explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

2025: Peer Review

2020-03-19T11:22:08Z

162.158.38.94: /* Updating date of Sci-hub link being up*/

{{comic
| number = 2025
| date = July 27, 2018
| title = Peer Review
| image = peer_review.png
| titletext = Your manuscript "Don't Pay $25 to Access Any of the Articles in this Journal: A Review of Preprint Repositories and Author Willingness to Email PDF Copies for Free" has also been rejected, but nice try.
}}

==Explanation==
How academic publishing works: When a researcher wants to publish their findings, they send it to an academic journal. The editor of the journal is another researcher (usually a college professor), ''who gets paid nothing or a minimal honorarium'' for editing the journal. The editor chooses a few (usually three) peer reviewers who are other researchers familiar enough with the study's subfield to judge the study's quality fairly and accurately, and sends it out to them for review. These peer reviewers ''do not get paid'' for the work of reviewing the manuscript and offering a detailed critique of every part of the study, from literature review to methodology to conclusions drawn from the results. If the peer reviewers and editor agree that the study was well-conducted and the paper well-written (or just needs minor revisions), it is accepted and published in the journal. The researcher ''is not paid'' for getting their paper published in the journal.

In short, nobody in the process is paid for their work except the journal publisher, who charges other researchers, libraries and individuals for access to the fruit of these people's free labor. This is commonly referred to as a "{{w|Paywall}}".

This system relies upon researchers to be employed by either companies or universities in positions which require them to publish in order to remain employed or achieve promotions or pay raises. In universities, only postdocs and tenure-track or tenured professors are paid in a way that figures in their research time as well as their teaching time, which means that anyone not in one of those positions (lecturers, educators, adjunct instructors) is not paid for any research they might be doing and publishing, nor are those who are conducting research but cannot get a tenure-track job due to universities replacing tenure lines with non-tenure-track positions.

Charging for access to these works has raised {{w|The Cost of Knowledge|controversy}} in recent years, due to concerns that this may lead to {{w|Information silo}}s.

[[Ponytail]] seems to be presenting papers concluding that this flow of currency is not equitable. Unfortunately (?), the journal she has submitted these findings to has opted not to review or publish them, either because they do not find her research suitable for their publication, or because they have a financial interest which conflicts with the findings, since sending her paper to review would give it directly to her target audience.

Furthermore, the comic contains the joke that Ponytail is doing exactly what she is dis-encouraging in the paper: publishing it in a journal, which probably does not pay their reviewers and possibly locks the papers behind a paywall. However, as this is how science works at the moment, she is obliged to do so in order to reach her audience.

The title text refers to a recent Twitter [https://twitter.com/hwitteman/status/1015049411276300289 post] that went viral. Researcher Dr. Holly Witteman informs the public that you could just ask many researchers for a PDF copy of their academic paper and that they would be delighted to do so free of charge. (This hearkens back to the days of snailmail, when researchers would distribute printed copies, "reprints", of their work for, at most, the price of a self-addressed stamped envelope.) She has additionally written [http://holly.witteman.ca/index.php/2017/12/11/getting-access-to-paywalled-papers/ an article] on the situation and how to get papers for free.

Pre-Print Repositories, such as {{w|ArXiv}}, are online databases for researchers to publish drafts of their research for quick distribution to willing reviewers, sidestepping the lengthy and often arduous reviewing process as conducted by many research journals. These databases are free to access by researchers and the general public, and often papers will remain on these sites long after their journal publication, making them a convenient way to get to papers locked behind a paywall. However, the pre-print versions of the papers will often lack peer review, and as such may contain a higher occurrence of errors. There are also sites which collect and re-publish papers for free, such as [http://sci-hub.tw/ Sci-Hub], which attempts to provide all published papers free of charge globally. Links to Sci-Hub can go dead after being widely published; this one was live as of 19th of March, 2020.

