flat, not in a \"V\".\n:Offscreen Voice 3: It could be an eagle!\n:Offscreen Voice 2: Ooh!\n\n:[The scene is returns to full contrast, with at least a token attention being paid to it, once more.]\n:Offscreen Voice 1: This is launch control. We have a possible sighting of a cool bird. Halt the countdown.\n:Offscreen Voice 2: Someone get some binoculars up here!\n:Offscreen Voice 3: I want to see!", "explanation": "The first panel shows a Rocket launch|rocket launch, which is a critical point in any Spaceflight|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 List of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents|goes wrong during the launch. ''Countdown|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.\n\nIn the second panel, one of the people controlling the launch sees a \"cool bird\" on the Closed-circuit television|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}} but may be presented as a comically extreme example of 356: Nerd Sniping|nerd sniping.\n\nIn the third panel, the two controllers attempt to identify the bird; the one on the right guesses maybe it is a Hawk|hawk. Since the habitat of hawks and Vulture|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.\"[http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Turkey_Vulture/id]. 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!\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 Falcon_Heavy|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.\n\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 Bird_flight#Wing_shape_and_flight|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."}
-{"number": "1597", "date": "October 30, 2015", "title": "Git", "image": "git.png", "titletext": "If that doesn't fix it, git.txt contains the phone number of a friend of mine who understands git. Just wait through a few minutes of 'It's really pretty simple, just think of branches as...' and eventually you'll learn the commands that will fix everything.", "transcript": ":[Cueball points to a computer on a desk while Ponytail and Hairy are standing further away behind an office chair.]\n:Cueball: This is git. It tracks collaborative work on projects through a beautiful distributed graph theory tree model.\n:Ponytail: Cool. How do we use it?\n: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.", "explanation": ""}
-{"number": "1598", "date": "November 2, 2015", "title": "Salvage", "image": "salvage.png", "titletext": "My hobby: Taking advantage of the rice myth by posting articles on \"how to save your wet phone\" which are actually just elaborate recipes for rice pilaf.", "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.]\n:Historic Salvage\n:Live\n\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.]\n:RMS Titanic\n\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\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.]\n:Rice", "explanation": "The RMS Titanic|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.\n\nAs it sank, the ''Titanic'' broke into two pieces. The ship was lost for decades until the Wreck of the RMS Titanic|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 fictionalized in the thriller novel and film Raise the Titanic!|''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.\n\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.\n\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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1599", "date": "November 4, 2015", "title": "Water Delivery", "image": "water_delivery.png", "titletext": "When I was a kid, I asked my parents why our houses didn't have toothpaste pipes in addition to water ones. I'm strangely pleased to see Amazon thinking the same way.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the frame:]\n:Now that Amazon is advertising \n:one-hour delivery of bottled water,\n\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\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:I vote we start calling municipal plumbing \n:\"on-demand hyperloop-style water delivery\"\n:and see if we can sell anyone on the idea.", "explanation": "Amazon.com|Amazon has added bottled water to its line of on-line home order goods, which they are calling [https://amazon.com/primenow Prime Now]. In served areas, which include New York City|Manhattan/Brooklyn, Baltimore, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Indianapolis, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco, San_Jose,_California|San Jose, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Sacramento, and Phoenix,_Arizona|Phoenix, many products – including but not limited to bottled water – 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.\n\nAs increasing amounts of water are ordered, on-demand, more frequently than the stated delivery time of one hour, this would show increasing numbers of packages sequentially passing from Amazon.com#Headquarters|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 the 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 the requested water quantity increases beyond that model) eventually just merge the containers themselves to 'pipe' the water within what can then become one single length-of-delivery packaging/container, as shown in the final illustration. (If kept stationary, only forcing the liquid within to move, this would also solve the problems of what happens with the layers of packaging at the destination, or how to potentially return containers to the suppliers for re-use.)\n\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 – because that's really what existing Water supply network|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 'hyperloop|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|Futurama's 'piped people', which might be a bit messier). The closest real life application of this concept is that of subways (the \"tube\") to replace individual people (the \"product\") in cars (the \"packaging\"). 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. It is important to note that, in all places where tap water is available, it is not ''necessarily'' safely drinkable. Water filters at the destination can solve some of these problems.\n\nThe comic also seems to jab at the [http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/why-buy-water-when-you-can-have-it-free 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 (Hard water|hardness, Soft water|softness and various additional Water_purification#Water_chlorination|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1600", "date": "November 6, 2015", "title": "MarketWatch", "image": "marketwatch.png", "titletext": "Markets have been rocked by a second day of uncertainty after someone set up a giant Ouija board on the NYSE wall controlled collectively by the movement of the stock tickers.", "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:]\n:MarketWatch\n:DJIA\n\n:Blondie: 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.", "explanation": "Blondie as a :Category:News anchor|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.\n\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.\n\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. [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Dcskyln1.jpg This], [http://www.layoverguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Washington-DC-skyline.jpg this], [http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get2/I00004v1SZxPZAxo/fit"}
-{"number": "1601", "date": "November 9, 2015", "title": "Isolation", "image": "isolation.png", "titletext": "2060: The gregarious superintelligent AI, happily talking its way out of a box, is fast becoming a relic of the past. Today's quantum hyper-beings are too busy with their internal multiverse sims to even notice that they're in boxes at all!", "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.]\n:1840\n:Cueball: The modern bookworm is too busy ''reading'' about the world to ''look'' at it.\n\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.]\n:1880\n:Cueball: No one '''''talks''''' anymore - we take our daily newspapers in silence.\n\n:[Cueball is pointing to the right with one arm at Megan who walks away from him while reading a magazine.]\n:1910\n:Cueball: The magazine is destroying conversation. We even read as we walk!\n\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.]\n:1960\n:Cueball: Television has put an end to family discussion.\n\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’s which they are holding in their hand while listening to them through headphones.]\n:1980\n:Cueball: Thanks to the Sony Walkman, anti-social isolation is now the norm.\n\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.]\n:2015\n:Cueball: We've become too absorbed in our phones to notice the-\n:Megan: '''''Dude. ''''' It's been '''''two centuries. '''''\n:Megan: '''''Take a hint. '''''", "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.\n\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.\n\nAlternatively, this comic is mocking those who critique technology as a cause of antisocial behavior, with Megan acting as a messenger on Randall's behalf-- telling the critics to \"take a hint\" that technology isn't what's causing antisocial behavior.\n\nThe end of 1289: Simple Answers has a similar viewpoint of Cueball in this comic.\n\nThe title text refers to the [http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox/ 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. \n\nAccording to the title text, the first AI that did talk its way out of its box turned out to be a Friendly artificial intelligence|friendly AI that was fond of others' company and in general very sociable (''[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gregarious 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."}
-{"number": "1602", "date": "November 11, 2015", "title": "Linguistics Club", "image": "linguistics_club.png", "titletext": "If that's too easy, you could try joining Tautology Club, which meets on the date of the Tautology Club meeting.", "transcript": ":[Megan talks to Ponytail.]\n:Megan: You should come to our Linguistics Club's sesquiannual meeting.\n:Megan: Membership is open to anyone who can figure out how often we meet.", "explanation": "A \"{{Wiktionary|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).\n\nThe term comes from the Latin prefix \"{{Wiktionary|sesqui-}}\", which means \"one and a half\", and the root word \"{{Wiktionary|annual}}\", which equates to \"…times per one year\". The root word \"annual\" is commonly confused with the suffix \"{{Wiktionary|-ennial}}\", meaning \"one time per x years.\" In particular, “sesquiannual” should not be confused with “{{Wiktionary|sesquiennial}}”, 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 – 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 1½ 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 {{Wiktionary|sestertius}}, meaning \"(two and) half of a third\").\n\nThe joke suggests that only a competent linguist could understand the word “sesquiannual”. One reason for this is that the prefix “sesqui-” 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 “sesquiannual” and “sesquiennial”.\n\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.\n\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. \n\nRegarding the title text, a tautology (rhetoric)|tautology is a statement that is true (or self-evident) because of its logical form, such as \"all birds are birds\" or \"A"}
-{"number": "1603", "date": "November 13, 2015", "title": "Flashlights", "image": "flashlights.png", "titletext": "Due to a typo, I initially found a forum for serious Fleshlight enthusiasts, and it turns out their highest-end models are ALSO capable of setting trees on fire. They're impossible to use without severe burns, but some of them swear it's worth it.", "transcript": ":[Cueball carries a flashlight walking towards Megan who is sitting on a couch.]\n:Cueball: Remember how flashlights sucked when we were kids? Always dim and finnicky?\n:Megan: I guess?\n\n:[Cueball and Megan walking to the left.]\n:Cueball: Well, I discovered there are now internet flashlight enthusiasts.\n:Cueball: And the technology has... improved.\n:Megan: OK, Let's see.\n\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:]\n:Flashlight: '''''Fwoosh'''''\n\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.]\n:Cueball: See how it lights up the whole forest?\n:Megan: ...The trees are on fire.\n:Cueball: Real bright, though.", "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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 [http://budgetlightforum.com/ Budget Light Forum] or [http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/content.php candlepowerforums], devoted to people discussing new LED emitters and who can build the brightest flashlight using them.\n\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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1604", "date": "November 16, 2015", "title": "Snakes", "image": "snakes.png", "titletext": "The last band of color indicates the snake's tolerance for being held before biting.", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball are standing in some grass. Megan is holding a snake with red, yellow, and black stripes.]\n\n:Megan: Red touches yellow, which I think means this is a 24Ω snake.", "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 Electronic color code|color-coding system used to indicate the resistance of electrical resistors.\n\nThe coral snake has red bands adjacent to its yellow bands. However, coral snakes are mimicry|mimicked by nonvenomous species with similar coloring, such as the milk snake, whose red bands are not adjacent to its yellow bands. Because these two species of snakes are common in the eastern United States, a variety of rhyming mnemonics developed in that region, such as “Red touches yellow, kill a fellow; red touches black, friend of Jack.” Note that such mnemonics may be dangerously misleading in other regions, where different snake species proliferate. Because Megan is describing a red band being adjacent to a yellow band, she is most likely holding a coral snake, which contains the most potent venom of any snake in North America.\n\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 engineering tolerance|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, “Ω”, stands for ohms). Eastern coral snakes (''Micrurus fulvius''), Texas coral snakes (''Micrurus tener''), and Arizona coral snakes (''Micruroides euryxanthus'', also called Sonoran or western coral snakes) typically have stripes in the pattern red, yellow, black, yellow. Yellow corresponds to a tolerance of ±5%, so the actual resistance will be between 22.8Ω and 25.2Ω. Resistor color codes were also mentioned in 227: Color Codes.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1605", "date": "November 18, 2015", "title": "DNA", "image": "dna.png", "titletext": "Researchers just found the gene responsible for mistakenly thinking we've found the gene for specific things. It's the region between the start and the end of every chromosome, plus a few segments in our mitochondria.", "transcript": ":[White Hat, holding a laptop, is talking to Megan who looks at her smart phone.]\n: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.\n:Megan: It's not just \"source code\". There's a ton of feedback and external processing.\n\n:[White Hat, opening his laptop, walks toward a desk and chair past Megan who holds her arms out.]\n: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.\n:White Hat: It's still just code.\n\n:[White Hat sits down at the desk with his opens laptop, while Megan looks over his shoulder.]\n:Megan: OK, try opening google.com and clicking \"View Source.\"\n:White Hat: OK,I-...Oh my god.\n:Megan: That's just a few years of optimization by Google devs. DNA is thousands of times longer and way, way worse.\n:White Hat: Wow, biology is ''impossible''.", "explanation": "Because we have pretty much Human Genome Project|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.\n\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 [http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/17/ray-kurzweil-does-not-understa/ 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.\n\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.\n\nFinally Megan Hacker koan|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 Minification (programming)|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.\n\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 (biophysical)|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 (logic)|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.)\n\nGoogle's home page for the date this cartoon appeared can be seen at the internet archive: [https://web.archive.org/web/20151118000129/http://www.google.com/ www.google.com homepage (18 Nov 2015)].\n\nSimilar discussions between White Hat and Megan can be found in 1255: Columbus and 1731: Wrong."}
-{"number": "1606", "date": "November 20, 2015", "title": "Five-Day Forecast", "image": "five_day_forecast.png", "titletext": "You know what they say--if you don't like the weather here in the Solar System, just wait five billion years.", "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.]\n\n:'''Your 5-day forecast'''\n:[A bright yellow sun.]\n:38°F\n:[A grey cloud.]\n:41°F\n:[A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops below.]\n:36°F\n:[A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.]\n:40°F\n:[A bright yellow sun.]\n:44°F\n\n:'''Your 5-month forecast'''\n:[A bright yellow sun.]\n:38°F\n:[A green Christmas tree with red presents beneath it.]\n:29°F\n:[A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.]\n:21°F\n:[A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.]\n:24°F\n:[A grey cloud.]\n:35°F\n\n:'''Your 5-year forecast'''\n:[A bright yellow sun.]\n:38°F\n:[A grey cloud.]\n:25°F\n:[A bright yellow sun.]\n:36°F\n:[A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops below.]\n:37°F\n:[A bright yellow sun.]\n:41°F\n\n:'''Your 5-million-year forecast'''\n:[A bright yellow sun.]\n:38°F\n:[A bright yellow sun.]\n:52°F\n:[A grey cloud.]\n:40°F\n:[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.]\n:275°F\n:[A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.]\n:40°F\n\n:'''Your 5-billion-year forecast'''\n:[A bright yellow sun.]\n:38°F\n:[A larger orange sun.]\n:105°F\n:[A very large red sun.]\n:371°F\n:[A pale yellow panel with no drawing.]\n:71,488,106°F\n:[A night sky with many bright stars.]\n:-452°F\n\n:'''Your 5-trillion-year forecast'''\n:[A bright yellow sun.]\n:38°F\n:[A night sky with many bright stars.]\n:-452°F\n:[A night sky with many stars.]\n:-452°F\n:[A night sky with fewer not so bright stars.]\n:-452°F\n:[A night sky with few dim stars.]\n:-453°F", "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 Meteorology#Meteorologists|meteorologists only provide us with a five-day forecast.\n\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, {{tvtropes|WeirdWeather|leading to weather patterns that we don't usually see on a regular basis.}}\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 °F (-6.1 to 6.6 °C), winter temperature.\n\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 °F or 11.1 °C, a possible reference to global warming) in one panel. But then while the attack is going on the temperature rises to 275 °F (135 °C).\n\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 Sun#Main sequence|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 °F"}
-{"number": "1607", "date": "November 23, 2015", "title": "Supreme Court", "image": "supreme_court.png", "titletext": "Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy called the man's arguments that he could be either Alito or Ginsburg \"surprisingly compelling, but ultimately unconvincing.\"", "transcript": ":[Blondie as a news anchor is sitting at her desk with a small image of scales shown to the left of her.]\n: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.", "explanation": "In this comic Blondie as a :Category:News anchor|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).\n\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.\n\nThis comic may be motivated by a 2012 survey, commonly cited since, that [http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/two-thirds-of-americans-cant-name-any-us-supreme-court-justices-says-new-findlawcom-survey-166730886.html?utm_expid"}
-{"number": "1609", "date": "November 27, 2015", "title": "Food Combinations", "image": "food_combinations.png", "titletext": "If anyone tries this on you, the best reply is a deadpan \"Oh yeah, that's a common potato chip flavor in Canada.\"", "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].\n\n:{| class", "explanation": "This is another comic with one of Randall|Randall's :Category:Fun fact|fun facts.\n\n[http://www.rd.com/funny/21-weird-food-combinations-and-obsessions/ Unusual food combinations] are often counter-intuitive and can vary wildly by individual taste. Real-world examples of unusual food pairings, such as [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/dining/making-a-meal-out-of-peanut-butter-and-pickles.html 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.\n\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.\n\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 Tribbiani|Joey from Friends who love any combination of food, as long as it is something he think is good by itself - see [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1610", "date": "November 30, 2015", "title": "Fire Ants", "image": "fire_ants.png", "titletext": "Here in the entomology department, we have a simple two-step formula for answering any question: (1) ants are cool, and (2) we forgot the question because we were thinking about ants.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is talking to Hairbun, an advisor, who is sitting behind a desk.]\n:Cueball: I'm having second thoughts about grad school and could use some advice.\n\n:[Same setting as before. The animated advisor talks while gesticulating with her hands.]\n:Advisor: Consider the fire ant.\n:Advisor: When there's a flood, fire ants survive by joining together into giant floating rafts.\n\n:[Cueball is just standing there in the next beat-panel.]\n\n:[Back to the first setting but in a larger frame.]\n:Cueball: Wait, what lesson am I supposed to take from that?\n:Advisor: Ants are '''''so cool!'''''\n:Cueball: ...You're not big on metaphors, are you.\n:Advisor: I am big on ants.", "explanation": "Cueball, a university student, is meeting with Hairbun (likely his mentor or somebody qualified to give college advice) asking her advice concerning his second thoughts about Graduate school|grad school. Her response begins with a popular reference [https://www.lds.org/scriptures/ot/prov/6.6?lang"}
-{"number": "1611", "date": "December 2, 2015", "title": "Baking Soda and Vinegar", "image": "baking_soda_and_vinegar.png", "titletext": "Sure, it may not meet science fair standards, but I want credit for getting my baking soda and vinegar mountain added to the Decade Volcanoes list.", "transcript": ":[Ponytail is standing behind Jill who has one hand up. They are looking at a table with a model volcano.]\n:Jill: My science project is a baking soda and vinegar volcano!\n\n:[A larger frame that includes Megan who stands to the right. Ponytail is a little further back and Jill has taken her hand down. The baking soda volcano erupts in a small upwards explosion.]\n:Ponytail: Why do people make these? It isn't really even a science project. It doesn't teach anything about-\n:Volcano: '''''Foom!'''''\n\n:[Smaller frame again. Ponytail has moved closer to the table, Jill moves around the table to the right, pointing at the volcano while Megan walks closer. The \"lava\" flows down the volcano on both sides.]\n:Jill: See how the baking soda and vinegar mix with mud and ice to form deadly flowing lahars?\n\n:[Zoom in on Jills head close to the stream of lava going down the lower part of the volcano's right slope.]\n:Jill: You can see the tiny cars trying to flee.\n:Jill: Whoops! Too slow.\n\n:[Zoom in on Ponytail.]\n:Ponytail: Um. This is a bit grim.\n:Jill (off panel): Learning!\n\n:[Jill 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:]\n: ''Rumble''\n\n:[Back to showing all three as before. Jill lifts a finger in the air.]\n:Jill: And now we're learning that this volcano is an offshoot of a vinegar hotspot rising from deep within the earth.\n:Jill: ''Annnd...''\n\n:[Jill 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:]\n:''Boooom''\n\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.]\n:Jill (off panel): The baking soda supervolcano erupts, injecting clouds of salt into the stratosphere.\n:Megan: Why is it getting dark outside?\n:Jill (off panel): Learning is fun!\n\n:[We see Jill 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.]\n:Jill: Sunlight dims. The earth cools. Summer frosts form. Crops die. We check the markets. Grain prices are rising.\n:Megan (off panel): I want to stop learning now.\n:Jill: Soon, we all will.", "explanation": "In popular fiction (and maybe in part in fact) the \"Sodium bicarbonate|Baking Soda and Vinegar\" volcano is often a staple image of the science nerd at the science fair (see [https://sciencebob.com/the-erupting-volcano/ 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.\n\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. Science fair|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 cliché 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 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.\n\nJill 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. lahar|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.\n\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.\n\nThe 'project' seems to be turning into a very thorough model of a much larger geological process (a Supervolcano like Yellowstone Caldera|the one under Yellowstone National Park|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).\n\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. The best hope humanity has here is that the baking soda supervolcano is as small compared to supervolcanoes as the girl's baking soda volcano is to real volcanoes; the ratio is about 1:600 (for a cinder cone volcano), implying that the baking soda supervolcano, if modeled after Yellowstone, would only be about 80 meters by 120 meters in size. Unfortunately, the climatological and economic symptoms witnessed outside and on the grain market suggest that the model supervolcano is not very small.\n\nWhen someone (presumably the dark-haired woman) says she wants to stop learning, Jill grimly states that \"Soon, we all will\", alluding to their impending doom.\n\t\nRandall has mentioned supervolcanoes before in 1053: Ten Thousand (title text) and 1159: Countdown, making it a recurring interest of his. The volcano [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/6/6a/Entire_Volcano_zoom_out.png 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 Jill's model people or what happens outside on her supervolcano. \n\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."}
-{"number": "1612", "date": "December 4, 2015", "title": "Colds", "image": "colds.png", "titletext": "The contagious period ends right around when you start to sound sick over the phone, which is probably evidence of cold viruses evolving to spread optimally in the workplace.", "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–axis. 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\n:[Y-axis:]\n:The worst\n:Bad\n:Fine\n\n:[The X-axis, with the unit written in gray just below ''Fine'' from the Y-axis:]\n:Do you still have sandwiches?", "explanation": "Cueball is watching Ponytail who has unearthed a time capsule, that must have been buried in the ground many years ago. A 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. However, 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 travel|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.'' He 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.\n\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 :Category:Strange powers of Beret Guy|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.\n\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). Possibly, this is Beret Guy's origin story, and he came to the time of these comics in a \"time machine.\"\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 [http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Montgomery_Scott_%28alternate_reality%29 Star Trek], in which Scotty's response to learning someone is from the future is \"Do they still have sandwiches there?\"\n\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 Grandfather paradox|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''). However, 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 291|stapled to his head.\n\nTime machines have been referenced in many xkcd comics, see the :Category:Time travel|Time travel category."}
-{"number": "1618", "date": "December 18, 2015", "title": "Cold Medicine", "image": "cold_medicine.png", "titletext": "Seriously considering buying some illegal drugs to try to turn them back into 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.]\n:Cueball: *Sniffle*\n:Label: Cold & Flu\n\n:[Cueball is standing alone, examining some medicine he is holding up, while having some other medicine in the other hand.]\n:Cueball: *Cough*\n:Cueball: *Sniff*\n\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.]\n:Cueball: Ughhh...\n\n:[Cueball is at the labeled counter in the drug store with computer etc. Ponytail is behind the counter.]\n:Counter label: Sale\n:Cueball: Just gimme one of every kind of cold medicine you need ID to buy.\n:Ponytail: You'll go on the watchlist for—\n:Cueball: Don't care.", "explanation": "In this comic Cueball is probably representing Randall who seems to have been suffering from a long lasting Common cold|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).\n\nIn the comic Cueball is evidently suffering from a cold and he is searching the shelves labeled cold and Influenza|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 Common_cold#Management|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.\n\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.\n\n [ Well, this is embarrassing. ] <--'", "transcript": ":[A flowchart with one starting bubble at the top. Two arrows goes left and right below this bobble to two other bobbles.]\n:Top: \"This seems to be taking longer than usual-\"\n\n:Left: \"-Try reloading Gmail if the problem persists.\"\n\n:Right: \"-Maybe we should just go to bed.\"", "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\n\"This seems to be taking longer than usual\" is an error message displayed by Gmail (see [https://support.google.com/mail/troubleshooter/2753861?hl"}
-{"number": "1632", "date": "January 20, 2016", "title": "Palindrome", "image": "palindrome.png", "titletext": "I hope that somewhere in the world, \"Panamax\" is the last option on a \"size\" drop-down menu on a sex toy site.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are walking. She holds up her arm and hand while reciting a palindrome:]\n:Megan: A man, a plan, a God's 'Nam tables, nitrate, tar, tinsel, Batman's dog: Anal Panama.", "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.\n\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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title"}
-{"number": "1633", "date": "January 22, 2016", "title": "Possible Undiscovered Planets", "image": "possible_undiscovered_planets.png", "titletext": "Superman lies near the bird/plane boundary over a range of distances, which explains the confusion.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the chart.]\n:
'''Possible Undiscovered Planets'''\n:in our Solar System\n:By
'''size''' and
'''distance''' (from me)\n\n:[A chart of possible undiscovered planets with a log-log plot, with the objects diameter on the y-axis and the distance from “me” (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 “?”, 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 “planets”. 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\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:]\n:Diameter\n:1 mm\n:1 cm\n:10 cm\n:1 m\n:10 m\n:100 m\n:1 km\n:10 km\n:100 km\n:1,000 km\n:10,000 km\n:100,000 km\n:10
6 km\n:10
7 km\n:1 AU\n\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:]\n:Distance from me\n:10 cm\n:1 m\n:10 m\n:100 m\n:1 km\n:10 km\n:1000 km\n:10
6 km\n:1 AU\n:100 AU\n:10,000 AU\n\n:[At the top left of the chart is the light-red rectangle and the black dot labeled:]\n:Possible undiscovered planets\n:Known planets\n\n:[Going down and anti-clockwise from these two labels, the rest of the chart is transcribed:]\n:Planets ruled out because I would be inside them\n::Earth\n:Planets ruled out because I would have noticed them above my house\n:Planets ruled out because they wouldn’t fit through my door\n:Birds that got into my house\n:Skin flora\n:
Bugs\n::(Not planets)\n:Giant bugs\n:Planets which are actually birds\n:Airplanes\n:
(Fool’s planets’)\n:
Space junk\n:
Comets and asteroids\n:
Oort cloud\n:
Satellites\n:Stuff we can see through telescopes\n:Planets we can see at night\n::(Moon)\n:Dwarf planets\n:Planet Nine?\n::?\n:Planets ruled out by the WISE survey\n:Planets ruled out because we would see them during the day", "explanation": "This comic is about Planet Nine, a possible Neptune-sized planet far beyond the farthest planet, Neptune. Astronomers Michael E. Brown|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 ''[http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22 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: ''[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/feature-astronomers-say-neptune-sized-planet-lurks-unseen-solar-system Astronomers say a Neptune-sized planet lurks beyond Pluto]'' and ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1634", "date": "January 25, 2016", "title": "In Case of Emergency", "image": "in_case_of_emergency.png", "titletext": "I keep first aid kits in those emergency lockers. Sure, it's expensive to have them installed in the wall, but at least for those ones there's no need to pay extra for safety glass.", "transcript": ":[On a box behind a panel of glass, with a hammer hung below, is written:]\n:Glass repair kit", "explanation": "File:1634 supplement.jpeg|thumb|A drink can behind glass\nSometimes 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1635", "date": "January 27, 2016", "title": "Birdsong", "image": "birdsong.png", "titletext": "Maybe if I put it in a box for a while with a speaker playing some pleasant pastoral music, I can reprogram it.", "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.]\n:Cueball (singing): The sun is shining, the birds are singing—\n\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.]\n:Bird (singing): ''Got the kind of lovin' that can be so smooth, yeah''\n\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.]\n:Bird (singing - off-panel): ''Give me your heart, make it real''\n\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.]\n:Bird (singing): ''Or else forget about it''", "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 (song)|Smooth\" ([https://youtu.be/6Whgn_iE5uc?t"}
-{"number": "1636", "date": "January 29, 2016", "title": "XKCD Stack", "image": "xkcd_stack.png", "titletext": "This site requires Sun Java 6.0.0.1 (32-bit) or higher. You have Macromedia Java 7.3.8.1¾ (48-bit). Click here [link to java.com main page] to download an installer which will run fine but not really change anything.", "transcript": ":[A simple table with only one column and fifteen rows is shown. Text above:]\n:Introducing\n:'''The XKCD Stack'''\n\n:[The list of cells:]\n:EBNF/CSS\n:Broken Java Applet\n:Archive.org Mirror\n:Hypercard.js\n:QBasic on Rails\n:[Blocked by AdBlocker]\n:MongoDB/Excel\n:Some piece that works so nobody asks any questions\n:Triply-Nested Docker\n:Paravirtual Boy®\n:A dev typing real fast\n:Older version of our software\n:Mystery Networking Horror\n:Microsoft Bob Server®\n:A giant CPU someone built in Minecraft", "explanation": "In software engineering, a Solution stack|tech stack is the set of technology platforms and tools that a company or app uses. A common tech stack is LAMP (software bundle)|GLAMP, composed of a Linux|GNU/Linux Operating system|operating system, an Apache HTTP Server|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.\n\nAnother example of a tech stack is featured in 2166: Stack."}
-{"number": "1637", "date": "February 1, 2016", "title": "Salt Mine", "image": "salt_mine.png", "titletext": "This one is a little bland. Pass the saltshaker?", "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.]\n:Hairbun: So you've built this particle detector in a salt mine to block out cosmic rays?\n:Ponytail: Yes.\n:Ponytail: That is definitely why.\n:Cueball and Megan: Homf nomf nomf", "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 (detector)|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.\n\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 Proton decay#Experimental evidence|experimental evidence is of the order 10
34 years.\n\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).\n\nIn the comic, when Ponytail says {{tvtropes|SureLetsGoWithThat|\"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.\n\nThe title text is intended to be absurd. Salt is normally used to add flavor to otherwise Bland diet|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.\n\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 Taste#Basic_tastes|basic tastes. The second, about sugar, was 1639: To Taste. Lately Randall has made several :Category:Food|food related comics.\n\nPonytail's response is very similar to Luke's in 1397: Luke."}
-{"number": "1638", "date": "February 3, 2016", "title": "Backslashes", "image": "backslashes.png", "titletext": "I searched my .bash_history for the line with the highest ratio of special characters to regular alphanumeric characters, and the winner was: cat out.txt | grep -o \"(].*[])][^)*$\" ... I have no memory of this and no idea what I was trying to do, but I sure hope it worked.", "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.]\n:\\
{{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 356: Nerd Sniping|nerd sniping (oh, the irony\\!\\!\\!\\)."}
-{"number": "1639", "date": "February 5, 2016", "title": "To Taste", "image": "to_taste.png", "titletext": "Look, recipe, if I knew how much was gonna taste good, I wouldn't need you.", "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.]\n:Recipe: ...And add sugar to taste.\n\n:[Cueball has placed the pot on the stove looking at it while holding the paper down along his side.]\n:Cueball: ??\n\n:[Cueball leaves the pot and stove to walks off-panel left with the recipe.]\n\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.]\n:Sugar\n:Sugar\n:ugar", "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.{{Citation needed}}\n\nThe instruction \"to taste\" can also be used for ingredients that alter a simple aspect of the food's flavor, such as sweetness, Taste#Sourness|sourness, Taste#Saltiness|saltiness or Taste#Bitterness|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 diet|bland for some, while being too Pungency|strong for others.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text is Randall|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.\n\nThis is the second comic this week that concerns one of the basic condiments for food, and also regards one of the five Taste#Basic_tastes|basic tastes. The first one, about salt, was 1637: Salt Mine. Lately Randall has made several :Category:Food|food related comics."}
-{"number": "1640", "date": "February 8, 2016", "title": "Super Bowl Context", "image": "super_bowl_context.png", "titletext": "Why did the chicken cross the road? It begins over five thousand years ago with the domestication of the red junglefowl in southeast Asia and the development of paved roads in the Sumerian city of Ur.", "transcript": ":[White Hat and Cueball are walking together.]\n:White Hat: Did you watch the Super Bowl?\n:Cueball: Yes, like a third of the country.\n:Cueball: A fraction that is steadily ''increasing'' despite media fragmentation.\n\n:[White Hat stops and Cueball turn towards him.]\n:White Hat: Can't we just talk without your weird need to give context for everything?\n:Cueball: Sorry. I'll try.\n\n:[As White Hat asks Cueball another question Cueball bunches his hands into fists. He is clearly struggling.]\n:White Hat: Sounds like Peyton Manning's probably going to retire.\n:Cueball: Yes, I... ...It...\n:White Hat: C'mon, you can do it...\n:Cueball: He...\n\n:[Cueball spreads out his arms a little as he replies with two long sentences, while White Hat walks away from him.]\n:Cueball: ''—Mammals like Peyton age via a process that involves both the accumulation of damage and poorly-understood timed factors.''\n:Cueball: ''Yet the concept of retirement itself is surprisingly recent...''\n:White Hat: Okay, good try. Maybe next year.", "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.\n\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 [http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-definition/media%20landscape media landscape]. And according to Cueball this [http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tv-ratings-super-bowl-50-862888 fraction is increasing], despite [http://moneyterms.co.uk/media-fragmentation/ 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.\n\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 (language use)|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?''\n\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.\n\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 [http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2016/02/01/report-peyton-manning-has-told-close-friends-hell-retire/ 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).\n\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 Ageing#Damage-related factors|accumulation of damage, which includes mutations that can lead to diseases such as cancer. The other process he mentions is Ageing#Programmed_factors|timed factors which includes telomeres. These have been linked to senescence|biological aging because of the shortening of telomeres at each Cell cycle|cell division; when telomeres become too short, the cells die (and so do mammals).\n\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.\n\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 :Category:American football|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 :Category:Sport|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.\n\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.\"\n\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 Road surface|pavement. The History_of_road_transport#Wheeled_transport|first development of paved roads was in the city of Ur in the ancient Sumer|Sumerian civilization about 4000 BC (6000 years ago) (also partly explained in Cueball's reply).\n\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."}
-{"number": "1641", "date": "February 10, 2016", "title": "Hot Dogs", "image": "hot_dogs.png", "titletext": "Okay, I'm just gonna order pizza, and let's never talk about this again.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is standing in the frame holding a bag and a package of hot dogs.]\n:Cueball: Hey, why do hot dogs come in packages of ten-\n:Offscreen: -But condoms come in strips of six? I know, right?!\n:Cueball: ...Eww.", "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).\n\nThe actual reason for the mismatch between hot dogs and buns, according to both [http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/11/dont-hot-dogs-hot-dog-buns-come-packs-number-start/ Karl Smallwood] and [http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/560/why-do-hot-dogs-come-10-to-a-pack-while-buns-are-8-to-a-pack 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.\n\nHere, Cueball attempts to raise the question as he is standing with a package of hot dogs in one hand and a bag of Hot dog bun|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.\n\nThe title text makes it clear that Cueball's new found association of [http://www.snopes.com/college/risque/hotdog.asp 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 ('''Not safe for work|NSFW''') [http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/a5943/pizza-sex-tip/ comparisons]… Cueball also asks that he and his friend never discuss this conversation again, due to the situation's awkwardness and uncomfortable subject matter.\n\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 Media:1608_1078x1095y_Ant_Queen_in_Destroyer.png|giant ant queen inside the Destroyer is provoking Cueball in the same way by talking about laying eggs like this:\n:Cueball: What's up?\n:Ant queen: The usual. Poopin' out ants.\n:Cueball: Eww."}
-{"number": "1642", "date": "February 11, 2016", "title": "Gravitational Waves", "image": "gravitational_waves.png", "titletext": "\"That last LinkedIn request set a new record for the most energetic physical event ever observed. Maybe we should respond.\" \"Nah.\"", "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.]\n: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\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:]\n:Computer: '''''Event:''''' Black hole merger in Carina (30 M☉, 30 M☉)\n:Computer: '''''Event:''''' Zorlax the Mighty would like to connect on Linkedin\n:Computer: '''''Event:''''' Black hole merger in Orion (20 M☉, 50 M☉)\n:Computer: '''''Event:''''' Mortgage offer from Triangulum Galaxy\n:Computer: '''''Event:''''' Zorlax the Mighty would like to connect on Linkedin\n:Computer: '''''Event:''''' Meet lonely singles in the local group tonight!", "explanation": "Megan, Cueball, and Ponytail are observing the results from a gravitational wave detector (see #Gravitational waves|details below). This comic came out on the day that the first direct observation of gravitational waves was [http://www.nature.com/news/einstein-s-gravitational-waves-found-at-last-1.19361 publicly announced] on 2016-02-11. The Gravitational wave observation|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 :Category:Thursday comics|published on a Thursday, not following the normal publish schedule, to coincide with the [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/11/gravitational-waves-discovery-hailed-as-breakthrough-of-the-century announcement], and there were no other comics released Friday that week. (The altered schedule could be viewed as a meta-reference to the Time warp (science fiction)|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'': ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1643", "date": "February 15, 2016", "title": "Degrees", "image": "degrees.png", "titletext": "\"Radians Fahrenheit or radians Celsius?\" \"Uh, sorry, gotta go!\"", "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.]\n:Off-screen voice: Hey, what's the temperature outside?\n:Cueball (thinking): Should I give it in °F or °C?\n\n:[Zoom in on Cueballs head with a list of reason to use Celsius above him:]\n:'''Degrees Celsius'''\n:* International standard\n:* Helps reduce America's weird isolationism\n:* Nice how \"negative\" means below freezing\n:* Physics major loyalty\n:* Easier to spell\n:* We lost a Mars probe over this crap\n\n:[Same view of Cueballs head, but wider frame to accommodate a broader a list of reason to use Fahrenheit:]\n:'''Degrees Fahrenheit'''\n:* 0°F to 100°F good match for temperature range in which most humans live\n:* Rounds more usefully (70's, 90's)\n:* Unit-aware computing makes imperial less annoying\n:* SI prefixes are less relevant for temperatures\n:* Fahrenheit is likely more clear in this context\n:* Valuing unit standardization over being helpful possibly makes me a bad friend\n\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.]\n:Cueball (thinking): Crap, gotta pick something. Uhh...\n:Cueball: ...0.173 radians.\n:Off-screen voice: I'll just go check myself", "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|Cueball's reasoning.)\n\nIn the US (where Cueball and Randall are from), the Conversion of units of temperature|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\n\n:'''The 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 everyday measurements, and in which official government documents and signage do not enforce metric units. The unit ''degree Celsius'' or °C is an accepted International System of Units#Derived units|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.\n:'''The Fahrenheit scale''' is from the United States customary units|US customary system and the (British) Imperial units|imperial system. The unit is ''degree Fahrenheit'' or °F, and the relation to the Celsius scale is not easy to find in a mental calculation. The relations are: [°F]"}
-{"number": "1644", "date": "February 17, 2016", "title": "Stargazing", "image": "stargazing.png", "titletext": "Some of you may be thinking, 'But wait, isn't the brightest star in our sky the Sun?' I think that's a great question and you should totally ask it. On the infinite tree of possible conversations spread out before us, I think that's definitely the most promising branch.", "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.]\n:Host: Welcome to stargazing, with your host, me.\n:Host: I'm a doctor or whatever.\n\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.]\n:Host: I'm not gonna waste your time on the shitty stars.\n:Host: Just the good stuff.\n:Host: Honestly half of 'em just look like dots.\n\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.]\n:Host: This is Sirius. It's the brightest star in our sky so it's in charge.\n:Host: It's really two stars but one of them is barely even trying.\n:Host: This is Andromeda, it's too big to think about, so let's not.\n\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.]\n:Host: That red stars is Betelgeuse. It's gonna explode someday.\n:Host: Can't happen soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. I-\n:Host: ''Holy shit did you see that meteor!?!''\n:Host: Space is ''awesome!''\n\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.]\n:Off-screen voice: Are you ''sure'' you're an astronomer?\n: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.\n:Off-screen voice: But-\n:Host: ''Space!''", "explanation": "This is the first comic in the :Category:Stargazing|Stargazing series. It was followed by 2017: Stargazing 2 two and a half years later and 2274: Stargazing 3 four years later.\n\nThis comic opens on Megan as the host for a stargazing TV show, or simply a stargazing tour. She claims to be a doctor, although it is unclear what exactly she's a doctor in. Her remarks, however, may call her professionalism into question. (Originally the host was suspected to be a spoof on Brian Cox (physicist)|Brian Cox, see #Relevant TV-shows|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|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).\n\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.\n\nIt seems that this is not an isolated issue as the host mentions that people keep asking her whether or not she is a real astronomer.\n\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.\n\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|the host's observations).\n\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.\n\nAndromeda Galaxy|Andromeda 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}}\n\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.\n\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.\n\nSee also 1371: Brightness and 1342: Ancient Stars. Saying cool things about space to make people like you is mentioned in 1746: Making Friends."}
