explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:2490: Pre-Pandemic Ketchup

2021-07-18T18:56:57Z

141.101.105.124: Eleborated on the impact of persistent post illness changed flavor perception as impact the Corona illness

is this cueball or randall? [[Special:Contributions/173.245.54.235|173.245.54.235]] 15:47, 16 July 2021 (UTC)Bumpf
:It's Randall writing pandemic comics (which aren't nearly as funny or quirky as some of his earlier work). I wouldn't mind it so much if he somehow included the more nerdy/geeky aspects (like maybe something to do with the genome, or with computer science, etc.). [[Special:Contributions/172.68.143.4|127.0.0.1]] 16:34, 16 July 2021 (UTC)
::What's with the weird signature? If you really want to be localhost, I don't think there's anything to stop you registering 127․0․0․1 as a username, but manually entering a signature with a link to the wrong contributions page is a little weird. [[User:Angel|Angel]] ([[User talk:Angel|talk]]) 10:39, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

i don't get it. ketchup keeps basically forever. i'd consider a bottle from early 2020 practically fresh. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.92.182|162.158.92.182]] 19:58, 16 July 2021 (UTC)
: I don' think the issue is "freshness", but that Cueball panic bought a "new" or "strange" brand, that they no longer are interested in trying or eating. Compare to the title text "discard the last weird food item". [[Special:Contributions/172.70.98.2|172.70.98.2]] 20:53, 16 July 2021 (UTC)
: Ketchup keeps basically forever when refrigerated. Not everybody does that (though I do). [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.222|108.162.245.222]] 07:31, 17 July 2021 (UTC)
: A bottle of ketchup costs what – maybe two dollars, three dollars tops? For that sort of money, it ain't worth taking the chance. Pitch it out and replace it. [[User:RAGBRAIvet|RAGBRAIvet]] ([[User talk:RAGBRAIvet|talk]]) 05:53, 18 July 2021 (UTC)
:: Good ketchup costs four, plus a trip to the store or shipping, and stays better than average ketchup for over a decade if kept cool. A mere 1.5 years? Only worth it if the power went out so long that your fridge warmed up. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.4|162.158.106.4]] 16:34, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

I even have pre-apprenticeship sugar sprinkles. And I'm currently in my third job. [[User:Fabian42|Fabian42]] ([[User talk:Fabian42|talk]]) 21:48, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

My reading of it is that they ''once'' might have bought that brand (maybe regularly, maybe as a 'try it and see'), and yet for some reason (perhaps through a combination of other people panic buying in the early days, later on just rushing in and out of stores with what is truly wanted, any online/curb-pickup options being more limited or just less compulsive buying without lingering by those oh-so-attractive "end of shelf" consumer-trap displays) it was not bought again as various degrees of lockdowns hit. (It also seems not to have suffered the fate of "we haven't had a proper shop in days, how about if we combine our last tin of soup with those cornflakes and further drench it with whatever random sauces we can find?" first-world-problem desparation. Maybe it was just ''too'' far back in the cupboard, crushed behind the tons of panic-bought toiletroll/etc?). Whatever the full implications of its existence, there's clearly no nostalgia for it. Or a new favourite has been adopted after discovering it as a promoted item by the online shopping site, and this older and less exciting ketchup just aint gonna cut the mustard any more? ...but there's a lot of "if"s and "or"s and "maybe"s in my interpretation, and I have no confidence I'm consistently, or even partially, interpretting it as it was intended to be. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.152|141.101.98.152]] 22:03, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Is it worth mentioning that this appears to be the very kitchen from 2178: Expiration Date High Score? [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 02:18, 17 July 2021 (UTC)
:Not the same kitchen - upper cabinet has shelves here (vs. door there). Lower cabinet has door and drawer that stick out (vs. just a drawer pull in High Score). [[Special:Contributions/172.69.63.139|172.69.63.139]] 19:02, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Covid-19 post-desease side affect is change of taste. Certainly things with Sauer taste like pickles and ketchup will teste totally different than before covid-19 illnesses. Typical before you liked them a lot, and now they taste totally different and awful. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.54.225|172.69.54.225]] 11:36, 17 July 2021 (UTC)
: Your taste is [[326: Effect an Effect|affect]]<nowiki>ed</nowiki> post-Covid? I didn't know taste had the ability to display emotions. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.233|162.158.107.233]] 19:35, 17 July 2021 (UTC)
:: Yeah you can make fun of people that have a hard time write perfect. But you could also look at the thing he is trying to say, and help people understand the impact. It's very simple, see people that had the Corona illness have as a result changed perception of gasses and flavors coming into their senors. For example they can taste different ingredients in Pepsi Max separate, and pickles and milk chocolate that they loved before now appear to them as glorie tasting products. I think this should be part of this XKCD explained. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.105.124|141.101.105.124]] 18:56, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

