explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

1257: Monster

2013-08-28T09:51:59Z

158.169.131.14: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| 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.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete}}

This 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 on the opening scene of Pacific Rim(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1663662/), where colossal monsters called Kaiju(which means Monster in Japanese) emerged from an interdimensional portal on the floor of the Pacific Ocean and attacked cities. The caption and the title text take this joke further; since the Hiroshima bomb was an actual nuclear weapon, the comparison loses its presumed surprise effect.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript}}

:[People discussing anxiously over a table with a map. Megan has a notepad, Cueball and Ponytail are wearing police hats.]

:Megan: It's as long as a football field. Runs as fast as a cheetah.
:Cueball: Weighs as much as a blue whale.
:Blonde girl: Can we negotiate with it?
:Ponytail: No. It has the intelligence of a two-year old child.

:Caption: 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.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Language]]

1233: Relativity

2013-07-03T07:19:38Z

158.169.131.14: /* Explanation */ Terrell rotation

{{comic
| 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.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete}}

Einstein used the term ''Gedankenexperiment'', where one thinks through a scientific experiment, one too impractical or impossible to actually perform, in order to examine its consequences. Moving close to the speed of light is an example of a currently-impossible experiment. The comic mixes the term with "badonkadonk", a slang term for a good-looking butt.

The title text refers to the Shakira song "Hips Don't Lie". The appearance of rotation is known as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrell_rotation Terrell rotation]

==Transcript==
:[A box is shown with Albert Einstein in a thinking pose.]
::Albert Einstein: If I were traveling at the speed of light, my butt would look ''awesome.''
::Text below the box: Einstein was famed for his ''Gedankedank.''

{{comic discussion}}

297: Lisp Cycles

2013-04-10T13:07:28Z

158.169.131.14: /* Explanation */ typoes

{{comic
| number = 297
| date = August 1, 2007
| title = Lisp Cycles
| image = lisp_cycles.png
| titletext = I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the MIT computer science program permamently.
}}

==Explanation==
Lisp is one of the oldest high level programming languages. Despite being ahead of its times, it never got enough traction and is not widely used. However, it is considered to be a very powerful language even on the present day. [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lisp_programming_language Quotes on Lisp] shows that several big names of computer science field hold Lisp in very high esteem. [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond Eric S. Raymond] goes as far as to say:

:Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

Lisp is also famous for its use of fully parenthesized Polish prefix notation.

In the first panel of the comic, [[Cueball]] praises Lisp, noticing that no other language can still match the awe that it strikes despite the age that Lisp has. In the second panel, Cueball wonders that new programmers will continue learning the "Lisp arts" that make better programmers.

The third panel rerferences ''Star Wars: A New Hope''. Obi Wan Kenobi said these lines when he gave a lightsaber to Luke Skywalker.

:Your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as random or as clumsy as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

The title text is also a reference to Star Wars lines:

:The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.

The "MIT" mentioned in the title text is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an institute fundamental to the development of Lisp (and its derivation, Scheme).

==Transcript==
:[Cueball sitting at computer. Megan listening]
:Cueball: Lisp is over half a century old and it still has this perfect, timeless air about it.
:Cueball: I wonder if the cycles will continue forever.
:Cueball: A few coders from each new generation rediscovering the Lisp arts.
:[Man in Jedi robes carrying an armload of parentheses, speaking to Cueball]
:Jedi: These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons. For a more... civilized age.
{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]

Talk:1173: Steroids

2013-02-13T12:22:03Z

158.169.131.14: /* Douglas Adams */ new section

Does anyone know what that 'something' is? That's what I came here to find out... :/ --[[User:NeatNit|NeatNit]] ([[User talk:NeatNit|talk]]) 11:57, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

:I had a lot of ideas, but I don't know. It might be a molecule, some sort of portal transmitting sound, a star, a future life form.
:--[[User:Jaap-Jan|Jaap-Jan]] ([[User talk:Jaap-Jan|talk]]) 12:13, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

== Douglas Adams ==

Does anyone else feel that the title text has a strong Douglas Adams flavour?
And if so, can we make that hard with a quote from one of his books?

1165: Amazon

2013-01-28T13:01:18Z

158.169.131.14: edges have length, vertices are points

{{comic
| 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'.
}}

==Explanation==
The {{w|Amazon River}} in South America is the second longest river in the world and by far the largest by waterflow. {{w|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.