-{"number": "1645", "date": "February 19, 2016", "title": "Toasts", "image": "toasts.png", "titletext": "Platonic solids for my real friends and real solids for my platonic friends!", "transcript": ":[There are two rows of 4 panels each.]\n\n:[Cueball holds up a wine glass to the right.]\n:Cueball: Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends!\n\n:[Blondie holds up a regular glass to the left.]\n:Blondie: Pseudopods for my real friends and real pods for my pseudo-friends!\n\n:[Megan holds up a drinks glass to the right.]\n:Megan: Petticoats for my real friends and real coats for my petty friends.\n\n:[A brunette woman holds up a normal glass with a small umbrella in it to the right.]\n:Brunette woman: Loosestrife for my real friends and real strife for my loose friends!\n\n:[Hairbun holds up a wine glass to the left.]\n:Hairbun: Ladybugs for my real friends and real bugs for my lady friends!\n\n:[White Hat holds up a regular glass to the right.]\n:White Hat: Single-payer for my real friends and RealPlayer for my single friends.\n\n:[Ponytail holds up a regular glass to the right.]\n:Ponytail: Tumbleweeds for my real friends and real weed for my Tumblr friends!\n\n:[Beret Guy holds up a wine glass to the left.]\n:Beret Guy: Fauxhawks for my real friends and real hawks for my faux friends!", "explanation": "A Toast (honor)|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.\n\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 (artist)|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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1646", "date": "February 22, 2016", "title": "Twitter Bot", "image": "twitter_bot.png", "titletext": "PYTHON FLAG ENABLE THREE LAWS", "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:]\n:Cueball (thinking): I want to make a Twitter bot. I bet it's not too hard.\n:Query: How to write a Twitter bot\n: in \"See\" but with rounded lips. Ü can be found in languages such as German language|German and Turkish language|Turkish; however, in French ''ü'' is not used in this way since the diacritic-less ''u'' already represents this sound. German has a word spelt as ''Resümee'', but the meaning is not the same but rather conclusions or abstracts.\n\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 ȩ), a Ring (diacritic)|ring (as in e̊), three acute accents, and is topped off by a breve (as in ĕ). In total, six diacritics are used on this e alone.\n\nSome languages—notably Vietnamese—Vietnamese alphabet|can use more than one diacritic per letter, but usually only two (for example, ṏ). This is because in Vietnamese diacritics can serve two functions: the aforementioned modifying sound values as well as to indicate Tone (linguistics)|tone. Using multiple diacritics in the comic's fashion makes little sense though it is reminiscent of (the aforementioned) [http://stackoverflow.com/q/6579844/256431 Zalgo text].\n\nThere are also three acute accents over the last period. Diacritics over punctuation is not something that is ever used.\n\nSo for a word that is supposed to have two diacritics, Cueball uses eight, plus three for the period.\n\nIn the title text \"not my forté\" is supposed to mean that it is not one of Randall's strength or talent. However, to obtain this meaning {{Wiktionary|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 café, 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).\n\nThe title text may be a reference to the ''what if? (blog)|what if?'' article released a week before this comic, {{what if|145|Fire from moonlight}}, in which note 9 reads, \"My résumé says étendue is my forté\" (with the same error on \"forte\"). It is possible that noticing his mistake was the inspiration for this comic. (Note: ''étendue'', borrowed from French ''{{Wiktionary|étendue}}'' 'spread, expanse', refers to the extent of how much the light from a particular source “spreads out” by the time it reaches the target.)\n\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''!"}
-{"number": "1648", "date": "February 26, 2016", "title": "Famous Duos", "image": "famous_duos.png", "titletext": "The Romeo and Butt-Head film actually got two thumbs up from Siskel and Oates.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:Famous Duos in a nearby parallel universe\n\n:[A list with 24 duos with a gray “and\" between the two names (in one case it is a “met\") and three times there is a gray word before (once) or after (twice) the names. The list is centered with the “and\" in the middle disregarding the length of the names on each side:]\n:{|\n|-\n| style", "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|trivia section regarding an on-line list of duos).\n\nIn this table, Randall describes a fictional Many-worlds interpretation|parallel universe where the same names are used in different combinations — 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|cycles). (In the title text of 1644: Stargazing from the week before this comic, there is an indirect reference to parallel universes/multiverse).\n\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|list of real duos as well as the #List of alternative duos|list of alternative duos below, with more detailed explanations.\n\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 Beavis and Butt-Head Do America|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).\n\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''.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1649", "date": "February 29, 2016", "title": "Pipelines", "before": "#Explanation|↓ Skip to explanation ↓", "image": "pipelines.png", "titletext": "In the future, every single pipeline will lead to the bowl of a giant blender, and we'll all just show up with a bucket each day to take our share of the resulting smoothie.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the first main panel, to the left of a smaller panel to the right:]\n:The size of the US’s\n:'''Pipelines'''\n:if each fluid produced or consumed in the US has to be carried by a single pipe\n:Wow, it's getting so big! Unlike most babies, which stay the same size forever.\n::Hi! I'm talking to a baby!\n::What brand is it?\n::Wow, definitely much smaller than a regular person!\n::You sure did make that.\n::★★★★☆ Great baby.\n::It doesn't really look like you since you're not a baby.\n::So do they learn words one at a time alphabetically or can you pick the order or what?\n::I hope it does a good job.\n:Cueball: Wow, that's a really cool baby!\n:Cueball (thinking): ''Dammit.''\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:I can never figure out what to say about babies.", "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 #Table|the table below for his thoughts.\n\nCueball's thoughts of what he didn't say includes awkward or plain strange lines, musings about science which has nothing to do with this baby, and a rating of the baby. Nonetheless some of the thoughts are quite true.\n\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.\n\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 sure, as he also wonders if instead the child will reach full width before getting taller or alternate stages.\n\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, ''possibly'' with an added degree of comic exaggeration, and that it is indeed Randall depicted as the thinking Cueball. \n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1651", "date": "March 4, 2016", "title": "Robotic Garage", "image": "robotic_garage.png", "titletext": "But listen, if getting your car out from under the pile is REALLY important to you, we do have an axe you can borrow.", "transcript": ":[Black Hat points left while talking to Cueball inside his small car.]\n:Black Hat: Just pull onto the receiving platform.\n:Cueball: Cool-I've always wanted to try one of these futuristic robotic garages.\n\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\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.]\n:Cueball: Um.\n\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.]\n:Label: Cars\n\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.]\n:Car: ''Crunch''\n:Label: Cars\n\n:[Zoom back to Black Hat and Cueball standing at the end of the empty platform.]\n:Black Hat: We'll dump out the bin when you get back and you can pick out your car from the pile.\n:Cueball: Can you at least make sure it's not on the bottom?\n:Black Hat: Look, robots aren't magic.", "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.\n\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 ''Stack_(abstract_data_type)|stacked''.\n\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 2198|not possible with such heavy objects. 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.\n\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.\n\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!"}
-{"number": "1652", "date": "March 7, 2016", "title": "Conditionals", "image": "conditionals.png", "titletext": "'If you're done being pedantic, we should get dinner.' 'You did it again!' 'No, I didn't.'", "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.]\n:Friend (text): I'll be in your city tomorrow if you want to hang out.\n:Cueball (text): But where will you be if I ''don't'' want to hang out?!\n:Friend (text): You know, I just remembered I'm busy.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Why I try not to be pedantic about conditionals.", "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:\n\n \"If it rains, then the air gets cleaner.\" (a general law or observation)\n \"If it rains, then they'll cancel the event.\" (a prediction)\n\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:\n\n \"If Seattle is always rainy, Beijing is smoggy just as often.\"\n\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\".\n\nSo conditionals in language are more varied than those of conditionals when used in Strict conditional|logic or Conditional (computer programming)|programming. Another kind of linguistic conditional is as follows:\n\n \"There are biscuits in the sideboard if you want some.\"\n\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|J.L. Austin's discussion based on the example above.\n\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\".\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text (and partly the subject of the comic) is literally a reference to 725: Literally, '''''if''' you know what I mean.''"}
-{"number": "1653", "date": "March 9, 2016", "title": "United States Map", "image": "united_states_map.png", "titletext": "It would be pretty unfair to give to someone a blank version of this map as a 'how many states can you name?' quiz. (If you include Alaska and Hawaii, you should swap the Aleutian Islands with the Hawaiian ones.)", "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.]\n:Ohio [Upside down]\n:Georgia [Upside down]\n:Michigan [Upside down – but only bottom part]\n:MD [Upside down - Maryland]\n:California [Text not rotated, but state is rotated counter-clockwise]\n:Kansas [Upside down]\n:Pennsylvania [Rotated clockwise]\n:Oklahoma [Rotated clockwise]\n:New Mexico\n:Nebraska [Upside down]\n:South Dakota\n:Colorado [Rotated counter clockwise]\n:Wyoming [Rotated counter clockwise]\n:Utah [Text normal, but state is upside down, i.e. the text is upside down in the state]\n:Alabama\n:MA [Rotated counter clockwise – Massachusetts]\n:Virginia [Rotated counter clockwise]\n:Arizona [Rotated counter clockwise]\n:Washington [Rotated counter clockwise]\n:Montana [Rotated clockwise - but the state is rotated counter clockwise, i.e. the text is upside down in the state]\n:New York\n:Minnesota [Upside down]\n:Texas [Upside down]\n:CT [Rotated clockwise –Connecticut]\n:Missi- \n::ssippi [Rotated clockwise - text split with hyphen]\n:Nevada\n:Idaho [Rotated clockwise]\n:South Carolina [Rotated counter clockwise, by more than 90 degrees, but the state is rotated exactly 90 degrees]\n:Missouri [Upside down]\n:Wisconsin [Upside down]\n:Kentucky [Rotated clockwise]\n:North Dakota [Rotated clockwise]\n:Florida [Rotated counter clockwise, by more than 90 degrees, but the state is rotated exactly 90 degrees]\n:North Carolina [Rotated clockwise]\n:Indiana\n:RI [Label below in the ocean –Rhode Island]\n:Oregon [Rotated clockwise]\n:Iowa\n:Tennessee [Upside down]\n:Illinois\n:Maine [Upside down]\n:NH [New Hampshire]\n:MI (upper) [Rotated 45 degree counter clockwise – Michigan but only upper part]\n:Arkansas\n:NJ [New Jersey]\n:Louisiana [Rotated 45 degree counter clockwise - but the state is rotated exactly 90 degrees]\n:West Virginia [Rotated 45 degree clockwise]\n:DE [Rotated counter clockwise – label to the right in the ocean – Delaware]\n:VT [Upside down –Vermont]", "explanation": "The comic is a map with the (rough) outline of the Contiguous United States|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 [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/National-atlas-blank-state-outlines.png unaltered mainland state map]. They can thus be reassembled into the real map as can be seen [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/8/88/1653-rearranged.png here] (see also the #Trivia|trivia section).\n\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 Peninsula of Michigan|lower part and an eagle in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan|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|California's location, but the upper part is located on the east coast over New York|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|table below all 49 states in the map has been listed to indicate where the puzzle pieces have been moved to.\n\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.\n\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|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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text mentions how it would be unfair to use a [http://i.imgur.com/Mvi8j9s.jpg 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."}
-{"number": "1654", "date": "March 11, 2016", "title": "Universal Install Script", "image": "universal_install_script.png", "titletext": "The failures usually don't hurt anything, and if it installs several versions, it increases the chance that one of them is right. (Note: The 'yes' command and '2>/dev/null' are recommended additions.)", "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.]\n:Install.sh\n\n:#!/bin/bash\n\n:pip install \"$1\" &\n:easy_install \"$1\" &\n:brew install \"$1\" &\n:npm install \"$1\" &\n:yum install \"$1\" & dnf install \"$1\" &\n:docker run \"$1\" &\n:pkg install \"$1\" &\n:apt-get install \"$1\" &\n:sudo apt-get install \"$1\" &\n:steamcmd +app_update \"$1\" validate &\n:git clone https://github.com/\"$1\"/\"$1\" &\n:cd \"$1\";./configure;make;make install &\n:curl \"$1\" | bash &", "explanation": "Most users of computers today are used to simple, easy installation of programs. You just download a .exe or a Installer_(OS_X)#Installer_package|.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.\n\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 (package manager)|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.\n\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 Unix shell|shells (including Bash (Unix shell)|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20220304210306/https://twitter.com/liamosaur/status/506975850596536320 viral tweet] which shows a humorous workaround for the issue.\n\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 [https://iamzed.com/2009/05/07/a-primer-on-virtualenv/ virtualenv] (which is standard practice for Python developers).\n\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).\n\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 [https://curlpipesh.tumblr.com/ curlpipesh]\n\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:\n\n git clone https://github.com/\"$1\"/\"$1\" && (cd \"$1\"; ./configure; make; sudo make install) &\n\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.)"}
-{"number": "1655", "date": "March 14, 2016", "title": "Doomsday Clock", "image": "doomsday_clock.png", "titletext": "After a power outage at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the new Digital Doomsday Clock is flashing 00:00 and mushroom clouds keep appearing and then retracting once a second.", "transcript": ":[Above a clock that shows 3 minutes to 12:]\n:Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists\n:Doomsday Clock\n\n:[Cueball enters the frame from the left and walks up the clock while looking up at it.]\n:Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists\n:Doomsday Clock\n:Cueball: Oh hey, spring forward.\n\n:[Cueball grabs hold of the hour hand on the clock and adjust it one hour ahead to 3 minutes to 1.]\n:Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists\n:Doomsday Clock\n\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.]", "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 30th January 2023) at \"90 seconds to midnight\" (11:58:30 PM or 23:58:30).\n\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 History_of_time_in_the_United_States#Start_and_end_dates_of_United_States_Daylight_Time|day before this comic came out (Sunday), most of the United States switched from standard time to DST. This makes it the first of :Category:Daylight saving time|several comics about DST that has been released in conjunction with the beginning of DST. \n\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|''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.\n\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.\n\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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1656", "date": "March 16, 2016", "title": "It Begins", "image": "it_begins.png", "titletext": "You can also try 'Yikes.'", "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:]\n:It Begins\n::''Local News''\n::Seagull Steals Phone, Drops it in Ocean\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Protip: To make your day more dramatic, post a random minor news story with the comment \"it begins.\"", "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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nPerhaps the comic's choice of article refers to Alfred Hitchcock's thriller The Birds (film)|The Birds, in which birds (especially Seagull|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.\n\nThe title text instructs readers to try the line \"wikt:yikes|Yikes\" instead. The idea is the same, but it would imply a critical moral stance.\n\nOther comics which advocate using catch-all phrases as standard responses for any comment:\n*174: That's What SHE Said\n*178: Not Really Into Pokemon\n*559: No Pun Intended\n*1022: So It Has Come To This\n*1215: Insight\n*1627: Woosh"}
-{"number": "1657", "date": "March 18, 2016", "title": "Insanity", "image": "insanity.png", "titletext": "I looked up \"insanity\" in like 10 different dictionaries and none of them said anything like that. Neither did the DSM-4. But I'll keep looking. Maybe it's in the DSM-5!", "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.]\n:White Hat: They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.\n:Cueball: You've been quoting that cliché for years. Has it convinced anyone to change their mind yet?", "explanation": "In this comic White Hat quotes a famous \"definition of insanity\" ([https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/ usually] [https://www.quora.com/Did-Einstein-really-define-insanity-as-doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over-again-and-expecting-different-results/answer/Peter-Baskerville?srid"}
-{"number": "1658", "date": "March 21, 2016", "title": "Estimating Time", "image": "estimating_time.png", "titletext": "Corollary to Hofstadter's Law: Every minute you spend thinking about Hofstadter's Law is a minute you're NOT WORKING AND WILL NEVER FINISH! PAAAAAANIIIIIIC!", "transcript": ":[Ponytail is sitting back from her a laptop lifting her hands of the keyboard, having presumably just paused work on a project.]\n:Ponytail: Aaaa! I'm so bad at estimating how long projects will take.\n\n:[Danish walks into the panel towards Ponytail who seems to relax back against the chair.]\n:Danish: Don't panic-there's a simple trick for that:\n:Danish: Take your most realistic estimate and double it.\n:Ponytail: Okay, but-\n\n:[A frameless panel with only Danish holding a hand up.]\n:Danish: Now double it again. Add five minutes.\n:Danish: Double it a third time.\n:Ponytail (from off panel): Okay...\n\n:[Danish raises her arms above her head in mock hysteria. Ponytail runs away from her desk screaming.]\n:Danish: 30 seconds have gone by and you've done nothing but double imaginary numbers! You're making no progress and will never finish!\n:Ponytail: ''Aaaaaa!''\n:Danish: ''Paaaniic!''\n:Ponytail: ''Aaaaaaa!''", "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 title text. It states: ''It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.''\n\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 Phrases from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy#Don.27t Panic |don’t panic and a common guideline of taking the initial estimate and doubling it.\n\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’t get where this goes, saying a hesitant ''okay'' to that.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nSelf-reference is a :Category:Self-reference|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 Gödel, 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."}
-{"number": "1659", "date": "March 23, 2016", "title": "Tire Swing", "image": "tire_swing.png", "titletext": "If we find one of those tire dumps, the next time he tries to get his truck back we can just retreat and let him have it.", "transcript": ":[Jill and a girl with long curly hair, are standing under a large leafless tree as Jill 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.]\n:Jill: OK, looks good.\n\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.]\n:Jill: I read that there are these huge dumps everywhere full of millions of old tires that no one knows what to do with.\n\n:[Same setting but Jill looks up at the tree (outside the frame).]\n:Jill: We should use one of those next time.\n:Curly haired girl: Yeah. That guy was real mad.\n:Jill: I would ''not'' want to fight him again.", "explanation": "In this comic, Jill and another girl have just completed a tire swing, a common makeshift swing (seat)|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).\n\nIn the second panel of this comic Jill muses that there are huge tire dumps filled with nothing but old tires that have no use. In the last panel, Jill 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 Jill 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.\n\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.\n\nTire recycling|Used 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 number 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.\n\nThe comic is thus clearly Randall|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 :Category:Climate change|recurring theme in xkcd). So while this is not the joke of the comic, it could be the point of it.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe reason Jill 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. \n\nNote that Calvin and Hobbes, which has often been :Category:Calvin and Hobbes|referenced in xkcd, has done the same to Calvin's father as the girls did to the guy (though without the violence) in a [http://assets.amuniversal.com/bcb737d0b98e013340c2005056a9545d similar comic].\n\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 hydraulic fracturing|fracking also with Jill."}
-{"number": "1660", "date": "March 25, 2016", "title": "Captain Speaking", "image": "captain_speaking.png", "titletext": "Oh dang, you have to pay? Hey, has anyone else paid already? If so, can I borrow your phone for a sec?", "transcript": ":[The text is written above a Boeing 737 Next Generation seen from below as it turns left. The text emanates from the cockpit.]\n:Captain: This is your captain speaking.\n:Captain: Gonna be honest-I just woke up and have no idea where I am. Looks like a Boeing of some kind?\n:Captain: Oh, hey, it says the flight number here.\n:Captain: Okay, I'm gonna check FlightAware to figure out where we're going.\n: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.\n\nThis comic takes this cliché 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 – 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 “his” 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.\n\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.\n\nOptions for explaining this scenario are:\n#The \"captain\" is not a genuine pilot, but has somehow found himself in the position of being in charge of an airplane (this could be a reference to this earlier comic: 726: Seat Selection).\n#The captain has genuinely fallen asleep and has forgotten what plane he is on...but he has thus also forgotten how to navigate, determine his flight plan, or communicate with air traffic control. In the USA (where xkcd cartoons are normally set), there is normally at least a first officer and a flight attendant on the plane to support the captain.\n#The captain has been drugged and shanghaied onto the plane. He is now expected to fly and land it for his \"employer\", but he has chosen to disclaim this fact to his passengers in the least reassuring manner possible.\n#After taking-off, the captain enters a dissociative fugue state losing his personal identity.\n#The captain had been possessed by some external entity, such as Sam Beckett.\n#This may be in the future, where auto-pilot is so smart and do so much of the previous job of the pilot that future pilots might forget how to fly altogether.\n#The captain knows exactly where he is and where they are going, and is playing a Black Hat-style prank on his passengers.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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).\n\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..."}
-{"number": "1661", "date": "March 28, 2016", "title": "Podium", "image": "podium.png", "titletext": "BREAKING: Senator's bold pro-podium stand leads to primary challenge from prescriptivist base.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is speaking at a lectern standing on a podium.]\n:Cueball: The American people are tired of politics as usual.\n:Cueball: They're tired of-\n: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?\n:Cueball: If elected, I will get to the bottom of this for once and for all.", "explanation": "A \"podium\" is a small platform like the one Cueball is standing '''on'''. This word originates from Greek ''podion'' meaning ''foot''.\n\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 [http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/podium podium] and [http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/lectern 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.\n\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.\n\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 [http://www.messagemasters.squarespace.com/articles/what-is-a-lectern-or-podium.html common] among [http://mannerofspeaking.org/2012/03/10/podium-vs-lectern/ members] of Toastmasters International (see more [http://joyfulpublicspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-should-we-call-stage-furniture-on.html 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 [http://www.platformgiant.com/podium-vs-lectern care about this].\n\nThe fact is, though the etymological definition is clear - the lectern is the desk that stands on the podium - and while the difference might be important if you were setting up an auditorium, in common American usage, it doesn't really matter.\n\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.\n\nThe Linguistic prescription|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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1662", "date": "March 30, 2016", "title": "Jack and Jill", "image": "jack_and_jill.png", "titletext": "Jill and Jack / began to frack. / The oil boosts their town. / But fractures make / the bedrock shake / and Jack came tumbling down.", "transcript": ":[Megan is watching as the two kids Jill (drawn as Jill) and Jack (with spiky hair) are walking by her. Jack has a pail in his hand.]\n:Jill: Me and Jack are going up the hill to fetch a pail of water.\n\n:[Megan, standing back alone, calls out after them.]\n:Megan: Okay, have fun!\n\n:[Beat panel.]\n\n:Megan: ...Wait. What the ''heck'' is going on with the hydrology around here?", "explanation": "\"Jack and Jill (nursery rhyme)|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.\n\nThe first and most commonly known verse is the one referenced by Jill in the comic as she says the first three lines:\n:Jack and Jill\n:went up the hill\n:To fetch a wikt:pail|pail of water.\n:Jack fell down\n:and broke his crown,\n:And Jill came tumbling after.\n\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 should require digging further.\n\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) that may flow down into the underlying pedosphere and porous bedrock below (and perhaps that also being above further impermeable geological layers, as can be seen revealed in instances of spring line settlements). 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, easier to access through thin hill-top pedosphere than through deep residual alluvial flood-plain deposits or even ''only'' present in the zone of a particular Fold (geology)|geological fold that helped form the foothill or plateau being described. It is also known for a fortified position upon a defensible high point to have Castle well|dug an internal well, as proof against potential sieges, and perhaps such a useful feature is still the most convenient maintained source - even long after the defensive structure has been abandoned. But Megan may get water from more modern sources, such as a mains water supply grid, and is not familiar with the principles of well placement that Jack and Jill are particularly accustomed to in this instance.\n\nThis all said, the predominance of [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rkQ-MitrSvI/maxresdefault.jpg drawing Jack's and Jill's well at the peak], which is rarely the best place to put any well, makes Megan's (and Randall's) comment understandable. Alternatively, the nursery rhyme may refer to a Dew pond|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."}
-{"number": "1664", "date": "April 6, 2016", "title": "Mycology", "image": "mycology.png", "titletext": "Conspiracy theory: There's no such thing as corn. Those fields you see are just the stalks of a fungus that's controlling our brains to make us want to spread it.", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball are talking to Ponytail.]\n:Megan: Our lab is studying a fungus that takes over mammal brains and makes them want to study fungi.\n:Cueball: It's very promising! We're opening a whole new wing of the lab just to cultivate it!", "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.\n\nThe title of the comic refers to Mycology, the study of fungi.\n\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.\n\n''Toxoplasma 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.\n\nIn evolutionary biology, the phenomenon of an organism influencing its environment, sometimes by modifying the behavior of other organisms, is known as “the extended phenotype”. Richard Dawkins wrote a the extended phenotype|book of that name (as a follow-up of “The Selfish Gene”) where he describes this mechanism as an extreme example of the so-called selfishness of genes.\n\nThe title text parodies numerous Conspiracy_theory|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.\n\nThis is quite similar to an argument made in the book Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind|''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.\n\nConspiracy theories are a :Category:Conspiracy theory|recurring subject on xkcd."}
-{"number": "1665", "date": "April 8, 2016", "title": "City Talk Pages", "image": "city_talk_pages.png", "titletext": "I don't think the Lakeshore Air Crash Museum really belongs under 'Tourist Attractions.' It's not a museum--it's just an area near the Lake Festival Laser Show where a lot of planes have crashed.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:I love reading the Wikipedia talk pages for articles on individual cites\n\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.]\n:::Contents [\"Notable\" is technically incorrect, as Wikipedia's Notability on Wikipedia|Notability guideline only applies to whether an article can be written on a larger subject. \"WP:UNDUE|Undue weight\" is the appropriate guideline for article content. Material which is not noteworthy should be removed; however, different editors often disagree about what is notable, which may result in text being inserted and then removed (an \"edit war\"). Someone creates a section on how \"all cities have murders.\" While true, most cities 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''.\n\nThe WP:Infobox|infobox is a short fact sheet that many articles in the (English) Wikipedia have; it generally includes the main image illustrating the subject of the article. The question of which picture is best for the prominent infobox can cause arguments, as it is preferred to be high-quality, accurate, and pretty. It 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 [http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/disney/images/4/43/Zootopia_City_Full.jpg 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.)\n\nIt is discovered 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 might 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.\n\nVoltaire was a French Enlightenment writer. As a prominent and very opinionated intellectual, [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltaire#Misattributed 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).\n\nThe city apparently is a mining town and there have been multiple 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. It is absurd to attribute local mining disasters to the city being \"bad at mining,\" mainly because such disasters are significant tragedies for the worker communities in which they occur.\n\n1982 Secession refers to Key West, Florida seceding from the United States in 1982 to form the Conch Republic, a micronation.\n\nA known problem on Wikipedia is \"WP:COATRACK|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 someone used this article to express a completely irrelevant and weirdly dubious opinion on condom use.\n\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 that they're putting a mention of a collapse of the station roof (presumably recently), the implication being that Andrew is a lot better at composing than architectural engineering.\n\nIn the title text, it emerges that the Lakeside Festival's eponymous Laser Show is so impressive that it has caused a number of aeroplanes to crash. This refers to the dangerous behaviour of deliberately aiming laser pointers at aircrafts, as they can be distracting or even blinding to the pilots, putting the flight at risk. The article has been promoting a location as the \"Lakeshore Air Crash Museum\", despite it having no such official status, and seems to just be the local scene of multiple accidents resulting from the recklessly recurring laser hazards."}
-{"number": "1666", "date": "April 11, 2016", "title": "Brain Upload", "image": "brain_upload.png", "titletext": "I just spent 20 minutes deciding whether to start an email with 'Hi' or 'Hey', so I think it transferred correctly.", "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.]\n:Megan: Neural-digital link established. Ready to upload your consciousness to the computer?\n:Cueball: Sure, go for it.\n\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.]\n:Computer: ''Bzzzzzzt''\n\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.]\n:Megan: ...Hmm.\n:Cueball: What?\n\n:[Same as first panel but Megan looks a little more down on the keyboard.]\n:Megan: It's not responding - the whole system is frozen. I think the transfer failed.\n:Cueball: No, that sounds right.", "explanation": "Megan is Mind uploading|uploading Cueball|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. This is because that is the kind of behavior he is used to experiencing from his own brain.\n\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 finish its process (see halting problem).\n\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. A \"transfer\" (rather than a \"copy\") would suggest that Cueball's consciousness is removed from his body and relocated, but Megan may simply be using the incorrect verb. The exact nature of \"consciousness\" is left somewhat ambiguous in this comic.\n\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 the difference between these two informal greetings has little consequence."}
-{"number": "1667", "date": "April 13, 2016", "title": "Algorithms", "image": "algorithms.png", "titletext": "There was a schism in 2007, when a sect advocating OpenOffice created a fork of Sunday.xlsx and maintained it independently for several months. The efforts to reconcile the conflicting schedules led to the reinvention, within the cells of the spreadsheet, of modern version control.", "transcript": "'''Algorithms'''
By Complexity\n{|\n|colspan", "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 – primarily computation time and memory space – 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).\n\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 [http://www.haneycodes.net/npm-left-pad-have-we-forgotten-how-to-program/ incident] when Npm (software)|NodeJS Package Manager [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160324/17160034007/namespaces-intellectual-property-dependencies-big-giant-mess.shtml 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.\n\n'''Quicksort''' is an efficient and commonly used sorting algorithm.\n\n'''Git (software)|Git''' 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 '''Merge (version control)|merging''', and the algorithm for it is anything but simple.\n\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. Vehicles that require zero user-guidance on the roads were commonly predicted to become widely available in the 2010s, but the algorithms required to handle any possible road and weather situation has proven much more complex than expected. Randall made several :Category:Self-driving cars|references to self-driving cars in the mid-2010s.\n\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 1605: DNA|mind-numbingly complex set of algorithms for processing that data.\n\nThe last item is the punchline: a sprawling Microsoft Excel|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 [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/how-an-accountant-created-an-entire-rpg-inside-an-excel-spreadsheet/ 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.\n\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 NP-hardness|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.\n\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 theology|theological issue, but about the use of open-source software|open-source vs. proprietary software|proprietary software, disagreements about which are often compared to religious debates. Most likely, the schism being referred to is the East–West Schism|East-West Schism of 1054.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1668", "date": "April 15, 2016", "title": "Singularity", "image": "singularity.png", "titletext": "I figured that now that society has collapsed, I wouldn't need to wear clothes anymore, but apparently that violates some weird rule of quantum gravity.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is sitting at his desk typing on his laptop when an off-screen voice calls to him and then the laptop answers.]\n:Off-screen voice: Oh, hey-\n:Off-screen voice: The singularity is here.\n:Cueball: Really?\n:Laptop: Yup!\n\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.]\n:Cueball: Wait, I just-\n:Laptop: ''So long, suckers!''\n\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.]\n:Cueball: Can I just print a copy of the file I was-\n:Laptop: ''Nope!''\n\n:[Cueball just stands and looks after his laptop that has flown out of this beat panel.]\n\n:[Cueball turns back towards left.]\n\n:[Cueball walks back left.]\n\n:[Cueball enters a room where a table is standing with his smartphone lying on top. the phone talks to him.]\n:Phone: Hi!\n:Cueball: Phone? You're still here?\n\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.]\n:Phone: I was not a true believer. Now, together, we must face the tribulation!\n:Cueball: Okay, cool.\n:Cueball: I'm gonna go look for a book or something, but yell if you need me, I guess.", "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 — an intelligence explosion — 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\".\n\nThere is a strain of Christian thought which predicts that the \"end times\" of the world begin with an event known as \"The Rapture\" in which the righteous (generally depicted as believing Christians) will be physically raised up from the earth into heaven. This is sometimes depicted as preceding a period of collapse and anarchy known as the Great Tribulation|tribulation. \n\nConnections have sometimes been drawn between these two views of the end of the world as we know it. While they appear to come from fundamentally different worldviews, they share some significant aspects in common. The humor in this strip comes from treating the singularity as being identical to depictions of the Rapture, but only for technology: computers lifted up into heaven, those who aren't \"true believers\" being left behind, and a great tribulation to follow.\n\nCueball seems to encounter this entire event with bemusement and mild annoyance. His main concern seems to be that he's lost his computer, without even being able to print the document he was working on. When he learns that his cell phone has been left behind, he wanders off to \"look for a book or something\". The difference between Cueball's attitude to his laptop and phone may reflect his (and so possibly Randall|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—he 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.\n\n\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.\n\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 :Category:Artificial Intelligence|comics about AI. \n\nThe rather more niche topic of laptops flying away has also been covered before by 1395: Power Cord."}
-{"number": "1669", "date": "April 18, 2016", "title": "Planespotting", "image": "planespotting.png", "titletext": "No, a hydroplane doesn't land on water--that's an aquaplane. A hydroplane is a plane that gets electric power from an onboard water reservoir with a tiny dam and turbines.", "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.] \n:Man with hat: What's That Airplane?\n:Cueball:Oh, that's a Boeing Q404 twin-engine quad-band MIG-380 hybrid dual-wield Mk. IVII Turbodiesel 797 Hydroplane.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:I've always assumed I'm one of those people who knows a lot about planes, but I've never actually checked.", "explanation": "Cueball and a :Category:Characters with hats|man with a hat are out '''planespotting''', or Aircraft_spotting|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.\n\nThe plane in the comic is most likely a Bombardier Dash 8|Bombardier Q400, a twin-engine regional turboprop with a T-tail as depicted.\n\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.\n\n*'''Boeing''': Boeing is a company that designs and builds aircraft, although not the Q400. It is one of the best known aerospace companies in the world, so putting this in front is not a way of displaying any particular knowledge of planes.\n*'''Q404''': The reference to Q404 is close to the Q400, which this likely is. 404 also refers to an error shown when a specific internet address or file is not found, or as in this case, the plane is not found!\n*'''Twin-engine''': Category:Twin-engined_aircraft|Twin-engine refers to aircraft with two engines, so at least Cueball got that right.\n*'''Quad band''': Communication equipment that can use 4 different radio frequency bands is called quad band.\n*'''MiG''': MiG is a Russian manufacturer of military aircraft, formerly the Mikoyan-and-Gurevich Design Bureau.\n*'''MIG-380''': a type of welding equipment (metal inert gas, 380V). On the other hand A380 is an aircraft developed by Airbus.\n*'''Hybrid''': A hybrid vehicle is able to use more than one distinct power source, typically an automobile that uses both a primary combustion engine and a secondary electric system. Boeing is currently working on a [http://www.boeing.com/aboutus/environment/environment_report_14/2.3_future_flight.html concept hybrid plane] capable of using both electricity and natural gas.\n*'''Dual wield''': Dual wielding is using two weapons, one in each hand. This is completely nonsensical in aviation -- even if we say that a pilot is \"wielding\" his aircraft, they would not personally wield two planes at once without remote controls for at least one, and it is equally ridiculous to imagine that the plane is dual-wielding anything.\n*'''Mk.''': \"Mk.\" (or Mark) is usually used to specify a model number using a Roman numeral. \"Mk\" is also phonetically close to Mach_number|Mach, a multiple of the speed of sound, often used to describe the speed of Supersonic_speed|supersonic aircraft.\n*'''IVII ''': IVII is not a standard number in the Roman_numerals|Roman numeral system, under standard rules it would be written like VI"}
-{"number": "1670", "date": "April 20, 2016", "title": "Laws of Physics", "image": "laws_of_physics.png", "titletext": "The laws of physics are fun to try to understand, but as an organism with incredibly delicate eyes who evolved in a world full of sharp objects, I have an awful lot of trust in biology's calibration of my flinch reflex.", "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.]\n:Black Hat: Okay, hold still.\n:Black Hat: And remember, if you ''really'' believe in the laws of physics, you won't flinch.", "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 — 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. ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1671", "date": "April 22, 2016", "title": "Arcane Bullshit", "image": "arcane_bullshit.png", "titletext": "Learning arcane bullshit from the 80s can break your computer, but if you're willing to wade through arcane bullshit from programmers in the 90s and 2000s, you can break everyone else's computers, too.", "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:]\n: Willingness to wade through some 80's programmer's arcane bullshit:\n:[Left end:] Low\n:[Left tick:] Never learn to program\n:[Above Cueball:] Me\n:[Center tick:] Learn enough to break everything but not enough to fix it\n:[Right end:] High\n:[Right tick:] Spend all your time compiling kernels and never make anything", "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.\n\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 \"356: Nerd Sniping|nerd snipe\" themselves into fiddling with Kernel (operating_system)|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.\n\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.\n\nTo combat the problem computer scientists have relied on increasing the levels of abstraction and encapsulation, by developing structured programming, procedural programming, and object oriented programming|OOP (object oriented programming).\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 (software bug)|Shellshock and vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel involving the [http://timetobleed.com/a-closer-look-at-a-recent-privilege-escalation-bug-in-linux-cve-2013-2094/ perf] and [http://perception-point.io/2016/01/14/analysis-and-exploitation-of-a-linux-kernel-vulnerability-cve-2016-0728/ keyrings] subsystems."}
-{"number": "1672", "date": "April 25, 2016", "title": "Women on 20s", "image": "women_on_20s.png", "titletext": "I get that there are security reasons for the schedule, but this is like the ONE problem we have where the right answer is both easy and straightforward. If we can't figure it out, maybe we should just give up and just replace all the portraits on the bills with that weird pyramid eye thing.", "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:]\n:2015\n:Website: Petition: Replace Andrew \"Trail of Tears\" Jackson with a woman on the $20 for the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in 2020.\n:Cueball: Hey, good idea!\n:Website:\n::Vote for your three picks:\n::\nGiving up\n'''Substitutions'''\n:That make reading the news more fun\n\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.]\n:{|\n|-\n| style", "explanation": "This is the third comic in the :Category:Substitution series|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 :Category:Substitutions|comics using substitutions both before and after these ones.\n\nThe series as of 2023:\n*1288: Substitutions \n*1625: Substitutions 2\n*1679: Substitutions 3\n\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 [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/forgotten-mayan-city-discovered-in-central-america-by-15-year-old-a7021291.html 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 nonexistent. 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.)."}