I wonder if this cartoon is also a play on catch up? There are many things which have been postponed or slowed down by the pandemic response. For instance, medical procedures (elective surgeries, cancer screening, routine immunizations, dental cleanings) delayed because providers were busy or from fear of exposure, also large gatherings (e.g., weddings). [[Special:Contributions/172.69.62.9|172.69.62.9]] 19:13, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Talk:666: Silent Hammer

2021-05-10T15:20:21Z

141.101.105.124:

I took the comic to be less about a haunting and more about a "Did that really happen to me?" Especially when considering that Black Hat never bothers him again. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.218|108.162.237.218]] 08:16, 7 May 2014 (UTC)
: Quite so. People who manage to pass the course for most sciences tend to become sceptical. I think that this is to allow them to worship the beast more readily than the uneducated would. {{unsigned|Weatherlawyer}}
The comic number is 666… Is this intentional, given the creepy premise of the comic? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.177|108.162.245.177]]
: I would think so; after all, Hat guy is metaphorically the devil of this comic. --[[User:Fallencrow305|Fallencrow305]] ([[User talk:Fallencrow305|talk]]) 21:56, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
I disagree with the Title Text explanation. My guess is that Black Hat was still talking, but Cueball was just being Cueball by absentmindedly trying out the silent hammer with the first piece of wood he found. [[User:Cody Hackins|Cody Hackins]] ([[User talk:Cody Hackins|talk]]) 03:54, 12 October 2016 (UTC)

I doubt it, the first comic shows black hat doing the act. I do think that Cueball could show black hat a use for those drills though.

I don't understand the "this doesn't end well for him" part. Nothing that bad really happened to the guy. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.105.124|141.101.105.124]] 15:20, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Talk:2457: After the Pandemic

2021-04-30T18:04:44Z

141.101.105.124: Other masking benefits

Other benefits of normalizing wearing masks: keeping warmer in the winter; protecting face from sun; reducing breathing of smoke and fine particulates; potentially reduce value of facial matching in face of ubiquitous surveillance. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.105.124|141.101.105.124]] 18:04, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

2457: After the Pandemic

2021-04-30T17:56:47Z

141.101.105.124: /* Explanation */ remove excess words

{{comic
| number = 2457
| date = April 30, 2021
| title = After the Pandemic
| image = after_the_pandemic.png
| titletext = I'm looking forward to having to worry a lot less about covid, but wouldn't mind if we worried a little more about giving each other colds. Colds are bad!
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a FACE MASK. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This is another in a series of comics about the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this comic Randall is saying that he is looking forward to not having to wear a mask everywhere after the pandemic is over. Mask mandates were a common way various organizations reduced the spread of Covid-19. Now that the vaccines exist, people are assuming that these mask mandates will soon end, and in many jurisdictions they have already.

However, Randall hopes that people will continue the practice of wearing a mask when they are sick, as is common in many East Asian countries. This lets other people know the person is sick so they can give the sick person distance, and also prevents the sick person's coughs, which contain particles of the virus causing the sickness, from getting into the air. Both features help reduce the spread of communicable diseases. Also, Randall thinks other people coughing on him is gross, as do most people.

The title text continues this line of reasoning by saying Randall wants to worry less about COVID-19, but hopes people would worry more about colds. However, the main benefit from continued mask-wearing by sick people would be to help reduce the spread of the flu. Colds are generally mild and might cause someone to spend a few days home sick from work or school, however, the flu is a deadly disease that usually kills tens of thousands of people each year.