In the title text, the publisher refuses to publish a paper that describes ways to get around the paywall restrictions that make up their bottom line. In this refusal they even acknowledged that the author has tried to trick them, maybe by using one of those very long titles filled with incomprehensible jargon that is almost impossible to read, and remember to the end. So they finish the refusal by adding a "but nice try".

==Transcript==
:[Ponytail is sitting in a office chair at a desk reading from a laptop. Above her the text from the screen is shown in a frame with a zigzag arrow pointing to the laptop.]
:RE: Economics Journal Submission
:We have received your manuscript ''"The Bizarre Economics of Academic Publishing: Why Volunteer Peer Reviewers Should Rise Up and Demand Payment from For-Profit Journals."''
:We have elected not to send it out for review.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Science]]
[[Category:Research Papers]]

Talk:1808: Hacking

2019-12-04T10:09:55Z

162.158.38.94:

Some explanations for title text:
* a list of millions of prime factors: trivial to produce and useless without knowing the problem they're from
* a 0-day Tamagotchi exploit: sounds not very useful, unless modern Tamagotchis [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39002142 have internet connection]
* and a technique for getting gcc and bash to execute arbitrary code: unlike other applications, these two programs (especially when used together) are specifically created to let user execute arbitrary code{{unsigned ip|141.101.80.106}}
--
Internet connected tamagotchis you say?
http://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity -- [[Special:Contributions/141.101.76.202|141.101.76.202]] 06:42, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
--

Expanded the details; I know Tamagotchi hacking is a thing, but I'll leave it to someone who actually knows about it to decide whether it's worth mentioning in the page. Also, "a list of millions of prime factors" could just as well be called "a list of millions of prime numbers", which sounds much less important, but I couldn't think of a brief way to mention that. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.4|162.158.78.4]] 09:53, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

The television-show "Zondag met Lubach" (Sunday with Lubach) has prior to the elections in the Netherlands launched the Kamergotchi-app. In this app you have to cuddle and feed your partyleader to keep him/her alive. The party leader is randomly chosen. In the last episode of the show the results from the app were compared with the polls. Surely the CIA and the Russians would like to hack this Tamagotchi-clone. Vince 10:27, 8 March 2017 (UTC){{unsigned ip|141.101.105.174}}

- I think the joke regarding the "millions or prime factors" is that "millions" sounds like a lot, but it is in fact a very small set that can be easily computed, and even more easily downloaded. It is also useless for cracking any modern encryption. Bigprimes.net has a downloadable list of the first 1.4 billion primes; the 1.4 billionth prime (32416190071) is a 40-bit number, which is only useful for factoring 80-bit products at best. The CIA would likely need (and probably do have) at least a trillion primes pre-computed. [[User:Sysin|Sysin]] ([[User talk:Sysin|talk]]) 10:53, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Say, this was the first header on the WSJ today! [[User:Jacky720|That's right, Jacky720 just signed this]] ([[User talk:Jacky720|talk]] | [[Special:Contributions/Jacky720|contribs]]) 10:54, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

I think the 0 day tamagotchi exploit might be a pun on 0 day exploits as explained above and the fact that tamigotchis use an ingame time mechanic. So a 0 day tamigotchi exploit might allow you to do something special with or to your tamigotchi while it is still and egg. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.2.28|172.68.2.28]] 12:56, 8 March 2017 (UTC)-

I think you're actually allowed to have an e-mail address like john dot doe@example.org - but a lot of programs will be greatly confused by it. That is not really a comment on the comic. Also, I once read someone's research which reported that spam list users simply delete obfuscated addresses, and particularly if "spam" appears in the address; for them, if not for the TLAs, to do more is pointless. So by all means set your real address to johnlovespamela@couples.com. Although you may have to change your names and sex. Robert Carnegie rja.carnegie@excite.com.fearless.not!:-) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.107.108|141.101.107.108]] 15:47, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

