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887: Future Timeline

2024-09-29T22:19:42Z

172.69.214.39: Randall doesn't use quotes for White in the title text so we should be consistent with his formatting.

{{comic
| number = 887
| date = April 18, 2011
| title = Future Timeline
| before = [[#Explanation|↓ Skip to explanation ↓]]
| image = future timeline.png
| titletext = Not shown: the approximately 30,000 identical, vaguely hysterical articles titled "WHITE PEOPLE IN [THE US/BRITAIN] TO BECOME MINORITY BY [YEAR]!", which came up for basically any year I put in.
}}

{{TOC}}==Explanation==
This comic uses the same strategy as comic [[715: Numbers]], in which [[Randall]] uses Google to search for phrases and then charts the results. This one is charted as a timeline, whereas 715 was charted as line graphs.
It is a list of things predicted or announced by anyone at any time (the ones you see on Google search using "by the year..." or similar statements).

"2101 - War Was Beginning" is a reference to the opening narration of video game ''Zero Wing''; the same narration is famous for the internet meme "{{w|All your base are belong to us}}". As there are not any other out and out references in the comic, and the rest are actually results that you can find using Randall's methods, "War Was Beginning" was probably the only thing he got when he googled 2101 as well.

Certain events in this comic, e.g., "Social Security stops running surplus", are repeated multiple times. Also, certain bizarre events, like "Apocalypse occurs", or "Flying cars reach market", happen before rather plausible things, like "'Big one' hits California". Certain events, like "Japan is a robot-only country" or "Gillette introduces 14-blade razor" may be related to the recurring theme [[605: Extrapolating]].

According to [https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1144.pdf some official projections], (non Hispanic) {{w|White people}} will no longer be the majority in the United States by 2045 due to low birth rates and high rates of immigration. The title text is Randall's statement that, for both the US and Great Britain, there are so many sources that mention this, for any year he cared to search for and many using more far more doubtful sources (if any), that he decided that it was not worth flooding the chart with all these spurious repetitions, even though he did include other less prolific recurring themes.

This comic has similar features to [[1413: Suddenly Popular]], [[1093: Forget]], and [[891: Movie Ages]].

==The predictions==
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Year
! Prediction
! Further Details
! Outcome
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2012
| World population
| Ever since the advent of modern medicine and the more efficient agricultural processes developed since the Industrial Revolution, the human population had been growing at an unprecedented rate. This has caused some people to {{w|Human overpopulation|worry about overpopulation}}, which would cause a scarcity of resources and overcrowding, and propose various solutions, most of which involve some form of eugenics. 7 billion is a landmark number because it is a multiple of 1 billion.
| Close; Earth reached 7 billion in late 2011.
|-
| Flying cars
| For decades, flying cars have been a staple of futuristic sci-fi and technological predictions. So far very few of these predictions, which to tend to hover around 5–10 years from whatever the current date is, have come true.
| Too early; a flying car designed for consumer use was [https://www.suasnews.com/2021/04/announcing-aska-the-electric-take-off-and-landing-flying-car-for-consumers first demonstrated in July 2021] , but has yet to go into production. You could argue that helicopters count as flying cars, but these are not affordable{{citation needed}} and hence not widely used by the general public.
|-
| Canada cuts greenhouse emissions
| Currently, the Earth is experiencing an unprecedented period of warming we call global warming, caused in part by greenhouse emissions, which are gases that help trap heat in the atmosphere. Countries have repeatedly gotten together and promised to stop emitting greenhouse gases, but so far they have failed to meet their targets.
| False. Canada withdrew from the Kyoto treaty in late 2011, and its emissions in 2012 were 18% ''above'' 1990 levels (though its population had grown 26% and its GDP had grown 67% in that period).
|-
| Apocalypse occurs
| The end of a cycle of the Mayan calendar on December 22, 2012 has been used in popular culture as a basis for predicting the end of the world. Amongst other things, this included the film '2012'. Some people took this rather more seriously, and actually believed that the world would end on this date.