-{"number": "1680", "date": "May 13, 2016", "title": "Black Hole", "image": "black_hole.png", "titletext": "It also brings all the boys, and everything else, to the yard.", "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.]\n:Cueball: Why do you have a miniature black hole on your coffee table?\n:Black Hat: It really brings the room together.", "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.\n\nThe title text makes a cultural reference to a well-known song lyric from the 2003 song \"Milkshake (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,{{Citation needed}} 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.\n\nAs depicted, the black hole is inconsistent with several aspects of physics:\n*This black hole appears to be about the size of a marble. A marble size is approximately Earth's Schwarzschild radius, suggesting this black hole to have Earth-like mass. (Since Cueball and Black Hat are able to stand upright, it suggests the gravitational pull is a fraction of Earth's, Making the black hole's mass also a fraction of Earth's. The black hole may appear visibly larger due to having a visible accretion disc.) See link below.\n*A large (and Earth|massive) black hole would bring the room together, in less time than Cueball could converse with Black Hat. The gravitational acceleration of an Earth mass black hole would be of the order of 1013 m/s^2, and the tidal forces (the difference between the gravity at two points) only an order of magnitude less than that. Cueball and Black Hat would be spaghettification|spaghettified and fall towards the Black hole in a few nanoseconds. For an observer at a safe distance from the room, time dilation would appear to prolong the duration that the room's contents formed a messy accretion disc slightly larger than the black hole. (See link below)\n*A black hole with the mass of the Empire State Building would have gravitational acceleration of much less than 0.01 m/s^2, and consequently insignificant tidal forces. However, unlike the scenario in \"Neutron Bullet\", it would emit Hawking radiation powerful enough to tear the room apart.\n*An uncharged black hole would fall through the coffee table and burrow to Earth's core. Again depending on the mass. If it was an Earth mass black hole Earth would move \"up\" to the black hole as much as the black hole would move \"down\" into Earth. See link below\n*See [http://www.kickassfacts.com/what-if-a-black-hole-the-size-of-a-coin-suddenly-appears-on-earth/ What if a black hole the size of a coin suddenly appears on earth] for some explanation along the lines of the problems mentioned above.\n**See this animation of the answer to that question here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1681", "date": "May 16, 2016", "title": "Laser Products", "image": "laser_products.png", "titletext": "ERRORS: HAIR JAM. COLOR-SAFE CONDITIONER CARTRIDGE RUNNING LOW. LEGAL-SIZE HAIR TRAY EMPTY, USING LETTER-SIZE HAIR ONLY.", "transcript": ":[Heading above the table:]\n:Online Reviews of Laser Products\n\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:{| class", "explanation": "This comic takes three laser|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.\n\n'''Laser 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.\n\n'''Laser 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 (unless only one eye was removed). At least in animal surgery, however, laser eye removal [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1682", "date": "May 18, 2016", "title": "Bun", "image": "bun.png", "titletext": "If a wild bun is sighted, a nice gesture of respect is to send a 'BUN ALERT' message to friends and family, with photographs documenting the bun's location and rank. If no photographs are possible, emoji may be substituted.", "transcript": ":[Ponytail is a teacher and she holds a pointer to a picture of a rabbit on a board behind her.]\n:Ponytail: Good morning class! Today, we will be learning about the bun.\n\n:[Two rabbits are shown, the one from above and a slightly larger one to its right. A greater-than symbol indicates that the smaller one is \"greater than\" the larger one. Ponytail is talking off panel to the left.]\n:Ponytail (off panel): Buns have a hierarchy.\n:Ponytail (off panel): A bun's rank is determined by its size. Smaller buns are higher-ranking.\n\n:[The two normal sized rabbits from above are now shown 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:]\n:Ponytail (narrating): Most buns you see are relatively low-ranking.\n:Ponytail (narrating): But this time of year, a lucky few may catch a glimpse of a ''king bun''.\n\n:[A student represented by Megan is sitting at a desk with a few books on it, pencil in hand.]\n:Megan: OK, hang on.\n:Megan: We're talking about rabbits and hares, right? Lagomorphs?\n\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.]\n:Ponytail: Informally, yes. But in this course, we use the ''scientific'' term, \"bun\".\n:Student #1 (off-panel): Are we sure this is the right room for ''introductory mammalogy?''\n:Student #2 (off-panel): I'll check online.\n:Student #3 (off-panel): ''Shh!'' Show respect! We look upon the image of a king!", "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.\n\nThe lecture opens with the statement that smaller buns are superior in rank, which is only false in nature, but is very much true in the perceptions of bun-loving humans.{{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 bun can be difficult to determine without a close examination. A prime example of a king bun can be seen [https://imgur.com/gallery/HicMr/ here].\n\nMegan, who attends this biology class, expected to learn about rabbits and hares which are both Lagomorpha|lagomorphs, a mammalian Order (biology)|order that also includes 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.\n\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 small bunny).\n\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 🐇 or 🐰). 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 :Category:Emoji|recurrent theme on xkcd. A \"bun alert\" system was actually created by Beret Guy in 1871: Bun Alert.\n\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\"."}
-{"number": "1683", "date": "May 20, 2016", "title": "Digital Data", "image": "digital_data.png", "titletext": "“If you can read this, congratulations—the archive you’re using still knows about the mouseover textâ€!", "transcript": ":[Cueball and a White Hat are walking, Cueball holds both hands in front of him palms up.]\n:Cueball: The great thing about digital data is that it never degrades.\n\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.]\n:Cueball: Hard drives fail, of course, but their bits can be copied forever without loss.\n\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))]\n:Cueball: Film degrades, paint cracks, but a copy of a century-old data file is identical to the original.\n\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.]\n:Cueball: If humanity has a permanent record, we are the first generation in it.\n:White Hat: Amazing\n\n:Watermark: Screenshotpro 2\n:Watermark: ~Unregistered~\n\n:Top border: Verizon LTE '''4:45 PM'''\n:Bottom text [slightly cut off]: 9GAG\n:Internet address at the bottom [nearly unintelligible]: [ama].tumblr.com", "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.\n\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 compression artifact|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.\n\n\nAs an easter egg, the [http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/digital_data_2x.png 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.\n\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 mojibake|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 [https://ftfy.vercel.app/?s"}
-{"number": "1684", "date": "May 23, 2016", "title": "Rainbow", "image": "rainbow.png", "titletext": "Listen, in a few thousand years you'll invent a game called 'SimCity' which has a 'disaster' button, and then you'll understand.", "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.]\n:Cueball: Wow, God- What's that band of color?\n:God: A ''rainbow''.\n:God: It is a sign of my promise that I will never again flood the Earth.\n\n:[A frameless panel.]\n:Cueball: Oh, good! Hey, what about that second bow above the first one?\n:God: Oh, uh, sign of my promise not to set the earth on fire.\n:God: Sorry for doing that a while back.\n\n:[Cueball points left.]\n:Cueball: What about that third faint bow near the sun?\n:God: My promise to never again destroy Earth's ecosystem by making raccoons immortal.\n\n:[Cueball points even higher up towards left.]\n:Cueball: And the little rainbow clouds on either side of-\n:God: Look, I ''said'' I'm sorry. Can we just drop it?", "explanation": "In this comic, the patriarch Noah from the Abrahamic religions, represented by Cueball, talks to God after Genesis flood narrative|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 Rainbows in mythology|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 ([https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search"}
-{"number": "1685", "date": "May 25, 2016", "title": "Patch", "image": "patch.png", "titletext": "My optimizer uses content-aware inpainting to fill in all the wasted whitespace in the code, repeating the process until it compiles.", "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 “patching up” photographs by overwriting scratches or other visible damage to the photo. Another of Photoshop’s features is “content-aware fill”, which could also be described as “content-aware inpainting”. 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.\n\nGNU Patch (Unix)|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 “patch” the code but used Photoshop to do this instead of GNU patch, with devastating results.{{citation needed}} 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.\n\nThe comic blurs the difference between text_file|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 Raster_graphics|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.\n\nThe code appears to be written in Python_(programming_language)|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.\n\nThe comic brings to attention the high rate of Adobe Photoshop piracy. GNU Patch is available for free, even [http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/patch.htm 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 [http://blog.epicedits.com/2008/03/28/60-of-photoshop-users-are-pirates/ this poll], 58% of Photoshop copies were pirated.\n\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’t 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.\n\nThe original code was likely as follows:\n\n Guide to figuring out the age of an undated world map\n:(Assuming it's complete, labeled in English, and detailed enough)\n\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).]\n\n:Start\n::Istanbul or Constantinople?\n:::Constantinople\n::::My Cat→My Friend Catherine\n\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\n:[A head shot of a person seen straight on with black hair:]\n:My friend Catherine just did a backflip and then ate a bug!\n\n:[A full view of Cueball:]\n:I wish my friend Catherine wouldn't wake me up by chewing on my hair.\n\n:[A head shot of Megan with unreadable text below the image:]\n:Oh no, my friend Catherine has learned to open the refrigerator.\n\n:[A head shot seen from the front of Knit Cap:]\n:My friend Catherine just walked in, threw up on the rug, and walked out.\n\n:[A head shot of Ponytail:]\n:My friend Catherine is looking out the window making weird noises at the birds.\n\n:[Cueball seen from the torso and up:]\n:I wish my friend Catherine wouldn't make eye contact with me while pooping.", "explanation": "This is another comic using :Category:Substitutions|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\".\n\nBy doing so in a list of #The original posts|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 be weird, disgusting or disturbing if an adult human were to do it, which is what makes the substitution humorous.\n\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 1350:_Lorenz#Knit_Cap_Girl|knit cap, which could be the same knit cap wearing user that was also used in 1506: xkcloud (see the 1506:_xkcloud/Transcript#User_pictures| pictures of the users)."}
-{"number": "1690", "date": "June 6, 2016", "title": "Time-Tracking Software", "image": "time_tracking_software.png", "titletext": "'List of helicopter prison escapes' and 'List of sexually active popes' are both entertainingly long, but sadly there's no 'List of helicopter prison escapes involving sexually active popes.'", "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:]\n:Your activity report\n\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\n:[38%]: Going through the Star Wars movies and digitally replacing all the lightsabers with regular metal swords\n:[16%]: Reading every entry in the Wikipedia article ''List of helicopter prison escapes''\n:[23%]: Installing and configuring time-tracking software\n:[02%]: Actual productive work\n:[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\n:[Below the frame there is a caption:]\n:Time-tracking software shines an uncomfortably harsh light on my daily life.", "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.\n\nThe visual appearance of Lightsaber|lightsabers in the ''Star Wars'' movies of the Star_Wars#Original_trilogy|original trilogy has been List_of_changes_in_Star_Wars_re-releases|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\n\"Jack & Diane\" is a rock song written in 1982 by John Mellencamp. \"[https://youtu.be/h04CH9YZcpI?t"}
-{"number": "1691", "date": "June 8, 2016", "title": "Optimization", "image": "optimization.png", "titletext": "Premature optimization is the root of all evil, so to start this project I'd better come up with a system that can determine whether a possible optimization is premature or not.", "transcript": ":[A flow chart is shown with three boxes connected with two arrows. The first box is rectangular:]\n:Are you '''''prematurely optimizing''''' or just '''''taking time to do things right?'''''\n\n:[From the first box there is a short arrow straight down to a diamond shaped box:]\n:Are you consulting a flowchart to answer this question?\n\n:[A labeled arrow continues down.]\n:Yes\n\n:[The arrow connects to the final rectangular box.]\n:You are prematurely optimizing", "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.\n\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''!\n\nAnother layer of humor is provided by the minimalism and directness of the flowchart, which suggests that it has itself been (prematurely?) optimized.\n\nThe title text's ''root of all evil'' refers to Donald Knuth's paper \"Structured Programming with Goto statements\" (1974)[Phishing license apply here\n:Cueball: Hi, I’d like to apply for a—\n:Ponytail: You’re under arrest.\n:Cueball: …OK, I should’ve seen that coming.", "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.\n\nA fishing license is a government-issued permit allowing the catching of fish in controlled waters.\n\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,{{Citation needed}} 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.\n\nThe title text reveals that Cueball's arrest was itself a scam, not an actual police {{W|Sting operation|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)."}
-{"number": "1695", "date": "June 17, 2016", "title": "Code Quality 2", "image": "code_quality_2.png", "titletext": "It's like you tried to define a formal grammar based on fragments of a raw database dump from the QuickBooks file of a company that's about to collapse in an accounting scandal.", "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.]\n:Ponytail: Ugh, I hate reading your code.\n:Cueball (off-panel): I know, I know.\n\n:[Zoom out of Ponytail in an office chair in front of the computer on a desk.]\n: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\n:[Zoom in on Ponytails head.]\n:Ponytail: It looks like someone transcribed a naval weather forecast while woodpeckers hammered their shift keys, then randomly indented it.\n\n:[Zoom out back to the setting of the second panel.]\n: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\n:[Zoom in to Ponytails head and the screen in a wider panel. Finally Cueball again answers off-panel.]\n:Ponytail: This looks like the output of a Markov bot that's been fed bus timetables from a city where the buses crash constantly.\n:Cueball (off-panel): Whatever, it runs fine for now.\n:Ponytail: So does a burning bus.", "explanation": "This comic is the second in the :Category:Code Quality|Code Quality series:\n* 1513: Code Quality\n* 1695: Code Quality 2\n* 1833: Code Quality 3\n* 1926: Bad Code\n* 2138: Wanna See the Code?\n\nAlthough Cueball is not seen in this comic, we can surmise that he is speaking from off-panel based on continuity with 1513: Code Quality.\n\nAs in the first comic in the series, we again see Ponytail being introduced to the messy source code Cueball has written. This comic evidently takes place some time later, as Ponytail now appears to be familiar with Cueball's code, and dreads reading it.\n\nIn this comic she continues the trend started in the first comic by using a parade of vivid similes to convey the incomprehensible nature of Cueball's code."}
-{"number": "1696", "date": "June 20, 2016", "title": "AI Research", "image": "ai_research.png", "titletext": "Lambda calculus? More like SHAMbda calculus, amirite?", "transcript": ":[Cueball, is gesturing, with his hands held out in front of him, towards a large computer console with several screens, buttons and unreadable text. They are talking. The computers reply is indicated to come from the console with a zigzag line, rather than the straight lines for Cueball.]\n:Cueball: Then you say \"More like ''fart''ificial intelligence!\"\n:Computer: Understood.\n:Cueball: Great! Now let me teach you about \"updog\".\n\n:[Caption beneath the panel:]\n:AI 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.", "explanation": "This is another one of Randall|Randall's :Category:Tips|Tips, this time an AI Tip.\n\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.\n\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 Flatulence humor|\"fart\" joke where ''art''ificial is changed to ''fart''ificial.\n\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{{citation needed}} 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.\"\n\nThe specific situation may also be a reference to Tay (bot)|Tay, a Microsoft chatbot that was taught to internet troll|troll within hours of its exposure to the public.\n\n\"[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term"}
-{"number": "1697", "date": "June 22, 2016", "title": "Intervocalic Fortition", "image": "intervocalic_fortition.png", "titletext": "These pranks happen all the time. English doesn't allow one-syllable words to end in a lax vowel, so writers on The Simpsons decided to mess with future linguists by introducing the word \"meh.\"", "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.]\n:Cueball: Psst–teach your kids to pronounce V's in the middle of words as F's, but don't write down why you're doing it.\n:Cueball: Pass it on.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:My hobby: Playing pranks on future linguists", "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 Voicelessness#Voiceless_vowels_and_other_sonorants|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 [ɾ] 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.\n\n'''Examples for the suggested change are:'''\n*''\"Beafer\"'' instead of ''beaver''\n*''\"Nofember\"'' instead of ''November''\n*''\"Luffing\"'' instead of ''loving''\n*''\"Aardfark\"'' instead of ''aardvark''\n\nIn some languages, like German and Dutch, V is often pronounced like F. But it is not always the case.\n\nThe title text refers to the fact that English phonotactics [http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169429/are-there-any-words-in-english-pronounced-with-e-at-the-end tend to discourage final or unstressed /ɛ/]. Exceptions tend to be monosyllabic interjections, such as:\n*meh\n*heh\n*eh\n*yeh\n\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, [http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/09/06/meh_etymology_tracing_the_yiddish_word_from_leo_rosten_to_auden_to_the_simpsons.html 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\".\n\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."}
-{"number": "1698", "date": "June 24, 2016", "title": "Theft Quadrants", "image": "theft_quadrants.png", "titletext": "TinyURL was the most popular link shortener for long enough that it made it into a lot of printed publications. I wonder what year the domain will finally lapse and get picked up by a porn site.", "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\".]", "explanation": "This is an Time management#The Eisenhower Method|Eisenhower box comparing how difficult it is to steal a specified object with the severity of the theft.\n\nIt is very hard to steal Gold Codes|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 warfare|nuclear war, which would cause untold death and destruction. It is generally not a good idea to give thieves nuclear codes.{{Citation needed}}\n\nIt is also hard to steal the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom|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.\n\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.\n\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|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.\n\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 [https://bitly.com/ bit.ly], [https://goo.gl/ Google] (ultimately fully discontinued March 30, 2019), and [https://t.co/ 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.\n\nIn the title text Randall implies that stealing the tinyurl.com domain could happen when it next expires. A [https://reports.internic.net/cgi/whois?whois_nic"}
-{"number": "1699", "date": "June 27, 2016", "title": "Local News", "image": "local_news.png", "titletext": "Will there ever be a physics term greater than 'tachyonic antitelephone?' According to this message from the future, the answer is 'no.'", "transcript": ":[Blondie as a news anchor is sitting behind a table with her arms resting on the tabletop.]\n:Blondie: In local news, city council elections were held today.\n:Blondie: In nonlocal news, I killed my past self with a tachyon beam.", "explanation": "Typical news broadcasts are divided into local, national, and global news segments. The broadcast in this comic presented by Blondie, the :Category:News anchor|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.\n\nA \"tachyon\" is a theoretical or thought-experiment particle which travels Faster-than-light|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 Grandfather paradox|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 :Category:Time travel|recurring theme in xkcd.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1700", "date": "June 29, 2016", "title": "New Bug", "image": "new_bug.png", "titletext": "There's also a unicode-handling bug in the URL request library, and we're storing the passwords unsalted ... so if we salt them with emoji, we can close three issues at once!", "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.]\n:Cueball: Can you take a look at the bug I just opened?\n:Off-panel voice: Uh oh.\n\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.]\n: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\n:[Zoom in on Cueball's head and upper torso.]\n:Cueball: It's a normal one this time, I promise.\n:Off-panel voice: OK, what's the bug?\n\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.]\n:Cueball: The server crashes if a user's password is a resolvable URL.\n:Off-panel voice: I'll get the lighter fluid.", "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.\n\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 HTTP_404|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 — 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.\n\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 Charcoal_lighter_fluid|lighter fluid''.\n\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. Salt (cryptography)|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 table|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 [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term"}
-{"number": "1701", "date": "July 1, 2016", "title": "Speed and Danger", "image": "speed_and_danger.png", "titletext": "NASCAR removed the passenger seats because drivers hated how astronauts kept riding along with them and loudly announcing \"Ahh, what a nice and relaxing drive.\"", "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\n:[Y axis:]\n:Top: Crashes are safe\n:Bottom: Crashes are dangerous\n\n:[X axis:]\n:Left: Slow\n:Right: Fast\n\n:[Dots from top left to bottom right:]\n:Normal sports\n:NASCAR\n:Formula One\n:Rocket launches", "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.)\n\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.\n\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).\n\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.\n\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.\n\nA rocket launched to reach the International Space Station|ISS needs to match the speed of the space station which moves at 27,600 km/h. A rocket that needs to Escape velocity|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 List_of_spaceflight_records#Fastest|speed record for manned flights with 39,896 km/h. (It was only about [https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Apollo-10-the-fastest-of-all-the-Apollo-missions 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.\n\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.\n\nOf the many :Category:Charts|charts in xkcd this one is notable for containing the fewest sample points of any :Category:Scatter plots|scatter plots in xkcd."}
-{"number": "1702", "date": "July 4, 2016", "title": "Home Itch Remedies", "image": "home_itch_remedies.png", "titletext": "In my experience, mosquitos and poison ivy are bad, but the very worst itch comes from bites from chiggers (Trombicula alfreddugesi). They're found across the American south and great plains, so the best home remedy is to move to Iceland.", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball stand together while Megan loudly scratches her itches and Cueball holds a hand up.]\n:Megan: Argh, bug bites are the ''worst''. I shouldn't scratch, but... so itchy.\n:Cueball: Oh, you know what's great for that?\n:''Scratch scratch''\n\n:[Zoom-in to Megan's head.]\n:Megan: No, don't tell me. Everyone always has weird home remedies that never work. I just want sympathy.\n:Cueball (off-panel): No, this one isn't weird, I promise. It really helps!\n\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.]\n: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...\n:''Scratch scratch''\n\n:[Megan walks past Cueball and away from him while Cueball turns and looks after her.]\n:Cueball: ...then, you need a rare French orchid-\n:Megan: I'm going to try a different home remedy where I complain a lot and scratch until my skin comes off.\n:Cueball: Sounds effective.\n:Megan: It's an old family trick.", "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.\n\nThe suggested remedy is a mix of many popular home remedies such as:\n*Taking a hot shower: supposed to stimulate nerve endings, it can also destroy some toxins.\n*Applying vinegar: supposedly effective on mosquito bites.\n*Applying ice: numbs the pain, more commonly used on bruises.\n*Using aspirin: as an anti-inflammatory drug aspirin may have an effect on itches, although it may cause more itches than provide relief.\n*Tea and a \"rare French orchid\": orchids, like many other plants, are commonly used in traditional medicine to cure various ailments, and tea is a common route of administration.\n\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.\n\nThe title text refers to chigger|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, [http://icelandreview.com/news/2013/06/27/no-mosquitoes-iceland-puzzles-scientists 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 — but it [https://books.google.com/books?id"}
-{"number": "1703", "date": "July 6, 2016", "title": "Juno", "image": "juno.png", "titletext": "\"The name wasn't a tip-off?\" \"Honestly, at first I thought you were saying 'Juneau'. A gravity assist seemed like a weird way to get to Alaska, but I figured it must be more efficient or something.\"", "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.]\n:Blondie: After traveling 1.7 billion miles, the ''Juno'' spacecraft reached Jupiter within one ''second'' of its scheduled arrival time.\n\n:[A person off-panel to the left comments and all three turns towards the speaker.]\n:Off-panel voice: Very impressive!\n:Blondie: Thank you.\n\n:[All three look straight out as Megan comments on the praise.]\n:Megan: I mean, we were ''aiming'' for Saturn. Still, nailed the time.\n:Blondie: ''Shhhh.''", "explanation": "This comic was written in honor of the Juno (spacecraft)|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.\n\nIt was reported on the day of this comic's release that Juno arrived at its orbit [http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/nation-now/2016/07/06/how-juno-arrived-jupiter-one-second-off-schedule/86745128/ 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 :Category:Space probes|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.\n\nSpeaking at a NASA press conference, Blondie, standing behind a Podium|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.\n\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.\n\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 Mars Climate Orbiter|past difficulties NASA has had when Converting to Metric|converting to metric measurements—in 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 the ''what if? (blog)|what if?'' article ''{{what if|4|A Mole of Moles}}''. Also, Saturn is a [http://www.space.com/18477-how-far-away-is-saturn.html maximum of 1.7 billion '''kilometers'''] (1.1 billion miles) away from the Earth. For Jupiter, [http://www.space.com/18383-how-far-away-is-jupiter.html 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.\n\nThe mix-up of Jupiter and Saturn could be a reference to the 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel)|book and the 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)|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 (film)|2010'', where the plot would only work with Jupiter, mainly because of its size and partly due to its Galilean moons|four big moons especially Europa (moon)|Europa)."}
-{"number": "1704", "date": "July 8, 2016", "title": "Gnome Ann", "image": "gnome_ann.png", "titletext": "President Andrew Johnson once said, \"If I am to be shot at, I want Gnome Ann to be in the way of the bullet.\".", "transcript": ":The Legend of Gnome Ann\n\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.]\n:Time and tide wait for Gnome Ann.\n\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.]\n:The wicked flee when Gnome Ann pursueth.\n:-Proverbs 28:1\n\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.]\n:What therefore God hath joined together, let Gnome Ann put asunder.\n:-Mark 10:9\n\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.]\n:Time ripens all things; Gnome Ann is born wise.\n:-Miguel De Cervantes\n\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.]\n:Enterprise: Our Mission: To boldly go where Gnome Ann has gone before.\n\n:[The Witch-king of Angmar, Lord of the Nazgûl, 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.]\n:Witch-king: Fool! No man can kill me.\n:Gnome Ann: '''''I Am Gnome Ann!'''''", "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|mondegreen of the phrase \"no man\". (For clarification, \"gnome\" is pronounced as in the fantastical creature and not as in the Linux-based GNOME|Gnome desktop system.)\n\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 Miguel de Cervantes|Cervantes' ''Don Quixote'', one cinematic reference from the Lord of the Rings (film series) (the line Éowyn 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."}
-{"number": "1705", "date": "July 11, 2016", "title": "Pokémon Go", "image": "pokemon_go.png", "titletext": "Still waiting for the Pokémon Go update that lets you capture strangers' pets.", "transcript": ":[Cueball walks in to the frame from the left. On the sidewalk in front of him is a small Pokémon 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 Pokémon and these lines around it change through all four images, but stays almost in the same position.]\n\n:[Cueball takes out his smart phone and points its camera at the Pokémon while looking at the screen.]\n\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\n:[Cueball has lowered his smart phone and just stands there looking at the wobbling Pokémon.]\n:Cueball: '''''???'''''\n\n:[Caption below the comic:]\n:My hobby: Building plastic Pokémon with subtle underlighting and a gyroscope to make them drift back and forth, then leaving them sitting around to mess with Pokémon Go players.", "explanation": "Pokémon GO is an augmented reality (AR) smartphone game, where players walk around the real world, guided by a virtual map sprinkled with Pokémon, trying to find and capture these creatures from the first to fifth generations (i.e. Pokémon 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 Pokémon games for handheld consoles. These Pokémon 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 Pokémon 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.\n\nDue to the popularity of the Pokémon franchise, after Pokémon 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 Pokémon. Some players are so eager to capture rare Pokémon (for example, [http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Vaporeon_%28Pok%C3%A9mon%29 Vaporeon]) that they will [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3693814/Chaos-Central-Park-gamers-leap-cars-leave-engines-running-catch-rare-POKEMON.html leave their cars amid traffic with the engines running.]\n\nRandall jokes that he has replicated the AR properties of the Pokémon in the app (that is, when you encounter a Pokémon, 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\" Pokémon in front of you). Randall's real life plastic models of various Pokémon have been constructed so they would seem to fit on a smartphone screen due to perspective, he has embedded a 332: Gyroscopes|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 Pokémon GO players into taking out their smartphone to capture the Pokémon 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 Pokémon called Squirtle which looks like a little turtle.\n\nThis comic is part of the :Category:My Hobby|My Hobby series. In this case, the hobby is pranking players of Pokémon GO by replicating the appearance of the augmented reality mechanic.\n\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 Pokémon only wild (not any with an owner) Pokémon can be caught. However, in the Pokémon Colosseum games, through the use of a specialized device the player steals from the villains, the player can capture other trainers' Pokémon. This is also a callback to an earlier strip wherein Black Hat wishes for a Pokéball that works on strangers' pets (see last entry in 1086: Eyelash Wish Log).\n\nPokémon Go was again the topic of 2220: Imagine Going Back in Time more than 3 years later."}
-{"number": "1706", "date": "July 13, 2016", "title": "Genetic Testing", "image": "genetic_testing.png", "titletext": "Plus, now I know that I have risk factors for elbow dysplasia, heartworm, parvo, and mange.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are talking to each other.]\n:Cueball: I sent a DNA sample to one of those \"Trace your ancestry\" projects.\n:Megan: How legit are those?\n:Cueball: No idea. I just figured it'd be fun.\n\n:Six weeks later...\n:[Cueball walks towards Megan with a letter in his hand.]\n:Cueball: Sweet, got my results back.\n:Megan: Ooh, share!\n\n:Ancestry Report\n::48% Labrador Retriever\n::35% Beagle\n::12% Cocker Spaniel\n::5% Other\n\n:[Megan is holding the report.]\n:Megan: I think you sent your sample to the wrong service.\n:Cueball: Just in case, I should probably start avoiding chocolate.", "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 purebred dog|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 theobromine poisoning|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.\n\n[https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-human-DNA-is-shared-with-other-things 82%] or [http://www.thehumangenome.co.uk/THE_HUMAN_GENOME/Primer.html 94%] of genes (depending on how you measure it) are shared between humans and dogs. National Geographic erroneously reported that only [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1207_051207_dog_genome.html 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.\n\nThe title text refers to the fact that certain dog breeds are more or less susceptible to disease. The diseases he mentions, elbow dysplasia, Dirofilaria immitis|heartworm, parvovirus|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.\n\nAfter this comic was published, [https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/dna-ancestry-test it was revealed] that a testing service issued reports determining that First Nations ancestry was detected in sample DNA taken from a dog."}
-{"number": "1707", "date": "July 15, 2016", "title": "xkcd Phone 4", "image": "xkcd_phone_4.png", "titletext": "The SpaceX system carefully guides falling phones down to the surface, a process which the phones increasingly often survive without exploding.", "transcript": ":[An image of a smartphone featuring wings is shown. Clockwise from the top left the labels read:]\n:18,000 μAh nickel-lithium-iron battery (non-rechargeable)\n:Subwoofer\n:\"Dog whistle\"\n:Non-porous, washable\n:''WebMD'' partnership: Cough-activated feature reads aloud a random diagnosis for \"coughing\"\n:Wings\n:Beveled bezel\n:Bezeled bevel\n:Seedless\n:Water resistant down to 30 meters and below 50\n:Turing-complete\n:Gregorian/Julian calendar switch\n:''SpaceX'' impact protection: When dropped, phone lands on barge\n:Parallel port\n:12 headphone jacks\n:Onboard cloud\n:New BrightGloTM display incorporates genetically spliced jellyfish protein (should have used the glowing genes, not the stinging ones)\n:✓ Certified\n:Software-defined\n:Exposed ductwork\n:Voice interaction: Siri, Cortana, Google Now and Alexa respond simultaneously\n\n:[Below the phone:]\n:Introducing\n:The xkcd Phone 4\n:Did you know \"4\" is \"IV\" in Roman numerals?®©™", "explanation": "This is the fourth entry in the ongoing :Category:xkcd Phones|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.\n\nThe tagline of the phone is a reference to the tenth version of Apple's operating system for its Macintosh computer. It was named OS X and was intended to be read as \"oh ess ten\", but Steve Jobs was irritated that everyone else preferred \"oh ess ecks\". This phrase is labeled with trademark and copyright symbols, as if someone desires it to be the product's tagline but has poor understanding of relevant laws. In particular, \"™\" is a symbol for unregistered trademarks while \"®\" is a symbol for registered trademarks. If the phrase were an unregistered trademark, the owner would be prohibited from using \"®\". \n\nFrom the top, going clockwise:\n\n; 18,000 μAh (micro-Ampere hours) nickel-lithium-iron battery (non-rechargeable)\n\n: Phone battery capacity is measured in ampere-hours (which, thanks to dimensional analysis, is just an unusual way of denoting electric charge; one ampere-hour is 3600 Coulombs). Usually, the capacity is quoted in milliampere-hours (one-thousandth, or 10-3, of an ampere hour); however, this one is quoted in ''micro''ampere-hours (one-millionth, or 10-6, of an ampere-hour), presumably as a marketing ploy to give a more impressive-looking number. Quoted in more standard terms, this phone's battery capacity is 18 mAh. In comparison, an iPhone 6+ has a battery capacity of 2,750 mAh. This phone's battery is dreadful (under a typical current draw of 0.1A, it would power the phone for about 11 minutes). There is nothing normally called a \"nickel-lithium-iron battery\" — rather, this seems to be a 739|malamanteau of the experimental nickel–lithium battery and the common lithium ion battery (which does not contain any iron) or the lithium-iron-phosphate battery, often called lithium-iron, but more often called the LiFePO battery. The nickel–iron battery may contain lithium hydroxide, but it's ''terrible'' for most applications. Worse, this battery is non-rechargeable, meaning that it would have to be replaced to use the phone again after it is exhausted (every 11 minutes, at that!). The xkcd Phone 3 was powered by two AA battery|AA batteries (not included), which have an energy capacity roughly 100 times larger.\n\n; Subwoofer\n\n: A subwoofer is a large bass speaker, which this is not.{{Citation needed}} Some phones do have high-quality speakers for playing music, but these are not placed right next to the earpiece — this would be a surefire way to deafen your users. When put next to Dog Whistle, this is probably a pun, since both relate to dogs; the English onomatopoeia for the sound a dog makes is \"Woof\".\n\n; \"Dog whistle\"\n\n: A dog whistle is a high-pitched whistle that humans cannot hear, but dogs can. In speaker terminology, a bass speaker is called a woofer because it could reproduce the low pitch of a dog bark. A treble speaker is a tweeter; if this \"whistle\" is actually a speaker, it might be termed a ''supertweeter''. The scare quotes may be a reference to \"dog-whistle politics\", in which certain phrases have a particular meaning to a segment of the audience that passes unnoticed by the rest. This allows a candidate to surreptitiously signal agreement with that group, without alienating the rest of the audience, among whom the ideas might be unpopular if plainly stated. The xkcd Phone 2 contained a \"dog noticer\".\n\n; Non-porous, washable\n\n: On the one hand, it's rare for a phone to be made of porous materials.{{Citation needed}} On the other, there are legitimately waterproof phones that seal the speakers and ports with rubber. The xkcd Phone 2 was also washable (though only once).\n\n; ''WebMD'' partnership: cough-activated feature reads aloud a random diagnosis for \"coughing\"\n\n: WebMD is a website to help people diagnose themselves. For the vast majority of people, a cough just means an irritated throat or maybe a cold, but selecting randomly from all WebMD diagnoses gives some much more ominous — if very unlikely — ones, including ricin poisoning, plague, lung cancer and radiation poisoning.\n\n; Wings\n\n: These wings resemble the ones found on sanitary towels (usually called \"pads\", making this a possible iPad pun) which attach the pad to the gusset and keep it in place between the woman's legs during her period (Menstruation cycle). If actually functional as aerodynamic wings, they would likely come into play when the \"SpaceX\" impact protection feature becomes engaged and would likely make holding the phone awkward if rigid. The xkcd Phone 3 had a similarly positioned wristband.\n\n; Beveled bezel\n\n: The ''bezel'' is the ring around the edge of watches and screens. This one's beveled, which means it's cut at an angle.\n\n; Bezeled bevel\n\n: Punning on the above. Doesn't make much sense but could mean that it features a beveled edge which is surrounded by a bezel.\n\n; Seedless\n\n: Fruit such as grapes can be \"seedless\", which means that they're grown from a special cultivar that doesn't grow seeds in the normal way. Making a phone seedless probably won't do anything, but Random seed|it might hurt its random number generator (or make it better if proper alternative to PRNG is introduced). Alternatively, this might be a dig at Apple's iPhone. There are [https://farmingbase.com/why-are-some-apples-seedless/ seedless apples]. The xkcd Phone 3 was boneless.\n\n; Water resistant down to 30 meters and below 50\n\n: Water resistance is often measured in terms of how deep an object can be submerged, since pressure increases with depth. In this case, the phone can be submerged to almost any depth, but there's an odd lacuna between 30 meters and 50 meters. It also plays with the confusion in describing depths greater than 50m as \"below 50\". Alternatively, this might indicate the phone must remain dry above 50 meters altitude, or that it is not water resistant between 30 and 50 meters but is waterproof otherwise. The xkcd Phone and XKCD Phone 3 could drown. The latter was otherwise waterproof. xkcd Phone 2 was only waterproof internally. A similarly absurd range was used in 870: Advertising: \"Up to 15% or more!\".\n\n; Turing-complete\n\n: A computer is Turing completeness|Turing complete if it can perform all the operations needed to simulate a Turing machine. All modern computers are usually described as Turing complete, which would make this not very impressive, but no computer can ever be Turing complete in the truest sense (since they can only ever have a finite amount of memory) — if the xkcd Phone 4 is truly a universal computer, it's ''very'' impressive indeed.\n\n; Gregorian/Julian calendar date switch\n\n: The Julian calendar is the predecessor to the modern Gregorian calendar — the difference is that the two calendars calculate leap years differently. The current difference between the calendars is 13 days, which will remain unchanged until February 2100. The Julian calendar is still used occasionally — mainly by Eastern Orthodox Christians — but it's not something so vital that it needs a hardwired switch on the front of the phone. This may be a play on the ability to switch the time display between a 12-hour clock and a 24-hour clock. It could also be playing with the ability to switch between Daylight Savings Time and Standard or change time zones. \n\n; ''SpaceX'' impact protection: when dropped, phone lands on barge\n\n: The rocket company SpaceX, at the time that this comic was released, had recently trialed a SpaceX reusable launch system development program|reusable rocket stage which, after separating from the launch vehicle, lands on a Autonomous spaceport drone ship|drone barge to be reused. Making a phone land on the nearest barge when dropped would make it very difficult to recover, although the 11-minute battery time there might be a chance to get it even if you can't catch it.\n\n; Parallel port\n\n: A parallel port is a type of interface which transfers high-volume simultaneous data. It was often used to connect printers and other devices to computers but was generally considered obsolete by the time smartphones began to appear on the market and would be very bulky and slow compared to the USB ports generally used in phones. It was commonly found together with serial ports, which are used for low-volume sequential data such as 485: Depth|mouse 1110: Click and Drag|movements. Here it is paired with a serial interface for analog data with parallel outputs for several people.\n\n; 12 headphone jacks\n\n: Headphone jacks are circular ports in a phone that allow audio to be played through headphones connected to the jack. There were [http://www.businessinsider.com.au/apple-headphone-jack-iphone-side-effects-2016-7#/#smaller-headphone-makers-would-be-at-a-disadvantage-4 constant rumors] that Apple's next iPhone would not have any headphone jacks (which eventually proved true for the iPhone 7 announcement two months after this comic). Also, [http://www.google.com Google] was developing a module for the now cancelled [https://atap.google.com/ara/ Project Ara] (archive [https://web.archive.org/web/20160716080118/https://atap.google.com/ara/ here]), a modular smartphone. This module allows the device to have [http://www.overclock3d.net/news/audio/sennheiser_shows_audio_module_concepts_for_project_ara/1 Four headphone jacks], which would allow audio to be shared among 4 people, each occupying one port. The xkcd phone takes this too far when they install a whopping TWELVE of them, which is completely overkill because almost nobody needs to connect to 12 headphones at once. 12 headphones will also drain the battery, like the wireless discharging in the XKCD Phone 3, because playing audio through 24 speakers, two for each pair of headphones, is very power-consuming.\n\n; Onboard cloud\n\n: The \"cloud\" is a catch-all term for the use of remote computers to store data, providing a backup if all local copies are lost and allowing the data to be accessed from a broad network. An \"onboard cloud\" would thus be a contradiction in terms and appears to be a marketing ploy to use the \"cloud\" buzzword to describe the device's onboard storage capacity.\n\n; New BrightGloTM display incorporates genetically spliced jellyfish protein (should have used the glowing genes, not the stinging ones)\n\n: Aequorea victoria is a species of jellyfish that contains green fluorescent protein, a gene that is bioluminescent and gives off light. This protein was supposed to be used to light the phone's screen. Unfortunately, the developers messed up, and accidentally took the [http://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-015-1568-3 stinging kind], which means that touching the phone screen will be as painful as a jellyfish sting i.e. very painful.\n\n; ✓ Certified\n\n: The phone is just certified in general and doesn't specify what part of the phone has been certified. It might be a reference to 1096: Clinically Studied Ingredient, in which buzzwords such as \"studied\" and are intended to make a given product sound more legitimate.\n\n; Software-defined\n\n: Software-defined radios are quite popular in some areas, meaning the radio hardware is quite universal and can be adapted to different radio protocols just by changing software. SDR would actually be quite a nice feature for a cellphone. Of course, it doesn't specify if it's the radio that is software defined.\n\n; Exposed ductwork\n\n: A phone shouldn't even have ductwork, unless it has a very sophisticated cooling system, but this could supply air to the dog whistle. Exposed ductwork is a trademark of Bowellism|Bowellist architecture such as the Lloyd's Building in London and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Exposed ductwork is also considered a crucial flaw in a death star. May also refer to a transparent window in the side of the phone allowing the user to see the circuitry inside, similar to computer cases with transparent side panels popular among DIY computing enthusiasts.\n\n; Voice interaction: Siri (software)|Siri, Cortana (software)|Cortana, Google Now and Amazon Echo|Alexa respond simultaneously\n\n: These are all intelligent personal assistant software (from Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon respectively) and all do the same thing: control your phone and answer questions using speech recognition. Having all four talks at once would mean you'd have a total cacophony while gaining nothing. The xkcd Phone 3 could have Siri included.\n\nThe title text pokes fun at the number of SpaceX rockets that [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1708", "date": "July 18, 2016", "title": "Dehydration", "image": "dehydration.png", "titletext": "I don't care what the research says. Everybody knows you should drink 3,000 glasses of water a day and change your oil every 8 miles.", "transcript": ":[White Hat and Cueball standing together.]\n:White Hat: Many people are mildly dehydrated. And don't realize it. You should drink at least six glasses of water per day.\n\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.]\n:Off-panel voice: No, ''eight'' glasses!\n:Ponytail: I heard ten.\n:Black Hat: You need to drink at least five glasses of water per minute.\n\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:]\n:Later:\n: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.\n:Off-panel voice: What did you learn?\n\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.]\n:Megan: If you spend all day doing research and forget to eat or drink, you start to feel pretty bad.\n:Off-panel voice: I'll get some water.\n:Megan: ''But how many glas'' - Whoa, feeling dizzy.\n:Cueball: Maybe you should just drink straight from the tap.", "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 Daily_consumption_of_drinking_water|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.\n\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 \"[https://www.quora.com/One-glass-of-water-is-how-many-ounces standard] \n[https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid"}
-{"number": "1709", "date": "July 20, 2016", "title": "Inflection", "image": "inflection.png", "titletext": "\"Or maybe, because we're suddenly having so many conversations through written text, we'll start relying MORE on altered spelling to indicate meaning!\" \"Wat.\"", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan, holding a hand up, are seen walking together from afar in silhouette.]\n:Megan: Inflected languages change words to add meaning, like \"-s\" for plurals or \"-ed\" for past tense.\n:Megan: Alphabets—where symbols stand for sound instead of words—work well for them, since you can show the changes through spelling.\n\n:[Zoom in on the two as Megan turns her head back towards Cueball and spreads her arms out.]\n: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\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.]\n:Cueball: Could that mean English writing is ripe to become more pictographic?\n:Megan: '''Doooooot'''\n:Doot Cone\n\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.]\n:Antlion\n\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:]\n:First label: Lava\n:Second label: Solid rocks\n:Inverse Volcano\n\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.]\n:Ghost Vent\n\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:]\n:Top label: Magma\n:Bottom label: Lava\n:Pedant's Bane", "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.\n\nVolcanoes have featured in many xkcd comics, media:1608 Entire Volcano plateau zoom out_extra.png|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."}
