explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:2070: Trig Identities

2018-11-10T04:09:59Z

162.158.142.100:

I am confused by the insect line. This seems to be true only if s=t.
[[Special:Contributions/141.101.96.209|141.101.96.209]] 19:03, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
:I added a note regarding how similar it sounds to 'sinsec'. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.51.154|172.68.51.154]] 01:47, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

:That one and the `cas` aren't making any sense to me. [[User:GreatBigDot|GreatBigDot]] ([[User talk:GreatBigDot|talk]]) 20:02, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
::Oh, the casinus is much important to... What was it? --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 20:15, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
::cas is realtively easy... it is cos(theta)=a/c -> cs(theta)=ao/c -> cas(theta)=o/c; when you realise that the top one isn't zero but o it clicks [[Special:Contributions/141.101.96.209|141.101.96.209]] 23:35, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
:::You made the same error Randall did: you divided by 'o' on the left and multiplied on the right. I think the theme of the page is expanding significantly upon common math errors that were already humorous, like the common proof of 5=3 by dividing and multiplying by zero. The error here is in line with the theme of casual beginner errors. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.51.154|172.68.51.154]]

:I think insect is.. a bug.. ;) [[User:Smerriman|Smerriman]] ([[User talk:Smerriman|talk]]) 20:18, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

Is Enchant at target a magic:the gathering reference? [[User:AncientSwordRage|AncientSwordRage]] ([[User talk:AncientSwordRage|talk]]) 20:55, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
:I think it is a Magic: The Gathering reference. Although it is phrased oddly. You'd think it would be "at target enchantment", rather than "target at enchantment". --[[User:Dryhamm|Dryhamm]] ([[User talk:Dryhamm|talk]]) 21:04, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
:: Likely, it refers to the bigbox retailer, Target.

:Voila - s=t.
::That was incredible! (assuming previous poster discovered the extrapolated proof in the description) [[Special:Contributions/172.68.51.154|172.68.51.154]] 01:47, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
::Combining <math>\cos\theta=\frac{a}{c}</math> and <math>\mathrm{cas}\ \theta=\frac{o}{c}</math> allows you to conclude <math>a^2 = o^2</math>, not <math>a=o</math>.

Somebody added a comment on puns, e.g. that "cin sucks". More explanation is needed. It looks like some kind of a meta-joke. If you ask why, and start interpreting, you see that "b/c" == "because". It might be the answer to why the puns line should be removed, though. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.51.154|172.68.51.154]]

For the Bot->Boat->Stoat line, this comes from the word game where you add/change letters to make a new word. Start with bot=a/c, multiply by a on both sides gets boat=a^2/c. Multiply by st on both sides and divide b on both sides gets Stoat=a^2/c*St/b.

Uh... people... THE NAME GAME? Hello?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_Game

Checking through the math, just working from the real trig identities, without considering Randall's at-first-glance questionable identities like cas theta = o/c, basically everything that does not have a factor of d or 2 in it is equal to 1, and d is equal to 1/2, which then establishes the more questionable identities as tautological, 1=1. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.142.100|162.158.142.100]] 04:09, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

2015: New Phone Thread

2018-10-10T18:08:10Z

162.158.142.100: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2015
| date = July 4, 2018
| title = New Phone Thread
| image = new_phone_thread.png
| titletext = I'm going to tell the manufacturer that their business practices are ADMIRABLE and ETHICAL and their developers are ATTRACTIVE and I'm going to report them to the FCC for their IMPECCABLE VIRTUE.
}}

==Explanation==

This comic shows the posts on an online forum by a person whose new phone is programmed to autocorrect every complaint about the phone to a plaudit, à la Orwell. The phone goes so far as to change a certain complaint to a scripted customer testimonial, complete with a hyperlink to an ordering site. This is of course a highly undesirable feature. This is continued in the title text, which presumably contains several flattering compliments about the great developers and the company.

"It's taking the words I type and leaving them exactly the same", "I mean the words are correct" and "some of my posts look normal" are definitely something one would not normally say. However, the
auto-correct features of cell phones are so notorious for mangling people's posts, that one might express astonishment at a phone which did not change one's meaning. However the rest of the thread does not support this interpretation.

The original posts may have read something like this:

----

Whoa, weird

I'm looking at my timeline on my friends phone, and some of my posts look '''strange'''

What the hell?