| False.{{Citation needed}}
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2013
| National debt paid off
| For years, the subject of national debt (in the USA) has been a political point of contention. While both parties theoretically support reducing the debt or paying it off entirely, Democrats are more willing to spend to pull the country out of recessions in the economy and Republicans to cut taxes. The last time that spending did not exceed revenue begin under Clinton, a Democrat, and ended after George W. Bush, a Republican, said that this amounted to taxpayers being "overcharged" and taxes were lowered, followed by the Great Recession. Clinton at one point proposed [https://money.cnn.com/1999/06/28/economy/clinton/ paying off the debt by 2015].
| False.
|-
| Microchipping all Americans
| Microchips are small computer chips, typically embedded in pets in case they get lost, that contain information about the pet. Some, more paranoid, people worry about the government microchipping everyone in an effort to monitor their activities.
| False, although voluntary RFID implants do exist.
|-
| Homelessness ended in MA
| In 2008, the Commission To End Homelessness in Massachusetts, under Governor Deval Patrick, proposed a plan to all but eliminate homelessness over the next five years (hence the 2013 end-date on the comic).
| False.
|-
| Health care reform law repealed
| A health care reform law, popularly known as Obamacare, was signed into law in 2010. Ever since, many Republicans have tried (in vain) to repeal it, disliking the idea that government should provide and require healthcare. However, President [[Joe Biden]] has stated to restore Obamacare.
| Too early; almost repealed in 2017.
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2014
| US leaves Afghanistan
| After the {{w|September 11 attacks|terrorist attack}} on the {{w|World Trade Center (1973–2001)|World Trade Center}} (WTC) in New York on September 11, 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan, due to the Taliban allegedly hosting al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization behind the attacks. The war has gone on since then, with the public growing increasingly tired of it. Public support then favoured a withdrawal, but for military and logistical reasons, the government could not simply move all the US troops in Afghanistan to their home. Therefore, the government promised to eventually withdraw all troops, initially planned to do so by the end of 2014.
| Too early; the remaining US troops [https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/afghanistan-afghan-troops-struggle-to-replace-americans-at-key-bagram-air-base-2480356 left Afghanistan in June 2021.]
|-
| GNU/Linux dominant OS
| An operating system, or OS, is the software that forms the structure in which applications on you computer function. Some typical OSs include Mac OS X, Windows 10, and Linux. The first two of those three are commercial products, sold as a copy by a company. The last is an open-source OS, one that anyone can download and modify free. Typically, open-source software is used by a small number of socially conscious people.
| False, although Linux-based Android dominated phones since 2011.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2015
| New Horizon reaches Pluto
| The New Horizon spacecraft is a U.S. space mission designed to go to Pluto and take photographs, collect samples, etc.
| True. [https://pluto.jhuapl.edu It reached Pluto on July 14, 2015].
|-
| Healthcare law causes hyperinflation
| The National Inflation Association warned that the [https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/healthcare-bill-to-cause-us-hyperinflation-by-2015-88711032.html healthcare bill would cause U.S. hyperinflation by 2015.]
| False.
|-
| Millennium development goals achieved
| {{w|Millennium Development Goals}}
| False.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2016
| Baby boomers begin turning 65
| {{w|Baby boomers}} are individuals conceived in the years following World War Two, roughly defined as those born from 1946-1959. This isn't so much a prediction as basic math; if you were born in 1946, you turned 65 in 2011.
| True.
|-
| Android takes 38%/45% of market share
| {{w|Android (operating system)|Android}} is a popular operating system for smartphones and tablets, created by Google. Market share is the percentage of all devices that use the product, in this case the Android operating system. These entries together are humorous because they cannot both happen at the same time.
