explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:3016: Cold Air

2024-11-26T01:01:48Z

172.69.195.60: Simple typo (perhaps also thinko, having read that the unbuilt taller ones were 60+ in height)

Back In The Day, one of the idiot youngsters in a first-year chemistry lab, before leaving at the end of the afternoon, connected a water faucet to a natural-gas line (used for Bunsen burners) with a rubber hose, and opened both taps. By the next morning, much of the natural-gas network in the heart of the city was flooded. It took a while to get everything working again, and the cleanup wasn't cheap. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 22:50, 25 November 2024 (UTC)
:You have the right username to mention this! ;)
:Also, the 'big trick', back in my day, was to be at the (correct end of) the science-lab bench and briefly blow into a pipe (temporarily unplugged from the burner) just as you turn your tap on. Then watch as the rest of the row (downstream of your connection to the supply) have their active flames go out. ...but I leave it to your imagination the ''three'' main problems (and various other less major ones) with trying that, with the benefit of hindsight. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.195.201|172.69.195.201]] 00:02, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Anyone understand the physics here? It seems clear that adding tanks of cool, dry air will make storms (and particularly tornados) far worse, not better, as the incoming hot, wet air will react with any released air to make even worse/dramatic weather patterns. But is there more to it? If the tanks are sealed, then effect could be muted by simply not releasing the stored air once the problem is realized, but this would be countered by at least two factors: First, the title text indicates that an additonal error was made resulting in it beingg impossible to seal the stored air completely (it escapes through the water system). But also, any time weather got bad enough to open leaks in the system, I think this would produce a catastrophic result as the storm mixed with all the cold dry air at once? [[User:Mneme|Mneme]] ([[User talk:Mneme|talk]]) 23:01, 25 November 2024 (UTC)
:My understanding is generally that explosive failure of a container with sufficient "anti-tornado" air inside is going to be non-trivial (and you face this threat constantly, in the settlement that has an "air tower", whereas tornados are relatively infrequent and mostly cross countryside). ''post-edit: And the editor who set up the current explanation seems to have had much the same idea... gratifying to know I'm on the same wavelength as at least one person!''
:And the water-connection would be bad due to (first) extremely pressurised water and (immediately afterwards) almost as pressurised air pushing through the areas plumbing systems, with unknown secondary effects such as effectively blowing empty any water-heaters that ''really'' shouldn't be left to be 'boiled dry' (after enough air bubbles in, the remaining water will soak up the burner heat and evaporate beyond design limitations, adding to the gas pressure ''and'' no longer moderating the effects on the boiler body itself; not sure exactly what will go wrong, but it may not be pretty). [[Special:Contributions/172.69.195.201|172.69.195.201]] 00:02, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Without knowing which 'city' the diagram might be of (or, indeed, how figurative Cueball's illustrative figure might be), I checked the first "tornado alley" city I could think of and
came up with {{w|One Kansas City Place}} as how tall the taller buildings might be. In that case, just shy of 200m (with spire on top) and 40-odd floors. The dimensions of the 3000psi tank (external, but ignoring support infrastructure) is somewhere around 400m in height, perhaps 600m side to side, presumably oblate spheroidal, so approaching (less thickness of container walls) 75 ''million'' m³ of compressed air. Which is compressed, and would otherwise be around 15,000 million m³ (15 km³!) of atmosphere if ever released. As a very vague upper limit. Notwithstanding the apparent use of an existing (ex-)water-tower in the titletext. But obviously there's possibly abstract and definitely reinterpretable alternative interpretations of the quantities that might be involved. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.195.225|172.69.195.225]] 00:48, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

2885: Spelling

2024-01-24T14:56:29Z

172.69.195.60: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2885
| date = January 24, 2024
| title = Spelling
| image = spelling_2x.png
| imagesize = 281x333px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = Any time I misspell a word it's just because I have too much integrity to copy answers from the dictionary.
}}

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

Some words are difficult to remember how to spel, but Google and other search engines have autocorrect when you search misspelled words which will return results with the correct spelling, so some people look up their best guess of the spelling on Google, then copy the corrected version and pasted it into their document.

Cueball is having a moral dilemma about whether it is okay to do that for the word 'plagiarism' (taking other's work without permission or credits) because he thinks that doing so would be plagiarism, and presumably undermine the point he might be intending to make (e.g. "I don't support plagiarism", "I have never committed plagiarism in my life" or even "To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.").

The title text is referring to a similar moral dilemma, in which Cueball says he tends to misspell words because he would rather not "copy from the dictionary," considering that plagiarism. This is against the point of the dictionary, however, which is to serve as a reference precisely for people to look up what words are in the language, how they are spelled, defined, derived, and so on. The individual words being defined in the dictionary, by definition, cannot actually be the copyrighted intellectual property of a specific person, since they represent words already in use, rather than original work. Thus it wouldn't actually be plagiarism to copy the correct spelling from there. Only if you were to copy the accompanying entry without attribution would there be ethical and legal issues. But if one was really paranoid about avoiding plagiarism, one could always quote the source of each word they copied out of the dictionary, listing which dictionary they copied the word or words out of.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

[Cueball and Megan are looking at a laptop being operated by Cueball]

Megan: When I can't spell a word I usually just google and copy and paste it from the results.