==Transcript==

{| class="wikitable"
|+After the Pandemic
|-
|Things I will not miss one bit after the Pandemic
|Things I hope stick around and become normalized
|-
|Wearing masks everywhere
|Wearing masks when you're feeling sick, because it's an easy way to tell people to give you space, and also getting coughed on is gross
|}

{{comic discussion}}

1755: Old Days

2021-04-27T13:32:22Z

141.101.105.124: /* Explanation */ www link of dwheeler now redirects to the home page, but works fine without www

{{comic
| 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.
}}

==Explanation==
This comic is showing a conversation between (young) [[Cueball]] and (old) [[Hairbun]] about computer programming in the past, specifically the {{w|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 3.5 years later. While her initial agreement that code needed to be compiled for multiple architectures is correct, Hairbun's claims rapidly grow ridiculous.

Hairbun 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 ({{w|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.

This is factually incorrect, but is plausible to those who do not have the knowledge or context to challenge it, similar to a {{w|Snipe hunt}}, or several other cultural myths told about things like the {{w|Tooth Fairy}}. It is clear from Cueball's final ''Wow'' that he falls for it. She then continues to explain more and more implausible so-called facts from the the olden days.

What she says is true in that it was tough and slow to program on punch cards, which were actually used for an extended period of time. However, there is very little in the rest of Hairbun's story that accurate, except that it was a big deal when the floppy disk was invented. The comment about punching holes in floppy disks is true. However, the nature and purpose of the holes punched this way was dramatically different than in punch cards. 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks had holes or notches in them to indicate the data capacity and it was common to punch additional holes into cheaper, lower capacity floppy disks to trick the computer into writing more data on them than specified by the manufacturer. With punchcards on the other hand, the holes themselves encoded the data so punching them was itself the act of programming. It is unclear if this was a coincidence, or intentionally included as a humorous aside to the readers who know the history as a misinterpreted truth in a sea of falsehoods.

In 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 {{w|UNIX}} co-creator {{w|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.

Hairbun 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 {{w|David A. Wheeler}} Ph.D dissertation "[http://dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/ Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)]".

==Table of statements==
{|class="wikitable"
!Statements
!Concepts used
!Explanation
|-
|Compile things for different processors
|{{w|Compiler}}s convert code from a human-readable programming language into a binary code that can be directly executed by computer processors.
|Many popular modern programming languages are either interpreted - meaning that they run directly from source code - or compile to an intermediate bytecode, like Java or common Python implementations. Programs written in such languages are portable across processor architectures - x86 to ARM, for example. {{w|Low-level programming language|Lower-level languages}} must take into account the features available on a given processor architecture and operating system. Before that, programs needed to compile directly into the native machine language for each processor they were intended to run on.
Native {{w|Machine code|machine language}} is dependent on processor architecture. Therefore different processors designed around different architectures will not run the same compiled code (unless the architectures are compatible; AMD64 processors will run i386 code natively, for example.) If the same code needs to be run on multiple architectures, it must be compiled separately for each supported architecture.
|-
|To compile your code, you had to mail it to IBM. It took 4-6 weeks.
|Similar to sending Kodachrome slide film to Kodak to be developed.
|While IBM has released multiple compilers, they sent the compiler to you, you did not send the code to them. There is some kind of truth in the statement, though: when programming on mainframes, programmers submitted their source code in the evening for compilation overnight. When there was an error in the code, they did not get a compiled version of it back, and had to resubmit their code. Sometimes there were time slots available for compilation, and in universities, students would have to wait for their next time slot for another try.
|-
|Before garbage collection, data would pile up until the computer got full and you had to throw it away.
|A {{w|Garbage collection (computer science)|garbage collector}} is a piece of the software that cleans the memory of data that is no longer being used in the execution of a program.
|Garbage collection is a form of memory management that generally destroys objects or frees up memory once a program no longer needs it. In languages without automatic memory management, like C, the program itself must keep track of what memory has been allocated, and free it once it is no longer needed. If the program does not, it can end up trying to use more memory than the computer has, and may crash. This was, however, a ''temporary'' condition. In the worst case, a simple reboot will clear the computer's memory.
|-
|Early compilers could handle code fine, but comments had to be written in assembly.
|A {{w|Comment (computer programming)|comment}} in programming is a text written in natural language that is meant to explain some feature of the source code; it is tagged such that the compiler will discard it to save space. {{w|Assembly language|Assembly}} is a low-level programming language.
|Comments, in code, are portions of one or more lines that are ignored by the compiler. They are commonly used to explain or comment on the code itself. But sometimes the comments are written in a certain way to compile documentation automatically from it. Also, when examining the output of compilers it's a common practice to use assembly code annotated with comments containing the source code of the program from which the assembly code was generated.