| Too late; passed these marks in 2010. {{w|Android OS}}'s [https://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp market share was already 84.4% as of the third quarter of 2014,] showing that both estimates were overly conservative.
|-
| Windows phone overtakes iOS
| {{w|iOS}} is the operating system used by Apple iPhones. At the time of the comic, Apple's mobile OS is much more popular than Microsoft's. The article Randall found predicts that the tables will turn. However, Windows Phone was discontinued in 2017, with support for the last version (Windows Phone 10) ending on December 10, 2019.
| False.
|-
| rowspan="5"| 2017
| China completes lunar mission
| The {{w|Chinese space program}} has plans for extraterrestrial exploration, including a manned mission to the moon.
| False. The first sample-return mission was completed in November 2020.
|-
| Social Security stops running surplus
| The first of many predictions about the United States {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}} trust fund program, all predicting its decline due to a variety of factors.
| Too early. Occurred in 2021.
|-
| US budget balanced
| The {{w|United States federal budget}} outlines how much the US government spends on what in a given fiscal year. The budget is not required to be balanced, and so often more money is spent than is earned in revenue, causing the national debt to rise.
| False. Still pretty negative.
|-
| Newspapers become obsolete and die out
| The increasing popularity of social media and online news has caused a steady decline in the popularity of print media.
| False. Though newspapers (especially printed ones) are in decline, they are certainly not obsolete as of 2017, or 2022, for that matter.
|-
| Cosmetic surgery doubles
| {{w|Cosmetic Surgery}}
| False. According to the ASPS (American Society of Plastic Surgeons), 1.6 million cosmetic surgeries were performed in 2011, while 1.8 million were performed in 2017, an increase of only 0.2 million.
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2018
| Social Security stops running surplus
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}} again.
| Still too early.
|-
| Jesus returns to Earth
| A number of Christians have attempted to predict the return of Christ (a.k.a. the {{w|second coming}} or the rapture) using clues from The Bible, even though the Bible and other religious texts says that "no man can know the date" and that it would be within the lifetime of some who witnessed Jesus's first appearance. Several predicted dates have come and gone.
| False.
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2019
| Social Security stops running surplus
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}} again.
| Still too early.
|-
| Every baby has genes mapped at birth
| {{w|Gene Mapping}}
| False.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2020
| Solar power becomes cheaper than fossil fuels
| Scientists estimate that more than half of the {{w|fossil fuels}} in existence have already been found and that fossil fuel production will begin to decline due to the scarcity, causing prices to increase. At the same time, improvements in {{w|Solar Power|solar technology}} are causing the prices for solar energy to steadily decrease.
| True, though only in {{w|Cost of electricity by source#Recent_global_studies|certain cases}}.
|-
| Keyboards and mice become obsolete
| {{w|Computer input device|Computer input devices}} are beginning to adopt other inputs, such as trackpads, voice commands, touch screens, and eye tracking. While touch screens in particular are gaining widespread use with the rise of smartphones and tablets, as of 2022 desktop computers that use mice are still fairly common. And while voice-to-text has greatly improved, it still doesn't have the accuracy to replace typing. None of the other text inputs are as fast as a keyboard, and none are suitable for writing program code.
| False. While touchscreen devices ''are'' increasingly common, desktop computers are still very much in use. Mice continue to be used alongside touchscreens and trackpads, and keyboards remain the dominant method of writing on computers.
|-
| New Tappan Zee bridge constructed
| A {{w|Tappan_Zee_Bridge#Replacement_bridge|replacement bridge}} was announced in 2008.
| Too late; completed in 2017.