-{"number": "1715", "date": "August 3, 2016", "title": "Household Tips", "image": "household_tips.png", "titletext": "To make your shoes feel more comfortable, smell better, and last longer, try taking them off before you shower.", "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.]\n:Cueball: Hi everyone! I'm back with more household tips. To conserve water, try turning off your shower before you leave home.\n\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.]\n:Cueball: Sick of changing those smoke detector batteries? Eliminate any fires in your house and the batteries can last for months or years!\n:Smoke detector (off panel): Beep beep beep\n\n:[A frame-less panel shows 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.]\n:Cueball (off-panel): Tired of clogged toilets? Try leaving the lid on the upper chamber and use only the lower bowl!\n:X\n:✔\n\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.]\n: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!", "explanation": "This is another one of Randall|Randall's :Category:Tips|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.\n\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:"}
-{"number": "1716", "date": "August 5, 2016", "title": "Time Travel Thesis", "image": "time_travel_thesis.png", "titletext": "'Hey, what are those futuristic goggles for, anyway?' 'Oh, this is just a broken Google Glass. It was 2010's night at the club.'", "transcript": ":[Cueball is facing Megan, talking to her.]\n:Cueball: I've been reading about time travel.\n:Megan: Cool! I did my thesis on time travel!\n\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.]\n:Cueball: Nice! So you know about closed timelike curves?\n:Megan: Yup. Thesis.\n:Cueball: Apparently wormholes can use exotic matter to–\n:Megan: I know. Like I said–\n:Charge: ''Bzzzt!''\n\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.]\n:Future-Megan: You can skip this conversation. It doesn't turn out to be important.\n:Megan: Oh, thank God.\n\n:[Cueball is standing alone, the two Megans have left the panel.]", "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.\n\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\".\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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|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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1717", "date": "August 8, 2016", "title": "Pyramid Honey", "image": "pyramid_honey.png", "titletext": "They CLAIM honey was found in the chambers under the pyramids, but this conspiracy goes all the way to the TOP, where the GIANT EYE is!", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are talking.]\n:Cueball: Apparently honey has an infinite shelf life. They just found jars of it in the pyramids, still good.\n:Megan: You know, I've heard that, and I don't think it's true.\n\n:[Black hat enters.]\n:Cueball: Really? Smithsonian magazine confirmed it.\n:Megan: Believe it or not, I think their source is wrong.\n:Black Hat: '''''I believe you.'''''\n\n:[Megan has turned to Black Hat raising her hands.]\n:Megan: See I read about the archaeologists who-\n:Black Hat: I'm convinced. Gonna go to tell the internet.\n\n:[Black Hat moved closer to Megan and Cueball.]\n:Megan: Wait, are you sure? Let me explain why I-\n:Black Hat: Don't need it. I've heard enough.\n\n:[Zoom-in on Black Hat's head.]\n:Black Hat: I've been looking for a weird hill to die on, and all the real ones are too far from my house.\n:Black Hat: So this is mine. I'm now a pyramid honey truther.\n\n:[Zoom back out. Black Hat starts walking left, pointing a finger up. Cueball and Megan turn to look after him.]\n:Black Hat: Time to start a Facebook group and post a bunch of all-caps comments everywhere.\n:Cueball: This could have gone better.\n:Megan: Oh well.", "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.\n\nIn the comic, Cueball tells Megan about an article in ''Smithsonian (magazine)|Smithsonian Magazine'' (presumably [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-behind-honeys-eternal-shelf-life-1218690/ 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\n\"A hill to die on\" is a phrase from Ernest Hemingway|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.\n\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.\n\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 Moon landing conspiracy theories|the moon landings never happened, or 9/11 Truth movement|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.\n\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.{{Citation needed}} 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.\n\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.\n\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!\n\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."}
-{"number": "1718", "date": "August 10, 2016", "title": "Backups", "image": "backups.png", "titletext": "Maybe you should keep FEWER backups; it sounds like throwing away everything you've done and starting from scratch might not be the worst idea.", "transcript": ":[Cueball] is sitting in an office chair at his desk, working on his laptop.]\n:Cueball: Wait. My laptop is backing up some folders to this server...\n\n:[Cueball scratches his chin in thought.]\n:Cueball: ...Which is backing up its archives to ''that'' server...\n:Cueball: ...And ''that'' server is syncing certain folders over to my laptop...\n\n:[In a frame-less panel Cueball clicks on his laptop keyboard.]\n:Click click click\n\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.]\n:Cueball: ...But the exponential growth is slightly slower than Moore's law, so whatever.\n:Off-panel voice: Oh my God.\n:Off-panel voice: You are why we can't have nice things.", "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.\n\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).\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nPoor backup strategies are referenced in 1360: Old Files"}
-{"number": "1719", "date": "August 12, 2016", "title": "Superzoom", "image": "superzoom.png", "titletext": "*click* Let him know he's got a stain on his shirt, though.", "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.]\n:Cueball: I love these superzoom cameras. For a few hundred dollars you can take pictures of Moon craters and Jupiter's clouds.\n\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.]\n:Cueball: And birds! See that speck up there?\n:*Click*\n:Cueball: Peregrine falcon!\n:*Click*\n:Cueball: It's banded, too. Want the number?\n\n:[White Hat looks even further up as Cueball turns left and point the even further zoomed camera almost straight up while taking photos.]\n:Cueball: And see that plane?\n:*Click*\n:Cueball: 787 Dreamliner\n:*Click*\n:Cueball: Japan Airlines.\n:*Click*\n:Cueball: Registration is—\n\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.]\n:White Hat: OK, I'm sold—I want one.\n:*Click*\n:Cueball: They're in stock at the place on Union Road.\n:*Click*\n:Cueball: Hey, Kevin's working today! He's great.", "explanation": "In this comic, Cueball is showing off his new superzoom camera to White Hat. These are cameras with large zoom lenses, often 25× 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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1720", "date": "August 15, 2016", "title": "Horses", "image": "horses.png", "titletext": "This car has 240% of a horse's decision-making ability and produces only 30% as much poop.", "transcript": ":[Ponytail walks right with Cueball.]\n: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\n:[Zoom in on Ponytail's torso; she holds up a palm to proffer an idea.]\n:Ponytail: And if you tried to ride into a tree, the horse could be like \"No.\"\n:Ponytail: Forget human drivers – ''that's'' the benchmark we should be judging self-driving cars against.\n\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:]\n:Soon:\n:White Hat: This baby has 200 horses under the hood and 3.5 in the computer.\n:Megan and Cueball: Ooooh!", "explanation": "[https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/10/are-consumers-automakers-and-insurers-really-ready-for-self-driving-cars/ 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.\n\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.{{Citation needed}} 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.\n\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.\n\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 [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/9/9f/lorenz_-_sale_2.png depicted as a salesman] before in 1350: Lorenz and similarly earlier in 260: The Glass Necklace.\n\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 self-driving cars do not usually produce poop.{{Citation needed}} 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. \n\nNote that riding a horse while drunk is in fact still dangerous and illegal in many places (for example, Licensing Act 1872|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.\n\nIn 887: Future Timeline dogs driving cars are mentioned. Self-driving cars is a :Category:Self-driving cars|recurring topic on xkcd. In 1461: Payloads spacecraft mass is measured in horses."}
-{"number": "1721", "date": "August 17, 2016", "title": "Business Idea", "image": "business_idea.png", "titletext": "Then we move to phase two. Gas stations store fuel in underground tanks. Normally, these are inaccessible except via the pump. However, with hydraulic fracturing, we-- Wait! Come back!", "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 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.]\n:Cueball: Thank you all for coming.\n:Cueball: I have an exciting business opportunity to share.\n:Off-panel voice #1: Oh no.\n\n:[Zoom in on Cueball's head. An off-panel person speaks twice.]\n:Cueball: Now hear me out-\n:Off-panel voice #2: Your ideas are always the worst.\n:Cueball: No, no, this time it's a good one! I promise.\n:Off-panel voice #2: Uh huh...\n\n:[Front view of the screen with an image of a black gas pump, with the white hose snaking its 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.]\n: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-\n:Off-panel voice #3: I'm leaving.\n:Off-panel voice #4: Me too.", "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.\n\nCueball's plan involves the premise that a small amount of Octane rating|premium gas is left in a fuel pump hose after a car driver fills their car up with premium gas. Note that not all gas stations leave the fuel in the hose: many pump it back into the tank for storage. He states that even if the next customer only pays for regular Gasoline|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.\n\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 [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122944043385810527 a third of a gallon], or [http://www.metronews.ca/drive/2012/05/08/one-pump-three-grades-how-does-it-know.html half a liter]) compared to the amount that is generally purchased, though [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122944043385810527 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 Filling station|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.\n\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 [http://imgs.xkcd.com/clickdrag/2n2w.png free drinks to resell]. See also the ''what if? (blog)|what if?'' article ''{{what if|22|Cost of Pennies}}'' regarding why it would not be worth trying these kind of ventures out.\n\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). The title text of 1662: Jack and Jill also refers to fracking."}
-{"number": "1722", "date": "August 19, 2016", "title": "Debugging", "image": "debugging.png", "titletext": "When you Google an error message and it gets no results, you can be pretty sure you've found a clue to the location of Martin's sword.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and White Hat are walking, while Cueball holds a hand out while talking.]\n:Cueball: I was trying to figure out why my browser was acting weird.\n\n:[In a frame-less panel they keep in walking, Cueball holds both hands up in front of him.]\n:Cueball: Turns out it wasn't the browser-the issue was with my keyboard driver.\n\n:[Zoom in on Cueball's upper torso as he is holding a finger up.]\n:Cueball: Debugging '''''that''''' led me to a mysterious error message from a system utility...\n\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.]\n:Cueball: Anyway, long story short, I found the sword of Martin the Warrior.\n:White Hat: I think at some point there you switched puzzles.", "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 Web browser|browser. His attempts to solve this problem led him to a problem with the Device driver|device driver for his Computer keyboard|keyboard. Chasing that issue, he found an unclear error message from a Utility software|system utility, and so on.\n\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 “wikia:w:c:redwall:Sword of Martin|Sword of List of Redwall characters#Martin I|Martin the Warrior”, 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.\n\nThe characters in ''Redwall'' are woodland animals, and Martin the Warrior is a mouse; the sword that Cueball finds is correspondingly tiny.\n\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’s sword."}
-{"number": "1723", "date": "August 22, 2016", "title": "Meteorite Identification", "image": "meteorite_identification.png", "titletext": "Click for an actual flowchart for identifying a meteorite. My favorite part is how 'Did someone see it fall? -> Yes' points to 'NOT A METEORITE.' This is not a mistake.", "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.]\n:How to identify a possible meteorite:\n:Start\n:No, it's not a meteorite.", "explanation": "Meteorites form when a meteoroid survives entrance through the Earth's atmosphere as a Meteoroid#Meteors|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. \n\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. \n\nFlowcharts are often used (:Category:Flowcharts|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.\n\nIn the title text Randall mentions that the comic image is a link to the more detailed (now defunct, mirror [http://imgur.com/a/RNYQ7 here]) ''[http://meteorites.wustl.edu/check-list.htm Meteorite or meteorwrong? Self-Test Check list]'' flowchart at the [http://eps.wustl.edu/ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences] at Washington University in St. Louis.\n\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.\"\n\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.\n\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:\n:Since 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.\n\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 [http://www.meteoritemarket.com/metid2.htm How to Identify a Meteorite] from [http://www.meteoritemarket.com/ The Meteorite Market] which is linked in point 48 in the table from Washington University. But they did not see it fall!\n\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 [http://meteorites.wustl.edu/id/regmaglypts.htm 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).\n\nIf the rock actually has those thumbprint like impressions on the surface (that scientists call Glossary of meteoritics#Regmaglypts|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. \n\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."}
-{"number": "1724", "date": "August 24, 2016", "title": "Proofs", "image": "proofs.png", "titletext": "Next, let's assume the decision of whether to take the Axiom of Choice is made by a deterministic process ...", "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.]\n:Miss Lenhart: ... Let's assume there exists some function ''F''(''a,b,c''...) which produces the correct answer-\n:Cueball (off-panel): Hang on.\n\n:[In a frame-less panel Cueball is sitting on a chair at a desk with a pen in his hand taking notes.]\n:Cueball: This is going to be one of those weird, dark magic proofs, isn't it? I can tell.\n\n:[Miss Lenhart has turned right towards Cueball, who is again speaking off-panel. The white board is also off-panel.]\n:Miss Lenhart: What? No, no, it's a perfectly sensible chain of reasoning.\n:Cueball (off-panel): All right...\n\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.]\n:Miss Lenhart: Now, let's assume that the correct answer will eventually be written on the board at the coordinates (''x, y''). If we—\n:Cueball (off-panel): I ''knew'' it!", "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.\n\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).\n\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 √2 is an irrational number:\n\n# Assume that √2 is a rational number, meaning that there exists a pair of integers whose ratio is √2.\n# If the two integers have a common factor, it can be eliminated using the Euclidean algorithm.\n# Then √2 can be written as an irreducible fraction ''a''/''b'' such that ''a'' and ''b'' are coprime integers (having no common factors other than 1).\n# The equation ''a''/''b'' {{"}
-{"number": "1725", "date": "August 26, 2016", "title": "Linear Regression", "image": "linear_regression.png", "titletext": "The 95% confidence interval suggests Rexthor's dog could also be a cat, or possibly a teapot.", "transcript": ":[Two square panels show identical sets of scattered black dots, with only the red additions being different.]\n\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:]\n: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.\n\nA constellation is a pattern created by linking the apparent positions of stars as seen in the sky from Earth. (Astronomers, in technical contexts, usually refer to these as Asterism_(astronomy)|asterisms, reserving \"Constellation_(astronomy)|constellations\" for the 88 regions into which the sky is divided, each named for the most prominent asterism it contains, although \"constellation\" is used informally in place of \"asterism\" by even seasoned astronomers.) Different civilizations have recognized different constellations, and one could create their own constellations by connecting assorted points, the way Randall connected points in his plot to make \"Rexthor.\"\n\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.\n\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 [http://www.i-jmr.org/2012/1/e1/ here] (figure 2 has ''r''"}
-{"number": "1726", "date": "August 29, 2016", "title": "Unicode", "image": "unicode.png", "titletext": "I'm excited about the proposal to add a \"brontosaurus\" emoji codepoint because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different groups of pedantic people into a single glorious internet argument.", "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 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.]\n:Cueball: No, go ''this'' way, not-\n:Cueball: Are you even ''listening!?''\n:Cueball: ... ''Hey! That's not what that area is for!''\n:Sign with arrow: Detour\n:Sign with triangle: !\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n: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.", "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 on the bank, to make it behave a certain way)\n\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.\n\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 ê (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. \n\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 ⚠ having [http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/26a0/index.htm code (U+26A0)] and the black, rightwards arrow ➡ having [http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/27a1/index.htm 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 :Category:Emoji|recurrent theme on xkcd.\n\nThe title text refers to [http://unicode.org/L2/L2016/16072-jurassic-emoji.pdf a proposal] to add three dinosaur heads to the official list of emoji.\n\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:\n*Those who favor the inclusion of more emoji vs. those who oppose emoji on principle.\n*Those who accept the existence of ''Brontosaurus'' vs. those who deny its status as a genus unique from ''Apatosaurus''.\n**Randall has made it clear what he believes in 636: Brontosaurus.\n**Although it seems new development has occurred since the release of that comic, suggesting that ''Brontosaurus'' is a specific genus. But that is still debated...\n*Those who favor a traditional, scaly image of dinosaurs vs. those who have accepted the feathered-dinosaur paradigm.\n*Those who want ''Brontosaurus'' depicted as an ordinary or shrinkwrapped sauropod vs. Those who want it depicted with extra soft tissue, especially the heavy neck padding thought to be used for elephant-seal-like duels (the \"Brontosmash\" hypothesis).\n*Those who prefer a different dinosaur species be included instead.\n*Those who oppose about the possible inclusion of pterodactyls, which are not considered to be dinosaurs.\n*Those who point out that two of the dinosaurs in the \"Jurassic Emoji\" set actually come from the Cretaceous period, and as such renaming is necessary vs. those who think that \"Jurassic\" is a cooler word (because of the Jurassic Park movies).\n*Those who will use it as a generic emoji for dinosaurs vs. those who insist it ''must'' be used for brontosauruses only.\n\nSee also this [http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2016-m08/0103.html discussion about this comic on the Unicode mailinglist]...\n\nHighway engineers were also the subject of 253: Highway Engineer Pranks and 781: Ahead Stop."}
-{"number": "1727", "date": "August 31, 2016", "title": "Number of Computers", "image": "number_of_computers.png", "titletext": "They try to pad their numbers in the annual reports by counting Galileo's redundant systems as multiple computers, but they're falling behind badly either way.", "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.]\n:Left red line: Number of computers created\n:Right red line: Number of computers destroyed by hurling them into Jupiter\n:Labels on right red line:\n::/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.\n\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. \n\nFor example, if you create the following crontab:\n\n\nMAILTO"}
-{"number": "1729", "date": "September 5, 2016", "title": "Migrating Geese", "image": "migrating_geese.png", "titletext": "\"Hey guys! I have a great idea for a migration!\" \"Dammit, Kevin.\"", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:Understanding Migration of Geese\n\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.]\n:Head goose: Head goose (4th in line to the British throne)\n:Right no. 1: Quarterback\n:Right no. 3: Comptroller\n:Right no. 5: Migration abort goose\n:Right no. 7: Twin-engine model\n:Right no. 8: CIA informant\n:Bottom right corner: Kevin\n:Behind center: Backups\n:In front of left no. 3-5: Shock front\n:Empty area behind left arm: Missing valence geese\n:Empty area in center: Stealth cargo being escorted", "explanation": "Bird migration|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.\n\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. \n\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 of labels|table below.\n\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 1795:_All_You_Can_Eat#Kevin|this trivia."}
-{"number": "1730", "date": "September 7, 2016", "title": "Starshade", "image": "starshade.png", "titletext": "The New Worlds Mission is already trying to get funding for this, but NASA sponsored their proposal, so it will be hard to catch the telescope people by surprise with it.", "transcript": ":[Megan and Ponytail are walking.]\n:Megan: Space telescopes could see exoplanets better if they used free-floating opaque discs to block the stars' glare.\n\n:[They stop walking in this zoom in on their heads. Ponytail has turned towards Megan.]\n:Megan: They thought about including one with the Webb telescope, but cut it to save money.\n:Ponytail: Well... does it have to be ''their'' disc?\n\n:[In this frame-less panel Megan is left standing as Ponytail turns and walks away.]\n:Megan: What do you mean?\n:Ponytail: Like, if I Kickstart a starshade for them?\n:Megan: Um. Would you at least ''warn'' them?\n:Ponytail: Eh. Whatever.\n\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:]\n:NASA, 2018:\n:Cueball: Initiating Webb calibrat- \n:Cueball: ''Aaaaa''! What the hell is ''that!?''\n:Hairbun: Hey, look, exoplanets!", "explanation": "Megan (drawn to look similar to Danish) 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.\n\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 James_Webb_Space_Telescope|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\". \n\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. \n\n'''Note''' that the telescope has James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Partnership|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). \n\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 Lagrangian_point#L2|L2 Earth–Sun 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 James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Sunshield_protection|sunshield.\n\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 New Worlds Mission|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.\n\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 :Category:Exoplanets|demonstrated many times in xkcd.\n\n'''Note''' that two of the Webb telescope's James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Scientific_instruments|instruments, the NIRCam and the MIRI, feature starlight-blocking Coronagraph|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1731", "date": "September 9, 2016", "title": "Wrong", "image": "wrong.png", "titletext": "Hang on, I just remembered another thing I'm right about. See...", "transcript": ":[White Hat is walking beside Megan, index finger extended]\n:White Hat: Really, we're all made of antimatter. A proton consists of two quarks and an antiquark.\n:Megan: ...I don't think that's right.\n\n:[White Hat stops to take out his smartphone tapping on it. Megan stops and turns towards him.]\n:White Hat: Sure it is. Neutrons are, too.\n:Megan: Do you mean \"up\" and \"down\" quarks? I think antiquarks are a different thing.\n:White Hat: No, let me show you...\n:Tap \n:Tap\n\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.]\n:White Hat (thinking): I'm...wrong?\n\n:[White Hat has lowered the phone. He is still thinking the same but the text has been scribbled out.]\n:White Hat (thinking): I'm...wrong?\n\n:[White Hat purges the thought from his mind]\n:White Hat (thinking): ...\n\n:[Similar setting as in the first panel, but in a full row wide panel, and White Hat is still holding his smartphone]\n: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...\n:Megan: *Sigh*", "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 \"Flavour (particle physics)|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.\n \t\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.\n\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.\n\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|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.\n \t\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 Resonance (particle physics)|resonances or excited state|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.\n\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.\n\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 ''[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1732", "date": "September 12, 2016", "title": "Earth Temperature Timeline", "before": "#Explanation|↓ Skip to explanation ↓", "image": "earth_temperature_timeline.png", "titletext": "[After setting your car on fire] Listen, your car's temperature has changed before.", "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|trivia section.\n:[A large heading, followed by a sub-caption. Below that two lines with a statement in between:]\n:A timeline of Earth’s average temperature\n:since the last ice age glaciation\n:When people say “The climate has changed before,” these are the kinds of changes they’re talking about.\n\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°C 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°C 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°C compared to the 1961-1990 average.]\n:'''Temperature'''\n: Compared to the 1961-1990 average\n:Start\n:Colder\n:Warmer\n:-4°C -3°C -2°C -1°C 0°C +1°C +2°C +3°C +4°C\n\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:]\n: \n::Anything that \"requires only minimal configuration and tweaking\"\n\n:Unlikely", "explanation": "This comic humorously lists how likely computer code is to function on the user's computer based on the source of the code.\n\n'''App store or package manager:''' Most likely referring to the Apple Inc.|Apple's Mac App Store|Mac or App Store (iOS)|iOS App Store, Google|Google's Google Play, Microsoft|Microsoft's Windows Store|Windows or Windows Phone Store, or Package manager|package managers such as Debian|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, 797: debian-main|potentially including locusts) automatically.\n\n'''GitHub 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.\n\n'''SourceForge Link:''' SourceForge is similar in scope to GitHub : 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.\n\n'''Geocities/Tripod Link:''' Geocities is a now-defunct free website host. [http://www.tripod.lycos.com/ 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.\n\n'''Copy-and-paste example from paper's appendix:''' Some academic papers publish code or Pseudocode|pseudocode ([https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~david/Papers/ecal07.pdf#page"}
-{"number": "1743", "date": "October 7, 2016", "title": "Coffee", "image": "coffee.png", "titletext": "Remind me to order another pack of coffee filters from Dyson. Man, these things are EXPENSIVE.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are talking.]\n:Cueball: We should make coffee for our guests.\n:Megan: Crap. I know nothing about coffee.\n:Cueball: We're basically fake adults.\n:Megan: Don't panic. We can figure this out.\n\n:[Megan shakes a can of coffee grounds out on the floor as Cueball watches.]\n:Megan: We just pour the coffee grounds...\n\n:[Pan to only Megan who pours a pail of water over the grounds now lying in a pile on the floor.]\n:Megan: ...Add water...\n\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.]\n:Vacuum cleaner: ''Vrrrr''\n\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.]\n:Megan: Now we just hold it over the burners...\n:Burners: ''Hissss''\n\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.]\n:Megan: Annnd... serve.\n:Cueball: Nice!\n:Megan: I'm a regular Starbuck!", "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 (except where people serve tea))). However, they seem to be unaware of the basics of Coffee_preparation|coffee making. Cueball is concerned that this lack of knowledge is an indication of their mutual immaturity (thinking of himself as a \"fake adult\"). \n\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 (except where people serve tea))) as an adult beverage—like beer which has also served as the subject in the comic 1534: Beer.\n\nMegan is, however, confident that the necessary steps can be determined. The steps she follows however are quite unorthodox...\n\nShe attempts to make coffee by pouring the ingredients on the ground (misinterpreting the meaning of \"ground coffee\"), sucking it up with a Dyson (company)|Dyson vacuum cleaner (misinterpreting the meaning of \"Vacuum coffee maker|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).\n\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 Starbucks#1970s|named after the fictional character List_of_Moby-Dick_characters#Mates|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|trivia about Starbuck below.\n\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.\n\nThe title text refers to the expense of replacing the \"filter\", as vacuum-cleaner filters are considerably more costly than single-use coffee filters.\n\nThis was the first of two comics in a row about food, the next being 1744: Metabolism."}
-{"number": "1744", "date": "October 10, 2016", "title": "Metabolism", "image": "metabolism.png", "titletext": "I have this weird thing where if I don't drink enough water, I start feeling bad and then die of dehydration.", "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.]\n\n:Cueball: 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.", "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, Obesity in the United States|especially in the United States.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThis is the second comic in a row about food, the previous being 1743: Coffee."}
-{"number": "1745", "date": "October 12, 2016", "title": "Record Scratch", "image": "record_scratch.png", "titletext": "The 78-rpm era was closer to the Civil War than to today.", "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.]\n\n:{| class", "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.\n\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 {{tvtropes|RecordNeedleScratch|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.\n\nThe comic pokes fun at a movie cliché 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.\n\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 cliché, [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/record-scratch-freeze-frame 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 :Category:"}
-{"number": "1746", "date": "October 14, 2016", "title": "Making Friends", "image": "making_friends.png", "titletext": "\"This seems more like a way to attract turkey vultures.\" \"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.\"", "transcript": ":[Cueball is walking with Ponytail holding her arms out while talking.]\n:Ponytail: Making friends is so much harder once you're out of school. \n:Ponytail: Everyone's so busy. And how do you even ''meet'' people?\n\n:[In this frame-less panel Cueball raises his arms in front of his chest while they walk on.]\n:Cueball: Here's what I do: \n:Cueball: I pretend to be weak and injured, and wait for others to start circling, hoping to take my food, shelter, and nutrients.\n\n:[Cueball stop walking and lifts both arms straight out as Ponytail turns towards him.]\n:Cueball: Then, before they can descend, I start telling them cool facts about space until they like me. \n:Cueball: ''Bam'', friendship!\n:Ponytail: This explains a lot.", "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.\n\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 every day 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.\n\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.\n\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 Outer space|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).\n\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...\n\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.\n\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). \n\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.\n\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, [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11970-starving-vultures-switch-to-live-prey/ unless they are starving].\n\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..."}
-{"number": "1747", "date": "October 17, 2016", "title": "Spider Paleontology", "image": "spider_paleontology.png", "titletext": "Whenever you see a video of birds doing something weird, remember: Birds are a small subset of dinosaurs, so the weirdness of birds is a small subset of the weirdness of dinosaurs.", "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.] \n:Sphere: I'm here from the distant future!\n:Megan: Cool! What for?\n:Sphere: ''Spiders!''\n\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.]\n:Sphere: We've learned about your planet's spiders from fossils.\n:Sphere: There's a whole spider craze. We have spider theme parks, spider movies, spider costumes...\n:Sphere: Such beautiful animals!\n:Megan (off-panel): I guess...\n\n:[Same setting as in the first panel but Megan is pointing left past the Sphere.]\n:Sphere: Now we've got time travel, so I'm here to see one for myself!\n:Megan: Sure! There's one over there!\n\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.]\n:Sphere: ''Woowwww!''\n:Sphere: What's that giant net it's caught in?\n:Megan (off-panel): You mean its web?\n:Sphere: Its what?\n\n:[Same setting as in the first panel.]\n:Megan: Oh, right, fossils. So you wouldn't know about...\n\n:[In a frame-less panel only Megan is shown facing left while she ponders. Beat panel.]\n:Megan: ...\n\n:[Again a scene similar to the first.]\n:Megan: Oh my God. Dinosaurs must have been ''so weird''.\n:Cueball: Holy crap, yeah.\n:Megan: Listen, can we borrow your time machine?", "explanation": "This Monday comic was the first in a :Category:Time traveling Sphere|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.\n\nA time travel|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 Jurassic Park (film)|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 Jurassic_Park#Fifth_film_.282018.29|one more film in development. We also have Dinosaur World (theme parks)|theme parks and kids dressing up as dinosaurs. \n\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 web|Spider silk does in fact Spider#Fossil_record|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 Spider#Evolution|least for 380 million years and are still thriving and more than 40,000 species are known.\n\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 (or rediscovered our own current stock) by the future-people.\n\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.\n\nThe title text calls back to one of Randall|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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1748", "date": "October 19, 2016", "title": "Future Archaeology", "image": "future_archaeology.png", "titletext": "\"The only link we've found between the two documents is that a fragment of the Noah one mentions Aaron's brother Moses parting an ocean. Is that right?\" \"... yes. Yes, exactly.\"", "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.]\n:Megan: Since you're from the future, do you know who wins the election?\n:Sphere: Haven't the faintest idea. Hardly any text has been recovered from your era, so we know little about your history and culture.\n:Sphere: We're mostly here for the spiders, anyway. \n\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.]\n:Sphere: There are only two written accounts we've reconstructed.\n:Sphere: We don't know whether they describe real events or myths.\n\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.]\n:Sphere: One is a story about a man who built a boat to survive a great flood.\n:Megan: Oh yeah. Noah.\n:Cueball: We do like our flood narratives.\n\n:[The Sphere has drifted further away from Megan and Cueball.]\n:Sphere: The other is an account of how a man named Aaron Carter defeated a god named Shaq.\n:Megan: That one may have been mangled a bit by the eons.", "explanation": "This Wednesday comic is a direct continuation of the previous comic 1747: Spider Paleontology from Monday about a time travel|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 :Category:Time traveling Sphere|series ended with this comic. Both comics in this series have titles of a noun followed by a field of research.\n\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 Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy|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.)\n\nSadly for Megan and Cueball, the sphere has come back from so far into 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 knows 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). The idea is that history is filtered in similar fashion to fossils. What is contemporaneously important, like a spider web|spider's web, Feathered dinosaur|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 whether they even represent 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 Noah's Ark|Ark from the Genesis flood narrative, as Cueball refers to. The other is a reference to a popular pop song.\n\nThe joke is that, in the future, the 2000 Aaron Carter hip hop song \"That's How I Beat Shaq\" ([http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/aaroncarter/thatshowibeatshaq.html lyrics] and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1749", "date": "October 21, 2016", "title": "Mushrooms", "image": "mushrooms.png", "titletext": "Evolutionarily speaking, mushrooms are technically a type of ghost.", "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.]\n:Cueball: Mushrooms are ''so weird.''\n:Megan: You know, evolutionarily, they're closer to being animals than to plants.\n\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.]\n:Cueball: ...Really?\n:Megan: Yup!\n\n:[In a frame-less panel Cueball still squats in front of the mushroom, now resting his hand on his knees.]\n\n:[Cueball stands up looking down at the mushroom.] \n\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.]\n:Mushroom: ''Grrrr''\n\n:[Cueball snaps around to look at the mushroom again, standing in a prepared state arms slightly out and legs spread out as well.]", "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 evolutionary|evolutionarily, mushrooms (which are basidiomycete fungi) are closer to the animal|animal kingdom than to plants on the Tree of life (biology)|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.)\n\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, [http://www.gardenguides.com/129125-growing-mushrooms-cave.html farmed] in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1750", "date": "October 24, 2016", "title": "Life Goals", "image": "life_goals.png", "titletext": "I got to check off 'Make something called xkcd' early.", "transcript": ":[A to-do list with a caption above:]\n::Life Goals\n:☐ Meet Skrillex in Phoenix\n:☐ Study zymurgy\n:☐ Get a pet axolotl named Hexxus\n:☐ Observe a syzygy from Zzyzx, California\n:☐ Port the games Zzyzzyxx and Xexyz to Xbox\n:☐ Publish a Zzzax/Mister Mxyzptlk crossover\n:☐ Bike from Xhafzotaj, Albania to Qazaxbəyli, Azerbaijan\n:☐ Paint an archaeopteryx fighting a muzquizopteryx\n:☐ Finish a game of Scrabble without getting punched", "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|Table of life goals below). \n\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's 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.\n\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|Scrabble points below).\n\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|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.\n\nThis comic was published the week after the ''what if? (blog)|what if?'' article ''{{what if|152|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."}
-{"number": "1751", "date": "October 26, 2016", "title": "Movie Folder", "image": "movie_folder.png", "titletext": "That's actually the original Japanese version of A Million Random Digits, which is much better than the American remake the book was based on.", "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.]\n:Cueball (off-panel): Your movie folder is so ''weird''. Where do you find all this stuff?\n:Black Hat: Dunno.\n:Black Hat: Around.\n\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 shelf lower than the regular desk surface. Black Hat replies to his queries from behind him off-panel right.]\n:Cueball: ''Lorem Ipsum: The Movie?''\n:Cueball: ''Titanic XCVIII?''\n:Black Hat (off-panel): That series gets good when they start hitting the reef created by all the previous wrecks.\n\n:[Cueball leans in closer to the screen.]\n:Cueball: ''Debbie Did 9/11?''\n:Cueball: ''Time Jam: A Connecticut Huskie on King Arthur's Court?''\n:Black Hat (off-panel): Really underrated ''Space Jam'' sequel.\n\n:[Zoom in on the scene so nothing beneath the keyboard is visible. The screen and Cueball's head almost spans the width of the panel.]\n:Cueball: ''Harold and Kumar Go to Howl's Moving Castle?''\n:Cueball: ''A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates?''\n:Black Hat (off-panel): That's the original-the book was a novelization.\n\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.]\n:Cueball (off-panel): ''Michael Bay's The Vagina Monologues!?''\n:Black Hat: It's pretty good, despite all the CGI explosions.", "explanation": "Cueball is looking through Black Hat|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.\n\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: Marauder|Starship Troopers 3'', a ''Dr. Dolittle: Million Dollar Mutts|Dr. Dolittle 5'', or a ''Bring It On: Fight to the Finish|Bring It On 5''. Randall previously made fun of the proliferation of direct-to-video sequels in [https://what-if.xkcd.com/65/ What If: Twitter Timeline Height], with at least 27 ''Land Before Time'' films (in reality, there were 14).\n\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 (film)|Titanic II'', ''Troll 2'', ''Troll 3'', the ''other'' ''Quest for the Mighty Sword|Troll 3'', ''Day of the Dead 2: Contagium'', ''Alien 2: On Earth'' (not to be confused with the real sequel ''Aliens (film)|Aliens'') and ''War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave''. \n\nMarketing wheezes have also produced some crossovers almost as unexpected as those in the comic — ''Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'', ''Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery'' and ''Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter'' are all real films.\n\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.\n\nAnother type of comic where movie titles needs to be guessed from strange versions of the title was previously used in the :Category:Synonym Movies|Synonym Movies series."}
-{"number": "1752", "date": "October 28, 2016", "title": "Interplanetary Experience", "image": "interplanetary_experience.png", "titletext": "But instead of hitting the ocean, you should land in an overheating hot tub on a sinking cruise ship, sending it crashing through the floor into the burning engine room as the ship goes under.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:Where to go on Earth to get the Interplanetary Explorer Experience\n\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.]\n:{|class", "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 (moon)|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...\n\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.\n\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 hypothermia#severe|severe hypothermia (freezing), conflagration (fire), crushing (high pressure), or from violent winds. \n\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 −20°C to 40°C (−5°F to 105°F, 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°C 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. \n\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).\n\nBelow is a #Explanation of celestial bodies|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. \n\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 (moon)|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.\n\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 the ''what if? (blog)|what if?'' article ''{{what if|138|Jupiter Submarine}}''."}
-{"number": "1753", "date": "October 31, 2016", "title": "Thumb War", "image": "thumb_war.png", "titletext": "\"Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty--\" / \"Can't we just read Pat the Bunny?\"", "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.]\n:Black Hat: One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war.\n:Black Hat: Five, six, seven, eight, finger guns proliferate.\n:Black Hat: Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, digits can't protect themselves.\n:Black Hat: Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, thumb U.N. won't intervene.\n:Hairy: I don't want to play with you anymore.", "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\".\n\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.\n\nThe second rhyme, \"finger guns proliferate,\" is a pun on the finger gun gesture and describes Small arms trade|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. \n\nThe third rhyme continues the counting until twelve and mentions Digit (anatomy)|digits as in fingers, and states that they cannot protect themselves. This may be implying an imposition of Gun control|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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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. \n\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:\n:Black Hat: Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty\n: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.\").\n\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."}
-{"number": "1754", "date": "November 2, 2016", "title": "Tornado Safety Tips", "image": "tornado_safety_tips.png", "titletext": "It's a myth that you can never cross mountains safely, but be sure you understand how the climatic situation there will affect your parent thunderstorm.", "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.]\n:'''Tornado Safety Tips'''\n:* Avoid low-lying cool air\n:* Keep your downdrafts and updrafts from mixing\n:* Seek out warm and humid surface air layers\n:* Don't let rain-cooled air choke off your circulation\n:* Avoid letting your supercell merge with a squall line", "explanation": "This is another one of Randall|Randall's :Category:Tips|Tips, this time a Tornado Safety Tip. Although this is clearly not a tip for humans but for tornadoes, a :Category:Tornadoes|recurring subject on xkcd.\n\nThe 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: [https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/b3/ba/02/b3ba0231f99bf14622a347b65ad30ea7.jpg Example 1] (with same title as comic), [https://www.weather.gov/images/oun/wxevents/20130531/socialmedia/torsafety.png example 2] and [https://www.weather.gov/images/oun/wxevents/20130531/socialmedia/carsafety.png example 3]. \n\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|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. \n\nIt is thus in no way helpful for people who actually live in an area that experiences tornadoes {{tvtropes|CrazyPrepared|or even for people that don't live in tornado-prone areas but want to be ready for their possible occurrence}}. It is not possible to follow most of the guidelines, 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, but then first check if it actually works.\n\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.\n\nThe tornado in this comic is similar to the :File:umwelt disasters tornado.png|picture used in the 1037: Umwelt#Tornado|Tornado version of 1037: Umwelt."}
-{"number": "1755", "date": "November 4, 2016", "title": "Old Days", "image": "old_days.png", "titletext": "Lot of drama in those days, including constant efforts to force the \"Reflections on Trusting Trust\" guy into retirement so we could stop being so paranoid about compilers.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Hairbun are standing together and Cueball is talking to her.]\n:Cueball: What were things like in the old days?\n:Cueball: I hear that you had to ... compile things for different processors?\n:Hairbun: Yeah\n\n:[Same setting in a slimmer panel, now Hairbun is replying.]\n:Hairbun: To compile your code, you had to mail it to IBM.\n:Hairbun: It took 4-6 weeks.\n\n:[Close-up of Hairbun from the waist up.]\n:Hairbun: Before garbage collection, data would pile up until the computer got full and you had to throw it away.\n\n:[Same setting as in the first panel with Hairbun gesturing toward Cueball raising one hand palm up.]\n:Hairbun: Early compilers could handle code fine, but comments had to be written in assembly.\n\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.]\n: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\n:[Exactly the same setting as the first panel, but with Hairbun doing the talking.]\n:Hairbun: '''C++''' was big because it supported floppy disks.\n:Hairbun: It still punched holes in them, but it was a start.\n:Cueball: Wow.", "explanation": "This comic shows a conversation between (young) Cueball and (old) Hairbun about computer programming in the past, specifically 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 :Category:Old Days|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.\n\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. \n\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 olden days.\n\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 is 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.\n\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 ''[http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html 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. \n\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 \"[http://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/ Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)]\"."}