Cueball: Yeah, but I can't do that '''HERE!!'''

[Caption below the panel:]
Why spelling "plagiarism" is especially hard
{{comic discussion}}

Talk:2882: Net Rotations

2024-01-19T09:42:41Z

172.69.195.60:

Wait, so I'm not the only one who thinks about this? [[Special:Contributions/172.71.167.177|172.71.167.177]] 23:28, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Second! Still, I'm surprised that there are no edits yet. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.160|172.70.210.160]] 23:58, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

This sounds like the premise of the 1966 sci-fi story The Revolving Boy by Gertrude Friedberg. I recall reading it sometime in the 1960s or ’70s. I wonder whether Randall has read the book too — https://solarbridge.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/the-revolving-boy-gertrude-friedberg/
I'm drawing a blank. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.68|162.158.158.68]] 01:05, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I feel like the "worldline torsion" line needs to be explained moreso than the OCD thing, since "worldline" is a word people might not know and it's the crux of the joke. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.50|162.158.62.50]] 02:47, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

:A worldline is a relativistic concept, the track of a particle (or anything, by extension) through 4D spacetime. Randall is imagining it as a physical object (not a mathematical abstraction) and thus whenever the actual object rotates, its worldline is twisted. Presumably these physical worldlines would build up torsional potential energy as they twisted, and could eventually be damaged if too many twists/year were present.[[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 02:57, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
:: Yeah - something like that needs to go in the explanation.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.47|172.70.85.47]] 09:44, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I would love to know what my net rotations is. Not enough to actually keep track, mind you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.178.126|172.70.178.126]] 02:53, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
:I had a season pass to an amusement park a few years ago, and the time I spent on the Scrambler would probably make mine quite difficult to calculate, even if I knew how many times I rode it. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.247.57|172.69.247.57]] 04:41, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
: Probably depends a lot on whether you suffer from Zoolander's Syndrome. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.62|172.70.91.62]] 09:48, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

isn't this a refernce to spacetime torsion and the einstien-cartan theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Cartan_theory

When I used to do plasma donations (they draw blood, centrifuge it, extract the plasma/platelet fraction and return the red and white cells) I would, when telling someone about it, jokingly say that the only side effect was, then I would jump and spin. [[User:RIIW - Ponder it|RIIW - Ponder it]] ([[User talk:RIIW - Ponder it|talk]]) 08:17, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

This comic makes sense in 2D because the space of rotations has fundamental group ℤ, but in 3D wouldn't you have at most ℤ/2ℤ corrections to make, since SU(2) double-covers SO(3)? cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_trick [[User:Ncf|Ncf]] ([[User talk:Ncf|talk]]) 09:27, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

:Considering the plane in which you are doing your rotation changes during the day due to Earth rotation, I think that it doesn't make sense in 3D at all. But thanks for {{w|Plate trick|link}}. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 21:00, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Is it worth mentioning the real medical conditions of torsion, e. . a torsion fracture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsion_fracture)? [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 12:43, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
:I immediately thought of medical conditions, too, in my case a torsion of the spine https://www.osmosis.org/answers/sacral-torsion . But the exercises that are supposed to alleviate back pain & torsions caused by one-sided movements (like always twisting/bending left when carrying a load, and twisting/bending right without a load) usually don't involve full rotations. [[User:Transgalactic|Transgalactic]] ([[User talk:Transgalactic|talk]]) 00:30, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

Remember that, to do it properly, any turns made in your car also have to be reversed in your car, to account for the rotation of the car's atoms. Go do a full loop through a counterclockwise cloverleaf! (Finding one is left as an exercise to the reader.) [[Special:Contributions/108.162.238.82|108.162.238.82]] 13:05, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Don't think it’s worth adding to the article but thought I would mention it here, anyone who has experience spending a long time in a VR headset will almost certainly have had to do this at some point to untwist the tether. To the point that there are apps you can run that show you how much your rotation has changed from the set 0 orientation. [[User:TomW1605|TomW1605]] ([[User talk:TomW1605|talk]]) 13:13, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
:Actually I think it's worth mentioning that the line to your virtual world (not quite a worldline, but close enough to make a pun?) will indeed suffer torsions unless you cancel out your net rotations. :-D [[User:Transgalactic|Transgalactic]] ([[User talk:Transgalactic|talk]]) 00:30, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

The CPSC recommends merry-go-rounds be limited to 13 ft/sec. https://www.sportsplayinc.com/images/cpsc.pdf For a 10 ft radius, that would be one rotation every 4.8 sec. Over "one long afternoon" (which I'll take as 6 hours) that would amount to 4,469 rotations. If you compensated for this with a mere one rotation per day, the excess rotation would be completely offset in 12 years and 3 months, so "decades" is quite an exageration. [[User:Loeb]]
: If your merry-go-round had a 20 inch diameter, though (the minimum at which those recommendations apply), at one a day it would take you nearly 37 years.[[Special:Contributions/172.69.195.60|172.69.195.60]] 09:42, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