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2021
| US debt reaches 97% of GDP
| {{w|US Debt}}
| Too late; reached in 2011.
|-
| US unemployment falls to 2.8%
| {{w|Unemployment in the United States}}
| False: because of the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment has actually ''increased''.
|-
| Restored caliphate unifies Middle East
| A {{w|caliphate}} is a form of {{w|Islam|Islamic}} theocracy, centred around a Caliph, or successor to the prophet {{w|Muhammad}}. This prediction foreshadows the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which attempted but failed to create a caliphate in the Levant.
| False.
|-
| Lake Mead evaporates
| Formed by the {{w|Hoover Dam}} on the {{w|Colorado River}}, {{w|Lake Mead}} is the largest reservoir in the United States (measured by maximum capacity). It hasn't reached its capacity since 1983, due to drought and increased demand for water. This is linked to {{w|global warming}}.
| False, although water levels continue to fall.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2022
| Kilimanjaro snow-free
| At 5,895 metres, {{w|Kilimanjaro}} is the highest mountain in {{w|Africa}}, and the highest free-standing mountain in the world. Around 85% of its ice cover disappeared between 1912 and 2011, and it continues to recede.
| False.
|-
| HTML 5 finished
| The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) began work on {{w|HTML 5}} in 2004.
| Too late; 5.0 specification released in 2014, but incremental updates continue.
|-
| Newspapers become obsolete and die out
| This is the second time this prediction has appeared.
| False.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2023
| Jesus returns to Earth (again)
| Again.
| False.
|-
| US debt passes 100% of GDP
| This references the common fear that {{w|US Debt}} will exceed GDP, possibly causing {{w|Economic bubble|economic turmoil}}.
| Too late; reached in 2012.
|-
| All unprotected ancient forests gone from Pacific Northwest
| Likely due to a combination of wildfire and {{w|deforestation}}.
| False.
|-
| rowspan="5"| 2024
| Atlantis begins to reappear
| {{w|Atlantis}} is the name of a fictional/hypothetical island, which is supposed to have been lost beneath the sea. It's not clear why ''rising'' sea level would make it reappear.
| False.
|-
| Orangutans extinct in wild
| {{w|Orangutan|Orangutans}} are a species of great ape, currently classed as an {{w|endangered species}}, and found only in the {{w|Rainforest|rainforests}} of {{w|Borneo}} and {{w|Sumatra}}.
| False.
|-
| China lands men and women on the moon
| The {{w|Chinese space program}} has plans for extraterrestrial exploration, including a manned mission to the moon.
| False; the Chinese government planned a manned mission to the moon for the 2030s.
|-
| NASA sets up permanent moon base
| There has been a lot of hype recently about finally returning to the moon, vis-a-vis Orion.
| Too early; the {{w|Artemis program}} plans to put the {{w|Lunar Gateway}} in orbit around the moon, which will be flown up in [https://www.nasa.gov/gateway-frequently-asked-questions four launches over the course of six years, beginning "no earlier than 2025"]
|-
| Female professionals pass males in pay
| This prediction is an erroneous extrapolation from the current (at the time this comic was made) rate at which female incomes were catching up to male incomes.
| False.
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2025
| World population reaches 8 billion
| Given current rates, it seems unlikely it will take this long to hit 8 billion, but advances in birth control options and especially their availability in developing nations may slow the current rate considerably.
| Too late. This number was reached in late 2022, although it may have been reached later as some countries overcount their population.
|-
| Two billion people face water shortages
| https://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/28-01-2008/103693-water_crisis-0/
|
|-
| 62 MPG cars introduced
| 62 miles per gallon, ~3.8 L/100km. 62 MPG is a very good mileage rate at today's standard, even though [https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=5231050&page=1 some cars can be driven carefully so as to attain over 100 MPG].
|
|-
| US power fades
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-us-power-will-fade-by-2025/
| Hard to know what the precise metric for this would be.
|-
| rowspan="5"| 2026
| Atlantis emerges completely
| {{w|Atlantis}} is the name of a fictional/hypothetical island, which is supposed to have been lost beneath the sea. It seems that it has taken 2 years for it to emerge completely.
|
|-
| Rock Bands die out
| https://bestbands.wordpress.com/2009/01/25/rock-bands-to-die-out-by-2026/
|
|-
| US debt paid off
| [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/business/27view.html It’s 2026, and the Debt Is Due.]
|
|-
| Car accidents cease
| Presumably, cars will be fully automated and able to pilot themselves at this point and will have fail-safes that prevent collisions currently attributed to user error. Car accidents will always be possible, however, due to mechanical and electrical failures.
|
|-
| West coast falls into ocean
| Most likely due to {{w|San_Andreas_Fault#The_next_.22Big_One.22|a significant seismic event}}.