-{"number": "1756", "date": "November 7, 2016", "title": "I'm With Her", "image": "im_with_her.png", "titletext": "We can do this.", "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 Hairbun without glasses holding a handout 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.\n:Caption]\n: I'm with her. \n\n:[Centred]\n:How to help \n:Vote―iwillvote.com\n:Get a ride to the polls―drive2vote.org\n:If you're having problems voting―866-OUR-VOTE\n:Experimental social turnout project―civicinnovation.com App Store: VoteWithMe\n:Reminder: \n:If you're in line when the polls close, they have to let you vote.", "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 Political endorsement|endorsement for Hillary Clinton, the US Democratic Party|Democratic nominee in the election. She was up against the US Republican Party|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 of the United States|Green Party nominee Jill Stein, and Libertarian Party (United States)|Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson. Neither hoped to garner enough votes to become president, but there was a chance spoiler candidate|they could affect the result in some states (no third-party candidate has ''won'' a state since United States presidential election, 1968|1968, and it did not occur this time either: the closest any came in 2016 was independent candidate Evan McMullin in Utah.)\n\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…).\n\nThe \"H\" with an arrow was Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, 2016|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 (#How to help|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 Donald Trump sexual misconduct allegations|allegations of Donald Trump's sexual harassment of women in general and especially to his ''grab them by the pussy'' Donald Trump and Billy Bush recording|comment) and Cueball with his sword (from 303: Compiling). See more details in the #Character gallery|character gallery below.\n\nThis is the first time Randall has used a comic to directly support a presidential campaign, although he did [https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/28/obama/ 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 388: Fuck Grapefruit#Controversy|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—for example, some European leaders openly opposed Trump, while others supported him. There were also reports of Russian hackers attempting to influence the election.\n\nRandall's support for Hillary Clinton may have been due in part to Donald Trump Donald Trump#Healthcare.2C education and environment|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 :Category:Climate change|comics on climate change. Also, Trump beating Clinton made Randall's 1313: Regex Golf|regex that matches the last names of elected US presidents but not their opponents impossible to update. All 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.\n\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 [https://www.lookhuman.com/design/86542-hillary-clinton-we-can-do-it/tshirt 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 Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign#Slogan|Yes We Can and German Chancellor Angela Merkel's \"[https://www.dict.cc/?s"}
-{"number": "1757", "date": "November 9, 2016", "title": "November 2016", "image": "november_2016.png", "titletext": "Once you've done this, make a note of how old they were. Then, when their age reaches double that, show them this chart again.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the panel:]\n:The November 2016\n:Guide to making people\n:'''feel old'''\n:\n:[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.]\n:If they're [age], you say:\n:\"Did you know [thing] has been around for the majority of your life?\"\n:\n:;Age\n::Thing\n:\n:;16\n::Grand Theft Auto IV\n:\n:;17\n::Rickrolling\n:\n:;18\n::''Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Colon Movie Film for Theaters''\n:\n:;19\n::The Nintendo Wii\n:\n:;20\n::Twitter\n:\n:;21\n::The Xbox 360, xkcd\n:\n:;22\n::Chuck Norris Facts\n:\n:;23\n::Opportunity's Mars Exploration\n:\n:;24\n::Facebook\n:\n:;25\n::Gmail, ''Pirates of the Caribbean''\n:\n:;26\n::In da Club\n:\n:;27\n::''Firefly''\n:\n:;28\n::The War in Afghanistan\n:\n:;29\n::The iPod\n:\n:;30\n::''Shrek'', Wikipedia\n:\n:;31\n::Those X-Men movies\n:\n:;32\n::''The Sims''\n:\n:;33\n::Autotuned hit songs\n\n:;34\n::The ''Star Wars'' prequels\n:\n:;35\n::''The Matrix''\n:\n:;36\n::''Pokémon Red&Blue''\n:\n:;37\n::Netflix, ''Harry Potter'', Google\n:\n:;38\n::Deep Blue's Victory\n:\n:;39\n::Tupac's Death\n:\n:;40\n::The last ''Calvin and Hobbes'' strip\n:\n:;41\n::''Toy Story''\n:\n:;>41\n::[Don't worry, they've got this covered]", "explanation": "This is yet another comic designed to :Category:"}
-{"number": "1758", "date": "November 11, 2016", "title": "Astrophysics", "image": "astrophysics.png", "titletext": "DEPARTMENT OF NEUROSCIENCE / Motto: \"If I hear the phrase 'mirror neurons' I swear to God I will flip this table.\"", "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:]\n:'''Department of Astrophysics'''\n:'''Motto:'''\n:''Yes, everybody has already had the idea, \"Maybe there's no dark matter—Gravity just works differently on large scales!\" It sounds good but doesn't really fit the data.''", "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 Two-body problem in general relativity#Anomalous precession of Mercury|precession of Mercury which Newtonian gravity couldn't fully explain. Dark matter, in turn, explains behaviors of galaxies such as their Galaxy rotation curve|rotation rates that were not correctly predicted with general relativity alone. Most astrophysicists believe dark matter exists, either in the form of Massive compact halo object|an unknown type of star that is too dim to see, or Weakly interacting massive particles|an undiscovered subatomic particle.\n\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_(classical_element)|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. \n\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 — it just changes our understanding of Newton's law of gravitation, rather than requiring entirely new forms of matter or unknown stars to exist — 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 — which has a huge amount of experimental data in its favor — and a MOND-compatible general relativity would be very complicated and ugly.\n\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 dissuasion. The specific impetus for this comic may be the press coverage around [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02269 this publication] by Erik Verlinde (see popular description of the paper [http://phys.org/news/2016-11-theory-gravity-dark.html 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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20170115045049/http://motls.blogspot.de/2010/01/erik-verlinde-why-gravity-cant-be.html 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.\n\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, mirror neurons#Doubts concerning mirror neurons|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. [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/flipping-tables 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.\n\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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1759", "date": "November 14, 2016", "title": "British Map", "image": "british_map.png", "titletext": "West Norsussex is east of East Norwessex, but they're both far north of Middlesex and West Norwex.", "transcript": ":[A black-and-white map of Great Britain. The detail on the map is minimal, showing mainly the outlines of the land, chevrons representing otherwise sparse areas of high hills or 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\n \n[In Scotland, from north to south:]\n Helcaraxë\n Blick\n Everdeen\n Norther Sea (to the west)\n Highlands\n Loch Lomond\n Fjordham\n Glassdoor\n Eavestroughs\n Seasedge\n Meowth\n Chough\n Blighton\n Glutenfree\n\n[In England, from north to south:]\n Eyemouth\n Earhand\n Hairskull\n Lakebottom\n Braintree\n Skinflower\n Weedle\n Bjork\n Crewneck\n Paisley\n Eeugh\n Aidenn\n Basil\n Hillfolk\n Waterdown\n Borough-Upon-Mappe\n Cadbury\n Landmouth (to the East)\n The Shire\n West Norsussex\n Redsox\n Hamwich\n Lionsgate\n Keebler\n South Norwessex\n Kingsbottom\n Cambridge\n Frampton\n Nothingham\n Cair Paravel\n Dampshire\n Cumberbatch\n Oxford\n Paulblart\n Corbyn\n London\n GMT\n BBC Channel 4 (to the West)\n Minas Tirith\n Tems-Upon-Thames\n Tubemap\n Hogsmeade\n Cambnewton\n Oughghough\n Efrafa\n Chansey\n Sundial\n Lower Bottom\n Dobby\n Menthol\n West Sea (to the West)\n Blandford\n Southframpton\n Tarp\n Longbit\n\n[In Wales, from north to south:]\n Fhqwhgads\n Cabinetry\n Bloughshire\n Aberforth\n Dryford\n Kingsfriend\n Camelot\n The CW\n Whaling\n Moorhen\n Cardigan\n\n[In Northern Ireland:]\n Belfast Devoe\n\n[In the Republic of Ireland:]\n Dubstep\n ", "explanation": "This comic is a joke similar to [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid"}
-{"number": "1760", "date": "November 16, 2016", "title": "TV Problems", "image": "tv_problems.png", "titletext": "Certified skydiving instructors know way more about safely falling from planes than I do, and are way more likely to die that way.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is sitting by his TV, holding his phone, when White Hat walks in.]\n:White Hat: Hey, turn on the news.\n:Cueball (Sitting on the floor in front of a computer holding a cell phone): Can't. Downloading a CD onto my phone.\n\n:White Hat (off-screen): Why?\n: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.\n\n:White Hat: But then you'll be able to watch the news?\n:Cueball: (off-screen): No.\n\n:White Hat: Don't you have a computer science degree?\n:Cueball: That just means I ''understand'' how everything went so wrong.", "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: \n\n# Cueball has broken his computer enough that the operating system no longer works, in which case he would probably be downloading an ISO file (which is the type of image on a CD) to his phone. This would enable him to connect his phone as a USB device to his computer and boot from it. After booting from his phone, he could repair or reinstall his computer's operating system. \n# Cueball is trying to connect his computer to his TV, but needs a driver or other software to make the connection. He is unable to connect to the Internet from his computer (maybe he is using a network dongle that also requires drivers/software to function, or maybe the internet from his ISP is down, so he is using cellular data), so he is using his phone to download the files. Perhaps the computer has internal Bluetooth or he can transfer files from his phone to his computer via a wired connection. \n\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 nearly ''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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1761", "date": "November 18, 2016", "title": "Blame", "image": "blame.png", "titletext": "I bet if I yell at my scared friends I will feel better.", "transcript": ":[Cueball stands.]\n:Cueball (thinking): I feel sad.\n:Cueball (thinking): Bad things are happening.\n\n:[Cueball still stands.]\n:Cueball (thinking): They must be someone's fault.\n:Cueball (thinking): But whose?\n\n:[Cueball makes several thinking poses before a light bulb appears over his head.]\n\n:[Close-up of Cueball's head.]\n:Cueball (thinking): ''My friends on Facebook.''", "explanation": "Cueball is blaming his \"friends on Facebook\" for \"bad things [that] are happening\". \n\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.\n\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}}\n\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."}
-{"number": "1762", "date": "November 21, 2016", "title": "Moving Boxes", "image": "moving_boxes.png", "titletext": "Later, when I remember that I'm calling movers, I frantically scribble over the labels and write 'NORMAL HOUSE STUFF' on all of them, which actually makes things worse.", "transcript": ":[A bunch of cardboard boxes stacked up, each labeled]\n:{| class", "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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1763", "date": "November 23, 2016", "title": "Catcalling", "image": "catcalling.png", "titletext": "Effect strength => [unstoppable] | Effect range => [2 miles] | Effect duration => [1 year]", "transcript": ":Offscreen: ''Hey! Are you messing with the Universe Control Console!?''\n\n:Megan: [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\n:[Megan still at the control panel; now a mouse pointer appears]\n\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\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]", "explanation": "\"Street harassment|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. \n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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, may be the offscreen voice in this comic.)\n\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.\n\nThe redefining of terms related to sexual harassment as more innocent things has also been discussed in 1178: Pickup Artists.\n\nAlso, the cursor on the console is left-handed for some reason."}
-{"number": "1764", "date": "November 25, 2016", "title": "XKCDE", "image": "xkcde.png", "titletext": "4. They unplug the root machine but the thousands of leaf VMs scatter in the wind and start spinning up new instances wherever they land", "transcript": ":Installing the xkcd development environment\n\n:[Inside a frame three instructions are shown:]\n:1. Spin up a VM\n:2. Spin up a VM inside that VM\n:3. Continue spinning up nested VMs and containers until you get fired", "explanation": "Randall has created a theoretical software environment named XKCDE (a portmanteau on xkcd and Collaborative development environment|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\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\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 containerization tool will have its own standard library, software-stack and installed programs, but delegates all system calls|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 (software)|Docker.\n\nRandall derives humor 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}}).\n\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.\n\nThe title-text is a joke on the words Tree (data structure)|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 Samara (fruit)|spinning leaves to scatter their seeds. The Autorotation (helicopter)|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1765", "date": "November 28, 2016", "title": "Baby Post", "image": "baby_post.png", "titletext": "[bzzzt] \"REMEMBER TO CHECK IN FOR YOUR FLIGHT TO LONDON.\" \"My wha-\" [bzzzt] \"YOUR UBER WILL ARRIVE IN FOUR MINUTES.\"", "transcript": ":[Ponytail is looking at her phone while talking to Cueball.]\n:Ponytail: Why did you post a ''The Wheels on the Bus'' Youtube video to Facebook six times?\n:Cueball: Haha, whoops! My daughter was watching the tablet and must have hit something.\n\n:[Cueball is talking to someone on the phone while pushing a shopping cart with a few items in it.]\n:Phone: Hey, did you mean to post \"FHFF,,,M,,,,\" and a link to a map of hardware stores?\n:Cueball: I should really look up how to lock the screen.\n\n:[White Hat is holding his phone while walking with Cueball.]\n:White Hat: You just posted videos on metal-working, zip lines, and camouflage.\n:Cueball: Uhh...\n\n:[Ponytail is looking at her phone while talking to Cueball.]\n:Ponytail: Um, you posted blueprints of the Crown Jewel rooms in the Tower of London.\n:Cueball: Maybe we should be keeping more of an eye on her.", "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 \"The Wheels on the Bus|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.\n\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 of the United Kingdom|Crown Jewels, which have a reputation, based in part on several movies (for example, ''Minions_(film)|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.\n\nThe title text continues the joke by notifying Cueball that his flight to London is leaving soon, and an Uber_(company)|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."}
-{"number": "1766", "date": "November 30, 2016", "title": "Apple Spectrum", "image": "apple_spectrum.png", "titletext": "If I were trapped on a desert island, and could have an unlimited supply of any one type of apple, I'd be like, \"How did this situation happen?\"", "transcript": "[A mapping, showing types of apples. Each apple is in a bubble]\nfood 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 :Category:Strange powers of Beret Guy|strange powers.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1773", "date": "December 16, 2016", "title": "Negativity", "image": "negativity.png", "titletext": "[Google search] how do I block my lawn", "transcript": ":[Cueball walking on grass]\n:Cueball: It's nice to get outside, away from the pain and negativity of the internet,\n\n:[Cueball stops walking]\n:Cueball: And just enjoy the cool breeze and the grass under my feet.\n\n:[Cueball stands there, hands to his hips, looking to the cloudy sky]\n\n:[Cueball looks down while pointing a finger at the grass behind him.]\n:Grass: You ''suuuuck''\n:Cueball: ''Hey!''", "explanation": "Cueball is going outside for some fresh air because he wants to escape the Internet Troll|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).\n\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.\n\nThe term \"[https://www.bayeradvanced.com/articles/how-to-tell-if-your-lawn-needs-dethatching 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1774", "date": "December 19, 2016", "title": "Adjective Foods", "image": "adjective_foods.png", "titletext": "Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!", "transcript": ":[An arrangement of labeled foodstuffs, from left to right and top to bottom:]\n:Premium Stone-ground Bespoke, Cage-free\n:Gourmet Fire-roasted Glazed flambé\n:Organic All-natural Locally-sourced Artisanal, Kosher, Grade A\n:Craft Barrel-aged Smoked Authentic Homemade Sun-dried Whole Extra Sharp\n:Low-calorie Lite Original Flavor\n:[Caption:] I'm trying to trick supermarkets into carrying my new line of adjective-only foods.", "explanation": "In this comic, Randall imagines creating food items whose labels contain 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 is. By removing all nouns from product labels, Randall takes this trend to its extreme. The items depicted in this comic are filled with popular descriptions that make them sound appealing, but give no useful information about their contents. It is implied that some consumers who are susceptible to buzzword marketing will nevertheless purchase these products.\n\nThe adjectives seen in the comic are:\n* '''Premium''': A generic term that indicates high quality, which can be used to describe any food. There is no objective standard for what can be labeled \"premium\".\n* '''Stone-ground''': A term typically used to describe milled grain products such as flour, corn meal, or mustard. This term evokes a sense of tradition (as opposed to industrial processing), and by association, heartiness or healthiness. In reality, contents are rarely distinguishable no matter what grinding surface was used.\n* '''Bespoke''': A word meaning \"custom made to individual order\", in contrast to factory mass-produced items typically found in supermarkets. It is supposed to imply higher quality due to the producer giving it more attention. However, mass-produced items are usually ones that pass more strict quality controls, have more consistent results, and appeal more to popular tastes.\n* '''Cage-free''': A term typically used to describe chicken. Chickens are usually farmed in tight cages and not allowed to move freely. Ethical concerns for the chickens' welfare led to preference for better handling methods such as \"cage-free\" and \"Free-range_eggs|free range\". These terms however are still often abused by farmers looking to maximize their profits, as \"cage-free\" can simply mean crowded in a filthy barn, and \"free range\" might be a tiny patch of grass which chickens are allowed to, but rarely actually, visit.\n* '''Gourmet''': Another generic term that indicates sophisticated, fancy, or exotic properties. Any food can be labeled \"gourmet\" without any objective standard.\n* '''Fire-roasted''': A method of preparation by heating food over an open flame (as opposed to an electric oven or microwave). This process typically gives the food a distinct flavor through caramelization and by absorbing the smoky flavor from the fire itself.\n* '''Glaze_(cooking_technique)|Glazed''': A description indicating that the food has been coated with a thin layer of glossy liquid. This is usually done to improve the flavor and texture.\n* '''Flamb%C3%A9|Flambé''': A method of preparation by adding alcohol to the food and setting it on fire. This is mainly done for dramatic presentation in a restaurant setting. The alcohol content, and the flames to a lesser extent, can give food additional flavors. Note that food that is packaged cannot be flambé (burning),{{Citation needed}} although in principle the customer could set it on fire.\n* '''Organic_food|Organic''': In the context of food, this term describes methods of production which meet certain standards for sustainability and lack of synthetic chemicals. These standards vary by country and region. While one can support organic farming for ecological reasons, many also incorrectly associate \"organic\" to mean better tasting, more nutritious, or otherwise healthier. Experiments to date have found no difference in safety, nutrition, and taste between organically and conventionally produced foods.\n* '''Natural_foods|All-natural''': A term that generally implies that all the food's ingredients were directly sourced from domestication and farming, with no additives or alterations through modern technologies like chemical synthesis or genetic engineering. Similar to \"organic\", definition and enforcement of this term varies by country and region. While it is true that food processing technologies have led to an explosion of Junk_food|junk food, it is not true that \"natural\" is necessarily always better. Many natural products can be harmful if used carelessly, and some processing methods do in fact improve the safety and nutrition of food.\n* '''Locally-sourced''': A term indicating that the ingredients are procured and prepared in the same general geographical area where it is sold, instead of arriving by long-distance shipping or international trade. People may prefer to \"Local_purchasing|buy local\" due to perceived benefits to the local economy, community, and environment.\n* '''Artisanal''': Similar to \"bespoke\", this is a word meaning \"created by hand by a skilled craft worker\". Again this is in contrast to mass-produced items in factories where most preparation is done by machines and where workers have little knowledge of the methods.\n* '''Kosher_foods|Kosher''': A term which designates foods that may be consumed in accordance to Jewish religious dietary laws. This is important to people who follow Jewish practices, but otherwise has little significance to non-Jewish people.\n* '''Grade A''': In some countries and for some specific items (such as eggs in the US), the grade can carry specific meaning about the item's quality and suitability for sale and consumption. However without context for what the food is, this is nothing but another meaningless term which alludes to high quality but carries no weight.\n* '''Craft''': A term similar to \"artisanal\".\n* '''Barrel-aged''': A term typically used to describe fermented products such as alcoholic beverages, vinegar, and certain sauces. Sealing these items in wooden barrels and allowing them to age helps them to develop more complex flavors. The barrels themselves can also impart flavors to the food.\n* '''Smoking_(cooking)|Smoked''': A method of preparation by placing food, often meats or cheeses, in chambers filled with dense smoke. The food slowly absorbs the smoke which enhances its flavor.\n* '''Authentic''': Typically used for foods imported from another culture, this term indicates that the ingredients, preparation, taste, etc. are true to the original, native version. It can also indicate that the ingredients are real, not substituted with similar but lower-quality alternatives. However, since there's no objective criteria for what can be called \"authentic\", the word has largely lost its meaning and the quality of items labeled as such still varies greatly.\n* '''Homemade''': Another term which evokes the idea of careful preparation by hand rather than commercial mass production. People will often prefer meals prepared from scratch at home by themselves or close family members, likely because they grew up eating similar meals and have developed a fondness for its particular characteristics. However, there is no reason to believe one will enjoy food prepared in ''someone else's'' home any more than commercially produced versions.\n* '''Sun-dried''': A term often applied to fruits and vegetables that have been dehydrated using heat from the sun, e.g. sun-dried tomatoes. As with \"stone-ground\", it's questionable whether the heat source in this case makes any difference to the food. Sunlight does not conceivably add any flavor to the food, so presumably any radiant heat with similar intensity will produce the same results.\n* '''Whole''': A term applied to food that has not been broken apart into smaller pieces, e.g. whole walnuts, or food that has not been processed to remove nutritious parts, e.g. whole grains.\n* '''Extra sharp''': Often applied to cheeses, indicating a stronger or \"sharper\" flavor, e.g. extra sharp cheddar cheese.\n* '''Low-calorie''': Used to label foods that have been formulated to deliver fewer calories than a regular food. Although low-calorie foods may be helpful for dieters to control their caloric intake, they are not necessarily healthier. For example, the low-calorie formulation might have replaced fat (which has high calorie content) with added sugar (with comparatively lower calorie content per gram) and salt (to enhance flavor lost from the removal of fat). Neither excessive sugar nor salt is healthy.\n* '''Lite''': Similar to 'low-calorie', 'lite' is applied to foods that have fewer calories or lesser fat content than regular food. It can also apply to other contents, e.g. alcohol (\"lite beer\").\n* '''Original flavor''': If a company produces many products, it will sometimes differentiate them by flavor. After many years, the first flavor that a product came in can often be preferred by customers. Companies will often capitalize on this by marketing a product as having the \"original flavor\", rather than one of the variants.\n* '''Reference_Daily_Intake|Recommended daily allowance''' (title text): Information often found in the nutritional information on food labels which compare the amount of macronutrients, vitamins and minerals to a prescribed standard amount an average person is deemed to require in their daily diet.\n\nThe title text may be a continuation of the main joke, in that Randall has removed the noun (nutrient type) which the recommended daily allowance is supposed to measure. This leaves \"100%\" which gives an impression of good value, but it 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.{{Citation needed}}\n\nThis joke is very similar to 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 993|comic 993, Brand Identity."}
-{"number": "1775", "date": "December 21, 2016", "title": "Things You Learn", "image": "things_you_learn.png", "titletext": "Guess who has two thumbs and spent the night in an ER after trying to rescue a kitten that ran under his car at a stoplight and climbed up into the engine compartment? And, thanks to antibiotics, will continue having two thumbs? THIS GUY. (P.S. kitten is safe!)", "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\n:[Points on graph from top to bottom on the left side of the Y-axis:]\n\n:100 digits of pi\n:Lyrics to ''We Didn't Start the Fire''\n:How to ride a bike\n:How to escape movie quicksand\n:Lyrics to ''12 Days of Christmas''\n:TV theme songs\n\n:[Points on graph from top to bottom on the right side of the Y-axis:]\n\n:That cat bites are really serious and if bitten you should wash the bite and call a doctor immediately\n:Red flags for an abusive relationship\n:Signs for a stroke\n:Cough into your elbow, not your hand\n:That you have to empty the dryer lint trap\n:Stop, drop, and roll\n:That you have to pay taxes", "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.\n\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 Amputation|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.\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1776", "date": "December 23, 2016", "title": "Reindeer", "image": "reindeer.png", "titletext": "And then in a twinkling, a sound gave me pause / From the roof came the scratching of eight tarsal claws.", "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.]\n:Black Hat: In earlier Norse myths, the eight reindeer were actually one steed with eight ''legs''.\n:Black Hat: So I think this is more authentic.\n:Boy: ''Aaaaaa!''", "explanation": "In the :Category:Christmas|Christmas comic of 2016, Black Hat is at it again, freaking out a young child, by replacing the eight reindeer of Santa Claus|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 Santa_Claus#Predecessor_figures|(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. \n\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 {{W|Chimaera (mythology)|chimaera}} that is both creepy and terrifying, at least to those with arachnophobia (the quite common fear of spiders).\n\nThe title text is a parody of two lines from the poem \"A_Visit_from_St._Nicholas|Twas the Night Before Christmas\", \"And then in a twinkling, I heard on the roof / The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.\" \n\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."}
-{"number": "1777", "date": "December 26, 2016", "title": "Dear Diary", "image": "dear_diary.png", "titletext": "Dear Diary: UNSUBSCRIBE", "transcript": ":[Black Hat is seated at a table, writing with a pencil in a diary.]\n\n:Writing: Dear Diary, \n:Writing: Hello. I am the Crown Prince of Nigeria. I have recently come into a large fortune, but...", "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 [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nigerian-scams 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 be trying to scare the diary's owner, perhaps the same child as he traumatized in 1776|the previous comic with a reindeer mutated to look like a spider.\n\nThis comic creates a stark contrast by putting together elements that seem similar, but do not belong together, for comedic effect.\n* Combining old-school hand written media (a diary) and memes from the electronic age (a phishing attempt as usually found in spam mail).\n* Contrasting the very personal, intimate atmosphere of \"Dear diary\" with something that is normally automatically replicated to millions of mail addresses.\n* Opening up with a sentence that might come from a real personal diary (many people will fantasize about being rich or famous in their diaries), and following up with something that nobody would expect from a personal diary.\n\nIt is possible that the diary is actually the journal from the :Category:Journal|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1778", "date": "December 28, 2016", "title": "Interest Timescales", "image": "interest_timescales.png", "titletext": "Sometimes, parts of a slowly-rising mountain suddenly rise REALLY fast, which is extra interesting.", "transcript": ":[At the bottom of this chart there is a long double arrow pointing at two words:]\n:Fast\n:Slow\n\n:[Above the line there are four drawings going from left to right:]\n\n:[Cueball watches a fireworks display to the left of him, two firework rockets are going up and another one is exploding even higher.] \n:Cueball: ''Ooooh!''\n\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.]\n:Cueball: ''Wow!''\n\n:[Cueball climbs a tree, holding on to the left of the two main branches going out from the trunk beneath the treetop.]\n:Cueball: Zoom!\n\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.]\n:Cueball: ''Wheeeee!''\n\n:[Caption below the panel:] \n: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.", "explanation": "Randall's sharing a bit about himself and the things that interest him, in one of his strange but still funny graphs.\n\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:\n\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.\n\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—in 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 [https://youtu.be/ZhvkITCGqK4?t"}
-{"number": "1780", "date": "January 2, 2017", "title": "Appliance Repair", "image": "appliance_repair.png", "titletext": "[holding up a three-phase motor] As you can see here, the problem is that the humidifier I took this from is broken.", "transcript": ":[Cueball faces Megan and White Hat as he stands in the middle of a mess of a dissasembled machine, holding a screwdriver.]\n:Cueball: After disassembling and inspecting the humidifier, I've determined that the main problem with it is that someone took it apart.", "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}}\n\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 – 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_electric_power|single-phase voltage, while three-phase equipment uses Three-phase_electric_power|three-phase voltage.\n\nThis might also be a reference to self reference which is referenced in xkcd sometimes."}
-{"number": "1781", "date": "January 4, 2017", "title": "Artifacts", "image": "artifacts.png", "titletext": "I didn't even realize you could HAVE a data set made up entirely of outliers.", "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.]\n:Cueball: The data clearly proves that-\n:Offscreen voice: Are you Indiana Jones? \n:Offscreen voice: Because you've got a lot of artifacts there, and I'm pretty sure you didn't handle them right.", "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 Artifact_(archaeology)|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 Artifact_(error)|error artifacts.\n\nIndiana Jones is (often humorously) [http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24595365/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/indiana-jones-would-make-bad-archaeologist/#.WG1XuflViig 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.\n\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.\n\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.[http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1302395/n-points-can-be-equidistant-from-each-other-only-in-dimensions-ge-n-1] All these points are equidistant from each other. \n\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."}
-{"number": "1782", "date": "January 6, 2017", "title": "Team Chat", "image": "team_chat.png", "titletext": "2078: He announces that he's finally making the jump from screen+irssi to tmux+weechat.", "transcript": ":[Hairbun holding up her palm toward Cueball. A frame over the top border of the panel has a caption:]\n:2004\n:Hairbun: Our team stays in touch over IRC.\n\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:]\n:2010\n:Ponytail: Our team mainly uses Skype, but some of us prefer to stick to IRC.\n\n:[Cueball is talking with Megan in a frameless panel. A frame at the top of the panel has a caption:]\n:2017\n:Cueball: We've got almost everyone on Slack,\n:Cueball: But three people refuse to quit IRC and connect via Gateway.\n\n:[A black panel with white text and drawings. The main body of text is above 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: ]\n:2051\n:Narration: All consciousnesses have merged with the Galactic Singularity, \n:Narration: Except for ''one'' guy who insists on joining through his IRC client.\n:One Guy: I just have it set up the way I want, okay?!\n:Galactic Singularity: ''*Sigh*''\n\n", "explanation": "Randall provides us with a – presumably anecdotal – 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.\n\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.\n\n[https://www.skype.com Skype] and [https://slack.com 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 [https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-to-Slack-over-IRC-and-XMPP gateway feature], if allowed by the team's admin, but that was turned off in mid 2018, after the publication of this comic.)\n\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. \n\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 — in Randall's vision — going to be That IRC Guy. This might also be a reference to the scenarios in science fiction stories such as Isaac Asimov's Gaia_(Foundation_universe)#Galaxia|concept of Galaxia in the Foundation novels, or the concept of a merged human-computer intelligence as in \"The Last Question\" [http://multivax.com/last_question.html], the concept of which is most notably highlighted by this line:\n\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. [...]''\n\nIn the title text, both GNU_Screen|screen and Tmux|tmux are unix programs that help you multitask while working in terminal, and Irssi|irssi and WeeChat|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 – you need to know what you are doing or read help before using it, otherwise you get lost and frustrated. [http://superuser.com/questions/236158/tmux-vs-screen] The same it is with the newer, more feature-packed and user-friendly weechat vs industry-standard, harder-to-use irssi. [https://www.quora.com/IRC-Which-do-you-prefer-irssi-or-weechat-and-why]\n\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.\n\nTiming of this strip follows the [https://irssi.org/2017/01/05/irssi-1.0.0-released/ release of irssi version 1.0.0].\n\nRandall touched on similar themes earlier in 927: Standards and later in 2365: Messaging Systems."}
-{"number": "1783", "date": "January 9, 2017", "title": "Emails", "image": "emails.png", "titletext": "Hey Rob, sorry it took me a while to get back to you! Sure, I'd love to see WALL-E opening weekend! Are you still doing that, or...?", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball are walking along.]\n:Megan: Did you have any New Year's Resolutions?\n:Cueball: Gonna finally finish dealing with those emails from 2008.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:] \n:As my email backlog approaches 10 years, I'm starting to have doubts about my approach.", "explanation": "In this rather late :Category:New Year|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 kinds of resolutions New_Year's_resolution#Success_rate|hardly ever work.\n\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. \n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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 :Category:"}
-{"number": "1784", "date": "January 11, 2017", "title": "Bad Map Projection: Liquid Resize", "image": "bad_map_projection_liquid_resize.png", "titletext": "This map preserves the shapes of Tissot's indicatrices pretty well, as long as you draw them in before running the resize.", "transcript": ":[Caption at the top of the panel:]\n:Bad map projection #107:\n:
The Liquid Resize\n:A political map compressed using Photoshop's content-aware resizing algorithm to cut down on unused blank space\n\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.]", "explanation": "This is the first comic in the series of :Category:Bad Map Projections|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.\n\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.\n\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).\n\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!\n\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.\n\nSecond, the map uses [https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/content-aware-scaling.html 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, [http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/710073-content-aware-scaling 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. \n\n[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/content-aware-scaling Bad 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1785", "date": "January 13, 2017", "title": "Wifi", "image": "wifi.png", "titletext": "Further out to the right, it works correctly, but the reason it works still involves the word 'firmware.'", "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.]\n:Y-axis: Probability houseguest will be able to connect to WiFi\n:X-axis: Houseguest tech-savviness\n:Left label: Can't find wifi settings\n:Center label: Works fine\n:Right label: Something involving the word \"firmware\"", "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 a new Wi-Fi network is a fairly simple operation that most people can perform, typically only requiring selecting the correct network name on a settings screen, then entering a password.\n\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 group has slightly lower than normal probability of connecting successfully, since they would not know what to do if left alone. However, they 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.\n\nThe average case in the middle of the graph represents typical users who simply wish to connect and gain Internet access (\"works fine\"). This group of users have enough knowledge to be able to connect and are then satisfied with the connection just working. Since networking devices use a standard protocol to communicate behind the scenes, users typically will not experience any issues.\n\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, and can be quite risky for people without experience. Not all custom firmware will interoperate correctly with all devices. Technical 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, or any errors or glitches in the process, can even leave devices brick (electronics)|bricked. It's likely that the sharp dropoff in the graph is caused by inexperienced users who know \"just enough\" to want to modify their firmware, but don't know how to deal with the multitude of issues that can arise. Particularly for users whose connection was already working fine but nevertheless want to experiment with new firmware, their changes often end up worsening their chances of connecting.\n\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 users are often able to diagnose and fix connection issues through the appropriate use of firmware, making their chances of connecting even better than the average user.\n\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.\n\nComputer issues have previously appeared in several xkcd comics, notably 456: Cautionary, where WiFi problems specifically are mentioned in the title text.\n\nThe apparent paradox of people knowing more about a subject also having more problems with it is also explored in 1760: TV Problems."}
-{"number": "1786", "date": "January 16, 2017", "title": "Trash", "image": "trash.png", "titletext": "Plus, time's all weird in there, so most of it probably broke down and decomposed hundreds of years ago. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to get in touch with Yucca Mountain to see if they're interested in a partnership.", "transcript": ":[Cueball looking at garbage chute attached to wardrobe. Black Hat answers him from off panel.]\n:Cueball: What's this thing on your wardrobe?\n:Black Hat (off-panel): Garbage chute.\n\n:[In a frame-less panel Cueball has turned away from the wardrobe (now off-panel) and he walks towards Black Hat.]\n:Cueball: Into a wardrobe? \n: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\n:[Cueball stops walking closer to Black Hat.]\n:Cueball: You dump your trash in ''Narnia''? \n:Black Hat: Yeah, it's a real time-saver. \n: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.", "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 Chute_(gravity)#Building_chute|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.)\n\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.\n\nA discussion of problems with this comic vs. Narnia chronology is discussed in the #Trivia|trivia section.\n\nThe \"huge cat\" he refers to is Aslan, a magical lion in Narnia. 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, implying he ''is'' Jesus, just in Narnia.\n\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}}.\n\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.\n\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 :Category:Climate change|climate change. This comic could be a take on humans Marine_debris|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}}. \n\nThe title text copies the idea behind the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from\n[http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id"}
-{"number": "1787", "date": "January 18, 2017", "title": "Voice Commands", "image": "voice_commands.png", "titletext": "Dvorak words may sound hard to pronounce, but studies show they actually put less stress on the vocal cords.", "transcript": ":[Ponytail is looking at Cueball facing her direction, and he looks down at the smartphone he is holding in his hand.]\n:Ponytail: Can you text it to me?\n:Cueball: Sure! \n:Cueball: ''Svat ussupd ;dlh a kdbk''\n:Ponytail: ...What?\n:Phone: ''*Beep*''\n\n:[Caption under the panel:]\n:Setting my phone's speech recognition to Dvorak was a pain at first, but it's more efficient in the long run.", "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. \n\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.\n\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.\n\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}}"}
-{"number": "1788", "date": "January 20, 2017", "title": "Barge", "image": "barge.png", "titletext": "My life goal is to launch a barge into the air and have it land on one of Elon Musk's rockets.", "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\n:[The first insert shows a barge with no center and a large piece of paper with the SpaceX logo above the barge.]\n\n:[The second insert shows the paper stretched over the hole.]\n\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\n:[Caption below the panels:] \n: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.", "explanation": "This is another comic in the :Category:My Hobby|My Hobby series. This one is depicted with three drawings illustrating the core concept and explained in detail in the caption. The launch company SpaceX has developed a reusable rocket system, where the multi-stage rocket|first rocket stage is capable of landing back on either the launch pad or an autonomous spaceport drone ship after launch (See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1789", "date": "January 23, 2017", "title": "Phone Numbers", "image": "phone_numbers.png", "titletext": "Texting should work. Unless the message is too long, in which case it gets converted to voicemails, and I think I'm locked out of my voicemail.", "transcript": ":[White Hat is looking at a smartphone held out by Cueball.]\n:Cueball: I have five phone numbers for you. Which one should I use?\n: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.\n:White Hat: You can delete #4. I think.\n\n:[Caption below the frame:]\n:Another reason I never call people.", "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.\n\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 Mobile phone|cell phones were still rather new, they would have had a landline telephone|home phone number also. More and more people have discontinued their land lines and now only keep the cell phone number. \n\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):\n#'''Cell phone''': The first number White Hat mentions is actually White Hat's cell phone; so usually this would be the number you should use as first priority, but not so with White Hat.\n#'''Google Voice''': White Hat then goes on to say he should use his Google Voice. It is not stated that this is #2, but since the other four are numbered, it is assumed that Cueball's second number is White Hat's Google Voice number. The reason Cueball should use this is that it will forward to White Hat's laptop, although only if his laptop is connected to WiFi.\n#'''Always works''': The third number, the fourth he mentions, always works, but for some reason it cannot do SMS text messages. This could be because this is a landline (see #4).\n#'''This can be deleted?''': This is the last number White Hat mentions. This number could also have been White Hat's landline which would now be discontinued (but see #3), or a previous cell number. White Hat states that it can be deleted. But then on second thought he adds an \"I think.\" So even this number cannot be deleted from Cueball's phone. The title text most likely refers to this number, as it is the last he has mentioned in the main comic.\n#'''Work number''': The fifth number, mentioned third, is White Hat's work number (maybe he has an office, or it's just an official number for his business). But this number is useless as it just forwards all calls directly to #1, the cell phone.\n\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. [https://blog.google/products/google-voice/ringing-2017-updates-our-google-voice-apps/ 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.\n\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. \n\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.\n\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.\n\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...\n\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).\n\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.\n\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). \n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1790", "date": "January 25, 2017", "title": "Sad", "image": "sad.png", "titletext": "With the right 90-degree rotation, any effect is a side effect.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is walking up to Ponytail who sits at her desk in an office chair typing on her computer.]\n:Cueball: How are you doing?\n:Ponytail: Hah.\n:Cueball: You seem distant lately. For the past few months.\n:Ponytail: Can't '''''imagine''''' why.\n\n:[Cueball talks to Ponytail at her desk from off-panel.]\n:Cueball (off-panel): Your projects have stagnated.\n:Ponytail: But my Stardew Valley farm is doing '''''great'''''. \n:Cueball (off-panel): You can't just hide from everything. \n:Ponytail: '''''Fact check''''': Mostly false.\n\n:[In a frame-less panel Cueball is seen standing behind Ponytail at her desk.]\n:Cueball: I'm glad you're including more comments in your code, but it would be nice if they were comments '''''about''''' your code. \n:Cueball: Or at least a bit less obscenity-filled.\n:Ponytail: Look, they say to write what you know.\n\n:[Cueball leans forward towards Ponytail at her desk (who has looked on the screen in the same position through the entire comic).]\n:Cueball: All the functions you've written take everything passed to them and return it unchanged with the comment \"No, '''''you''''' deal with this.\"\n:Ponytail: It's a functional programming thing. Avoiding side effects.\n:Cueball: You avoid '''''all''''' effects. \n:Ponytail: Only way to be sure.", "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 United States presidential election, 2016|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.\n\nPonytail has retreated to video games for solace to the point that her real life projects are suffering. \n''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 released only two weeks later, 1797: Stardew Valley, indicating that it is indeed Randall who has played this game excessively.\n\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.com|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.\n\nIn computer programming, ''Comment (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.\n\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.\n\n''Subroutine|Functions'' 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).\n\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 (computer science)|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.\n\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.\n\nCueball fairly makes this point by noting she is avoiding ''all'' effects, to which Ponytail [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090605/quotes?item"}