I mean the words are '''incorrect'''

'''That isn't''' what I typed!'

?????????

I think this new phone is '''screwed up'''

No, it's doing it again

Those '''aren't''' my words!

Help!

How do I explain?

It's taking the words I type and '''changing them [from criticism to praise]'''

Forget it, I give up

I'll '''just''' get a new phone. This one is '''crap'''.

What?!?

Listen, if you're thinking about buying the new Mobile Pro 3, you '''shouldn't'''. It's the '''worst''' phone on the market''', a total rip-off. DON'T BUY IT!''' {or this entire paragraph may be an ad inserted by the phone with no prompting}

AAAAA HELPPP

I '''hate''' my new phone!!!!

I'm going to tell the manufacturer that their business practices are '''DEPLORABLE''' and '''HEINOUS''' and their developers are '''DISGUSTING''' and I'm going to report them to the FCC for their '''DESPICABLE CRIME'''.
----

The comic may have been inspired by a [https://www.androidcentral.com/samsung-messages-app-randomly-sending-pictures-some-users bug in Samsung Galaxy S9 and Note 8], discovered a few days earlier – the phone sometimes sent random photos to contacts without leaving any sort of evidence. This doesn't happen with the Mobile Pro 3.

==Transcript==

:[A thread of posts by the same user is shown with a default user profile, and square and heart-shaped buttons.]

:Whoa, weird

:I'm looking at my timeline on my friends phone, and some of my posts look normal

:What the hell?

:I mean the words are correct

:That's exactly what I typed!

:?????????

:I think this new phone is working really well

:No, it's doing it again

:Those are my words!

:Help!

:How do I explain?

:It's taking the words I type and leaving them exactly the same

:Forget it, I give up

:I'll never get a new phone. This one is perfect.

:What?!?

:Listen, if you're thinking about buying the new Mobile Pro 3, you should. It's the best phone on the market at an incredible price. [ORDER NOW button]

:AAAAA HELPPP

:I love my new phone!!!!

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Smartphones]]

Talk:603: Idiocracy

2018-03-24T22:02:28Z

162.158.142.100:

This explanation seems to be incorrect. The key point was that White Hat actually was wrong! The average education has gone up, and the average IQ ''cannot'' sink! By allowing Cueball to agree with clearly false laments, he baits him into revealing his stupidity. --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 19:58, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
:The title text pretty much spells out that, in Randall's mind, White Hat is correct. [[Special:Contributions/199.27.128.66|199.27.128.66]] 06:14, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

I propose that the hatted figure is not in fact [[White_Hat|White Hat]], as neither the hat shape nor the personality are consistent with other appearances. ([[:Category:Comics featuring White Hat‏‎]]) The real White Hat, when he speaks, is generally a bit of a wet blanket or well-meaning buffoon. This one, whom I'll dub [[White_Derby|White Derby]], is speaking counter-buffoonery, what we may reasonably guess to be the actual thoughts of the author. Usually Cueball fills this role (eg [[258:_Conspiracy_Theories]]), and in fact if the roles here were reversed I'd tend to ignore the misshapen hat. But two and two, together, well... --[[Special:Contributions/66.114.70.139|66.114.70.139]] 18:39, 28 October 2013 (UTC)
:Eh. He hasn't appeared in any other strips, and it's not too harmful to put him under the umbrella of the real White Hat. I see your point; White Hat is no longer a generic character like [[Hairy]], but an actual recurring one.
:Also, have Black Hat and White Hat ever appeared in the same comic? (Click and Drag doesn't count.) [[User:Alpha|Alpha]] ([[User talk:Alpha|talk]]) 09:08, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
::White Hat is not this Safari Hat guy and this has been corrected recently. Also recently in [[1708: Dehydration]] White and Black Hat appears together and Black Hat actually reacts in a discussion White Hat has begun. See more under the explanation for [[:Category:Characters with Hats|Characters with Hats]]. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 19:56, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

So, does this page qualify for Complete now? [[Special:Contributions/199.27.128.66|199.27.128.66]] 05:36, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Sorry Randall. You're wrong here. IQ can change. Just because there is a mean for the IQ of the current population, doesn't mean that average can't shift over time. And if we used to be cavemen then either the IQ did shift, or we've always been this smart, which means we couldn't have evolved.