A list of one prime from each of the million most important RSA keys could accurately, if understatedly, be described as "a list of a million prime factors". If people realize what it is it would break the web. So it depends on which primes: the first million, meh; a million random primes; yawn; a million carefully chosen primes, yowza! The last two would not be obviously different unless you did some fairly minimal work. A prime the CIA classifies could be interesting. Or they could be messing with us.--[[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.21|162.158.62.21]] 15:52, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

I can't resist pointing out that anything that has a speaker also has a microphone. So a network connected tamagotchi, which is presumably capable of playing sounds, could also be used as a bug, despite being a "low-end device" ☺{{unsigned ip|162.158.78.130}}

:I don't think you can turn a speaker into a microphone using only software, you have to reconnect wires. Also the sound card must already have hardware for audio input. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.92.34|162.158.92.34]] 14:59, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
::Any speaker can be a microphone too, so "hardware for audio input" is rather loose. It just has to be capable in some way, directly or indirectly, to measure the fluctuations from sound waves striking the speaker.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.130|162.158.78.130]] 17:30, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
:::By hardware for audio input I meant electronic circuits inside the sound card that accept analog input and convert it to a digital signal. If a device is designed just for sound output it might not have the necessary electronics for sound input. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.92.34|162.158.92.34]] 21:52, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

:If the device uses a RealTek (Conexant, IDT or other) audio codec chip, malware may silently "retask" the output channel as an input channel (as per Intel High Definition Audio specification) and record sound from normally connected speakers [https://www.wired.com/2016/11/great-now-even-headphones-can-spy/ without any hardware modification]. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.92.34|162.158.92.34]] 15:16, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

If the gcc/bash thing was actually a reference to ShellShock or some other real problem, then its inclusion wouldn't be funny... [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.51|162.158.74.51]] 19:18, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Pretty sure the gcc/bash thing is a joke about using gcc to make a program, then executing it in bash. This is trivial. A real hack that did this unintentionally would need to involve some other program as well, like some way to get remote access using ssh or such. [[User:Trlkly|Trlkly]] ([[User talk:Trlkly|talk]]) 21:52, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

In light of the CIA hack revelations, I'm tempted to change my email to Me '); DROP TABLE @gmail.com [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.193|162.158.154.193]] 09:39, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Having millions of passwords without a context can be very useful. Ever heard of a dictionary attack? This list is such a dictionary. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.202|162.158.134.202]] 20:16, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

I really do not think that Cueball is being sarcastic! People exposing security leaks often seem to be convinced that they have found something terrifying when it's really something trivial. Sarcasm would be hugely less funny. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.38.94|162.158.38.94]] 10:09, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

Talk:2119: Video Orientation

2019-03-04T16:15:27Z

162.158.38.94:

[IMG]http://i64.tinypic.com/2co1zio.png[/IMG]
More readable:I think this could be done with text too.
[[Special:Contributions/172.68.154.64|172.68.154.64]] 13:41, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Obligatory prior art in this commentary space: [https://vimeo.com/313458699 Glove and Boots: Vertical Video Syndrome] (apparently they decamped from Youtube to Vimeo last month, the original c. 2013 video was Bt9zSfinwFA). [[User:JohnHawkinson|JohnHawkinson]] ([[User talk:JohnHawkinson|talk]]) 14:21, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

The title text seems to be a reference to AL, the A.I in ''2001 : A Space Odyssey'' which cause a few problems to the crew and mainly communicate through a round lens. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.226.171|172.69.226.171]] 14:27, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
::Or 2002 movie The Ring [[Special:Contributions/141.101.96.221|141.101.96.221]] 14:32, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
:I presumed it was a reference to summoning circles. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.62.160|172.69.62.160]] 15:28, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
:It was HAL, not AL in Space Odyssey. Move the letters forward one, and it's IBM. Deliberate Easter egg.