The measure of flow for the Amazon river (cubic meters per second) indicates the volume of water that passes a given point 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 length of 60.4 meters. By comparison the 0.9 cubic meters of goods that are shipped by Amazon.com seems very small (note that 0.9 cubic meters of goods per second is still a lot).
To illustrate this size, the comic shows an Amazonian fish (or possibly an {{w|Amazon river dolphin}}) investigating the packages.

'Minutes to skeletonize a cow' refers to {{w|piraña}}, a predatory fish with a popular reputation of being capable of the mentioned act when hunting in groups, which has little basis in reality, though.

==Transcript==
:Round 14
:Estimated outflow volume
:in cubic meters per second
:[A cube of water representing the outflow of the Amazon.]
:Amazon 220,000
:[A pile of boxes representing the outflow of Amazon.com.]
:Amazon.com 0.9
:Advantage: Amazon

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics with color]]

Talk:1133: Up Goer Five

2012-11-12T12:10:41Z

158.169.131.14: Created page with "This comic is also a celebration of what many people, presumably including former NASA employee Randall, consider the greatest technological achievement ever."

This comic is also a celebration of what many people, presumably including former NASA employee Randall, consider the greatest technological achievement ever.

1104: Feathers

2012-09-11T06:56:08Z

158.169.131.14: remove incomplete tag as explanation is now pretty much exhaustive

{{comic
| number = 1104
| date = September 05, 2012
| title = Feathers
| image = feathers.png
| imagesize =
| 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!)
}}

== Explanation ==
{{w|Dinosaur}}s have been a fascinating topic in popular science and captivated children's interest since the first fossils were discovered in modern times around the 1700's. Prior discoveries in China were described as dragon bones. The success of the ''{{w|Jurassic Park (film)|Jurassic Park}}'' movies resulted in an erroneous understanding of how dinosaurs looked by the majority of the general public. Since the first movie of that series new scientific evidence has emerged suggesting that {{w|Dromaeosauridae}}, or "raptors", the main antagonists of that movie, had looked quite different from their animatronic and cgi imitations featured in the movies; in particular, they are now known to have been much small and are believed to have had feathers and even wings, as evidenced by quill nobs observed on the arms of raptors.

[[File:Deinonychus (Raptor Prey Restraint).jpg|thumb|upright=1.5|Artist's impression of a "raptor prey restraint" as suggested by Fowler et al. (2011), and described by the child in the comic. (from Wikimedia Commons)]]
Denver Fowler is among the scientists who support this hypothesis. The comic refers to [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0028964 a publication by him and his colleagues] ("{{Wiktionary|et al.}}"), in the ''{{w|PLoS ONE}}'', an online scientific journal ("PLoS" stands for "Public Library of Science").

[[Megan]] believes this new model of the appearance of raptors makes them much less cool, but the way in which the child reformulates the facts to make them seem like even more vicious predators re-ignites her interest and makes the new raptors seem like even better candidates for a good action thriller movie than the original version. Thus the phrase "the past keeps getting cooler".

Clicking on the original cartoon links to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qpdk-U8fI0 a YouTube video] of a bird of prey using its wings for stability while standing on top of a moving prey, from which one can easily envision instead a raptor upon its prey — especially in case of some kind of "raptorphobia", as for [[Randall]] (see comics [[87: Velociraptors|#87]] and [[135: Substitute|#135]]). {{w|Microraptor}} was a small raptor with four wings, which lets imagine even more scarier scenes.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]

[[Category:Comics featuring Velociraptors]]

1104: Feathers

2012-09-05T11:37:48Z

158.169.131.14: original attempt at explanation

Talk:245: Floor Tiles

2012-09-05T10:03:01Z

158.169.131.14: alternative explanation

I wond what HE thinks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5Jyu6eioZ4

==Obsession==
The explanation fails to mention the link with Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Stepping on, or avoiding particular floor tiles can be an example of OCD-induced behaviour. Moreover OCD is positively correlated with high IQ and therefore within the "nerd" scope of XKCD.

The reason why Cueball simply denies walking funny (sic) instead of offering the correct explanation, apart from simplicity, may also be because he is embarrassed by the awareness of his own disorder.--[[Special:Contributions/158.169.131.14|158.169.131.14]] 10:03, 5 September 2012 (UTC)