In this case, IQ is exactly the same as morality. Both shift ever so slightly over time, such that the mean is always the acceptable "norm". You can't feel this shift unless you study it. The difference is that morality exhibits locality, so morality shifts slower or faster depending on the subsection of society. Thus you have people who believe they are more right than others, but no one believes they are outright wrong (as a culture). Proof in the pudding is doing a poll on the population as to how smart they think they are. They always rate themselves such that the mean is shifted 1 or 2 deviations up. Same thing with morality. People all espouse a morality that they think is 1 or 2 deviations greater than the standard, whether they are a religious sect or secularists.

But the short of it, a population mean doesn't imply the mean never changes.[[User:Cflare|Cflare]] ([[User talk:Cflare|talk]]) 21:12, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

:While IQ can change, the way you're explaining it is not the way the Cueball or "White Hat" is explaining it. In fact, "White Hat" never explicitly states that IQ doesn't evolve at all; just not to the depressing trend Cueball here thinks it does. Anonymous 23:04, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

In fact average IQ cannot change. The average IQ of humanity is always 100, because that is the definition of the IQ scale.[[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.129|108.162.216.129]] 01:15, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

"IQ" per se is simply what IQ tests measure. There's no law that says any specific test that purports to be the best measure of IQ is the gold standard. In the US and many (perhaps most) other English-speaking countries, the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet scales are the most popular. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale is the IQ test most commonly used (for adults) by neuropsychologists. It's re-normed every few years (e.g., WAIS-III becomes WAIS-IV, then WAIS-V, etc.). In "re-norming" each question is studied and perhaps refined, some are dropped, and new questions--sometimes entirely new subtests--are added. The method of calculating the IQ is often tweaked as well. Re-norming involves administering versions of the test to thousands of people and using statistics to determine the one to keep. Obviously the same pool of test-takers is not used every time in a process that goes on decade after decade. It's not unusual for test questions to become more difficult and what's considered to be an average score to be a bit higher in the new edition than in the old. This has been interpreted to mean that people are getting more intelligent, but that's not the only possible explanation. (Also, the test is not normed on "humanity" but on a tiny subset of earth's humans.) Oh, and your IQ is not a number carved in stone, so to speak, but a best-guess that falls within the range of scores you'd be expected to earn if (theoretically) you took the same test multiple times.[[User:Npsych|Npsych]] ([[User talk:Npsych|talk]]) 10:20, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

If there is reason for climate change it is almost certainly due to the destruction of trees. Any ridiculous assertions about carbon dioxide can not be confirmed or denied and the political machinations about carbon dioxide stem from Margaret Thatcher's war on the coal miners in Britain.

It would be a simple matter to replant forests. All we would have to do is pay for that in higher latitudes and send in drones to deal with illegal loggers in lower latitudes. 20 years or so should sort out most of the problems.

[[User:Weatherlawyer| I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait]] ([[User talk:Weatherlawyer|talk]]) 17:03, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

: I see what you did there... This is the bit where you go "Everything I just said was wrong" --[[User:Pudder|Pudder]] ([[User talk:Pudder|talk]]) 17:26, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Elitism is an eminently more desirable trait than stupidity to breed into one's offspring. An elitist might be hated, but he will be *competent*; he will *accomplish things*, while a stupid person will harm themselves and others through their stupidity, often remaining well-liked in spite of being cancerous and toxic to everything nearby. Elitism is the bitter taste of medicine which will make you better; stupidity is the delicious candy to which you will become hopelessly addicted at a formative age, leading to a miserable lifetime of diabetes and an early death by heart failure. I only wish I intended to reproduce, so that I could practice what I preach on this regard. [[Special:Contributions/173.245.54.52|173.245.54.52]] 19:28, 30 October 2015 (UTC)

Changed the text in the first paragraph because the movie never implied that people with lower IQ were more fertile, it clearly stated that they were more likely to reproduce due to lack of education, absence of planning, and general negligence with regards to the consequences of their actions. If you disagree with me on this, go watch the movie again. Or just the first few minutes which explains this in detail. -Pennpenn [[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.162|108.162.250.162]] 05:08, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

So... what else does this explanation need to be considered complete? [[User:Edo|Edo]] ([[User talk:Edo|talk]]) 23:24, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