A circular screen is great for that retro-look, like a [https://picclick.com/1950s-ZENITH-PORTHOLE-Television-18-Circular-TV-Screen-113317154719.html 1950's Zenith Porthole TV]. I seem to remember seeing circular screens on some really old sci-fi shows as well. As well as one use of a [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/ThisIslandEarth triangular screen]. [[User:Shamino|Shamino]] ([[User talk:Shamino|talk]]) 14:37, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Fails in the obvious- Horizontal is better because you can send the video in to the TV news for your 15 seconds of fame without looking like a douche who doesn't know how to rotate their phone. And why isn't there a setting for "always landscape" anyway?[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 14:48, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

:I have to agree... the fact that most non-mobile screens are oriented horizontally being left out was kind of a big miss. A vertical video looks like crap on a TV or Computer Monitor (Ironically unless it's an old 3:4 one, where the difference is a lot more minor.) -Graptor [[Special:Contributions/172.69.62.220|172.69.62.220]] 15:34, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Ironically, when I first read the comic on my phone (portrait), I did not realise there was a third "CONS" column. [[User:ColinHogben|ColinHogben]] ([[User talk:ColinHogben|talk]]) 15:20, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

2115: Plutonium

2019-02-22T19:08:31Z

162.158.38.94: Undo revision 170034 by 162.158.106.6 (talk) reverting obvious nonsense

{{comic
| number = 2115
| date = February 22, 2019
| title = Plutonium
| image = plutonium.png
| titletext = It's like someone briefly joined the team running the universe, introduced their idea for a cool mechanic, then left, and now everyone is stuck pretending that this wildly unbalanced dynamic makes sense.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a SENTIENT POWER ORB. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic pokes fun at the properties of plutonium, claiming that it is so unrealistically powerful that it may as well be random sci-fi jargon. Indeed, the ability for a metal to radiate free energy sounds impossible. This is reflected by Megan and Hairy treating Cueball's idea as a practical joke.

There are devices that need substantial electrical power over long time – in the order of decades – but local sources of energy are insufficient or unavailable, yet constructing a power line or resupplying them with some power source (like fuel, fresh chemical batteries etc.) is either impossible or overly costly. Such devices include maritime beacons and buoys, automatic weather and science stations located in remote areas, and – most importantly – deep space probes and some planetary probes or science packs. Probes sent beyond Jupiter cannot effectively rely on photovoltaic panels for energy, because the large distance to the Sun means that the amount of solar radiation per unit of area is very low, requiring impractically large (and thus heavy) panels to provide enough energy. Carrying a lot of fuel also adds mass to the probe.

Instead, such devices usually use {{W|radioisotope thermoelectric generator}}s (RTGs). In an RTG the natural radioactive decay of some unstable isotope (such as Plutonium-238 or Strontium-90) produces a lot of heat, which is then used to generate energy using {{W|thermocouple}}s, which generate electricity directly from heat by employing the {{W|thermoelectric effect}}. The key element of an RTG, a pellet of radioactive material such as plutonium dioxide, could be facetiously described as a "power orb" – a lump of a substance that gives out heat apparently out of nothing.

The title text references video game development, and how after joining a team and implementing a mechanic, a dev can leave, and give others working on it little or no knowledge of how to fix a specific design.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[Megan, Hairy, Cueball, and Ponytail are talking.]
:Megan: How will we keep the spacecraft supplied with heat and electricity?
:Cueball: We could use a power orb. They give off thousands of watts 24/7.
:Megan: Huh? How do you recharge it.
:Cueball: You don't. It's just made of a metal that emits energy.
:Megan: OK, come on.
:Hairy: Can we please be serious here?
:[Caption below the panel:]
:For something that's real, plutonium is so unrealistic.