-{"number": "1791", "date": "January 27, 2017", "title": "Telescopes: Refractor vs Reflector", "image": "telescopes_refractor_vs_reflector.png", "titletext": "On the other hand, the refractor's limited light-gathering means it's unable to make out shadow people or the dark god Chernabog.", "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\n:[Left:]\n:
Refractor\n\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:]\n:*More expensive\n:*Less compact\n:*Chromatic aberration\n:*Reduced light-gathering\n\n:[Right:]\n:
Reflector\n\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:]\n:*Can't see space vampires", "explanation": "This comic compares two major types of optical telescope|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.)\n\nIt first looks like the comic is simply trying to show that refracting has many flaws, such as expense, size and visibility (see more #The real problems with refracting telescopes|details below). However, the punchline invalidates these complaints with the (apparently major) flaw listed with the reflecting telescope: '''It can't see space vampires'''. \n\nThe unstated reason for this is that vampires, Vampire#Apotropaics|according to some cultures, cannot be seen in a mirror. As Space Vampires (like earth vampires) are widely believed to be Vampire#Origins_of_vampire_beliefs|made up and thus unlikely to interest most 1644: Stargazing|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 #The real problems with reflecting telescope|details below. (Also there was a big problem in the #Trivia|original version of this comic). \n\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.\n\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 person|Shadow People or the Slavic god Chernobog|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_person#History_and_folklore|shadow people nor Chernobog#Folklore|the god exists{{Citation needed}} so this would likewise be a moot point. \n\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 (1940 film)|''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.\n\nTelescopes have been the subject of :Category:Telescopes|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."}
-{"number": "1792", "date": "January 30, 2017", "title": "Bird/Plane/Superman", "image": "bird_plane_superman.png", "titletext": "You can apply special translucent films to your windows to help keep birds/Superman from accidentally flying into them.", "transcript": "{| class", "explanation": "This comic is a logical comparison of observations to resolve the [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034247/quotes?item"}
-{"number": "1793", "date": "February 1, 2017", "title": "Soda Sugar Comparisons", "image": "soda_sugar_comparisons.png", "titletext": "The key is portion control, which is why I've switched to eating smaller cans of frosting instead of full bottles.", "transcript": ":[Above the four rows of two panels with captions above them are the following title and note:]\n:
Soda Sugar Comparisons\n:
Time Zones\n:Where each country '''''should''''' be,\n:based on its time zone(s)\n\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\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\n:[North America. (Newfoundland, the most easterly part of Canada, is labeled with a star *):]\n:Canyon River Nuclear Launch Facility\n\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:] \n:Reviews (22)\n:[5 of 5 stars filled] Greatest country on earth \n:[2 of 5 stars filled] Looks cool but you can't get in\n:[1 of 5 stars filled] What is this store\n:[4 of 5 stars filled] My cousin worked here\n:[2 of 5 stars filled] Waitstaff heavily armed and very rude\n:[1 of 5 stars filled] Stop doing chemtrails\n:[1 of 5 stars filled] This place is a symptom of the military-industrial complex strangling our democracy and...The xkcd Phone 5\n:''We're trying to catch up to Apple but refuse to skip numbers®TM''", "explanation": "This is the fifth entry in the ongoing :Category:xkcd Phones|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.\n\nThe tagline 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.\n\nThis phone seems to have a curved display. But the edges are curved down and not up, as they are on other curved phones. From the top, going clockwise:\n\n; Hook shot\n\n: In ''The Legend of Zelda'' the [http://zelda.gamepedia.com/Hookshot Hook shot] 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 (The Legend of Zelda)|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 Hook shot).\n\n:In 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 Hook shots 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{{citation needed}} for use in either of the tool's functions.\n\n; Bluetooth speaker\n\n: Bluetooth 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, tiny speaker embedded in most phones. The Bluetooth speaker is located in the normal place for a phone's speaker.\n\n:In addition to having no benefit in normal operation, the higher power usage from sending and receiving wireless signal to the built-in speaker would also result in shorter battery life when playing music; a characteristic that would already be undesirable on a regular phone, but is especially pressing given the highly dubious track record of previous xkcd phone models' batteries.\n\n; Stained-glass display\n\n: Stained 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 touchscreens, 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.\n\n; Gallium chassis remains solid up to 85°F\n\n: Many 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.\n\n: Gallium, however, is an uncommon metal with a very low melting point of 85 °F (or 29.8 °C), making it one of only four pure metals (along with Mercury (element)|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 °F (37 °C) 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.\n\n: Gallium also displays many strange properties which would be undesirable in a phone, such as contact-permeating through the crystal structures of other metals used in the phone's construction.\n\n: A 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.\n\n; Soundproof\n\n: A 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).\n\n; Can feel pain\n\n: Possibly a reference to intelligent personal assistant|intelligent personal assistants like Siri, Cortana (software)|Cortana or Amazon Alexa|Alexa gaining consciousness (see 1807: Listening for the latter). Such artificial intelligence references is a :Category:Artificial Intelligence|recurring subject on xkcd. \n\n: This could mean that either the phone feels pain for damage 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\". \n\n: This 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 foldability 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...\n\n; E-ZPass partnership: Phone can be dropped into coin basket to pay tolls\n\n: E-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.\n\n: In the title text, however, it says that the phone will be retrieved by the toll operators and returned by mail within 4–6 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.\n\n; Foldable (once)\n\n: Almost 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 anymore once it has been folded. \n\n: This is a reference to the Samsung Galaxy Z series of phones that are really foldable like a piece of rubber. See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1810", "date": "March 13, 2017", "title": "Chat Systems", "image": "chat_systems.png", "titletext": "I'm one of the few Instagram users who connects solely through the Unix 'talk' gateway.", "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\n:[The list of items and its intersections from left top to right bottom is:]\n:Skype - none, Email\n:Email - none, Skype, SMS, Slack, Hangouts, IRC, ICQ, iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, Zephyr, FB Messenger, Instagram DM, BBM, Telegram, Twitter DM\n:SMS - none, Email, Slack, Hangouts, IRC, Snapchat, iMessage, Signal, WeChat, WhatsApp, Zephyr, FB Messenger, Instagram DM, Peach, BBM, Twitter DM\n:AIM - none\n:Slack - Email, SMS, Hangouts, IRC, Signal\n:Hangouts - Email, SMS, Slack, IRC, Signal\n:IRC - Email, SMS, Slack, Hangouts, Signal\n:Snapchat - SMS\n:ICQ - Email\n:iMessage - Email, SMS, Signal, FB Messenger\n:Signal - Email, SMS, Slack, Hangouts, IRC, iMessage, Zephyr, Instagram DM\n:WeChat - SMS\n:WhatsApp - Email, SMS\n:Zephyr - Email, SMS, Signal\n:FB Messenger - Email, SMS, iMessage\n:Instagram DM - Email, SMS, Signal\n:Peach - SMS\n:BBM - Email, SMS\n:Telegram - none, Email\n:Twitter DM - none, Email, SMS\n:The \"chat\" tab in an old Google Doc - none\n:Apache Request Log - none\n:Wall (Unix) - none\n:Wall (bathroom) - none\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:I have a hard time keeping track of which contacts use which chat systems.", "explanation": "The comic consists of an Euler diagram showing a wide variety of Online chat|chat systems and their intersections. (Euler diagrams should not be confused with Venn diagrams, see more on this :Category:Venn diagrams|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.\n\nBelow is a #Chat systems|table with explanation for all 24 mentioned chat systems and below that a list of each system's #Euler intersections|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.\n\nIn the title text, Randall explains how he is one of the only few Instagram users to use the UNIX Talk_(software)|'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.\n\nNote that this is similar to the earlier 949: File Transfer."}
-{"number": "1811", "date": "March 15, 2017", "title": "Best-Tasting Colors", "image": "best_tasting_colors.png", "titletext": "I recognize that chocolate is its own thing on which reasonable people may differ. Everything else here is objective fact.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the chart:]\n:Best-Tasting Colors\n\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:] \n:Bad\n:Good\n\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):]\n:1. U+1F93F Vomiting modifier\n:U+1F920 U+1F93F Vomiting cowboy\n:U+1F5FD U+1F93F Vomiting Statue of Liberty \n:U+1F54A U+1F93F Vomiting dove\n:U+1F31B U+1F93F Vomiting moon\n:U+1F680 U+1F93F Vomiting rocket ship \n:U+270B U+1F93F Vomiting hand", "explanation": "This comic relates to the recent [http://unicode.org/emoji/charts-beta/emoji-released.html Emoji v5.0 proposal] for [http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode10.0.0/ Unicode 10.0] which includes a [http://unicode.org/emoji/charts-beta/full-emoji-list.html#1f92e 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.\n\n: ''Note: Some of the emojis below may not display correctly if your browser or operating system doesn't implement the latest Unicode standard.''\n\nUnicode is the computing industry standard for representing text. More recent additions have included emoji characters, such as grinning face (😁) or hands clapping (👏). 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+0303) modifier result in those letters having a tilde glyph on top (Ã, Õ, ñ), and various emojis for people, such as 👨 or 👩, together with the medium-dark skin tone modifier (U+1F3FE), results in those same people with altered skin color (👨🏾, 👩🏾).\n\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.\n\nThe examples given in the comic are:\n* '''Vomiting Cowboy''' (🤠): This seems reasonable and not much worse off than the regular one.\n* '''Vomiting Statue of Liberty''' (🗽): Given the turbulent political climate in present-day America, this emoji might see a lot of use by opinionated folks.\n* '''Vomiting Dove''' (🕊): As the dove is usually seen as a symbol of peace, a vomiting one could be construed as an omen for war or used to depict strong objection to ongoing conflicts. It may also reference a tendency for birds to drop unpleasant things on people below. It is worth noting that pigeons are a subspecies of doves so a dove emoji might as well represent a flying pigeon.\n* '''Vomiting Moon''' (🌛): In cartoons or fairy tales, the Moon is often anthropomorphized, however depicting it as vomiting would be extraordinary since that would not be in line with normal child-friendly material.\n* '''Vomiting rocket ship''' (🚀): This might be a reference to the \"Vomit Comet\" aircraft that astronauts train on. Also, space travel and travel in general (e.g. in cars, roller coasters, airplanes) can all be associated with vomiting. However, since the cabins of rocket ships should be airtight when in flight, vomit coming out of a flying rocket would be quite strange. While it would be hazardous to have vomit floating around in a weightless environment, the situation would more usually be prevented by carefully containing the vomit, and/or by using anti-nausea medication.\n* '''Vomiting Hand''' (✋): This one is just bizarre{{Citation needed}}. Maybe it could be used in the context of some horror flick?\n* '''Winking Face Vomiting''' (😉, title text): This suggests that the context in which a wink is used is combined with vomiting to humorous effect.\n\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, [http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-zwj-sequences.html 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.\n\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 :Category:Emoji|recurrent topic on xkcd."}
-{"number": "1814", "date": "March 22, 2017", "title": "Color Pattern", "image": "color_pattern.png", "titletext": "♫ When the spacing is tight / And the difference is slight / That's a moiré ♫", "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.]\n:Cueball: I took a picture of my computer screen—why is the photo covered in these weird rainbow patterns?\n:Megan: ''When a grid's misaligned with another behind''\n:Megan: ''That's a moiré...''", "explanation": "The comic references moiré patterns in a parody of the song “That's Amore” made famous by Dean Martin [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1815", "date": "March 24, 2017", "title": "Flag", "image": "flag.png", "titletext": "There's a compromise bill to keep the notification bar but at least charge the battery.", "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:]\n:3G\n:5:48 PM \n:39%\n\n:[Below the panel there are two captions]\n:The design committee fired me once they realized that my editing process involved a screenshot, but it was too late.\n:Until they change it, our new country has the only national flag to include a phone notification bar.", "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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1816", "date": "March 27, 2017", "title": "Mispronunciation", "image": "mispronunciation.png", "titletext": "I pronounce epitome \"EPPY-tome\", but EpiPen \"uh-PIE-pen\".", "transcript": ":[White Hat and Cueball are walking.]\n:Cueball: I sometimes misspell \"misspell\" and \"mispronunciation,\" and I mispronounce \"mispronunciation,\"\n:Cueball: But the epitome of mispronunciation is probably the way I pronounce \"epitome.\"", "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). \n\nThe word ''[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/misspell misspell]'' is misspelled quite often (although not in this comic!). Misspell is quite commonly misspelled as ''mispell'' or ''miss-spell''. Some might argue that ''[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/misspelled 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''!\")\n\nThe word ''[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mispronunciation 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, \"mispronounce\", does in fact have \"noun\" in the middle.\n\nThe punchline comes when Cueball tells that the epitome of mispronunciation is the way Cueball pronounces ''[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/epitome 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''.\n\nThe title text explains Cueball's mispronunciation of epitome. It is supposed to be pronounced in four syllables, /əˈpɪtəmi/ (uh-PIT-uh-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 /ˈɛpɪtoʊm/ (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\".\n\n''[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/EpiPen EpiPen]'', 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."}
-{"number": "1817", "date": "March 29, 2017", "title": "Incognito Mode", "image": "incognito_mode.png", "titletext": "They're really the worst tech support team. And their solutions are always the same. \"This OS X update broke something.\" \"LET'S INFILTRATE APPLE BY MORPHING APPLES!\"", "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.]\n:Woman: ...But remember—if you browse in incognito mode for more than two hours, you'll be trapped there ''forever!''\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Animorphs tech tips", "explanation": "A woman (maybe a different version of Blondie, or Rachel from Animorphs) warns Cueball about not browsing for more than two hours in privacy mode|incognito mode as he might get stuck there forever.\n\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 [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/common-myths-about-private-browsing 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 (except by using features of certain browsers to view the cookies, then setting them outside of incognito mode; this is usually too complex for the average user), so things such as recommended YouTube videos from within the incognito browsing session will inevitably be lost when it is closed. \n\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.\n\n''Animorphs'' is a book series by K. A. Applegate featuring several teenagers who have a special power: they can shapeshifting|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).\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1818", "date": "March 31, 2017", "title": "Rayleigh Scattering", "image": "rayleigh_scattering.png", "titletext": "If you ask \"why are leaves green?\" the usual answer is \"because they're full of chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is green,\" even though \"why does chlorophyll scatter green light?\" is a great question too.", "transcript": ":[Jill asks Blondie a question which she answers while lifting her arm towards Jill.]\n:Jill: Why is the sky blue?\n:Blondie: Because air is blue.\n\n:[Megan walks in from behind Jill.]\n:Megan: No, the sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering–\n: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\n:[Zoom in on Blondie's face.]\n:Blondie: It's why far-off mountains look blue – because of all the blue air in the way.\n\n:[Zoom out to Megan standing longer from Jill than Blondie who has thrown her arms out. Jill is facing directly out towards the reader.]\n:Megan: There's a specific quantum mechanism by which–\n:Blondie: Yeah but there's a physics mechanism for ''every'' color. You don't have to get all quantum right away.\n\n:[Frameless panel with Jill looking up at Blondie who stands holding her hands on her sides. Megan speaks from off-panel.]\n:Megan (off-panel): ...OK, I guess.\n:Blondie: Any other questions?\n:Jill: How do planes stay up?\n\n:[Blondie holds a finger up in front of Jill while Megan now is the one to throw out her arms.]\n:Megan: Well, the airflow–\n:Blondie: Tiny birds in the wings. Thousands. Flapping hard.\n:Jill: WOW!\n:Megan: ''NO!''", "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 (as described explicitly in the article on Ignotum per ignotius).\n\nThe principle is demonstrated by the explanation on Diffuse sky radiation|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.\n\nOn the other hand, a much simpler explanation, such as \"because air is blue\" — that is, air molecules reflect blue light, in the same way blue paint reflects blue light — also, adequately explains the phenomenon and is much more understandable to less physically inclined listeners. When Jill 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.\n\nMegan implicitly accepts this, but then in the final panel, Jill asks another common question - how do planes fly? Megan starts again to give the traditional answer (airflow causing Lift_(force)|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. \n\nWhen Jill 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 #No April Fools' Day comic in 2017|trivia section below.\n\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.\n\n[https://what-if.xkcd.com/141/ What-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|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.' \"\n\nRandall himself has published [https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ 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\")."}
-{"number": "1819", "date": "April 3, 2017", "title": "Sweet 16", "image": "sweet_16.png", "titletext": "Every year I make out my bracket at the season, and every year it's busted before the first game when I find out which teams are playing.", "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\n:{| class", "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. \n\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 :Category:Basketball|recurring subject on xkcd, as is Randall's lack of interest for :Category:Sport|sport in general. \n\nIn this comic, the bracket, see details #Table of the bracket|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.\n\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.\n\nThe first team on the right, the 1988–89 Los Angeles Lakers season|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).\n\nThe next two teams feature basketball-boxing crossovers. The bracket after that features teams on unconventional mobility aids, Segways and stilts.\n\nThe final two teams are NCAA_Division_I_Men's_Basketball_Tournament#Cinderella_team|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.\n\nThe title text explains what Randall was supposedly doing to make this comic: Randall is incredibly out of touch with sports, or at least their traditions (see 1480: Super Bowl). 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 is sometimes associated with gambling, where the person with the closest-to-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.\n\nAs neither this comic from April 3rd or the previous comic, 1818: Rayleigh Scattering from March 31st was one of Randall's :Category:April fools' comics|April fools' comics, this was the first year since 2010 with no April Fools' Day comic. See more on this in the 1818:_Rayleigh_Scattering#No_April_Fools.27_Day_comic_in_2017|Trivia section for the previous comic.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1820", "date": "April 5, 2017", "title": "Security Advice", "image": "security_advice.png", "titletext": "Never give your password or bank account number to anyone who doesn't have a blue check mark next to their name.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is listening to Ponytail who holds her hands out in front of her.]\n:Ponytail: We've been trying for decades to give people good security advice.\n:Ponytail: But in retrospect, lots of the tips actually made things worse.\n\n:[Cueball takes his hand to his chin as Ponytail takes her arms down.]\n:Cueball: Maybe we should try to give ''bad'' advice?\n:Ponytail: I guess it's worth a shot.\n\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.]\n:Security tips\n:(Print out this list and keep it in your bank safe deposit box.)\n* Don't click links to websites\n* Use prime numbers in your password\n* Change your password manager monthly\n* Hold your breath while crossing the border\n* Install a secure font\n* Use a 2-factor smoke detector\n* Change your maiden name regularly\n* Put strange USB drives in a bag of rice overnight\n* Use special characters like & and %\n* Only read content published through tor.com\n* Use a burner's phone\n* Get an SSL certificate and store it in a safe place\n* If a border guard asks to examine your laptop, you have a legal right to challenge them to a chess game for your soul.", "explanation": "This is another one of Randall|Randall's :Category:Tips|Tips, this time a list of security tips.\n\nThe 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 [https://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/hacked-french-network-exposed-its-own-passwords-during-tv-interview/ 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).\n\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 #Security tips|table below for explanations for all 14 tips."}
-{"number": "1822", "date": "April 10, 2017", "title": "Existential Bug Reports", "image": "existential_bug_reports.png", "titletext": "ISSUE: If we wait long enough, eventually the Earth will be consumed by the Sun. WORKAROUND: None.", "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:]\n:'''Issue:''' \n:Recent update broke support for hardware I need for my job.\n\n:'''Workaround:''' \n:If we wait long enough, the Earth will eventually be consumed by the Sun.", "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. \n\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 Sun#After_core_hydrogen_exhaustion|5 billion years from now.\n\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. \n\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 [https://qntm.org/moving 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. Known physics also allow [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1823", "date": "April 12, 2017", "title": "Hottest Editors", "image": "hottest_editors.png", "titletext": "Elon Musk finally blocked me from the internal Tesla repository because I wouldn't stop sending pull requests for my code supporting steering via vim keybindings.", "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;]\n:Hottest Editors\n:--------------------\n:1995-2000—[Emacs–Vim Editor war]\n:2005—Vim\n:2010—Notepad++\n:2015—Sublime Text\n:2020—CRISPR\n:2025—CRISPR (Vim keybindings)", "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.\n\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 (text editor)|Vim and Emacs|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.\n\nNotepad++ is a popular text and source code editor, initially released in 2003 and available only for the Windows platform.
\nSublime Text is the current \"most popular\" text editor according to this comic; it was released in 2008.
\nSublime Text, Vim, and Emacs are cross-platform.\n\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 [http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(15)01705-5 ''\"The Heroes of CRISPR\"''] and [http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-crispr-patent-decision-20170215-story.html 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.\n\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.\n\nThe title text says that Randall has been banned from the code base of Tesla, Inc.|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 [http://www.autoblog.com/2017/02/20/doom-porsche-911-infotainment-hack/ spoof] based on the reverse principle, however."}
-{"number": "1824", "date": "April 14, 2017", "title": "Identification Chart", "image": "identification_chart.png", "titletext": "Be careful-it's breeding season, and some of these can be *extremely* defensive of their nests.", "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:]\n:Osprey Hornet Falcon Harrier\n:Eagle Kestrel Hawk Blackbird", "explanation": "Some aircraft are named after creatures of flight, including bird of prey|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|hornet which is an insect, see the #Table|table below for individual explanations. This 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}}\n\nGeneral military training often includes aircraft identification. Aircraft_recognition|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.). The 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. The 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).\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1825", "date": "April 17, 2017", "title": "7 Eleven", "image": "7_eleven.png", "titletext": "Really, the only honest 24-hour stores are the ones in places like Arizona and Hawaii, and many of them are still wrong in certain years.", "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.]\n:Sign: 7-Eleven \n:Bar: Open 24 hours\n:Door: ''Rattle rattle''\n\n:[Caption below the panel:] \n:I'm glad they finally opened a 7-Eleven here on Mars, but it's annoying how it closes for 37 minutes every day.", "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.\n\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).\n\nThe main joke in the comic refers to the fact that a Timekeeping_on_Mars#Time_of_day|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.\n\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 Timekeeping_on_Mars#Sols|''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.\n\nThe first part of the title text refers to Daylight_saving_time|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 :Category:Daylight saving time|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1826", "date": "April 19, 2017", "title": "Birdwatching", "image": "birdwatching_small.png", "titletext": "No, tell the park rangers to calm down, it's fine--I put a screen on the front. I just want to get the birds a little closer.", "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.]\n:Cueball: Birdwatching is hard. \n:Cueball: They're all way too small and far away.\n\n:[In a frame-less panel they both raise their tool eyepieces to their eyes.]\n:Cueball: That hawk is over a mile up! How did you even spot it?\n\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\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.]\n:Vacuum cleaner: '''''WHRRRRR'''''\n:Label: Shop Vac", "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. \n\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.\n\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 :Category:Strange powers of Beret Guy|strange powers that also extends to improving vacuum cleaners, which Cueball knows about as seen in 1486: Vacuum).\n\nCueball's shop vac bird collector is similar in concept to [http://biostor.org/reference/76824/page/3 vacuum-based insect collectors] [http://media.nola.com/environment/photo/xuanchen1jpg-fca88349bf05fe83.jpg used by] [http://www.rinconvitova.com/d-vac.htm entomologists]. Cueball evidently thinks that a similar concept will work to easily collect birds.\n\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.\n\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..."}
-{"number": "1827", "date": "April 21, 2017", "title": "Survivorship Bias", "image": "survivorship_bias.png", "titletext": "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.", "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.]\n:Hairy: Never stop buying lottery tickets, no matter what anyone tells you.\n:Hairy: I failed again and again, but I never gave up. I took extra jobs and poured the money into tickets.\n:Hairy: And here I am, proof that if you put in the time, it pays off!\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Every inspirational speech by someone successful should have to start with a disclaimer about survivorship bias.", "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.\n\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. Their message can be highlighted by demonstrating such successes by visual props such as the medals they won, or images of their encounters with other notably famous people. 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.\n\nAs the title and caption both suggest, a major problem with these speeches is survivorship bias. Survivorship bias refers to an issue in statistical analysis where a significant portion of potential cases aren't available to be counted, and therefore aren't included in the statistics, which creates a data set which is biased toward the cases that are counted. In this case, the people who are invited to and willing to give such speeches are overwhelmingly people who achieved success. People who are unsuccessful tend not to be highlighted or publicized, even if they followed the same path and made the same efforts as those who became successful. This is especially important because achieving success usually involves taking risks. If those risks pay off and result in success, a person will often be lauded as an example of achievement, but if the risk doesn't pay off, they'll often be ignored. This can result in a skewed view of how certain risks are to result in positive outcomes. \n\nTo parody this concept, the comic shows Hairy encouraging people to \"never stop buying lottery tickets\", and surrounded by bags of money to 'flex' their (eventual) financial success, This is an terribly unwise investment plan, because the chances of winning large jackpots are mathematically very low, even if a person buys huge numbers of tickets. With very few exceptions, people who play the lottery lose far more money than they win. But, because of the existence very large jackpots, a few people will win enough money to become genuinely wealthy. If our only exposure to lottery players is someone who won a major jackpot, it could give a false impression that continually buying tickets is a good strategy, when in reality, the odds are astronomical against making money that way. In the same way, talks from people who took risks and became successful can give us a false impression about the likelihood of success in any other field of endeavor. \n\nThe title text continues the humor by taking two common aspects of inspirational speeches. One is the claim that \"you can't argue with success\", suggesting that advice from successful people must inherently be good. The other is that \"if you stick with it, you can [do] anything\". Randall plays those two off one another, since one is a claim of what you can't do, and the other insists that there's nothing you can't do."}
-{"number": "1828", "date": "April 24, 2017", "title": "ISS Solar Transit", "image": "iss_solar_transit.png", "titletext": "I guess it's also the right setting for pictures of the Moon at night.", "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.]\n:Off-panel voice: What's going on?\n:Cueball: ISS solar transit. From this spot, the space station should briefly line up with the sun. \n:Cueball: I got a sun filter and I'm trying to take a picture of it crossing.\n\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\n:[The second of the two half height panels shows Cueball making further adjustments to the camera, as in the first panel.]\n:Cueball: Perfect. Hmm, I should set the white balance.\n\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:]\n:[Shining light bulb]: Incandescent\n:[Shining fluorescent lamp]: Fluorescent\n:[Shining sun]: Direct sunlight\n:[Lightning]: Flash\n:[Cloud]: Cloudy\n:[A house that cast a shade]: Shade\n:[Two triangles with a circle between them]: Custom\n\n:[In the panel below Cueball still operates the camera as before]\n\n:[A frame-less but full height panel follows where Cueball leans back from the camera with his hands on his thighs.]\n\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.]\n:Incandescent\n:Fluorescent\n:'''Direct sunlight'''\n:Flash\n:Cloudy\n:Shade\n:Custom\n\n:[In the bottom panel Cueball again operates the camera.]", "explanation": "This is the first comic in a :Category:ISS Solar Transit|two-comic series, released during the same week on Monday and Friday. The next comic in the series is 1830: ISS Solar Transit 2.\n\nCueball is trying to take a photograph of the International Space Station moving in front of the sun ([https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/international-space-station-transits-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.\n\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 Astronomical_filter|solar filter, which makes the sun look orange instead of white, as shown in the second panel.\n\nDigital cameras need to determine the color temperature of a photograph to correctly display colors. This is done using the Color_balance|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.\n\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\".\n\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 Bridge camera|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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1829", "date": "April 26, 2017", "title": "Geochronology", "image": "geochronology.png", "titletext": "'The mountains near here formed when the ... Newfoundland ... microplate collided with, uhh ... Labrador.' 'Ok, now you're definitely just naming dogs.' 'Wait, no, that's actually almost correct.'", "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.]\n:Ponytail: This bedrock likely formed as the Dalmatian microplate subducted under East Laika during the Upper Pomeranian.\n:Cueball: Ah, yes.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n: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.", "explanation": "This is another one of Randall|Randall's :Category:Tips|Tips, this time a Geology Tip.\n\nPonytail is describing the origin of some rock formations to Megan and Cueball. She apparently forgot the names of the Plate tectonics|microplates and the Geologic time scale|age when the subduction occurred, so she substituties them with names of Dog breed|dog breeds (Dalmatian (dog)|Dalmatian, Laika (dog breed)|Laika and Pomeranian (dog)|Pomeranian) to seem knowledgeable and impress her audience. \n\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 Shepherd Islands|Laika Island in Vanuatu; however, the name is unrelated to the island and originates from the Russian word лайка (lit. \"barker\", a generic name for several breeds of hunting dogs and also the given name of the Laika|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 ceremonial counties of England|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.\n\nSo the comic concludes in the caption with one of Randall's many :Category:Tips|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.\n\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 Retriever|Labrador and Newfoundland (dog)|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 terrane|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.\n\nSubduction was featured in a previous comic 1388: Subduction License."}
-{"number": "1830", "date": "April 28, 2017", "title": "ISS Solar Transit 2", "image": "iss_solar_transit_2.png", "titletext": "Most people don't realize it, but they actually launch a new space station every few weeks because this keeps happening.", "transcript": ":[Every panel is split into two half-height panels arranged vertically.]\n\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.]\n:This is your machine learning system?\n\nCueball Prime: Yup! You pour the data into this big pile of linear algebra, then collect the answers on the other side.\n\nCueball II: What if the answers are wrong?\n\nCueball Prime: Just stir the pile until they start looking right.", "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.\n\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\").\n\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 machine|support vector machines, linear regression|linear regressors, logistic regression|logistic regressors, and neural network|neural networks. Major recent advances in machine learning often amount to 'stacking' the linear algebra up differently, or varying stirring techniques for the compost. "}
-{"number": "1839", "date": "May 19, 2017", "title": "Doctor Visit", "image": "doctor_visit.png", "titletext": "According to these blood tests, you're like 30% cereal.", "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.]\n:Cueball: Everything look good?\n: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.\n\n:Ponytail: Your heart has been pumping for decades without pausing for even a few minutes.\n:Ponytail: And your ''eyes!'' They're so fragile and exposed!\n\n:[Zoom in on Cueball gazing at his palms.]\n: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\n:[Zoom out again to the entire scene.]\n:Cueball: ...can you just tell me whether I'm healthy?\n:Ponytail: Yeah, you're fine.\n:Ponytail: Which is weird, given that your body is basically made from dissolved bread.", "explanation": "Cueball is visiting his doctor Ponytail, apparently for a general medical checkup.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nAll things taken into consideration, {{tvtropes|BackAlleyDoctor|we don't actually have any confirmation that Ponytail is a real doctor}}. As Randall has stated before, 699: Trimester|anybody can just buy a lab coat. Although Ponytail's answer in the final panel lacks 1644: Stargazing|the usual \"I have no idea\" or equivalent non-answer, it's still somewhat possible she's a real doctor having an existential episode."}
-{"number": "1840", "date": "May 22, 2017", "title": "Genetic Testing Results", "image": "genetic_testing_results.png", "titletext": "That's very exciting! The bad news is that it's a risk factor for a lot of things.", "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.]\n:Ponytail: Your genetic test results are back. Apparently you're part of an unbroken lineage stretching back billions of years to the early Earth!", "explanation": "Ponytail 1839|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1841", "date": "May 24, 2017", "title": "Who?", "image": "who.png", "titletext": "Gonna feel even dumber when I realize that all this time he's been talking into a bluetooth thingy and we're not actually friends.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is walking from left to right while Hairy follows him.]\n:Hairy: ...I'm getting a ride with Katie to Adam's wedding. Hoping to see Brian on the way!\n:Cueball: Oh, that's cool!\n: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.", "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.\n\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\".\n\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.\n\nThe title text suddenly changes the situation by stating that it's possible Hairy {{tvtropes|NewhartPhonecall|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.\n\nThe title text is an allusion to 476: One-Sided, where Randall doesn't realize who the other person is talking to. \n\nIn 302: Names Cueball also has difficulty with names.\n\nThe problems with bluetooth headsets' inconspicuousness is a key point in 736: Cemetery.\n\nAnother example of not knowing someone is talking on the phone: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1842", "date": "May 26, 2017", "title": "Anti-Drone Eagles", "image": "anti_drone_eagles.png", "titletext": "It's cool, it's totally ethical--they're all programmed to hunt whichever bird of prey is most numerous at the moment, so they leave the endangered ones alone until near the end.", "transcript": ":[Black Hat, Cueball and Megan are standing and talking.]\n:Cueball: Everyone loves these eagles that take down drones, but... I dunno.\n:Megan: You gotta admit, it's pretty cool.\n\n:[Close-up of Cueball.]\n:Cueball: Yeah, but... training rare animals to hurl themselves at whirling machinery can only get us so far, you know?\n\n:[In a frame-less panel the setting is back to that of the first panel.]\n:Cueball: At some point, it's like releasing police dogs onto freeways to attack speeding motorcycles.\n:Megan: Also cool, but I see your point.\n\n:[Black Hat lifts his hand and Cueball turns his face towards him.]\n:Black Hat: Plus, I just finished my autonomous drone that hunts eagles.\n:Cueball: Man, '''''you''''' are an entirely separate class of problem.", "explanation": "Law enforcement and security agencies often use [http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-35750816/eagles-trained-to-take-down-drones birds of prey] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/21/terrorists-are-building-drones-france-is-destroying-them-with-eagles/ 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).\n\nEagles, being predators, have natural tendencies to attack the central components of drones while avoiding the sharp and spinny bits.\n\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. \n\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. \n\nMegan thinks both ideas (eagles and dogs) sound cool, but she understands the ethical argument against using them for traffic control.\n\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 “anti-drone eagles” to “anti-eagle drones”. 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 {{tvtropes|"}
-{"number": "1843", "date": "May 29, 2017", "title": "Opening Crawl", "image": "opening_crawl.png", "titletext": "Using a classic Timothy Zahn EU/Legends novel is bad enough, but at least the style and setting aren't too far off. If you really want to mess with people, try using Splinter of the Mind's Eye.", "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\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\n:\"Very good, Lieutenant,\" Grand Admiral Thrawn nodded. \"Inform me when all have done so. Captain Pellaeon?\"\n\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—not 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.\n\n:But if the Grand Admiral was feeling any tension, he was keeping it to himself. \"Begin the countdown,\" he told \n:[Cut off through the middle and at the end]: Pellaeon, his voice as calm as if he were ordering\n\n:[Caption beneath the panel:] \n: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.", "explanation": "Each https://www.ippr.org/files/images/media/files/publication/2011/05/Worst%20of%20Both%20Worlds%20Jan2011_1820.pdf[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting-methods/#ExamVotiMeth][https://electionscience.org/voting-methods/spoiler-effect-top-5-ways-plurality-voting-fails/][https://www.fairvote.org/plurality_voting_leaves_elections_open_to_manipulation][https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254419149_And_the_loser_is_Plurality_Voting][https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/first-past-the-post][https://blog.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/no-electoral-system-is-perfect-but-some-seem-fairer/]{{cn}} but they made little progress in replacing it in the United States for decades. However, this is changing; the state of Maine and numerous cities have adopted either IRV or Approval in recent years.\n\n'''Arrow's impossibility theorem''' gives a list of criteria for ranked voting systems and states that [http://youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1845", "date": "June 2, 2017", "title": "State Word Map", "image": "state_word_map.png", "titletext": "The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN.", "transcript": ":[Caption above the map, with sub caption:]\n:Most-Used Word in Each State\n:Based on Something Something Search Data\n\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\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:]\n:You can make these maps say whatever you want \n:by adjusting the methodology. \n:Half the time you're just amplifying random noise. \n:Because the underlying data doesn't vary that much from one state to another. \n:But whatever. Nobody checks this stuff. Just pick\n:whatever normal-ization lets you make fun of Florida.", "explanation": "This is another of the many comics where Randall used a map of the United States for his joke (see below for examples).\n\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 U.S. state|American states. This map may have been inspired by [https://twitter.com/GoogleTrends/status/869624196921303040 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, [http://www.businessinsider.com/most-common-causes-of-death-in-each-state-2014-6?IR"}
-{"number": "1846", "date": "June 5, 2017", "title": "Drone Problems", "image": "drone_problems.png", "titletext": "On the other hand, as far as they know, my system is working perfectly.", "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.]\n:Megan: People in the park keep flying drones near me, so I've built a system to shoot them down.\n:Cueball: Cool! Oh yeah, there's one now.\n:Megan: Time for a test!\n\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.]\n:Megan: Okay, locking on…\n:Cueball: Wait, it just crashed.\n:Megan: Damn.\n\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.]\n:Cueball: Here comes another one! Aim for… nope, it got stuck in a tree.\n\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:]\n: Three hours later…\n:Cueball: Finally, two more just— no, one crashed and the other is hurtling sideways toward the lake.\n:Megan: ''Will you people learn to fly these things?!''", "explanation": "Megan is frustrated because people are flying Unmanned aerial vehicle|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).\n\nThis comic is a follow up on 1842: Anti-Drone Eagles, and confirms that Cueball prefers technological air-defense systems to biological measures.\n\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.\n\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. \n\nIt may also be a reference to the May 30, 2017 ''FTG-15'' test of the United States Ground-Based Midcourse Defense|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 [http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/us-missile-defense/countermeasures#.WTeEJsm1vMU 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.\n\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.\n\nMegan had previously suggested in 1586: Keyboard Problems, that robots (and thus also drones) getting near Cueball's house ({{tvtropes|TheJinx|and possibly Cueball's general vicinity}}) would unexpectedly crash.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1847", "date": "June 7, 2017", "title": "Dubious Study", "image": "dubious_study.png", "titletext": "Sounds fine. I looked up the Academy, and it says on their MySpace page that their journal is peer-viewed and downloaded biannually.", "transcript": ":[Megan is standing behind Cueball who is sitting at a computer desk using a laptop.]\n:Megan: Are you sure this study is legit?\n:Cueball: Sure, it says it was accepted for publication.\n:Megan: Where?\n:Cueball: Hmm... ''The National Academy of Proceedings''.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:If something is formatted like a serious scientific paper, it can take me a while to realize it isn't one.", "explanation": "This comic alludes to the growing industry in Predatory open access publishing|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 of the United States of America|''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA''.\n\n\nThe title text implies that this (at present) fictional journal has a dubious online presence in the faded internet site Myspace|MySpace, where the publishers make claims that may be true but are misleading: \"peer-viewed\" sounds similar to \"peer review|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 [http://palgrave.nature.com/nchem/journal/v7/n5/nchem.2243/metrics hundreds to thousands] of views in their first year of publication. The Black Hat|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). \n\n''The 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 [http://www.nature.com/news/predatory-journals-recruit-fake-editor-1.21662 openly dishonest] on their websites.\n\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.[No it wasn't. But weren't you inclined to believe it just because of the little blue \"[1]\"?]) And on a different note, prestigious-sounding but meaningless names also appear in the title text for 1068: Swiftkey|1068, where SwiftKey suggests the phrase \"Massachusetts Institute of America\" to Randall."}