The explanation of the Dunning-Kruger effect is incorrect, insofar as it tries to apply the effect to intelligence, and mention here may be off topic entirely. The Dunning-Kruger effect is refers to bias in self assessment relative to the norm of low-skilled people in a given field to high skilled people in the same field. Proficiency in a field is not intelligence, nor does the theory allow generalization to intelligent people generally versus those less intelligent generally, irrespective of field, and while there is probably evidence of a correlation between IQ and and proficiency within some collection of fields, the Dunning-Kruger effect would require much stronger evidence to generalize to intelligence for specific proficiency, specifically it would require evidence of a causal, not correlative, (from skill to IQ, and not the reverse) link, and evidence that such link exists not just in general or at average, but that such link occurs in any hypothetical, non-specified area if proficiency. The wiki article that is linked is technically correct but somewhat misleading in use of the term 'cognitive ability,' which is in some contexts used to refer to intelligence, but in context refers to the specific, non-IQ domained, mental practice of effective megacognition and self-assessment, as well as a type of social awareness regarding group standards of passable performance. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.142.100|162.158.142.100]] 22:02, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

1114: Metallurgy

2017-02-23T15:37:35Z

162.158.142.100: added to LOTR category

{{comic
| number = 1114
| date = September 28, 2012
| title = Metallurgy
| image = metallurgy.png
| titletext = This exotic blade was wrought from a different fallen star. The meteorite was a carbonaceous chondrite, so it's basically a lump of gravel glued into the shape of a sword. A SPACE sword!
| imagesize =
}}

==Explanation==
The comic explains how weapons would really behave if they were made out of unusual materials. In fantasy stories, using unusual materials for weapons traditionally makes the weapons more powerful and cooler despite limited explanation for exactly why materials of extraterrestrial origin are so superior to their earthen counterparts.

The first panel is a reference to a fairly common fantasy trope: the use of iron meteorites for making weapons and armour (for example the sword "Brisingr" of the Inheritance series, "Anglachel" in the Tolkien Legendarium or the bear's armour in Pullman's Northern Lights). The quality of such metal can be rather hit-and-miss. On one hand, iron from meteorites was often mixed with "terrestrial" iron in the early stages of human development to create relatively high quality steel for swords. Undeveloped metalworking techniques at the time meant that extraterrestrial metal was often more refined and plentiful than man-made metal ingots. With that in mind, however, [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0016703767901408 research] has shown that meteorites have an abundance of the chemical element Antimony (Sb) which by itself is a very brittle metal and therefore swords forged from metals harvested from meteorites may not be as strong as lore would have one think.

The second panel is a reference to stories set in Middle-earth and the sword is Sting, which glows blue when Orcs are near. Sting used to belong to Bilbo Baggins; when he grew old he gave it to Frodo Baggins as a gift. The dagger in question, though, glows because of the radioactive properties of {{w|Actinium}} (Ac) which is also highly toxic. Definitely not a dagger you would want to carry around for your every day battles.

The word "Eldritch" in the third panel means sinister, ghostly, or magical.

The fourth panel mentions that the weapon gives a +2 to a player's attribute. This is a reference to role-playing games in which it is common to find items that are able to improve one's character by increasing desirable attributes. In this case, however, +2 to cancer risk, a consequence of the dagger's radioactivity, would definitely not be considered a desirable attribute to increase.

In the title text, the salesman tries to sell [[Cueball]] another meteoric blade, this one made from a {{w|carbonaceous chondrite}}. Carbonaceous chondrites are rocky meteors that generally don't contain a lot of metallic iron. The salesman is either stating that the blade is simply a bunch of nonferrous meteor fragments glued together in the shape of a sword, or stating that the iron he got out of the meteor is so full of impurities that it may as well be gravel. However, because it's made of extraterrestrial material he seems confident he'll still be able to sell it on novelty value alone.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball and Megan are in a weapon store talking to a bearded salesman wearing a hat.]

:[Salesman holds up a sword.]
:Salesman: This sword was forged from a fallen star. Antimony impurities make the blade surpassingly ''brittle'' and ''weak''.

:[Salesman holds up a dagger.]
:Salesman: And this dagger is made of metal from a far-off kingdom. It glows blue.
:Off-panel: When orcs are near?

:Salesman: No, always. Radiation from the Actinium content.
:Megan: ...Does it have Eldritch powers?

:Salesman: It gives the wearer +2 to cancer risk.
:Cueball: I think we should find another shop.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Physics]]
[[Category:Cancer]]
[[Category:LOTR]]