{{comic discussion}}

Talk:743: Infrastructures

2019-01-25T09:18:36Z

162.158.38.94:

The link inside "arrogance that crowds out perspective" is merely an example of a situation in which someone with the same ideology that Cueball has can declare that proponents of free software have arrogance instead of perspective. [[User:Greyson|Greyson]] ([[User talk:Greyson|talk]]) 14:23, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

How do we know that professor is going to do anything with the document other than read it? I remember electronic submission back in the Word 6 era (and probably earlier) as a direct replacement to handing over pieces of paper. Doesn't affect the joke, but is rather an unsubstantiated and unnecessary part of the explanation. [[Special:Contributions/178.98.192.132|178.98.192.132]] 00:02, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

This could use some serious style editing. I have a bad habit of using parentheses, and find that forcing myself not to use them can actually improve my writing (kowabunga! - oh shit). Whoever put in the large parenthetical expressions here may need to learn that as well. Or learn LISP, where they'll realize that parentheses are not always your friends. --[[User:Quicksilver|Quicksilver]] ([[User talk:Quicksilver|talk]]) 02:13, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

This seems a bit painted to me, sure its a comic in favor of open source but the explanation doesn't have to sound like it was written by a snob. --[[User:Lackadaisical|Lackadaisical]] ([[User talk:Lackadaisical|talk]]) 23:22, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

;Diaspora seed: a personal web server that stores all of your information and shares it with your friends

"Seed" is not used in the torrent sense (of a running client, seeding a file to other clients), but as a "personal web server that stores all of your information and shares it with your friends" via the http protocol. See [https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Federation_protocol_overview] and [http://p2pfoundation.net/Diaspora].
Here is the text I replaced:

:The "seed" to which the fellow mentioned is a reference to the {{w|BitTorrent}} protocol, an infrastructure that allows users to share files for others to download directly from them (rather than from a server). Essentially, the user packs a description of the files in a torrent file, then "seeds" the torrent file using a program made for torrenting (for example, {{w|μTorrent}}). People who want to download the files would first download the corresponding torrent file, and open it in a torrenting program to "leech" (download) the original files. After the files referred by the torrent file are downloaded, the "leechers" can "seed" them too, so that more people can download the files from them in turn. Since the user is in control of the upload and download, torrenting is an option of choice for those in support of free software.

[[User:Nealmcb|Nealmcb]] ([[User talk:Nealmcb|talk]]) 16:46, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

Since when does most of the open source word processors not save in .DOC as well, just because it is saved in that format does not mean it had to be made with MS Word. Most of the time unless I am sending a .PDF I save a copy of what I am working on in .DOC just to be sure the receiver can open it as most programs can. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.166|108.162.216.166]] 13:44, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Still relevant lol --[[User:DPS2004|DPS2004'); DROP TABLE users;--]] ([[User talk:DPS2004|talk]]) 18:20, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

No autist in over 5 years has pointed out that the bearded guy is Richard Stallman, for shame. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.94.88|172.68.94.88]] 20:39, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Why is playing "the world's tiniest open-source violin" described as "dubious"? Cueball has, in spite of warnings, engaged in and encouraged the spread of the use of an infrastructure which will have the inevitable effect of handing control of all his data to psychopathic corporations. The Bearded One surely has a right to have no pity, and in effect say "Told you so". [[Special:Contributions/162.158.38.94|162.158.38.94]] 09:18, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

2079: Alpha Centauri

2018-12-03T14:31:46Z

162.158.38.94: removed the gender of the offscreen person, and clarified pun statement

{{comic
| number = 2079
| date = November 30, 2018
| title = Alpha Centauri
| image = alpha_centauri.png
| titletext = And let's be honest, it's more like two and a half stars. Proxima is barely a star and barely bound to the system.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a SOLAR SAIL. It would be good to enumerate similar projects. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
{{w|Alpha Centauri}} is the closest star system to our solar system, being 4.37 {{w|light-year}}s away. As such, there are numerous ongoing plans and projects to journey to, and explore the star system, especially since {{w|Proxima Centauri b}} was found in 2016 to possibly have liquid water oceans and a very thin atmosphere. Ponytail announces such a project using a {{w|Voyager program|Voyager}}-like probe.