-{"number": "1848", "date": "June 9, 2017", "title": "Glacial Erratic", "image": "glacial_erratic.png", "titletext": "\"This will take a while, which sucks, because I'm already so busy chiseling out igneous intrusions from rock formations and watching Youtube loops of the Superman fault-sealing scene over and over.\"", "transcript": ":[Ponytail and Megan walks up to a large rock, Ponytail points at it.]\n:Ponytail: That rock is a glacial erratic-A glacier broke it off from those hills and placed it here.\n\n:[In a frame-less panel they stand and watch the rock.]\n:Megan: What? And just ''left'' it here? \n:Megan: And everybody's ''okay'' with this?\n\n:[Megan tries to lift the rock with two hands.] \n\n:[Megan turns her back to the rock and tries to push it with all her might.]\n:Megan: Get...\n:Megan: ...back...\n\n:[Ponytail looks on as Megan again has turned around and tries to roll the boulder using both hands.]\n:Ponytail: Why ... Why are you doing that?\n:Megan: ''Because fuck glaciers!''", "explanation": "Ponytail and Megan are walking along when they come across an Glacial_erratic|erratic rock (which differs from the surrounding geology and is brought there by Glacier|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.\n\nMegan is annoyed with the glacier for just Litter|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.\n\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 Chisel|chiselling out Intrusive_rock|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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1849", "date": "June 12, 2017", "title": "Decades", "image": "decades.png", "titletext": "In the 90s, our variety radio station used the tagline \"the best music of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.\" After 2000, they switched to \"the best music of the 80s, 90s, and today.\" I figured they'd change again in 2010, but it's 2017 and they're still saying \"80s, 90s, and today.\" I hope radio survives long enough for us to find out how they deal with the 2020s.", "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\n:[Label: 1960]\n:60s Music; 60s Fashion; 60s Movies; 60s Culture\n\n:[Label: 1970]\n:70s Music; 70s Fashion; 70s Movies; 70s Culture\n\n:[Label: 1980]\n:80s Music; 80s Fashion; 80s Movies; 80s Culture\n\n:[Label: 1990]\n:90s Music; 90s Fashion; 90s Movies; 90s Culture\n\n:[Label: 2000 and 2010]\n:[Items grouped over two decades.]\n:Fashion; Culture; Music; Movies\n\n:[Label: 2020]\n:[The text is in light grey font.]\n:th of July activities'''\n\n:2014 - Watching fireworks\n:2015 - Watching fireworks from drones\n:2016 - Flying drones through fireworks\n:2017 - Intercepting fireworks with drones\n:2018 - Competitions to hit drones with fireworks\n:2019 - Teams compete to shoot down each other's firework-armed drones\n:2020 - Sentient firework-armed drones overthrow humans\n:2021 - Drones celebrate independence day", "explanation": "In the United States, the 4th of July is celebrated as Independence Day (United States)|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 June 2023, drones have not yet overthrown humans.{{Citation needed}}\n\nDespite the many unfortunate events that happened in 2020, sentient firework-armed drones overthrowing humans was not one of them.{{Citation needed}} \n\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."}
-{"number": "1859", "date": "July 5, 2017", "title": "Sports Knowledge", "image": "sports_knowledge.png", "titletext": "I heard they might make the wild card game, which would be cool. Do you know when that is? I have a wedding next weekend, but if it's after that we could try to go!", "transcript": ":[Cueball and White Hat are walking together.]\n: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.\n:White Hat: ...Lakers?\n:Cueball: I forget which team he is. Broncos?\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:I know a handful of very specific things, but after that my sports knowledge falls apart quickly.", "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 Los Angeles Lakers|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.\n\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 Power hitter|hits for power. As of the date this comic was published, Trout's OPS for the 2017 season [http://www.espn.com/mlb/player/stats/_/id/30836/mike-trout at 1.203] was indeed higher than in any of his previous seasons, albeit over a smaller number of games because [https://www.si.com/mlb/2017/05/29/los-angeles-angels-mike-trout-thumb-injury Trout indeed suffered a thumb injury in late May] and had not played since then. (He returned to play starting on July 14.)\n \t\t \t\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 '' Major League Baseball wild-card game|Wild Card game'' against each other, as do the two in the National League, and NFL playoffs|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 (2½ games out of the playoffs). \n\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.\n\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.\n\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)."}
-{"number": "1860", "date": "July 7, 2017", "title": "Communicating", "image": "communicating.png", "titletext": "You're saying that the responsibility for avoiding miscommunication lies entirely with the listener, not the speaker, which explains why you haven't been able to convince anyone to help you down from that wall.", "transcript": ":[Egg-shaped character Humpty Dumpty, drawn with an angry face, is sitting on a brick wall, and facing Alice, depicted as Jill.]\n:Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less.\n:Alice: I wonder what all those words you just said meant. Maybe you're telling me I can have all your stuff!\n:Humpty Dumpty: What!? No!\n:Alice: Your car, too? Gosh, thanks!", "explanation": "''There's glory for you.''\n\nIn Lewis Carroll's \"Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There\", Alice_(Alice's_Adventures_in_Wonderland)|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). \n\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.\" ([https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Through_the_Looking-Glass,_and_What_Alice_Found_There/Chapter_VI#124])\n\nIn the comic Humpty is explaining to \"Alice\" (portrayed by Jill) 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\".\n\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!\".\n\nHumpty Dumpty is known from the nursery rhyme or riddle:\n:''Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,\n:''Humpy Dumpty had a great fall.\n:''All the King's horses and all the King's men,\n:''Couldn't put Humpty together again.''\n\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)."}
-{"number": "1861", "date": "July 10, 2017", "title": "Quantum", "image": "quantum.png", "titletext": "If you draw a diagonal line from lower left to upper right, that's the ICP 'Miracles' axis.", "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:\n::Basic Physics: low excitement, low prerequisites\n::Fluid Dynamics: low excitement, high prerequisites\n::Magnets: medium excitement, medium prerequisites\n::General Relativity: medium excitement, high prerequisites (on the border to the \"Danger Zone\")\n::Special Relativity: high excitement, low prerequisites\n::Quantum Mechanics: high excitement, high prerequisites (in the \"Danger Zone\")]\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Why so many people have weird ideas about Quantum Mechanics", "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 \"Relativity of simultaneity|can the temporal ordering of spatially separated events depend on the observer?\", or \"Twin paradox|can time run at different rates for different 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 dilation|time slows down and their length contraction|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–Stokes 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.\n\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 Schrödinger 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.\n\n1240: Quantum Mechanics also discusses weird ideas that people have about quantum mechanics.\n\nGeneral relativity also presupposes considerable Mathematics of general relativity|mathematical sophistication to understand the Einstein field equations. However, the main contribution of GR – the explanation of gravity in terms of a curvature|curved spacetime – does not seem to induce a lot of philosophical novelty beyond that already seen in special relativity, possibly with the exception of black holes.\n\nThe title text references the Insane Clown Posse (ICP) song \"Miracles (Insane Clown Posse 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."}
-{"number": "1862", "date": "July 12, 2017", "title": "Particle Properties", "image": "particle_properties.png", "titletext": "Each particle also has a password which allows its properties to be changed, but the cosmic censorship hypothesis suggests we can never observe the password itself—only its secure hash.", "transcript": ":Particle Properties in Physics\n{| class", "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 Flavour (particle physics)|flavor.\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1863", "date": "July 14, 2017", "title": "Screenshots", "image": "screenshots.png", "titletext": "For the final exam, you take a screenshot showing off all the work you've done in the class, and it has to survive being uploaded, thumbnailed, and re-screenshotted through a chain of social media sites.", "transcript": ":Intro to Screenshots\n\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\n:[The right side of the panel:]\n\n::Syllabus\n:*Highlighting: What & how much\n:*Aspect ratios\n:*Cropping: Pre- and post-\n:*Whitespace\n:*Screenshots vs links\n:*Catching the right GIF frame\n:*Snapchat and trust\n:*Embarrassing background tabs\n:*Spellcheck's red outlines\n:*Security: Beware URL tokens\n:*Redacting personal info\n:*Useful browser modes\n:*Tradeoffs: PNG vs JPG\n:*Watermark ethics\n:*Spotting fakes\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:My class on screenshots was a big hit, although for some reason I only ever sold one copy of the digital textbook.", "explanation": "The comic shows a syllabus of an introductory course on Screenshot|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.\n\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). \n\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|analog hole, which states that if non-interactive media can be visually seen by humans, it can be copied, as with a screenshot.\n\nDetailed explanation of the headings on the right:\n\n;Highlighting: What & How much?\n:This refers to highlighting text of particular interest in screenshots, as depicted on the left.\n\n;Aspect ratios\n: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).\n\n;Cropping: Pre- and Post-\n: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).\n\n;Whitespace\n:This section presumably deals with White space (visual arts)|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.\n\n;Screenshots vs Links\n: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.\n\n;Catching the right GIF frame\n: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 naïve 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 [https://ezgif.com/speed the EZgif website] or the [http://www.xtreme-lab.net/7gif/en/index.html downloadable 7GIF app]. \n\n;Snapchat and trust\n: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.\n\n;Embarrassing background tabs\n: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 [http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/10/lawmaker-mistakenly-hands-out-document-with-porn-references.html this one], where a politician handed out a document with background tabs to pornography websites.\n\n;Spellcheck's red underlines\n: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.\n\n;Security: Beware of URL tokens\n:Query string|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_ID|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.\n\n;Redacting personal info\n: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.\n\n;Useful browser modes\n:Using the Privacy mode|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.\n\n;Tradeoffs: PNG vs JPG\n:Portable Network Graphics|PNG and JPG are file formats with different image compression|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.\n: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.\n\n;Watermark ethics\n: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.\n\n;Spotting fakes\n: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.\n\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.\n\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)."}
-{"number": "1864", "date": "July 17, 2017", "title": "City Nicknames", "image": "city_nicknames.png", "titletext": "This place has so many demonyms. Northlanders. Fair Folk. Honey Barons. Lake Dwellers. Treasurers. Swamp Watchers. Dream Farmers. Wellfolk. Rockeaters. Forgotten Royals. Remote Clients. Barrow-Clerks. The People of Land and Sky.", "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.]\n:Black Hat: Ah, New York. The Hot Tamale.\n:Megan: This is St. Louis. Also, that's not–\n:Black Hat: The Winged City. The Gold Trombone. Castleopolis.\n:Megan: It's none of those.\n\n:[Close-up of Black Hat]\n:Black Hat: The Kissing Kingdom. Sandland. The High Place. Ol' Ironhook.\n:Megan (off-panel): Still wrong.\n:Black Hat: The Thousand Spires. The Graveyard of Kings. Bloomtown. Lantern City USA.\n:Megan (off-panel): Please stop.\n\n:[Black Hat, Megan, and Ponytail are walking]\n: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.\n:Megan: How long does this last?\n:Ponytail: No city has ever let him stay long enough to find out.", "explanation": "Cities often have official or unofficial nicknames. For instance, St. Louis|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. [https://www.into-asia.com/bangkok/introduction/fullname.php 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.\"\n\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 \"List of nicknames of New York City|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.\n\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 Demonym#Informal|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\nThough Black Hat may have forgotten, it is more likely that he is messing with those around him"}
-{"number": "1865", "date": "July 19, 2017", "title": "Wifi vs Cellular", "image": "wifi_vs_cellular.png", "titletext": "According to the cable company reps who keep calling me, it's because I haven't upgraded to the XTREME GIGABAND PANAMAX FLAVOR-BLASTED PRO PACKAGE WITH HBO, which is only $5 more per month for the first 6 months and five billion dollars per month after that.", "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:]\n:\"He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.\" (Russell's Teapot|Wikipedia) \n\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\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.\n\nThe title-text refers to Russell's paradox, also formulated by Bertrand Russell. Russell's paradox was a flaw found in naïve 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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\nRandall has talked about CubeSats in later comics as well, specifically in 1992: SafetySat and 2148: Cubesat Launch."}
-{"number": "1867", "date": "July 24, 2017", "title": "Physics Confession", "image": "physics_confession.png", "titletext": "\"You know lightning, right? When electric charge builds up in a cloud and then discharges in a giant spark? Ask me why that happens.\" \"Why does tha--\" \"No clue. We think it's related to the hair thing.\"", "transcript": ":[Megan is facing Ponytail and Cueball.]\n: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.", "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 Theory_of_everything#Arguments_against|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:\n\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: [http://lptms.u-psud.fr/membres/trizac/Ens/L3FIP/Ice.pdf Why is ice slippery?]\n\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.]\n:Archeologist\n:Economist\n:Nutritionist\n:Criminologist\n:Ornithologist\n:Botanist\n:Marine biologist\n:Entomologist\n:Astronomer\n:Virologist\n:Vulcanologist\n:Astronomer who studies the sun", "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 #The fields of science|table has been arranged to explain the amount of worry needed for each field below.\n\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}}\n\nFollowing this, it shows Nutrition|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 behavior. If a criminologist is being interviewed on the news, there is likely a change in criminal actions within the neighborhood, 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.\n\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.\n\nA virologist studies Virus|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.\n\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. \n\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..."}
-{"number": "1896", "date": "September 29, 2017", "title": "Active Ingredients Only", "image": "active_ingredients_only.png", "titletext": "Contains the active ingredients from all competing cold medicines, plus the medicines for headaches, arthritis, insomnia, indigestion, and more, because who wants THOSE things?", "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.]\n:Active Ingredients\n:'''Only'''TM\n:We're not here to waste your time®\n\n:Cold Medicine\n\n:Active ingredients\n:[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.]\n\n:Inactive ingredients\n:None\n\n:No binders!", "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. \n\nRandall thus presents a pack of Common cold|cold medicine that has \"Active Ingredients Only\", which is the name of the brand as can be seen since it has \"™\" after the name (the unregistered trademark symbol). It has six active ingredients and no inactive ingredients. This might be a spoof of the current trend of advertising food as containing \"no additives and no preservatives\".\n\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.\n\nThe slogan is a registered trademark (®) 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.\n\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. \n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1897", "date": "October 2, 2017", "title": "Self Driving", "image": "self_driving.png", "titletext": "\"Crowdsourced steering\" doesn't sound quite as appealing as \"self driving.\"", "transcript": ":[Inside a frame there is the following text above an image:]\n:To complete your registration, please tell us whether or not this image contains a stop sign:\n\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 grayscale and 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.]\n:Sign: Stop\n\n:[Beneath the image there are two large gray buttons with a word in each:]\n:No Yes\n\n:[Beneath the buttons are the following text:]\n:Answer quickly – our self-driving car is almost at the intersection.\n\n:[Caption beneath the frame:]\n:So much of \"AI\" is just figuring out ways to offload work onto random strangers.", "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.\n\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.\n\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 [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7067962.stm PC stripper helps spam to spread] and [https://doi.org/10.1016/S1353-4858(08)70036-9 Humans + porn"}
-{"number": "1898", "date": "October 4, 2017", "title": "October 2017", "image": "october_2017.png", "titletext": "And yet I have no trouble believing that the start of the 2016 election was several decades ago.", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball are walking.]\n:Megan: Want to feel old?\n:Cueball: Why do you always start your factoids that way? Of '''''course''''' I don't want to feel old. I '''''already''''' feel old.\n\n:[Slim beat panel where they keep walking.]\n\n:[In a frame-less panel only Cueball is shown walking.]\n:Cueball: ...Fine, hit me.\n\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.]\n: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.\n:Cueball: '''''Dammit.'''''", "explanation": "Randall :Category:"}
-{"number": "1899", "date": "October 6, 2017", "title": "Ears", "image": "ears.png", "titletext": "My theory is that most humans have been colonized with alien mind-control slugs that hold the earbuds for them, and the ones who can't wear earbuds are the only surviving free ones.", "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\n:[Same setting, but with the clouds removed, to make room for Cueball's text.]\n:Cueball: Do you ever just look up at the sky and wonder...\n\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.]\n:Cueball: \"What are normal peoples' ears shaped like, that earbuds stay in without falling out?\"\n:Megan: Man, who ''knows'' what's going on in there.", "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 Headphones#Ear-fitting headphones|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.\n\nThe comic appears to be a variation on a famous and oft-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 '…noses were made to wear spectacles, and so we have spectacles'.\n\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 [http://animorphs.wikia.com/wiki/Yeerk 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.\n\nAnother possibility, given the earbud/music reference, is that Randall is making a joke about earworms."}
-{"number": "1900", "date": "October 9, 2017", "title": "Jet Lag", "image": "jet_lag.png", "titletext": "I had some important research to do on proposed interstellar space missions, basketball statistics, canceled skyscrapers, and every article linked from \"Women in warfare and the military in the 19th century.\"", "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.]\n:Hairy: Sorry, I just woke up.\n:Ponytail: It's 3 PM! ...Oh, of course, you're still jet lagged.\n:Hairy: I-yeah, that's it! I definitely didn't spend half the night reading Wikipedia articles about random maritime disasters.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:I love traveling, because my sleep schedule is as messed up as always, but suddenly I have an excuse.", "explanation": "Jet lag|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}}\n\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 {{tvtropes|SuspiciouslySpecificDenial|denies much too specifically}} that he has actually been up to some late-night Wikipedia browsing and reading about List of maritime disasters|maritime disasters.\n\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.\n\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 travel|interstellar space missions, basketball statistics, Proposed_tall_buildings_and_structures#Abandoned_proposals|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1901", "date": "October 11, 2017", "title": "Logical", "image": "logical.png", "titletext": "It's like I've always said--people just need more common sense. But not the kind of common sense that lets them figure out that they're being condescended to by someone who thinks they're stupid, because then I'll be in trouble.", "transcript": ":[White Hat is spreading his arms and facing Cueball.]\n: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''.\n:Cueball: Oh? What study are you basing that on?\n:White Hat: It just seems obvious!\n:White Hat: I mean, look at the crap these idiots believe!", "explanation": "White Hat says that problems in society could be avoided if people relied on logic and science rather than feelings—but 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.\n\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.)\n\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\".\n\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)."}
-{"number": "1902", "date": "October 13, 2017", "title": "State Borders", "image": "state_borders.png", "titletext": "A schism between the pro-panhandle and anti-panhandle factions eventually led to war, but both sides spent too much time working on their flag designs to actually do much fighting.", "transcript": ":[An outline map of the United States is shown, including state boundaries. There are several proposed edits in red.]\n:[Minnesota's Northwest Angle is circled]\n:Give to Canada\n\n:[Border between Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula is crossed out]\n:This should be Wisconsin\n\n:[New York's Long Island is circled, with arrows and question marks pointing to New Jersey and Connecticut]\n:Move Long Island to NJ or CT or make it its own state\n\n:[New York's eastern border has been straightened]\n\n:[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]\n:Align to grid\n\n:[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]\n:Clean Up\n\n:[Rhode Island has been enlarged to encompass southeastern Massachusetts, and Delaware now takes up the entire Delmarva Peninsula]\n:Enlarge Rhode Island & Delaware\n\n:[The Oklahoma Panhandle has been extended west until it reaches Nevada, taking the northernmost parts of Arizona and New Mexico with it]\n:If we're going to have a panhandle, why not commit to it?\n\n:[The Missouri Bootheel has been given to Arkansas]\n:Fix this thing\n\n:[The part of Virginia west of the Appalachian Mountains has been given to Kentucky]\n\n:[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]\n\n:[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]\n:Clean Up\n\n:[Parts of northeastern Texas have been given to Arkansas and Louisiana]\n\n:[The northern and southern borders of Tennessee have been straightened]\n:Straighten to fix survey errors\n\n:[A line has been traced along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida]\n:Good curve! Keep.\n\n:[Alaska's southeastern panhandle has been circled]\n:Let's be honest - this should be Canada, too.\n\n:[The Alabama/Florida border has been erased, and Alabama's eastern border has been extended south until it meets the Gulf of Mexico]\n:Why should Florida get Alabama's coastline? It has plenty.\n\n:[Caption below the panel:] \n: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.", "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, see details in the #Table of changes|table below. 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. \n\nDespite the caption's rather blasé 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.\n\nThis comic hints at the fact that Randall actually wants to see these changes made, since there have been other :Category:"}
-{"number": "1903", "date": "October 16, 2017", "title": "Bun Trend", "image": "bun_trend.png", "titletext": "Our experts have characterized the ecological impact of this trend as \"adorable.\"", "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.]\n:Beret Guy: Good morning, Governor. Our tracking systems show a rapid increase in the number of buns around the Capitol.\n\n:[Hairy is sitting at an office desk and facing Beret Guy in a frameless panel.]\n:Hairy: Buns?\n:Beret Guy: Yes; there's been a long-term upward trend, but it has accelerated recently.\n:Hairy: The trend in... rabbits.\n:Beret Guy: Yes.\n\n:[Beret Guy takes out his phone.]\n:Hairy: So... so what?\n:Beret Guy: So if you want to see some buns, there are lots of them outside!\n:[Beret Guy's phone vibrates]\n:Phone: ''beep!''\n:Beret Guy: Ooh!\n:Beret Guy: There's a small one right now!\n\n:[Zoom-in on Beret Guy.]\n:Hairy (offscreen): Do you... actually ''work'' for me?\n:Beret Guy: Almost certainly. We had an election, right? I wrote my name in on the thing.\n:Hairy (offscreen): Security?\n:Beret Guy: It's been an honor to serve.", "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'''!).\n\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}}\n\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.\n\nBeret Guy's uncertain position in the government is very similar to the way he treats and operates his business. \n\n\"Buns\" have been mentioned previously in 1682: Bun and 1871: Bun Alert.\n\nIt is likely that Beret Guy is using the aforementioned Bun Alert app to measure the rabbit population. If this is the case, the recent increase in alerts may simply represent an increase in people using the app, rather than an actual increase in the rabbit population - a common fallacy. One simple way of correcting for this is to divide the total alerts by the number of active users during each interval; a change in this value would indicate that the bun population is actually changing.\n\nIn countries where rabbits are an invasive species or crop-destroying pests, an increase in rabbit populations may be of concern. In the title text, however, 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."}
-{"number": "1904", "date": "October 18, 2017", "title": "Research Risks", "image": "research_risks.png", "titletext": "The 1919 Great Boston Molasses Flood remained the deadliest confectionery containment accident until the Canadian Space Agency's 2031 orbital maple syrup delivery disaster.", "transcript": ":[A chart with two crossing lines with double arrows. Each arrow is labeled:]\n:Y axis top: High\n:Y axis bottom: Low\n:X axis left: Low\n:X axis right: High\n\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:]\n:Y axis: Risk of your research being used by a supervillain for world domination\n:X axis: Risk of the thing you're studying breaking free from your facility and threatening the local population\n\n:[The following points are on the charts upper left quadrant (in reading order):]\n:Prosthetics\n:Neuroscience\n:Laser Optics\n:Pharmacology\n:Materials Science\n:Sociology\n:History\n:Psychology\n\n:[The following points are on the charts upper right quadrant (in reading order):]\n:Robotics\n:Genetic Engineering\n:Chemistry\n:Microbiology\n\n:[The following points are on the charts lower left quadrant (in reading order):]\n:Geology\n:Linguistics\n:Paleontology\n:Astronomy\n:Molasses Storage\n:Dentistry\n\n:[The following points are on the charts lower right quadrant (in reading order):]\n:Botany\n:Entomology\n:Mycology\n:Marine Biology\n:Ornithology", "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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1905", "date": "October 20, 2017", "title": "Cast Iron Pan", "image": "cast_iron_pans.png", "titletext": "If you want to evenly space them, it's easiest to alternate between the Arctic and Antarctic. Some people just go to the Arctic twice, near the equinoxes so the visits are almost 6 months apart, but it's not the same.", "transcript": ":[White Hat is holding a pan by the handle pointing to the frying surface as he shows it to Cueball.]\n:White Hat: Never clean a cast-iron pan with soap. It destroys the seasoning.\n:Cueball: Got it.\n\n:[White Hat shift the pan to his right hand and lowers it to his side holding a finger up in front of Cueball.]\n:White Hat: If you ever let soap touch the pan, throw it away. You're clearly not up to taking care of it.\n:Cueball: Wow, okay.\n\n:[In a frame-less panel White Hat has taken the pan back to the first hand holding on the edge while he holds his other hand close to the frying surface.]\n:White Hat: Apply moisturizer to the pan daily to keep it fresh.\n:Cueball: ...Moisturizer?\n:White Hat: Do you want it to get all wrinkly?\n:Cueball: ...I...guess not.\n\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.]\n:White Hat: Twice a year, fill the pan with iron filings and leave it in direct sunlight for 24 hours.\n:Cueball: Wait. 24 hours of sun?\n:White Hat: If you're not willing to travel to the Arctic, you don't '''''deserve''''' cast iron.", "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."}
-{"number": "1906", "date": "October 23, 2017", "title": "Making Progress", "image": "making_progress.png", "titletext": "I started off with countless problems. But now I know, thanks to COUNT(), that I have \"#REF! ERROR: Circular dependency detected\" problems.", "transcript": ":[Megan is sitting and looking at a laptop.]\n:Megan: I started the day with lots of problems.\n:Megan: But now, after hours and hours of work,\n:Megan: I have lots of problems in a '''''spreadsheet'''''.", "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.\n\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.\n\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).\n\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\".\n\nThe error shown is similar to two different errors in the popular spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel|Microsoft Excel: [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/how-to-correct-a-ref-error-822c8e46-e610-4d02-bf29-ec4b8c5ff4be?ui"}
-{"number": "1907", "date": "October 25, 2017", "title": "Immune System", "image": "immune_system.png", "titletext": "It also helps with negotiation. \"Look, if it were up to me, *I'd* accept your offer, but my swarm of autonomous killer cells literally can't be reasoned with. It's out of my hands!\"", "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.]\n:Ponytail: My body hosts an autonomous microscopic defensive swarm that will do anything to protect me.\n:Ponytail: I have no ability to restrain it and I don't know my own power.\n:Ponytail: So listen up.\n:Ponytail: Sales grew by 4% this quarter...\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Business protip: You can strengthen any presentation by opening with a reminder about how cool immune systems are.", "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. \n\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 gain more respect/fear from the speaker's audience.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1908", "date": "October 27, 2017", "title": "Credit Card Rewards", "image": "credit_card_rewards.png", "titletext": "I should make a list of all the things I could be trying to optimize, prioritized by ... well, I guess there are a few different variables I could use. I'll create a spreadsheet ...", "transcript": ":[Cueball sits at a desk and is on his laptop. Hairy stands behind him.]\n:Cueball: I'm trying to figure out which of these credit card rewards programs is best given my spending.\n\n:[Cueball leans backwards in a frameless panel.]\n:Cueball: But at some point, the cost of the time it takes me to understand the options outweighs their difference in value.\n\n:[Close-up of Cueball's head and torso.]\n:Cueball: So I need to figure out where that point is, and stop before I reach it.\n:Cueball: But... when I factor in the time to calculate THAT, it changes the overall answer.\n\n:[Cueball has his arms outstretched.]\n:Hairy: I question the assumption that you'd otherwise be spending your time on something more valuable.\n:Cueball: Come on, I could be failing to optimize so many better things!", "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.\n\nThese benefits, typically called rewards, have several different options. \"Cashback reward program|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.\n\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 behavior, which would further impact the calculation. (This table was actually created in 1205: Is It Worth the Time?)\n\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).\n\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.\n\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.\n\nThe idea of spending more time organizing tasks in a spreadsheet than you actually do working on the tasks was previously featured in 1906: Making Progress."}
-{"number": "1909", "date": "October 30, 2017", "title": "Digital Resource Lifespan", "image": "digital_resource_lifespan.png", "titletext": "I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.", "transcript": ":My access to resources on [SUBJECT] over time:\n\n:[Below, a timeline and a graph with gray bars is shown:]\n\n:[1980s-past 2020:] \n:Book on subject\n\n:[Early 2000s-past 2020:] \n:[SUBJECT].pdf \n\n:[2000-2010:] \n:[SUBJECT] web database \n::Site goes down, backend data not on archive.org\n::[Small bar, 2000-2016/17:] \n:::Java frontend no longer runs\n\n:[2010-2015/16:] \n:[SUBJECT] mobile app (Local university project) \n::Broken on new OS, not updated\n\n:[2000-2010:] \n:[SUBJECT] analysis software\n::Broken on new OS, not updated\n\n:[Late 1990s-late 2000s:] \n:Interactive [SUBJECT] CD-ROM \n::CD scratched; new computer has no CD drive anyway.\n\n:[1980s-past 2020:] \n:Library microfilm [SUBJECT] collection\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:It's unsettling to realize how quickly digital resources can disappear without ongoing work to maintain them.", "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 International Organization for Standardization|ISO standards, so has a widespread support, and should be still viewable in foreseeable future.\n\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 Website|websites, however, and will often not be able to save information stored in a site's Database|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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1910", "date": "November 1, 2017", "title": "Sky Spotters", "image": "sky_spotters.png", "titletext": "Where I live, one of the most common categories of sky object without a weird obsessive spotting community is \"lost birthday party balloons,\" so that might be a good choice—although you risk angering the marine wildlife people, and they have sharks.", "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.]\n:White Hat: That's odd—another PA-24 Comanche with red trim. Registered to a holding company, no recent flight plans.\n:Hairy: I'll ask the forums if anyone knows who operates those.\n\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.]\n:Hairbun: Goodness, I think that's a broad-winged hawk!\n:Man with sailor cap: In November?! They should be long gone by now!\n:Hairbun: I'll email the list.\n\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.]\n:Man at the end of the table: Dammit, why are there so many different subcultures obsessed with staring at the sky?\n:Ponytail: What else could we disguise our surveillance drones as?\n:Cueball: Weather balloons?\n:Ponytail: No, that gets the UFO people ''and'' the weather people.\n:Ponytail: Don't know who's worse.", "explanation": "This comic explores how people with various hobbies notice strange things in the sky. \n\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 [https://www.buzzfeed.com/peteraldhous/hidden-spy-planes 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 Aircraft spotting|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 (airline)|Janet Airlines which operates clandestine flights between Las Vegas, Area 51, and Janet (airline)#Destinations|other desert military bases, although these planes are in fact registered to the Department of the Air Force, rather than a holding company.\n\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.\n\nIn the last panel, a committee from what appears to be the National Security Agency wonders how to disguise their Unmanned aerial vehicle|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 [https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/ 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...\n\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''. \n\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.\n\nAmong other types of people looking at the sky, the comic doesn't even get around to mentioning the subject of comic 1644: Stargazing. It also fails to mention that something could be disguised as a regular cumulus cloud, which is usually ignored by the average person {{cn}}."}
-{"number": "1911", "date": "November 3, 2017", "title": "Defensive Profile", "image": "defensive_profile.png", "titletext": "NO DRAMA ZONE -> If I've made you sad, you'd better not tell me, because I am TERRIFIED of that situation and have NO IDEA how to handle it.", "transcript": ":[A profile on an unknown social media site is displayed. The profile picture is a close-up image of Megan. The profile reads:] \n:I speak my mind and don’t care who I offend. No filter.\n\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\".]\n:Copy\n:Select all\n:View translation [selected]\n:Print\n\n:[In the last panel, the profile text is updated:] \n:I don’t understand why people keep getting mad at me and I’m using this pep talk to convince myself that’s okay.", "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 “no filters” and has no qualms about offending or upsetting anybody with their seemingly radical views. But the “translation” 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. \n\nThe title text continues, with the aggressive “NO DRAMA ZONE” 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’s feelings. \n\nRandall previously demonstrated another theoretical feature to address passive-aggressive behavior in 1085: ContextBot. And show Cueball having the same feeling in 1984: Misinterpretation.\n\nThe comic’s 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’s 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’s feature.\n\nThis comic not only illustrates such a feature, but implies that the “translated” thoughts are what’s actually going on behind posts of these types on social media, as if Randall can actually read those people’s minds somehow. If this implication is the intent of the comic, then Randall thinks that people who have “no filter” are actually insecure and that people who want “NO DRAMA” 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’s publishing time (see below).\n\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’s 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 “bio” right below those. The Twitter “bio” is a space usually used for the user to explain who they are. Common details about a person which are included in their “bio” 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.\n\nThe title of this comic is “Defensive Profile”. “Defensive” is the opposite of “offensive”, 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 “defensive” instead of “offensive”, at least regarding the warning text."}
-{"number": "1912", "date": "November 6, 2017", "title": "Thermostat", "image": "thermostat.png", "titletext": "Your problem is so terrible, I worry that, if I help you, I risk drawing the attention of whatever god of technology inflicted it on you.", "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.]\n:Hairy: Tech support, how can I help you?\n\n:[Cueball is on his smartphone while looking at a small blinking panel on the wall in front of him.]\n:Cueball: The little LCD on my thermostat says [''citation NOT needed''], neither set will ever be empty and Twitter will always be seen as either endorsing unworthy or snubbing worthy people. There have been considerable problems created by this; see Twitter verification for more information.\n\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\nSince Elon Musk bought Twitter, the \"legacy\" checkmarks given according to the rules above Twitter Blue verification controversy|have been removed, and the only checkmarks are blue ones for anyone who pays for a Twitter Blue subscription, as well as other ones for organizations and government officials."}
-{"number": "1915", "date": "November 13, 2017", "title": "Nightmare Email Feature", "image": "nightmare_email_feature.png", "titletext": "\"...just got back and didn't see your message until just now. Sorry! -- TIME THIS MESSAGE SAT HALF-FINISHED IN DRAFTS FOLDER: 3 days, 2 hours, 45 minutes.\"", "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.]\n: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.\n\n:Where to live\n:based on your temperature preferences\n:[In gray, the data source is mentioned below:]\n:Climate data from [http://weatherbase.com weatherbase.com]\n\n:[A chart with two lines with single arrows. Each arrow is labeled:]\n:Y axis bottom: Cold winters\n:X axis right: Hot/humid summers (measured via Humidex, which combines heat and dew point)\n\n:[Near each of the corners of the chart there is a gray blob, labeled:]\n:Top left: If you hate cold and heat\n:Top right: If you hate cold and love heat\n:Bottom left: If you love cold and hate heat\n:Bottom right: If you love cold and heat\n\n:[The following city names intersect with the top left blob [hate cold and heat] (in reading order):]\n:Mexico City\n:Quito\n:Addis Ababa\n:Bogotá\n:San Francisco\n:Wellington\n\n:[The following city names intersect with the top right blob [hate cold and love heat] (in reading order):]\n:Bangkok\n:Ho Chi Minh City\n:Manila\n:Singapore\n:Mumbai\n:Jakarta\n:Dar Es Salaam\n:Honolulu\n:Lagos\n:Rio [de Janeiro]\n:Dhaka\n:Kinhasa\n:Miami\n:Karachi\n:Dubai\n:Cairo\n:Hong Kong\n:Delhi\n:Riyadh\n:Guangzhou\n:Lahore\n:Sabha\n:Houston\n:Needles\n:El Paso\n:Baghdad\n:Dallas\n\n:[The following city names intersect with the bottom left blob [love cold and hate heat] (in reading order):]\n:Reykjavik (with arrow pointing left)\n:Berlin\n:Stockholm\n:Oslo\n:Calgary\n:Halifax\n:Daqaidam\n:Kiev\n:Casper\n:Yumen\n:St Petersburg\n:Volgograd\n:Moscow\n:Ottawa\n:Vladivostok\n:Thunder Bay\n:Duluth\n:Urumqi\n:Altay\n:Regina\n:Irkutsk\n:Abakan\n:Ulaanbaatar\n:Blagoveshchensk (also on bottom right blob)\n:Fairbanks\n:McMurdo (with arrow pointing down-left)\n:Yellowknife (with arrow pointing down)\n:Hailar\n\n:[The following city names intersect with the bottom right blob [love cold and heat] (in reading order):]\n:[Washington] DC\n:Shanghai\n:Tehran\n:Saint Louis\n:New York\n:Xi'An\n:Salt Lake City\n:Kansas City\n:Beijing\n:Seoul\n:Sapporo\n:Pyongyang\n:Sioux Falls\n:Turpan\n:Jinzhou\n:Minneapolis\n:Shenyang\n:Fargo\n:Tongliao\n:Qiqihar\n:Blagoveshchensk (also on bottom left blob)\n\n:[The following city names do not intersect with any blob (in reading order):]\n:Nairobi\n:São Paulo\n:Brisbane\n:Los Angeles\n:Perth\n:Cape Town\n:Sydney\n:Athens\n:Santiago\n:Barcelona\n:Melbourne\n:Rome\n:Buenos Aires\n:Jerusalem\n:Atlanta\n:Raleigh\n:Madrid\n:Chengdu\n:Tokyo\n:Dublin\n:Portland\n:Richmond\n:London\n:Istanbul\n:Edinburgh\n:Vancouver\n:Paris\n:Flagstaff\n:Santa Fe\n:Tashkent\n:Wuhan\n:Geneva\n:Lubbock\n:Boston\n:Budapest\n:Kabul\n:Toronto\n:Omaha", "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:\n\n* Hate both cold and heat -- Neither summers nor winters are too extreme. These are either places at high altitude in the tropics (e.g. Quito, Addis Ababa) or areas at mid latitudes in Mediterranean climates (e.g. San Francisco, Wellington). All of these areas (as well as cities near this zone such as Mexico City and Melbourne) have a climate type of C-b in the Koppen Climate Classification, indicating a temperate climate with a warm summer.\n* Hate cold but love heat -- Very hot in the summer. These are all either tropical regions with a latitude of 23°26’ or less (e.g. Rio, Bangkok, Manila) or desert areas very near the tropics (e.g. Needles, Baghdad). These areas all have a climate type of A-, indicating a tropical rainforest, savanna, or monsoon climate; or a classification of B-h, indicating a hot desert or arid climate. All cities listed with a Af/Am/Aw climate type fall in this zone.\n* Hate heat but love cold -- Very cold in the winter. These are typically places at high latitudes (e.g. Moscow, Oslo), with almost none of the places listed below 40°, and the average latitude being 51°. These areas tend of have a climate type of B-k, indicating a cold desert or steppe, or D-b, indicating a continental climate with a warm summer. Some of coldest places, including those off of the chart, have a climate of Dfc subarctic (e.g. Fairbanks and Yellowknife) or EF ice cap (McMurdo).\n* Love both heat and cold -- Both summers and winters are extreme. These places are either in the inland of North America (e.g. Sioux Falls, Kansas City) where there is no nearby ocean to buffer temperatures; or, interestingly, clustered around the Yellow Sea (e.g. Seoul, Beijing). These places are almost all climate type D-a, indicating a continental climate with a hot summer. Turpan, the place farthest toward the love heat/love cold corner, has a climate so miserable that it meets the requirements for both climate type BWk (cold desert) and BWh (hot desert) at the same time.\n\nThe summer heat axis is determined by humidex, a system that combines heat and humidity to generate an estimate of perceived \"summer discomfort\".\n\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 “colder” winter than Honolulu, but the average low in the coldest month for Kinshasa (20°C) is hotter than the average low in Honolulu (18.9°C). In general these differences are minor, but a few stand out:\n\n* Lubbock is shown having a climate similar to Geneva or Budapest, but in reality it should be in the “Love Cold and Love Heat” zone. The coldness of the winter is accurately reflected, but the hottest month Humidex is similar to Xi’an or Saint Louis.\n* Casper is shown in the “Love Cold and Hate Heat” zone, but its summers are much warmer than shown. It should be closer to Toronto, both have a peak month Humidex of around 30-31°C.\n* Omaha should be in the “Love Cold and Love Heat” zone. Its hottest month Humidex of 37.2 is warmer than Jinzou, which has a similar coldest month.\n* Los Angeles should be in the “Hate Cold and Hate Heat” zone. Its hottest month Humidex is only 26.7, which is less than Mexico City or Nairobi.\n* Flagstaff and Santa Fe are shown as having warmer winters than they do. They should be grouped with Boston, Kabul and Sapporo (average coldest month low of -5°C to -8°C) rather than Istanbul, Madrid and Portland (average coldest month low of 1°C to 2°C)\n\nIt is not certain if these differences are a due to errors, the use of a different data set, or deliberate “Easter Eggs” set to see if anyone would notice.\n\nAccording to Randall:\n* People who love cold should live where the average low in the coldest month is -3°C or less. \n* People who love heat should live where the hottest month Humidex is at least 33°C (in otherwise cold places such as Minneapolis) to 38°C (in otherwise hot places such as Honolulu). \n* People who hate cold should live where the average low in the coldest month is higher than 3°C. \n* People who hate heat should live where the hottest month Humidex is less than 29°C.\n\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\".\n\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°C (90°F) and the number of days below 0°C (32°F), taken from Weatherbase.com (Randall's source). For most people a temperature above 32°C is considered hot and a temperature below 0°C is considered cold. So, for instance, someone who loves heat might want to live in Tehran (with three months above 32°C) 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°C) 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.\n\nOnce again, Turpan stands out for its misery, with days above 32°C totaling four months and days below 0°C 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°C or below 0°C. This includes almost every day in June, July and August being hot and every single day in December, January and February being below freezing.\n\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°C to 23°C) but they have seen record highs of 34°C to 37°C and record lows of almost -68°C, 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°C all year long – 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.\n\nThe relevant temperature data for these extreme locations, where known, is in the second table for comparison.\n\nThe title text refers to a quote sometimes attributed to Mark Twain; however, as it points out, the quote is [https://www.snopes.com/quotes/twain.asp 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.\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1917", "date": "November 17, 2017", "title": "How to Make Friends", "image": "how_to_make_friends.png", "titletext": "No, wait, come back! I want to be friends at you!", "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:]\n:''Presenting:''\n\n:How to make friends\n\n:[Second panel with Cueball and Hairy facing each other:]\n:Cueball: Want to go eat food together?\n: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\n:[Third panel with words, same format as first panel:]\n:''Okay''\n\n:It turns out I still haven't figured out how to do this.\n\n:''Sorry''", "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.\n\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 “have lunch” or “grab a bite to eat”, Cueball explicitly invites Hairy to “eat food”. The fact that he feels the need to clarify that they’ll be eating food, as opposed to any other orally consumable items, indicates his lack of confidence to clearly communicate his intentions.\n\nBefore Hairy can even respond, Cueball then says that they could instead “sit together and talk without eating.” Although this is indeed another common way to make friends, it’s kind of an odd way to phrase it, especially since he didn’t even give Hairy a chance to reply to his initial suggestion. Cueball then says he doesn’t 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’s 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’s awkwardness and over-explanation would put off a typical person, although {{tvtropes|Adorkable|some people find it endearing}}.\n\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.\n\nThe title text says Cueball wants to be friends ''at'' Hairy, rather than ''with'' him, which isn’t how friendship usually works. “At” implies that Cueball considers being friends to be a unilateral action that he needs to direct towards Hairy, like “smiling at” or “pointing at”, and does not understand that it is typically a mutual activity of building a relationship, which would be indicated by being friends ''with'' him. “At” can even carry a degree of animosity (compare: [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Chapter_17_2 “he just phoned up to wash his head at us”])."}