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2027
| Japan introduces new fastest Maglev train
| Japan's railway systems are famous for their "bullet trains", or {{w|Shinkansen}}. The Chūō Shinkansen is planned to be opened in this year.
|
|-
| Lyndon Larouche-planned Mars colony is established
| https://totse.mattfast1.com/en/technology/space_astronomy_nasa/moonmars.html
|
|-
| Social Security stops running surplus
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}} again.
|
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2028
| Tobacco outlawed
| Tobacco products (cigarettes and chewing tobacco) have become more and more taboo in modern culture, with most public places and private businesses forbidding their use indoors and near places children congregate.
|
|-
| 40% of coral reefs gone
| Many factors have been attributed to the decline of {{w|Coral_reef#Threats|coral reefs}}, including mining, over fishing, and rising ocean tempteratures.
|
|-
| US debt paid off
| {{w|US Debt}}
|
|-
| Social Security stops running surplus
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}} again
|
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2029
| Social Security trust fund exhausted
| The next stage of the collapse of {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}}. After years of deficits deplete the trust fund, the program will only be able to pay out as much in benefits as it takes in each year.
|
|-
| Computers pass the Turing test
| It is no coincidence that 2029 is the timeline for Terminator Movies.
| Some computer programs already clear the Turing Test about 30% of the time.
|-
| Aging reversed
| [https://www.zdnet.com/article/manhattan-beach-project-to-reverse-aging-by-2029/ Manhattan Beach Project to reverse aging by 2029]
|
|-
| Wikipedia reaches 30 million articles
|
| As of July 2024, Wikipedia has over [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#Grand_Total 63.2 million total articles], if all languages are included. The source being cited may have meant the English language Wikipedia, which has only {{w|Special:Statistics|6.8 million articles}}.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2030
| Half of Amazon rain forest lost to logging
| WWF press release - [https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/climate-change-speeds-up-amazon-s-destruction-says-wwf Climate Change Speeds Up Amazon’s Destruction] referring to a report on the [https://assets.panda.org/downloads/amazonas_eng_04_12b_web.pdf Amazon's vicious cycles].
|
|-
| Cancer deaths double from 2008 levels
| From the [https://www.cancer.org/myacs/newengland/global-cancer-burden-to-double-by-2030 Global Cancer Burden to Nearly Double by 2030] article about the article from page 37 of [https://www.cancer.org/research/cancerfactsfigures/globalcancerfactsfigures/global-facts-figures-2nd-ed Global Cancer Facts & Figures 2nd edition].
|
|-
| Arctic ice-free in summer
| https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091015-arctic-ice-free-gone-video-ap.html
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2031
| Computers controlled by thought
| https://www.gizmag.com/future-mobile-technology/17554/
| As of 2017, this is {{w|Brain–computer interface|already possible}}, but still not used in any mass available devices as of 2022.
|-
| Realtors replaced by technology
| https://agbeat.com/editorials/will-realtors-be-replaced-by-technology-by-the-year-2031/
|
|-
| Social Security trust fund exhausted
| https://crfb.org/blogs/cbo-95-percent-confident-social-security-trust-fund-runs-out-25-years
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2032
| "Big One" hits San Francisco
| {{w|San Franscisco}} is located on the {{w|San Andreas Fault}}, which is predicted to produce a magnitude 7+ earthquake in the 'near future'. This event is referred to as {{w|San_Andreas_Fault#The_next_.22Big_One.22|"The Big One"}}.
