Talk:2884: Log Alignment

so does anybody know how a video with a misaligned log scale even looks? like what does a log scale even mean for a video? 172.71.99.18 19:30, 22 January 2024 (UTC)mstrofcmdy209

I think he's suggesting that the video shows the changes in a graph over time, and the misalignment could also change during the video. Barmar (talk) 20:47, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Imagine that a plot is just a 2D picture, or even more fundamentally as a function taking two variables and returning a pixel color. Changing an axis of the plot to be logarithmic is equivalent to applying a non-uniform scaling to one of the input variables to that function. In this comic that non-uniform scaling has instead been applied along an axis that does not correspond to either the X or Y axes but instead some combination of the two. A video can similarly be thought of as a function of 3 variables (X, Y, T) and so the non-uniform log scaling could be applied along an axis that is some combination of the X, T, and T axes. 172.71.154.252 23:37, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

it's time, probably -jade 172.69.64.198 20:28, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

LOG is also a video format, though I don't understand this well enough to discern whether this might be part of the joke or an unintentional coincidence.172.70.86.80 09:59, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

it's pretty common for videos to have flashbacks and scene changes. Graphing the electron beam for crt video would be pretty pretty straightforward, just wavy line(s) with pulses that mean go down one line and back the far "left."108.162.216.19 17:14, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

There seems to be a subtle relativity joke in the title text, with misalignments in both time and space being a reference to spacetime. 172.71.154.42 (talk) 00:05, 23 January 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Shall we try to straighten out the plot with regards to the axes, leaving the log stripes all wavy? For kicks? -- Enfield (talk) 02:14, 23 January 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

https://xkcd.com/356/ Bischoff (talk) 08:33, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

I feel like this comic, along with others like 2023: Y-Axis and 2311: Confidence Interval should go in a category for misleading charts. -- 172.69.33.111 (talk) 02:23, 23 January 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

It may be interesting to refer to a tephigram instead of, or as well as, a SkewT-LogP as a tephigram has no normal axis. In my opinion, this makes the point even stronger. A tephigram shows the same lines as a SkewT-LogP but pressure is drawn as a curve, which straightens out the entropy lines. Temperature (te) and entropy (phi) lines are straight and normal to each other, but at around 45° to the page. 172.71.178.176 14:14, 23 January 2024 (UTC)