Hairbun's comment is thus very strange, implying the compilers of the day could only distinguish between comments and code if assembly was used to insert the separating tags.
|-
|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.
|{{w|C (programming language)|C}} is a programming language. A {{w|punch card}} is a early form of storing data; the pattern of holes and non-holes in a paper or cardboard card represented information.
|Punch cards were used through the late 1970s and early 1980s to enter programs and data in COBOL, FORTRAN and other early languages. The use of punch cards and punch card machines were being replaced by magnetic storage and {{w|text editor|text editors}} by 1972, when C (or C++) was developed. This site demonstrates a card punch and cards: [http://www.masswerk.at/keypunch/ Keypunch].

Hairbun claims that code was not written using keyboards, but by punching out letter and character shapes in the punch cards, and the computer would read keystrokes that way. Simply put, this was never true. Punch cards store characters in binary; there is no font involved and they store up to fixed limit of characters per card (80 characters in the most common format.)
|-
|C++ was big because it supported floppy disks. It still punched holes in them, but it was a start.
|{{w|C++ (programming language)|C++}} is a programming language. A {{w|floppy disk}} is a form of storing data magnetically. It's way more advanced than punch cards (by several orders of magnitude; a card can store about 80 bytes, vs 1,474,560 bytes of a floppy disk), but it's still obsolete compared to modern storage.
|Hairbun says that the improvement from C to C++ was that C++ finally "supported floppy disks", but then it turns out that in C++ the floppy disks were just used instead of punch cards. So the programming was to make holes in floppy disks rather than punch cards. This would of course not be an improvement as floppy disks store information magnetically, as opposed to physically, as punch cards do. This is likely a play on the concept of punching holes in 5.25" floppy disks to double their storage (see {{w|Double-sided disk}}), or it can also be a reference to the "index hole" of 5.25" floppy disks (see {{w|Floppy_disk#Design|Floppy disk Design}} and the tiny hole at the right of the big central hole in this [https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/roger.broughton/museum/floppys/images/201041b.jpg image]). A notch in the side of 5.25" floppy disks indicates when the disk could be written. Though many floppy disks were intended to have only a single side with data, many people used a hole punch to notch the opposite side of the disk, allowing a drive to write data to the other side of the disk in a single sided drive. 5.25" floppies also featured a tiny "index hole" near the central hole of the disk.
|}

==Transcript==
:[Cueball and Hairbun are standing together and Cueball is talking to her.]
:Cueball: What were things like in the old days?
:Cueball: I hear that you had to ... compile things for different processors?
:Hairbun: Yeah

:[Same setting in a slimmer panel, now Hairbun is replying.]
:Hairbun: To compile your code, you had to mail it to IBM.
:Hairbun: It took 4-6 weeks.

:[Close-up of Hairbun from the waist up.]
:Hairbun: Before garbage collection, data would pile up until the computer got full and you had to throw it away.

:[Same setting as in the first panel with Hairbun gesturing toward Cueball raising one hand palm up.]
:Hairbun: Early compilers could handle code fine, but comments had to be written in assembly.

:[In a frame-less panel Hairbun is seen from the front, with both arms out to the side with both hands held palm up.]
:Hairbun: '''C''' could only be written on punch cards.You had to pick a compact font, or you'd only fit a few characters per card.

:[Exactly the same setting as the first panel, but with Hairbun doing the talking.]
:Hairbun: '''C++''' was big because it supported floppy disks.
:Hairbun: It still punched holes in them, but it was a start.
:Cueball: Wow.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairbun]]
[[Category:Old Days]]
[[Category:Comics sharing name|Old Days]]
[[Category:Programming]]