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Handedness
A 'left-handed specialist' is a physicist who studies the weak interaction.
Title text: A 'left-handed specialist' is a physicist who studies the weak interaction.

    Explanation

    The spin of a subatomic particle gives it handedness, so that it is not identical to its mirror image. Particles may thus be described as left- or right-handed.

    This phenomenon is named after, but entirely unrelated [citation needed] to, human Handedness: most humans have a preferred hand to use between their right and left hands. In baseball, pitchers throw with their preferred hand, and batters stand with the preferred hand away from the pitcher. Batters of the opposite handedness from the pitcher have a slight advantage in hitting, and managers will sometimes choose a substitute batter or pitcher to send in based on this difference.

    This comic makes a joke by mixing up human and particle handedness, pretending that a right-handed batter is going to be swinging at left-handed particles to try to hit them. This is not how particle colliders, or baseball, work.[citation needed]

    In the title text, right-handed particles aren't affected by the weak nuclear force, so people who specialize in that force mostly study left-handed particles and could be called left-handed specialists. However, in baseball a "left-handed specialist" is a pitcher who specializes in throwing to left-handed batters, rather than anything to do with particle physics.

    Transcript

    [Ponytail and Cueball stand looking at a whiteboard on the wall which has some illegible text and a graph on it. Cueball has his hand on his chin.]
    Ponytail: The W bosons produced by the collider beam will mostly be left-handed.
    Cueball: So we should send in a right-handed batter.

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    This Week's Explanation for Improvement

    As part of the Explanation Improvement Project, each week the community selects one older, neglected, or otherwise stagnant explanation to expand and polish together. This week's pick is 380: Emoticon; please help us improve it! To get involved with the project, you can also nominate an explanation or vote on current nominations!

    Emoticon
    U+FDD0 is actually Unicode for the eye of the basilisk, though for safety reasons no font actually renders it.
    Title text: U+FDD0 is actually Unicode for the eye of the basilisk, though for safety reasons no font actually renders it.

      Explanation

      Welcome to This Week's Explanation for Improvement! Anyone is encouraged to help explain comic 380: Emoticon; click here to get started! If you are new to wiki editing, you can read our editing FAQ for guidance. Here are some suggestions for improving this explanation:

        Explain that Cueball is not called Rob in this comic because the username is a reference; consider moving this to a more prominent position rather than the last paragraph?
        Link similar comics that feature chat clients.
        Give an historical background about old chatrooms and requests for A/S/L, which are now uncommon.

      A basilisk, originating in Greco-Roman antiquity, is a legendary creature reputed to have the power to kill, or turn to stone, any living creature with a single glance (Shakespeare, in his play Richard III, uses the basilisk as a metaphor for something that kills). In this comic Cueball doesn't appear to be turned to stone, he simply appears to have died.

      Cueball, who goes by "NICKM", chats online with a user named "BSLSK05" via instant messaging. He quickly learns, much to his dismay, that he is chatting with an actual basilisk, who kills him by texting him a smiley emoticon (a colon and a closing parenthesis: :)), suggesting that the basilisk's power can extend beyond actual physical eye contact and is effective even with a mere visual representation of a pair of "basilisk" eyes as keyboard characters.

      The username "BSLSK05" is, of course, the word "basilisk" without vowels and with appended numbers. Often, appended numbers in a username denote the last two digits of the year when the user was born, which in modern internet settings usually refers to years in the 21st century. The numbers could also just be a random string of digits users add to their usernames when their initial choice has already been taken, since most websites disallow the same username for different users.

      Cueball's question, "A/S/L?", is an online texting shorthand for requesting information about someone, specifically their age, sex, and location. This was commonly used when first meeting someone online in text-only mediums, especially in determining how they might wish to continue to converse with their correspondent - whether it might lead to online flirting or finding some other interesting topic of conversation. The term has fallen out of style since the comic, with the introduction of avatars, profile pictures, and other methods of presenting a user's identity up front. Modern dating sites such as Tinder have built-in algorithms that automatically connect people whose preferences match, skipping the basic introduction stage of a first-time interaction entirely.

      Some more modern chat-only platforms, such as Emerald Chat, have birthed new introductory questions such as 'M or F' to ask a person's gender.

      The type of chat system pictured may be Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the earliest popular system used for instant messaging, as most IRC clients share the use of formatting usernames with surrounding angle brackets and prefixing event messages with "-!-".

      The title text refers to the Unicode character at code point U+FDD0, which is a non-character — this specific one is permanently reserved for internal application processing rather than regular text, meaning no font sets support the character. If you attempt to render the non-character in a text field or editor, it would either not show up or would display as an empty rectangle (🯄) or an invalid/missing character box (�). Unicode does, however, have many characters for representing images and icons/symbols, such as ✉ (Envelope), ☎ (Telephone), ✏ (Pencil), ✂ (Scissors), ⚙ (Gear), ★ (Star), ancient Egyptian glyphs, and (most popularly) emojis. The title text claims that U+FDD0 is actually the character for the eye of a basilisk (which does not exist), but is not rendered by any fonts for safety reasons, because it may kill anybody who looks at the character.

      The myth of the basilisk has been adapted into many places in popular culture which the comic may be referencing, rather than the original myth directly. In this comic, Cueball is explicitly not referred to as Rob, if his username is to be taken at face value. This is because, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets of the novel and movie series Harry Potter, a basilisk is let loose in Hogwarts School of Wizardry. The character going by "NICKM" could refer to the character Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, also known as Nearly Headless Nick, a ghost who, in the story, becomes a victim of the basilisk's gaze. However, since he is a ghost and has already died, he is instead rendered immobile, or in the book, "petrified". Another possible reference is the Basilisk monster from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Here, the Basilisk is a monster with the special ability "Petrifying Gaze".

      Transcript

      [Cueball sits at computer, typing. The computer screen reads as follows:]
      ~!~ Opening Chat with BSLSK05
      <NICKM> Hi!
      <NICKM> A/S/L?
      [The next panel is unframed, with two smaller frames within it.]
      <BSLSK05> :)
      [Cueball looks stunned, flies backward.]
      [The two smaller frames focus in on BSLSK05's emoticon, implying rotation to show a smile and two open eyes.]
      [Cueball at computer slouches in chair, dead, crossbones above his head.]
      [At the remote computer, a basilisk is looking at its screen, pleased with its endeavours.]

      Trivia

      The unicode character used as the eye of the basilisk, U+FDD0 did in fact kill at least one chat client, Konversation (and presumably any other Qt-based chat clients using QTextDocument). This was because U+FDD0 is one of the 32 non-characters located in the block “Arabic Presentation Forms-A” used "to make additional codes available to programmers to use for internal processing purposes". According to the Unicode FAQ they are reserved for internal (private) use.

      However, QT's UTF-8 encoder let it through anyway. But QT's qtextdocument uses U+FDD0 as text frame delimiter so when it is appended to a QTextDocument, counters run wrong and eventually it crashes.

      D-bus closes the connection and crashes the client when it encounters illegal UTF-8, and KDE's notification system works through d-bus.

      The problem was fixed after the xkcd "report" and Konversation now handles unicode normally.


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