It makes me think a lot about [[162: Angular Momentum]] [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.34|141.101.98.34]] 19:45, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

2881: Bug Thread

2024-01-16T09:36:00Z

172.69.195.60: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2881
| date = January 15, 2024
| title = Bug Thread
| image = bug_thread_2x.png
| imagesize = 317x495px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = After some account issues, we've added 6 new people from the beach house rental website support forum.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by an UNFIXED BUG MEETUP - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

A bug thread, or issue tracker, is a type of forum intended for discussions of unintended behavior in a program, also known as a bug. Examples include Github and Bugzilla. Most bug threads have a rule to only leave a comment if you have something insightful to add, such as being able to reproduce how the bug occurs or possible solutions to resolving it. However in practice this rule is often ignored and many threads end up with multiple people simply commenting that the bug still exists.

In this scenario, what the actual bug is is unknown, as the original details are off-screen. But we can see that a number of different authors are present from their differing profile icons. Although we cannot see the unreadable timestamp information on the posts, one author makes the observation that the problem has been ongoing for five years. Tongue-in-cheek, Randall suggests giving up on fixing the bug and treating the thread as some sort of socializing group instead.

The title text reveals that the meet-up was actually attempted, although (presumably unrelated) technical issues arose with the online booking of the vacation venue. Now having gained a taste for linking up with fellow 'victims' of bugs, however, the organiser appears to have extended the invitation to several other new acquaintances. These later additions having similarly fallen foul of the holiday-home site's own problematic implementation.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[Part of a discussion thread in progress on an online forum is shown. Each comment has the writer's avatar to the left of the text and small illegible text immediately above the text. Part of the first comment's text is cut off at the top.]
:Commenter #1: Same issue here.
:Commenter #2: I'm having this problem too. None of the posted fixes work.
:Commenter #3: Same.
:Commenter #4: +1. So frustrating.
:Commenter #5: I'm still having this. Did you all ever figure out a fix?
:Commenter #6: Same problem as everyone. I tried the steps in the posts here, here, and here. Nothing.
:Commenter #7: Add me to the list.
:Commenter #8: Same. Ugh. Can't believe this thread is 5 years old now.
:Commenter #9: Where does everyone live? Do we want to get a beach house for a weekend or something?
:[Caption below the image:]
:At some point, you just have to give up on fixing the bug and embrace the fact that you have dozens of new friends.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Social interactions]]

2881: Bug Thread

2024-01-16T09:35:29Z

172.69.195.60: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2881
| date = January 15, 2024
| title = Bug Thread
| image = bug_thread_2x.png
| imagesize = 317x495px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = After some account issues, we've added 6 new people from the beach house rental website support forum.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by an UNFIXED BUG MEETUP - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

A bug thread, or issue tracker, is a type of forum intended for discussions of unintended behavior in a program, also known as a bug. Examples include Github and Bugzilla. Most bug threads have a rule to only leave a comment if you have something insightful to add, such as being able to reproduce how the bug occurs or possible solutions to resolving it. However in practice this rule is often ignored and many threads end up with multiple people simply commenting that the bug still exists.

In this scenario, what the actual bug is is unknown, as the original details are off-screen. But we can see that a number of different authors are present from their differing profile icons. Although we cannot see the unreadable timestamp information on the posts, one author makes the observation that the problem has been ongoing for five years. Tongue-in-cheek, Randall suggests giving up on fixing the bug and treat the thread as some sort of socializing group instead.

The title text reveals that the meet-up was actually attempted, although (presumably unrelated) technical issues arose with the online booking of the vacation venue. Now having gained a taste for linking up with fellow 'victims' of bugs, however, the organiser appears to have extended the invitation to several other new acquaintances. These later additions having similarly fallen foul of the holiday-home site's own problematic implementation.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[Part of a discussion thread in progress on an online forum is shown. Each comment has the writer's avatar to the left of the text and small illegible text immediately above the text. Part of the first comment's text is cut off at the top.]
:Commenter #1: Same issue here.
:Commenter #2: I'm having this problem too. None of the posted fixes work.
:Commenter #3: Same.
:Commenter #4: +1. So frustrating.
:Commenter #5: I'm still having this. Did you all ever figure out a fix?
:Commenter #6: Same problem as everyone. I tried the steps in the posts here, here, and here. Nothing.
:Commenter #7: Add me to the list.
:Commenter #8: Same. Ugh. Can't believe this thread is 5 years old now.
:Commenter #9: Where does everyone live? Do we want to get a beach house for a weekend or something?
:[Caption below the image:]
:At some point, you just have to give up on fixing the bug and embrace the fact that you have dozens of new friends.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Social interactions]]