|
|-
| US elects first married lesbian President
| https://4chandata.org/g/In-what-major-ways-do-you-think-the-world-of-2032-will-be-different-from-that-of-today-a20155
|
|-
| Entire world converted to Christianity
| https://www.goddiscussion.com/38920/christian-domininionsts-to-take-over-the-world-by-2032/
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2033
| Kilimanjaro ice disappears
| https://www.reuters.com/article/2009/11/02/idUSL2210825
|
|-
| India becomes superpower
| https://www.facebook.com/pages/India-A-SuperPower-by-2033/151177191568098
|
|-
| Europe reaches Mars
| [https://www.spacedaily.com/news/esa-general-03zb.html Specifically, a manned European mission]. ESA's {{w|Mars Express}} probe landed in 2003.
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2034
| US diabetes cases double, treatment costs triple
| [https://www.reuters.com/article/2009/11/27/us-diabetes-usa-costs-idUSTRE5AQ0C220091127 U.S. diabetes cases to double, costs triple by 2034]
|
|-
| US builds autonomous robot army
| The concept of robots built for military service is another common element of science fiction stories. [https://www.aos-inc.com/index.php/medialias/press-releases?id=112 Unmanned Systems] article, about the [https://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA522247 2009-2034 Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap] publication ([https://www.amazon.com/2009-Unmanned-Integrated-Aircraft-Technologies-ebook/dp/B0047743A0 details at Amazon]).
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2035
| 80% of America's energy comes from renewable sources
| From fact sheet on Obama's [https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/25/fact-sheet-state-union-president-obamas-plan-win-future State of the Union.]
|
|-
| Himalayan glaciers down 80% in size
| From an IPCC report on [https://web.archive.org/web/20100116132657/https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch10s10-6-2.html The Himalayan glaciers] that has been analysed in quite some depth. See for example detailed article on an [https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2010/02/anatomy-of-ipccs-himalayan-glacier-year-2035-mess/ anatomy of IPCC’s mistake].
|
|-
| Arctic sea lane opens
| [https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/730ef8fe-27e1-11e0-8abc-00144feab49a.html#axzz3OBgEHYNY Arctic sea lane could open by 2035]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2036
| 80% of US has access to high-speed rail
| [https://www.wnyc.org/story/284946-obama-80-percent-of-americans-should-have-access-to-high-speed-rail-by-2036/ Obama: 80 Percent of Americans Should Have Access to High Speed Rail By 2036]
|
|-
| Asteroid Apophis misses/hits Earth
| 99942 Apophis is a near-Earth asteroid that caused a brief period of concern in December 2004 because initial observations indicated a probability of up to 2.7% that it would hit Earth on April 13, 2029.
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2037
| Arctic ice-free in September
| {{w|Arctic sea ice decline}}
|
|-
| Social Security trust fund exhausted
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}}
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2038
| 32-bit timestamps roll over, causing Y2K-level chaos
| On 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038, the value of time_t rolls over, that is it will return to zero. time_t is a computing standard measurement of time; it is a count of the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970. time_t is used by most computer systems to store date and time information. It is recommended that new software should convert to a 64 bit time_t; indeed, most operating systems designed to run on 64-bit hardware already use signed 64-bit time_t integers. This would give an epoch of 15:30:08 UTC on 4 December 292,277,026,596 (292 billion years away). Of course, legacy systems may not be upgradable so action taken now should prevent this becoming a problem closer to 2038...