However, the offscreen person is against her idea, for the strange logic that "Alpha Centauri sucks". The person says that they looked "online" and that the system "only has three stars". This is a pun playing on the stars used in online reviews and stars in the solar system.

===Star Rating Systems===
Online rating systems, such as {{w|Yelp}}, often use {{w|Star (classification)|star rating system}}s, with more stars indicating higher quality, up to an arbitrary maximum, such as five stars to indicate the best rating. Due to [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/937:_TornadoGuard the nature of 5 star rating systems], [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1098:_Star_Ratings anything scoring less than 4 out of 5 in a 5 star rating system is crap]; and in a 10-star rating system, scoring a mere 3 stars out of a possible 10 stars would be ''exceedingly'' low quality. The Alpha Centauri star system has 3 ''physical'' {{w|star}}s: Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B, and Proxima Centauri. The offscreen person has misconstrued this fact of the system as some kind of review.

A previous comic, [[1098: Star Ratings]], points out that star ratings below 4 out of 5 tend to be seen as "crap".

The title text furthers the pun. Some online star rating systems also allow partial stars, such as a half-star, to allow more precision in rating (e.g. rating 2.5 stars instead of being forced to chose 3 stars or 2 stars), or display an average collective rating as partial stars (e.g. showing 2.5 stars when five people have rated 3 stars and five people have rated 2 stars). Alpha Centauri's "half star" refers to Proxima Centauri, a {{w|red dwarf}}, which is a type of low-mass star. According to the offscreen person, this barely qualifies it to be a star. Furthermore, Proxima Centauri is nearly 13,000 AU (0.21 light years) away from the other 2 stars in the system, so it was long unknown whether Proxima Centauri was gravitationally bound to the Alpha Centauri star system.

===Calculations===
All numbers are rounded after subsequent calculations.

According to [https://www.space.com/41447-parker-solar-probe-fastest-spacecraft-ever.html space.com] the fastest spacecraft ever will be the Parker Solar Probe which will reach 430,000 mph (692,000 km/h) as it reaches its closest point orbiting the sun. This is just over half of 1% of the needed speed of the Alpha Centauri vehicle proposed in the comic. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, is currently traveling at about 38,000 mph (61,000 km/h).

Distance to Alpha Centauri system = 4.367ly

4.367 light years / 35 years = 0.12477ly per year

0.12477 light years/year * 5.879e+12 miles/light year = 733,484,000,000 miles/year

733,484,000,000 miles/year / 365 days/year / 24 hours/day = 83,000,000 Miles/hour / 1.60934 miles/kilometer = 134,000,000 Kilometers/hour

The above math assumes a constant speed, and requires a speed of ~0.124855c. Assuming a constant acceleration from rest (non-relativistic math follows):

35*365.25*24*60*60 = 1.10e+9 seconds in 35 years

4.367 * 5.879e+12 = 2.57e+13miles, 4.13e+13 km, 4.13e+16 m.

x = 1/2*a*t2

a = 2*x*t -2

Assuming constant acceleration to the halfway point and constant deceleration to the destination, (otherwise you streak through the system, barely observing anything):

ttrip = 2*thalfway

a = 2*2.06e+16*(5.50e+8) -2 = 0.136 m/s2, roughly 1/80 gravity.

vhalfway = a*thalfway.

Top Speed: 75,000,000 m/s ~ 1/4*c.

Assuming E = F*d, 0.136*1*4.13e+16 = 5.37e15 Joules will be required for each kilogram carried to Alpha Centauri in 35 years.

This would require an unimaginable amount of mass for a conventional chemical rocket, and is a completely impractical power requirement for any sort of passive solar sail concept.