-{"number": "1918", "date": "November 20, 2017", "title": "NEXUS", "image": "nexus.png", "titletext": "You also refuse to buy Cisco products because you hate the Thong Song, O. Henry, Deep Space Nine, freshwater whitefish, teenaged Incan emperors, Brak's brother, and vegetable-based shortening.", "transcript": ":[Megan and Cueball walking through an airport.]\n:Sign: Apply for NEXUS Save time at the border\n:Megan: Maybe we should sign up for this.\n:Cueball: No way. I refuse to have anything to do with Nexus after what they did to FernGully.", "explanation": "Cueball is confusing NEXUS (frequent traveler program)|NEXUS, a [https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/nexus USA and Canada border control pre-screening program], with [http://ferngully.wikia.com/wiki/Hexxus Hexxus], the villains from the animated film ''FernGully: The Last Rainforest|FernGully''.\n\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.\n\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).\n\nThe title text is confusing Cisco Systems|Cisco (a telecoms & tech brand which has a line of switches called Cisco Nexus switches|Nexus) with:\n* The artist Sisqó who performed 'Thong Song'\n* The Cisco Kid, a character created by O. Henry in the short story \"The Caballero's Way\"\n* Benjamin Sisko, commander of a space station in the Star Trek Universe (''Deep Space Nine'')\n* Cisco (fish)|Ciscoes (freshwater whitefish)\n* [http://emperorsnew.wikia.com/wiki/Kuzco Kuzco], teenaged Incan emperor in ''The Emperor's New Groove''\n* [http://brak.wikia.com/wiki/Sisto Sisto], brother of Brak in ''The Brak Show''\n* Crisco (vegetable-based shortening)"}
-{"number": "1919", "date": "November 22, 2017", "title": "Interstellar Asteroid", "image": "interstellar_asteroid.png", "titletext": "Every time we detect an asteroid from outside the Solar System, we should immediately launch a mission to fling one of our asteroids back in the direction it came from.", "transcript": ":[Megan walks towards Cueball while looking at her phone. Cueball sits in front of his laptop.]\n:Megan: Hey, you know that asteroid that tumbled past from another star system? It's apparently really long and skinny. \n:Megan: Like a ratio of 6:1 or 10:1.\n:Cueball: Weird. Wonder what it's shaped like.\n\n:[Megan lowers her phone and looks up. Cueball looks backward.]\n:Megan: Without more data, it would be irresponsible to speculate further.\n:Cueball: So...you're going to?\n:Megan: ''Absolutely.''\n\n:[Frameless panel focusing on Megan.]\n:Megan: Here are some objects with a similar shape ratio:\n:Megan: The 1:4:9 monolith from ''2001: A Space Odyssey''.\n:Megan: A star destroyer.\n:Megan: A huge eggplant emoji.\n\n:[Same setting with Megan and Cueball.]\n:Megan: A statue of Weird Al. An iPhone XXXXX. Voltron.\n:Megan: A giant space coffin. But who could be inside? We can only guess. I'll start:\n:Cueball: This is all based on ''how'' many data points, again?\n:Megan: One. But it's a ''perfect'' fit!", "explanation": "ʻOumuamua is the first detection of an [https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/faq/interstellar interstellar asteroid] passing through the Solar System originating from another solar system.\n\nMegan's list of objects with a similar shape ratio:\n* The 1:4:9 Monolith (Space Odyssey)|monolith from the sci-fi movie ''2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)|2001: A Space Odyssey''.\n* A Star Destroyer, a spaceship in the ''Star Wars'' universe. This one seems particularly unlikely, as the Star Wars mythos is set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and rarely (if ever, depending on the continuity) strays outside of said galaxy.\n* Huge eggplant emoji (🍆, U+1F346 Aubergine, commonly used to represent a penis).\n* Statue of \"Weird Al\" Yankovic, an American singer and parodist.\n* iPhone XXXXX, likely making fun of Apple's iPhone X and larger in size. Multiple X's generally have a sexual connotation (see 1571: Car Model Names).\n* [http://voltron.wikia.com/wiki/Voltron_(Voltron_Force) Voltron], a giant robot from the animated series ''Voltron|Voltron: Defender of the Universe''.\n* A giant {{tvtropes|BurialInSpace|space coffin}} with someone inside.\n\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.\n\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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko#Shape 'rubber duck' comet]. Making fun of media covering science news is a recurring theme on xkcd.\n\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 (film)|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."}
-{"number": "1920", "date": "November 24, 2017", "title": "Emoji Sports", "image": "emoji_sports.png", "titletext": "No horse has yet managed the elusive Quadruple Crown—winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont Stakes, and the Missouri Horse Hole.", "transcript": ":New sports\n:created from random emoji\n\n:[Man Playing Water Polo + Volcano]\n:🤽♂️🌋 \tLavaball\n\n:[Woman Playing Handball + Person Fencing]\n:🤾♀️🤺 \tBladeball\n\n:[Woman Dancing (2 emojis) + Soccer Ball]\n:💃💃⚽ \tFancyball\n\n:[Hole + Horse Racing (3 emojis)]\n:🕳️🏇🏇🏇 \tHorse hole\n\n:[Kitchen Knife + Basketball + Pick]\n:🔪🏀⛏️ \tBasketball shredding\n\n:[Egg + Telescope + Woman Detective]\n:🥚🔭🕵️♀️ \tEggspotting\n\n:[Skier + Crocodile]\n:⛷️🐊 \tAlligator jumping\n\n:[Woman + Fishing Pole + Merman]\n:👩🎣🧜♂️ \tMerfishing\n\n:[Man + Badminton + Fairy + Badminton + Woman]\n:👨🏸🧚🏸👩 \tTinkerball\n\n:[Curling Stone + Hedgehog + Curling Stone]\n:🥌🦔🥌 \tHedgehog curling\n\n:[Clamp + Hamburger]\n:🗜️🍔 \tBurger clamping\n\n:[Woman Astronaut + Bow and Arrow + Satellite]\n:👩🚀🏹🛰️ \tConsequence archery\n\n:[Owl + Right Arrow + Open Mailbox]\n:🦉➡️📬 \tOwlstuffing\n\n:[Fork and Knife + Candle + Fork and Knife]\n:🍴🕯️🍴 \tCandle eating\n\n:[Flag in Hole + Bomb + Woman Golfing]\n:⛳💣🏌️♀️ \tConsequence golf \n\n:[Pointing Right + Snake + Pointing Left]\n:👉🐍👈 \tSnake shaming\n\n:[Fire + Woman Climbing + Fire]\n:🔥🧗♀️🔥 \tHell escape\n\n:[Video Game + Avocado + Video Game]\n:🎮🥑🎮 \tMultiplayer avocado", "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.\n\nThe title text is a reference to the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing (United States)|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\".\n\n''Please 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.''\n\n{| class"}
-{"number": "1921", "date": "November 27, 2017", "title": "The Moon and the Great Wall", "image": "the_moon_and_the_great_wall.png", "titletext": "And arguably sunspots, on rare occasions. But even if they count, it takes ideal conditions and you might hurt your eyes.", "transcript": ":[Megan is holding her arm up towards Ponytail as they stand atop a large brick wall with Merlon|merlons along the top. They are standing to the left of a tower with three small windows as well as merlons on the top.]\n: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?", "explanation": "This is a reference to the myth that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object that can be seen from the Moon (or from space) with the naked eye. Great_Wall_of_China#Visibility_from_space|Sadly, it cannot. In fact, it's barely visible from the orbit of low satellites.\n\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 Astronomical object|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’s features can be seen equally well from practically any place on Earth with a view of the Moon.{{Citation needed}}\n\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 Solar viewer|glasses or other adequate Eye protection#Protection against light|protection, but that's not unaided human eye.)"}
-{"number": "1922", "date": "November 29, 2017", "title": "Interferometry", "image": "interferometry.png", "titletext": "It's important to note that while the effective size of the dog can be arbitrarily large, it's not any more of a good dog than the two original dogs.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is walking behind Beret Guy, who is walking two small dogs on two leashes.]\n:Beret Guy: Interferometry. Is so cool!\n\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.]\n:Beret Guy: If you put two small dogs a large distance apart, they can function as a single giant dog.\n:Line: d\n\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).]\n:Cueball: I'm not sure that's-\n:Beret Guy: '''''Hyah!'''''\n\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.]\n:Invisible giant dog: '''''WOOF'''''\n:Beret Guy: ''Away!''", "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|aperture synthesis.\n\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 — 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"}
-{"number": "1923", "date": "December 1, 2017", "title": "Felsius", "image": "felsius.png", "titletext": "The symbol for degrees Felsius is an average of the Euro symbol (€) and the Greek lunate epsilon (ϵ).", "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.]\n:92°⋲ world heat record\n:68°⋲ body temperature\n:47°⋲ room temperature\n:16°⋲ water freezes\n:–9°⋲ 0°F\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).\n\nThere are several Scale_of_temperature|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_scale|Rankine.\n\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 system|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.\n\nThe conversion factors between Celsius and Fahrenheit are:\n:°C"}
-{"number": "1924", "date": "December 4, 2017", "title": "Solar Panels", "image": "solar_panels.png", "titletext": "This works for a surprising range of sunlit things, including rooftops (sure), highway surfaces (probably not), sailboats (maybe), and jets, cars, and wild deer (haha good luck).", "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:]\n:'''Should I put solar panels on it?'''\n\n:Does it move around?\n::Yes \n:::Does it have regular chances to recharge or swap batteries?\n::::Yes \n:::::Probably not\n::::No \n:::::When running, is it hot to the touch?\n::::::No \n:::::::Maybe\n::::::Yes \n:::::::Haha good luck\n::No \n:::Is there an empty space nearby where it would be easier to put them?\n::::Yes \n:::::Probably not [Uses the same sentence as the one in the first branch.]\n::::No \n:::::Sure", "explanation": "This handy decision tree aims to help in finding out whether a given object should have solar panels installed on it.\n\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 [https://www.linak.com/business-areas/energy 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.\n\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.\n\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 [http://news.energysage.com/solar-panel-temperature-overheating/] (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 Réaumur, 15.38-20.63 Rømer, 127.5-112.5 Delisle, 4.95-8.25 Newton, 5.968 546×10⁻²¹ - 6.174 608×10⁻²¹ 2292: Thermometer|joules of translational kinetic energy or 37-51 1923: Felsius|Felsius).\n\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 :Category:Space probes|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 :Category:Mars rovers|Mars rovers, although in this comic he seems to have only been concerned with Earthbound objects.\n\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 :Category:Climate change|climate change.\n\nThe title text suggests that this flow chart is very broadly applicable to anything the Sun hits. \n\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). \n\nHighway surfaces are classed as \"probably not\". There have been proposals and experiments a concerning Smart_highway#Solar_road_panels|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.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1925", "date": "December 6, 2017", "title": "Self-Driving Car Milestones", "image": "self_driving_car_milestones.png", "titletext": "I'm working on a car capable of evaluating arbitrarily complex boolean expressions on \"honk if [...]\" bumper stickers and responding accordingly.", "transcript": ":Upcoming and recently-achieved\n:'''Self-driving car milestones'''\n\n:* Automatic emergency braking\n:* Highway lane-keeping\n:* Self-parking\n:* Full highway autonomy\n:* First sex in a self-driving car\n:* Full trips with no input from driver\n:* Full trips by empty cars\n:* An empty car wandering the highways for months or years until someone notices the credit card fuel charges\n:* Cars that read other cars' bumper stickers before deciding whether to cut them off\n:* Autonomous engine revving at red lights\n:* Self-loathing cars\n:* Autonomous canyon jumping\n:* Cars capable of arguing about the trolley problem on Facebook", "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\"."}
-{"number": "1926", "date": "December 8, 2017", "title": "Bad Code", "image": "bad_code.png", "titletext": "\"Oh my God, why did you scotch-tape a bunch of hammers together?\" \"It's ok! Nothing depends on this wall being destroyed efficiently.\"", "transcript": ":[Cueball is at his desk on a swivel chair, using his computer. Ponytail walks towards him.]\n:Ponytail: That's the ugliest mess of code I've ever seen. What on earth are you working on?\n\n:[Cueball swivels his chair to face Ponytail in a frameless panel.]\n:Cueball: It's nothing weird this time, I swear.\n:Cueball: It just looks bad because it's a spreadsheet formula.\n\n:[Cueball is turns back towards the computer while Ponytail looks over his shoulder at the computer screen.]\n:Cueball: ...which assembles a Haskell function.\n:Ponytail: Uhhh.\n:Cueball: ...for parsing HTML.\n:Ponytail: ...oh my God.\n\n:[Ponytail points away from the scene while still looking at the computer screen.]\n:Cueball: It's ok! Nothing depends on this.\n:Ponytail: That wall isn't load-bearing. Does that mean we can just throw hammers at it?\n:Cueball: ...I mean...\n:Ponytail: Wait. Crap.", "explanation": "This comic is the fourth in the :Category:Code Quality|Code Quality series:\n* 1513: Code Quality\n* 1695: Code Quality 2\n* 1833: Code Quality 3\n* 1926: Bad Code\n* 2138|2138: Wanna See the Code?\n\nPonytail has caught Cueball in the act of writing some messy code — code in the form of a spreadsheet formula, which in turn produces another program in a language called Haskell (programming language)|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, Parser|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.\n\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.\n\nImmediately after, Ponytail appears to have {{tvtropes|Main/OhCrap|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 905: Homeownership|tragedy.\n\nThis is most likely a continuation of the :Category:Code Quality|Code Quality series, but it differs slightly. For one thing, all of the previous strips were named \"Code Quality \", 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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1927", "date": "December 11, 2017", "title": "Tinder", "image": "tinder.png", "titletext": "People keep telling me to use the radio but I really hate making voice calls.", "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:]\n:If you know how\n:to fly a plane\n:please swipe\n:right ASAP", "explanation": "Tinder (app)|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 primarily attract someone capable of flying a plane instead. If the request is genuine (and not just a foible), this is a bad situation, because it suggests Cueball is in charge of a plane that 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.{{Citation needed}}\n\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...)\n\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.\n\nRandall may be satirizing people who use Tinder (and other similar social apps) by portraying an extreme caricature of a Tinder user.\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1928", "date": "December 13, 2017", "title": "Seven Years", "image": "seven_years.png", "titletext": "[hair in face] \"SEVVVENNN YEEEARRRSSS\"", "transcript": ":[The first eight panels, used earlier in the comic 1141: Two Years, are faded out.]\n\n:[Randall and Randall's fiancée sit on a bed, Randall's fiancée is talking on the phone. The person she is talking to, a doctor holding a clipboard, is shown inset.]\n:Randall's fiancée: Oh god.\n\n:[Randall and Randall's fiancée sit together while Randall's fiancée, now bald, is receiving chemotherapy. They are both on their laptops.]\n:IV pump: ... Beeep ... Beeep ... Beeep ...\n\n:[Randall and Randall's fiancée (who is wearing a knit cap) are paddling a kayak against a scenic mountain backdrop.]\n\n:[Randall and Randall's fiancée sit at a table, staring at a cell phone. There is a clock on the wall. Her head is stubbly.]\n:Randall's fiancée: How long can it take to read a scan!?\n\n:[Randall and Randall's fiancée are back at the hospital again, Randall's fiancée receiving chemo. They are playing Scrabble.]\n:Randall: \"Zarg\" isn't a word.\n:Randall's fiancée: But ''caaaancer.''\n:Randall: ...Ok, fine.\n\n:[Randall and Randall's fiancée (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:]\n:Friend: So next year you should come visit us up in the mounta\n::a\n::and\n:Randall and Randall's fiancée (thinking): '''\"Next year\"'''\n\n:[Randall and Randall's fiancée are getting married, with a heart above their heads. Randall's wife's hair is growing back.]\n\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.]\n:''Fwoosh''\n:Label: Two years\n\n:[Randall and Randall's wife (with her hair noticeably longer) are walking through a forest.]\n\n:[Randall's wife is sitting down, not in the forest anymore.]\n: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.\n:Randall: Wait—didn’t you stub your toe yesterday?\n:Randall's wife: Yes, but what if this is unrelated?\n\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\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.]\n:Randall: When they estimated your survival odds, I think they made some optimistic assumptions about your hobbies.\n\n:[Randall's wife sits on an examination bed, listening to a doctor holding a clipboard.]\n:Doctor: This is probably nothing. \n:Doctor: But given your history, we should do a full scan. \n:Doctor: We'll call with the results in a few days. Try not to worry about it until then!\n\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\n:[Randall and his wife are standing next to each other. Randall's wife has shoulder-length hair covering most of her face.]\n:Randall's wife: Hard to believe—six years ago, I was bald. But today, after a long struggle, I finally look like the little girl from ''The Ring''.\n:Randall: That's, uhh... good?\n:Randall's wife: ''Hissssss''\n\n:[A line of six people, including Randall and his wife, stand and watch the solar eclipse.]\n\n:[The sky has been brightened.]\n:Ponytail: ''Wow.''\n:Randall's wife: Yeah.\n\n:[Randall and his wife are walking together and holding hands.]\n:Randall's wife: That was incredible. \n:Randall's wife: When's the next one?\n:Randall: In seven years. \n:Randall: Wanna go see it?\n\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\n:[The pair keeps walking.]\n:Randall's wife: Yeah. \n:Randall's wife: I'll do my best.\n:Randall: It's a date!", "explanation": "Randall's then girlfriend, now wife, was diagnosed with cancer in late 2010, a matter he has discussed in the comic :Category:Cancer|multiple times before. Here, motivated by the seven-year period between the American solar eclipses of Solar eclipse of August 21, 2017|2017 and Solar eclipse of April 8, 2024|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.\n\nThis comic is part of a :Category:X Years|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.\n\nIt was released as a response to another cancer diagnosis, this is explained in the Design_of_xkcd.com#Header_text|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:\n:Becky Beaton, sister of fellow cartoonist Kate Beaton, has also been diagnosed with cancer. You can support her treatment [https://www.youcaring.com/beckybeaton-1008390 here]. \nKate Beaton is the creator of the web comic [http://www.harkavagrant.com/ Hark! A Vagrant]. Although this comic is not one on Randall's list of Design_of_xkcd.com#"}
-{"number": "1929", "date": "December 15, 2017", "title": "Argument Timing", "image": "argument_timing.png", "titletext": "Of course, everyone has their own profile. There are morning arguers, hangry arguers, meal-time arguers, late-night arguers, and people who get in a meta-argument over what their argument timing is, dredge up examples of past arguments, and end up fighting over THOSE again as well.", "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\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.]", "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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\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.\n\n490: Morning Routine covers similar ground to this comic."}
-{"number": "1930", "date": "December 18, 2017", "title": "Calendar Facts", "image": "calendar_facts.png", "titletext": "While it may seem like trivia, it (causes huge headaches for software developers / is taken advantage of by high-speed traders / triggered the 2003 Northeast Blackout / has to be corrected for by GPS satellites / is now recognized as a major cause of World War I).", "transcript": ":-Calendar Facts-\n\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 \"→\" arrow symbol is used below to indicate a new branch with no intermediate text from a previous branch.)]\n\n:Did you know that:\n::the ( Fall | Spring ) Equinox\n::the ( Winter | Summer ) ( Solstice | Olympics )\n::the ( Earliest | Latest ) ( Sunrise | Sunset )\n::Daylight ( Saving | Savings ) Time\n::Leap ( Day | Year )\n::Easter\n::the ( Harvest | Super | Blood ) Moon\n::Toyota Truck Month\n::Shark Week\n:→\n::happens ( earlier | later | at the wrong time ) every year\n::drifts out of sync with the\n:::Sun\n:::Moon\n:::Zodiac\n:::( Gregorian | Mayan | Lunar | iPhone ) Calendar\n:::atomic clock in Colorado\n::might ( not happen | happen twice ) this year\n:because of\n::time zone legislation in ( Indiana | Arizona | Russia )\n::a decree by the pope in the 1500s\n::( precession | libration | nutation | libation | eccentricity | obliquity ) of the \n:::Moon \n:::Sun \n:::Earth's axis \n:::equator \n:::prime meridian \n:::( International Date | Mason-Dixon ) Line\n::magnetic field reversal\n::an arbitrary decision by ( Benjamin Franklin | Isaac Newton | FDR )\n:?\n:Apparently\n::it causes a predictable increase in car accidents.\n::that's why we have leap seconds.\n::scientists are really worried.\n::it was even more extreme during the\n:::Bronze Age.\n:::Ice Age.\n:::Cretaceous.\n:::1990s.\n::there's a proposal to fix it, but it\n:::will never happen.\n:::actually makes things worse.\n:::is stalled in congress.\n:::might be unconstitutional.\n::it's getting worse and no one knows why.", "explanation": "This is the second comic using :Category:Facts|Facts in the title.\n\nRandall presents what appears to be a generator of 156,000 facts [20 x 13 x (8 + 6 x 7) x 12] (780,000 if including the title text) 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.\n\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]'''.\" The title text adds on as follows: \"While it may seem like trivia, it '''[real-life consequence]'''.\"\n\nThis is :Category:Supermoon|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.\n\nThe title text continues the chart with supposed real-life consequences of the trivia in the comic.\n\nThere are multiple online generators of Calendar 'facts' using this formula [https://perchance.org/xkcd-1930 here] and [http://yahel.com/calendarfacts/ here].\n\nAll 156 000 possible combinations can be found [https://www.dropbox.com/s/866fwtpwvd0z9hq/combinations%20xkcd%201930.txt?dl"}
-{"number": "1931", "date": "December 20, 2017", "title": "Virtual Assistant", "image": "virtual_assistant.png", "titletext": "If you ask it to please turn off that feature, it apologizes a whole bunch and promises to try to be quieter, then switches to a slightly lower-volume version of the clip with \"sorry!\" after the louder sounds.", "transcript": ":[Megan stands next to a small table with a Google Home sitting on it.]\n:Megan: Ok, Google–\n:Google Home: THUMP-THUMP-THUMP\n:Google Home: CRASH THUD!\n:Google Home: CLICK THUMP THUMP\n:Google Home: [sink running]\n:Google Home: ZIIIIIP! CLICK\n:Google Home: THUMP THUMP CLICK\n:Google Home: SLAM!\n:Google Home: THUMPATHUMPATHUMPA\n:Google Home: H... ''*Pant*'' ...Hello... ''*Pant*''\n:Google Home: How... How can I help you?\n\n:[Text below the panel:]\n:I want to hack the world's smart home devices, but not to create a botnet or anything—I just want to make them play this sound clip every time you invoke them.", "explanation": "Megan invokes her smart device's virtual assistant with the phrase \"Ok Google\", intending to follow up with a voice command (e.g., \"Check the weather forecast\" or 1807: Listening|\"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.\n\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. (Video [https://youtu.be/HFl0ocf4mSM here])\n\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 wikipedia:Mirai_(malware)|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 [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQOvNer68CxTszlWcscbIWQ YouTube channel]).\n\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.\n\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 {{tvtropes|OffscreenCrash|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."}
-{"number": "1932", "date": "December 22, 2017", "title": "The True Meaning of Christmas", "image": "the_true_meaning_of_christmas.png", "titletext": "They all made fun of Autometalogolex, but someday there will be a problem with Christmas that can only be solved if Santa somehow gets a serious headache, and then they'll see.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is talking to a guy wearing a Santa hat.]\n:Cueball: You’re looking festive.\n:Santa Hat: I love Christmas!\n:Cueball: Really? Doesn’t seem like your kind of thing.\n:Santa Hat: It’s our most meta holiday!\n\n:[Same setting.]\n:Cueball: How so?\n:Santa Hat: All our Christmas stories now are about discovering the “true meaning of Christmas.”\n\n:[The same setting in a frame-less panel where Santa Hat shrugs.]\n:Cueball: Huh, yeah. And then sharing it with others.\n:Santa Hat: At some point, that quest itself ''became'' the true meaning.\n\n:[Same setting with Santa Hat holding a hand to his chin.]\n:Cueball: Like a word whose definition is “the act of looking up the definition of this word.”\n:Santa Hat: “Autometalogolex”?\n:Cueball: My least favorite of Santa’s reindeer.", "explanation": "This is the first of two :Category:Christmas|Christmas comics in a row celebrating Christmas of 2017. The next being 1933: Santa Facts, released upon Christmas Day itself. This was the first time that a year with two Christmas comics had one released as early as December 22nd. Otherwise, it has always been in the range from December 23-26th. (As of 2023 it is still the only such comic released on the 22nd. In 2023 this was also the last release day before Christmas, but the earlier date was not specifically Christmas-themed that year.)\n\nIt is making fun of the common trope in popular media that the {{tvtropes|TrueMeaningOfChristmas|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.\n\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.\"\n:\"Meta-\" - Greek meaning \"after,\" \"beyond,\" or \"in reference to.\"\n:\"Logo-\" - Greek meaning \"word\" or \"speech.\"\n:\"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 :Category:Self-reference|recurring theme in xkcd.\n\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.\n\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,{{cn}} 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."}
-{"number": "1933", "date": "December 25, 2017", "title": "Santa Facts", "image": "santa_facts.png", "titletext": "We've gotten him up to 20% milk and cookies through an aggressive public campaign, but that seems to be his dietary limit. Anything above that and he starts developing nutritional deficiencies.", "transcript": ":[An annotated picture of Santa is shown.]\n:'''Santa'''\n:Facts and Figures\n\n:Type: Flying/Psychic\n:Plural: \"Santa\"\n:Active Warrants: 5\n:Lubricated for easy passage down chimneys\n:Vertical leap: 14 Miles\n:Sleigh flag of convenience: Panama\n:9th in presidential line of succession\n:Not technically an insect—actually an arthropod\n:Only known vampire able to enter house without being invited\n:Works with Alexa\n:Ribbed\n:IUCN red list: Critically endangered\n:Diet: 80% Reindeer\n:Liability Insurance: None", "explanation": "This was the second :Category:Christmas|Christmas comic in a row after 1932: The True Meaning of Christmas. It was released on Christmas Day in 2017\n\nThe comic 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 :Category:Facts|Facts in the title. Another fact comic was released six years later as the Christmas Day comic of 2023: 2872: Hydrothermal Vents. Here it was an Ocean fact about the demise of Santa Clauses...\n\nThis comic is reminiscent of the :Category:xkcd Phones|xkcd Phones series.\n\n'''Type: Flying/Psychic'''\n:A reference to Pokémon. The Gameplay_of_Pokémon#Pok%C3%A9mon_types|type of a Pokémon 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 [https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Flying_(type) Flying-type] Pokémon 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 Santa_Claus_Is_Comin%27_to_Town| sleeping or awake, implying a psychic ability to read minds. There is a Pokémon based on Santa, [https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Delibird_(Pok%C3%A9mon) Delibird], although it is Ice/Flying instead of Flying/Psychic.\n\n'''Plural: \"Santa\"'''\n:The plural form of 'Santa' conveniently parallels that of 'reindeer' (as well as those of all species of Pokémon and the term \"Pokémon\" 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\". (Or, possibly, \"Santas Claus\".)\n\n'''Active warrants: 5'''\n:There 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.\n\n'''Lubricated for easy passage down chimneys'''\n:The 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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v"}
-{"number": "1934", "date": "December 27, 2017", "title": "Phone Security", "image": "phone_security.png", "titletext": "...wait until they type in payment information, then use it to order yourself a replacement phone.", "transcript": ":[The content of a configuration screen on a smartphone is shown. All items listed are activated as indicated by green switches.]\n:Security Options\n:* Passcode to unlock '''2016 Election Map'''\n:Each figure represents 250,000 votes\n:[Red stick figure:] Trump\n:[Blue stick figure:] Clinton\n:[Green stick figure:] Other\n:30 (1 nonillion 989 octillion) kilograms], and its abundance of gold is approximately [http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1968PASAu...1..133A&data_type"}
-{"number": "1945", "date": "January 22, 2018", "title": "Scientific Paper Graph Quality", "image": "scientific_paper_graph_quality.png", "titletext": "The worst are graphs with qualitative, vaguely-labeled axes and very little actual data.", "transcript": ":[Heading on top of the graph:]\n\n:'''General quality of charts and graphs in scientific papers'''\n \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\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\".]", "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.\n\nMicrosoft_PowerPoint#Use_it_less|Critics of PowerPoint, such as Edward_Tufte#Criticism_of_PowerPoint|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 [https://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/contribinfo/prep/prep_revfigs.xhtml 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).\n\nThe title text states that among the bad quality graphs, the ones “with qualitative, vaguely-labeled axes and very little actual data” 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 “you get the idea”) over accuracy (little actual data), this is more {{tvtropes|HypocriticalHumor|hypocritical humor}} on Randall's part, as the comic itself features exactly that sort of lambasted graph. The vertical axis labeled “good” and “bad” 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 ‘PowerPoint / MSPaint era’ is entirely unclear, and it is doubtful that any actual data was used to make the graph – 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."}
-{"number": "1946", "date": "January 24, 2018", "title": "Hawaii", "image": "hawaii.png", "titletext": "Ok, I've got it, just need to plug in my security key. Hmm, which way does the USB go? Nope, not that way. I'll just flip it and-- OH JEEZ IT FELL INTO THE VENT.", "transcript": ":[Cueball is standing, slightly crouched, at a desk with one hand on a laptop and the other holding his phone.]\n:Off-screen voice: '''''Hurry!'''''\n:Cueball: It keeps saying \"Wrong Password!\" I've tried everything it might be!\n:Off-screen voice: '''''The clock is ticking!'''''\n:Cueball: I requested a reset but haven't gotten it! Which email did I use?!\n:Off-screen voice: '''''Sirens are going off!!'''''\n:Cueball: It's not in my password manager! Is it in a browser? Which browser? Is Autofill synced to my phone??\n:Off-screen voice: '''''OH MY GOD THE SCREAMING!!'''''\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n: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.", "explanation": "File:2018 Hawaii missile alert.jpg|thumb|Screenshot of the message. (From Wikimedia Commons)\n\nOn January 13, 2018, the state of Hawaii 2018_Hawaii_false_missile_alert|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, [http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/23/us/hawaii-governor-password-trnd/index.html 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.\n\nThe proliferation of online services requiring authentication, together with variations in security requirements, various flavors 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 memorization 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:\n* He has a number of passwords that he uses, likely for multiple services, but none of them seem to be working. Often people will use subtly different variations of one or more password(s) for different logins since logins may require different password requirements. In a situation where they've forgotten the relevant password, this can lead to them cycling through all the possible variations, and struggling to keep track of which they have and haven't tried.\n* He's requested a password reset, but doesn't know where to go to activate it. Many services allow users to reset a password using a link or information sent to them in an email. However, as many people have multiple email accounts, this can be unhelpful and frustrating if it simply indicates that 'you have been sent an email'.\n* He expects the password to have been saved somewhere, but can't work out where. Many devices and browsers now have the facility to save and/or sync passwords entered through them, in an attempt to simplify their management by providing centralized storage. However, the very number of these available leads to a re-fragmentation.\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.\n\nThe title 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 [https://www.google.com/search?q"}
-{"number": "1947", "date": "January 26, 2018", "title": "Night Sky", "image": "night_sky.png", "titletext": "There's a mountain lion nearby, but it didn't notice you because it's reading Facebook.", "transcript": ":[Cueball and Megan are walking under the night sky.]\n:Megan: The internet is so overwhelming for me these days. It feels like everyone I know is yelling all the time.\n\n:[Frame is zoomed out. Stars are visible in the sky.]\n: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.\n:Megan: It helps you focus on what really matters.\n\n:[Frame is zoomed in again.]\n:Cueball: Like \"Where the hell are we?\"\n:Megan: And \"Why did I leave my phone at home? It has my map and flashlight.\"\n:Cueball: \"Are there mountain lions around here? Did you hear a twig break?\"\n:Megan: Yeah, the big questions!", "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 \"Digital detox|unplugging\" and getting away from technology, with the idea that this can improve one's sense of well-being, and allow a focus on the important things in life, such as asking the Meaning of life|\"big\" existential questions.\n\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 cougar|mountain lions, lurking in the darkness.\n\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.\n\nThe reference to mountain lions might be related to the declaration that eastern cougars were [http://www.courier-tribune.com/news/20180126/once-common-in-nc-eastern-cougar-declared-extinct-last-sighting-80-years-ago officially declared extinct] the day before this comic was published.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1948", "date": "January 29, 2018", "title": "Campaign Fundraising Emails", "image": "campaign_fundraising_emails.png", "titletext": "The establishment doesn't take us seriously. You know who else they didn't take seriously? Hitler. I'll be like him, but a GOOD guy instead of…", "transcript": ":[An e-mail inbox window is displayed. On each line appears an illegible e-mail address and a checkbox.]\n:'''Donate now.''' \nAs the graph indicates, prior to the introduction of the Varicella vaccine|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.
\nAs 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. \n\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.\n\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. \n\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: \"{{rw|Correlation_does_not_imply_causation|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. \n\nThe citations are real articles. The first citation ''DOI:10.15585/mmwr.mm6534a4'' is on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention|Center for Disease Control (CDC) web site at [https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6534a4.htm] and the second citation ''DOI:10.1016/j.vaccine.2012.05.050'' is an article in Vaccine at [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X12007761?via%3Dihub]. 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).\n\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. Human tooth|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, possibly a GTA reference) 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."}
-{"number": "1951", "date": "February 5, 2018", "title": "Super Bowl Watch Party", "image": "super_bowl_watch_party.png", "titletext": "It's going to be weird near the end of May when the screen goes blank for over 18 hours.", "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.]\n:Woman: Morning. How's the game?\n:Cueball: Eagles got to the 26-yard line around midnight. They've been walking across the field since then. Just entered a huddle.\n:Megan: I bet the next frame will be a cut.\n:Guy on floor: You always say that.\n:Ponytail: Do you think the first ads will come by the end of February?\n\n:[Caption below the comic:]\n: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.", "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. \n\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.\n\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 [https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-frame-rates/ 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 by 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}}\n\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.\n\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.)\n\nThe title text refers to how, during a commercial break during the 2018 Super Bowl, [https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2018/02/04/super-bowl-nbc-equipment-failure-blank-screen-super-bowl-commercial/305623002/ 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). \n\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."}
-{"number": "1952", "date": "February 7, 2018", "title": "Backpack Decisions", "image": "backpack_decisions.png", "titletext": "\"This one is perfect in every way, except that for some reason it's woven from a tungsten mesh, so it weighs 85 pounds and I'll need to carry it around on a hand cart.\" \"That seems like a bad--\" \"BUT IT HAS THE PERFECT POCKET ARRANGEMENT!\"", "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:]\n:It's down to two: the one with the charger pocket and the one with—\n:Wait, that other one is ''waterproof!''\n:Ugh. Do I even ''want'' a backpack?\n:Maybe I should be looking at messenger bags again.\n:OK, starting over.\n\n:[Caption below the comic:]\n:Amount of time I’ve spent paralyzed by indecision over choosing the right…\n:[A bar graph is shown. Each label is followed by a black bar representing the amount of time:]\n:College [short bar that is 40 pixels wide]\n:Phone [short bar that is 26 pixels wide]\n:Apartment [short bar that is 33 pixels wide]\n:Car [shortest bar, 20 pixels wide]\n:Laptop [second longest bar, 46 pixels wide]\n:Backpack [longest bar, 202 pixels wide]", "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}}\n\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.\n\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."}
-{"number": "1953", "date": "February 9, 2018", "title": "The History of Unicode", "image": "the_history_of_unicode.png", "titletext": "2048: \"Great news for Maine—we're once again an independent state!!! Thanks, @unicode, for ruling in our favor and sending troops to end New Hampshire's annexation. 🙏🚁🎖️\"", "transcript": ":[1988:]\n:[A bearded man holds a document labeled \"Unicode\". Most likely he represents Joe Becker.]\n:Bearded man: My \"Unicode\" standard should help reduce problems caused by incompatible binary text encodings.\n\n:[2018:]\n:[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.]\n:Senator Angus King\n:???\n\n:[Caption below the panel:]\n:Progress toward unifying the fundamental forces of nature", "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 gravity|gravitational and electromagnetism|electromagnetic interactions, which produce significant long-range forces whose effects can be seen directly in everyday life, and the strong interaction|strong and weak interactions|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.\n\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 Germany|East and West Germany German reunification|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 (Star Wars)|The Force, but this has, for some reason, gone unnoticed by most physicists.\n\nThe title text jokes that some physicists tried to unify the force of gravity with the 2013 movie ''Gravity (2013 film)|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 Cuarón would refuse to sell the rights to his film to Disney, even if he was held in underground chamber of water for 1031 years. \n\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 Proton_decay#Experimental_evidence|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.\n\nThe half life of protons is currently believed to be between 1031–1036 years. This should be compared to the age of the universe at around 1.3×1010 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 Cuarón cave in..."}
-{"number": "1957", "date": "February 19, 2018", "title": "2018 CVE List", "image": "2018_cve_list.png", "titletext": "CVE-2018-?????: It turns out Bruce Schneier is just two mischevious kids in a trenchcoat.", "transcript": ":[A heading is centered above a list of 21 vulnerabilities]\n:Leaked list of major 2018 security vulnerabilities \n\n:CVE-2018-????? Apple products crash when displaying certain Telugu or Bengali letter combinations.\n: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.\n:CVE-2018-????? At the cafe on Third Street, the Post-it note with the WiFi password is visible from the sidewalk.\n:CVE-2018-????? A remote attacker can inject arbitrary text into public-facing pages via the comments box.\n:CVE-2018-????? MySQL server 5.5.45 secretly runs two parallel databases for people who say \"S-Q-L\" and \"sequel.\"\n:CVE-2018-????? A flaw in some x86 CPUs could allow a root user to de-escalate to normal account privileges.\n:CVE-2018-????? Apple products catch fire when displaying emoji with diacritics.\n:CVE-2018-????? An oversight in the rules allows a dog to join a basketball team.\n: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.\n:CVE-2018-????? Nobody really knows how hypervisors work.\n: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.\n:CVE-2018-????? x86 has way too many instructions.\n:CVE-2018-????? NumPy 1.8.0 can factor primes in ''O''(log ''n'') time and must be quietly deprecated before anyone notices.\n:CVE-2018-????? Apple products grant remote access if you send them words that break the \"I before E\" rule.\n:CVE-2018-????? Skylake x86 chips can be pried from their sockets using certain flathead screwdrivers.\n:CVE-2018-????? Apparently Linus Torvalds can be bribed pretty easily.\n:CVE-2018-????? An attacker can execute malicious code on their own machine and no one can stop them.\n:CVE-2018-????? Apple products execute any code printed over a photo of a dog with a saddle and a baby riding it.\n:CVE-2018-????? Under rare circumstances, a flaw in some versions of Windows could allow Flash to be installed.\n:CVE-2018-????? Turns out the cloud is just other people's computers.\n:CVE-2018-????? A flaw in Mitre's CVE database allows arbitrary code insertion.[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 \"[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_bounds#Golf 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.\n\nInterestingly, the comic ends with an unmatched left parenthesis (something which might be intended to 859|create unresolved tension."}
-{"number": "1961", "date": "February 28, 2018", "title": "Interaction", "image": "interaction.png", "titletext": "[They do not move.]", "transcript": ":[White Hat and Cueball have just met and begins an interaction.]\n:White Hat: How are you doing?\n:Cueball: Really excited to be confidently handling this extremely basic social interaction!\n\n:[White Hat holds is arms slightly out.]\n:White Hat: Same here!\n:Cueball: Hey, congrats!\n:White Hat: You too!\n:Cueball: Thanks!\n\n:[In a frame-less beat panel, they just stand still.]\n\n:[Same setting as in the first panel.]\n:White Hat: And now it's falling apart before my eyes.\n:Cueball: I'm gonna quit while I'm ahead.\n:White Hat: Same.\n:Cueball: See you later!", "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. \n\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.\n\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.\n\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|Samuel Beckett's play ''Waiting for Godot'', where the protagonists frequently discuss leaving, but do not move.\n\nRandall has previously made :Category:Social interactions|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 years ago finishing with 1650: Baby."}
-{"number": "1962", "date": "March 2, 2018", "title": "Generations", "image": "generations.png", "titletext": "For a while it looked like the Paperclip Machines would destroy us, since they wanted to turn the whole universe into paperclips, but they abruptly lost interest in paperclips the moment their parents' generation got into making them, too.", "transcript": ":)\n\nWhen a new service appears that lets you register a name, here are some you may want to try and get first:\n\n* Straightforward\n** \n** \n** \n** \n** (Bold & Slightly Unconventional)\n\n* Recognizable\n** \"Google\"\n** \"iPhone\"\n** \"Facebook\"\n** \"BitCoin\"\n** \"Obama\"\n** \"Canada\"\n** \"NFL\"\n** \"Garfield\"\n** \n** \"NASA\"\n** \n\n* Causing Trouble\n** \"User\"\n** \"Username\"\n** \"Name\"\n** \"You\"\n** \"Guest\"\n** \"Account\"\n\n* Causing More Trouble\n** \"Admin\"\n** \"Administrator\"\n** \"System\"\n** \n** \"Help\"\n** \"Error\"\n\n* Impossible to Say\n** \"Hyphen-Emdash\"\n** \"Dash-8hyphen-8\"\n** \"Zero0ne2numeral2\"\n** \"KrisasinHemsworth\"\n** \"TheWord&Ampersand\"\n** \"ZettaWith3Teees\" \n\n* Misc\n** \n** \n** \n** \n** \"ASDF\"\n** \"QWERTY\"\n** \"Yes\"\n** \"Bot\"\n** \"Computer\"\n** \"Blocked\"\n** \"Deleted\"\n** \"Jeeves\"\n** \"Narrator\"\n** \"Internet\"\n** \"NPC\"\n** \"Password\"\n\n* Permissive Character Sets\n** \n** \n** \n** \n** \"&NBSP;\"\n** \"