|
|-
| "Big One" hits California
| [https://www.presstelegram.com/technology/20080414/the-big-one-likely-to-hit-by-2038 `The big one' likely to hit by 2038]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2039
| US population hits 400 Million
| [https://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2008/us400million.aspx U.S. Population Projected to Hit 400 Million in 2039]
|
|-
| Severe heat waves become commonplace
| [https://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/july/extreme-heat-study-070810.html Heat waves and extremely high temperatures could be commonplace in the U.S. by 2039, Stanford study finds]
|
|-
| Scientology becomes majority religion in US
| [https://home.snafu.de/tilman/2039.html Essay: Scientology in the year 2039]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2040
| Arctic summers ice-free
| [https://www.livescience.com/9419-arctic-summer-ice-free-2040.html Arctic Summer Could be Ice-Free by 2040]
|
|-
| Nanotechnology makes humans immortal
| [https://www.computerworld.com/article/2528330/app-development/nanotech-could-make-humans-immortal-by-2040--futurist-says.html Nanotech could make humans immortal by 2040, futurist says]
|
|-
| 2041
| Social Security trust fund exhausted
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}}
|
|-
| 2043
| World population passes 9 Billion
| {{w|Population growth}}
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2044
| Mankind genetically engineered to be happy
| Premise of the movie [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1363468/ Zenith] - further details are in the [https://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/esearch/e3i25130cd57f1590bda4527c098ac85b01 film review for Zenith.]
|
|-
| Childhood obesity reaches 100%
| [https://www.ivanhoe.com/channels/p_channelstory.cfm?storyid=11414 100-Percent Childhood Obesity Predicted by 2044]
|
|-
| 2045
| Humans and machines merge
| {{w|Ray Kurzweil}} predicts of a 'singularity' which will lead to a race of super intelligent beings.
|
|-
| 2046
| World's natural resources depleted
| [https://raphaelvanlaer.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/peak-uncertainty-when-will-we-run-out-of-fossil-fuels/ Peak uncertainty, when will we run out of fossil fuels?]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2047
| World ruled by banks and corporations
| [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Schlock-2047-RM-Krakoff-ebook/dp/B0039IT37Q Future Schlock - the story of a world turned upside down in 2047]
|
|-
| Tobacco industry fails
| [https://www.news.wisc.edu/16857 Experts: Big Tobacco dead by 2047, possibly sooner]
|
|-
| US begins using autonomous attack drones
| [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/22/us-air-force-drones-pilots-afghanistan US Air Force prepares drones to end era of fighter pilots]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2048
| Salt-water fish extinct from overfishing
| WWF report on [https://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/blue_planet/problems/problems_fishing/ unsustainable fishing.]
|
|-
| Unisex bathing suits cover body from shoulder to ankle
| [https://future.wikia.com/wiki/RyansWorld:_Bathing_Suits_of_the_Future RyansWorld: Bathing Suits of the Future]
|
|-
| Entire US population overweight
| [https://web.archive.org/web/20090321075605/https://thestatsblog.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/scientists-say-thin-people-face-extinction-in-united-states-everyone-will-be-overweight-by-2048-%E2%80%93-and-less-smart Scientists Say Thin People Face Extinction in United States: Everyone Will Be Overweight by 2048 – And Less Smart (archive)]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2049
| $1,000 computer exceeds computational ability of humanity
| [https://www.americanbar.org/content/newsletter/publications/technology_e_report_home/2007_may_technotes.html TechNotes: Trends in Technology]
|
|-
| Singularity occurs
| [https://www.prismdecision.com/the-singularity-is-near The Singularity Is Near]
|
|-
| Fishing industry collapses
| This tends to happen when your food-stock is extinct{{citation needed}} - see WWF report on [https://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/blue_planet/problems/problems_fishing/ unsustainable fishing.]