Further, the top speed is fast enough to require a recalculation using relativistic physics to model the problem. This means that the energy budget will need to increase, as the relativistic mass of the probe will increase, requiring more force (and thus more energy) to accelerate and decelerate near its top speed than this calculation returns.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot Active], laser based propulsion methods require currently non-existent and purely specualtive laser and materials technologies, as well as a powerplant equivalent to 12,500 of the [https://www.power-technology.com/features/feature-largest-nuclear-power-plants-world/ World's Largest Nuclear Plant] to transport sub-gram masses on this timescale. This also assumes that any probes can be steered accurately enough across interstellar distances to come close enough to image with any resolution the bodies they will be passing at a non-trivial fraction of c.

Short of FTL travel or near-perfect mass-energy conversion technology, transporting more than a fraction of a gram of material to Alpha Centauri in a human lifetime will be unachievable. Short of an enormous breakthrough in power generation, transporting even a fraction of a gram is impossible.

Nonetheless, [http://breakthroughinitiatives.org/challenges/3 Breakthrough Starshot] is attempting to send many gram-sized probes to Alpha Centauri within the century. Following current technological trends, they expect the efficiency of laser-based propulsion to increase by launch time, allowing launches driven by an unreasonably-large-but-achievable amount of power. The top speed needed is halved by refraining from slowing at all at the destination: the probes will aim a distance away from the target, so that it traverses by slowly enough for a camera to rotate and track it, even at near-light speeds. To account for error and space dust, the plan is to launch many tiny probes simultaneously. They may only be able to accomplish their goal if they can get enough funding to actually affect the global economy enough to make the technologies they require more efficient to produce. Launches would additionally burn incredible quantities of natural gas.

==Transcript==
:[Ponytail stands on a podium giving a presentation in front of a slide with an image of a [https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 Voyager-like] spacecraft.]
:Ponytail: Our probe can reach Alpha Centauri in under 35 years.
:Offscreen voice: We should go somewhere else. Alpha Centauri sucks.
:Ponytail: Huh? It's the closest, most convenient system!
:Offscreen: Yeah, but I checked online and it only has three stars.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Space probes]]
[[Category:Online reviews]]

1996: Morning News

2018-05-21T18:51:46Z

162.158.38.94: Fix typo.

This is comic number 1996, for the comic with the name 1996 click here: [[768: 1996]]
{{comic
| number = 1996
| date = May 21, 2018
| title = Morning News
| image = morning_news.png
| titletext = Support your local paper, unless it's just been bought by some sinister hedge fund or something, which it probably has.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a DEAR OLD GRANNY - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

Megan is complaining to Hairbun about her easy access to infuriating national news stories and bad opinions and worries that it may be having a negative effect on her. Hairbun sarcastically tells Megan that things were different in her time, stating that access to infuriating national news stories and bad opinions required only a tiny bit more time during a morning routine. Megan counters this idea and says that while it is true they also had much more local news mixed in and that there were no bad opinions. Hairbun agrees with Megan on the former and suspiciously suggests that Megan not check the latter.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[Megan, looking on a smartphone in her hand, and Hairbun are standing together and talk.]
:Megan: Every morning, before my eyes even focus all the way, I read a bunch of infuriating national news stories and bad opinions. I wonder what this is doing to my brain.
:Megan: It's probably not great.

:[Zoom in to the head of Hairbun.]
:Hairbun: Back in my day, we had to pay people to '''''print out''''' infuriating news stories and bring them to our door. And we waited until we had stumbled out to the '''''kitchen''''' to read them.
:Hairbun: '''''Totally''''' different.

:[Frameless panel, zoom out on both while Megan has lowered her hand holding the phone.]
:Megan: OK, fair. But newspapers at least had more local news mixed in, right?
:Hairbun: Yeah, true.

:Megan: I bet they weren't full of bad opinions.
:Hairbun: Yyyyyes.
:Hairbun: All our opinions were good. It was a remarkable time.
:Hairbun: Please don't go check.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairbun]]