|
|-
| rowspan="5"| 2050
| 80% of Earth's population lives in urban centers
| [https://infochangeindia.org/population/books-a-reports/80-of-world-population-will-soon-be-in-urban-areas.html 80% of world population will soon be in urban areas]
|
|-
| China controls space
| [https://books.google.com/books?id=op851Uf99LQC&dq=China+controls+space+2050&source=gbs_navlinks_s Space Science & Technology in China: A Roadmap to 2050]
|
|-
| Sex with robots possible
| [https://www.livescience.com/1951-forecast-sex-marriage-robots-2050.html Forecast: Sex and Marriage with Robots by 2050]
|
|-
| Cars banned from European cities
| [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/8411336/EU-to-ban-cars-from-cities-by-2050.html EU to ban cars from cities by 2050]
|
|-
| One million species extinct from climate change
| [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0107_040107_extinction.html By 2050 Warming to Doom Million Species, Study Says]
|
|-
| 2051
| Atmosphere escapes into space
| [https://www.thehulltruth.com/boating-outdoor-photos/255705-have-you-ever-seen-fallstreak-hole.html Conspiracy theory] relating to {{w|Fallstreak hole}} or hole punch clouds.
|
|-
| 2052
| Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security spending exceed total US revenue
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}}
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2053
| US budget balanced
| [https://crfb.org/blogs/omb-releases-long-term-projections-fy2015-budget-proposal OMB releases long-term projections for the FY2015 budget proposal]
|
|-
| Majority of Americans in prison
| [https://articles.philly.com/1992-06-14/news/26032105_1_prison-officials-prison-time-prison-commissioners 'Beyond Bricks And Bars' As Jails Overflow, The Lock-'em-up Credo Is Drawing Unlikely Criticism - From Prison Officials Themselves]
|
|-
| Cars driven by dogs
|
| This has [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWAK0J8Uhzk already occurred] in 2012! However, it is not as widespread as the prediction may be implying.
|-
| 2054
| Hunger becomes unimaginable global problem
| [https://www.albionmonitor.com/0403a/earth2054.html Hunger Could Be 'Unimaginable' Global Problem By 2054]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2055
| Atmospheric CO2 doubled
| [https://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/flash_intro.php Carbon Mitigation Initiative: Stabilization Wedges]
|
|-
| Oil runs out
| [https://raphaelvanlaer.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/peak-uncertainty-when-will-we-run-out-of-fossil-fuels/ Peak uncertainty, when will we run out of fossil fuels?]
|
|-
| Copper, tin, lead, gold, and nickel all exhausted
| [https://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/environment/5-valuable-metals-that-could-vanish-by-2055 5 Valuable Metals That Could Vanish by 2055]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2056
| RFID-tagged driverless cars
| [https://www.zdnet.com/article/rfid-tagged-driverless-cars-on-roads-by-2056/ RFID-tagged driverless cars on roads by 2056]
|
|-
| Robots given same rights as humans
| [https://www.cc.gatech.edu/news/robots-given-same-rights-humans-2056 Robots Given Same Rights As Humans By 2056]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2057
| 150 Japanese settlers on Mars
| [https://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9011051292/will-japan-colonize-mars Will Japan colonize Mars?]
|
|-
| Colorado River runs dry
| [https://news.agu.org/press-release/colorado-river-reservoirs-could-bottom-out-from-warming-business-as-usual/ Colorado River Reservoirs Could Bottom Out From Warming]
|
|-
| 2058
| Smoking ends in New Zealand
| [https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10698966 Smoking to die out in NZ by 2058]
|
|-
| 2059
| Humans have domesticated robots
| [https://diehardempiricist.blogspot.co.nz/2012/05/6-may-2011-virtual-necking-demography.html Virtual necking, demography, and robots]
|
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2060
| Human race lives in peace
| [https://www.arasfoundation.org/vision.html ARAS vision/mission]
|
|-
| Extreme droughts across much of Earth
| [https://wdas.cosmosmagazine.com/news/extreme-drought-across-most-earth-30-years/ Extreme drought across most of Earth by 2060]
|
|-
| Global temperature rise reaches 4 °C
| {{w|Avoiding dangerous climate change}}
|
|-
| Oil runs out again
| [https://business.financialpost.com/2011/04/01/oil-may-run-out-by-2060-hsbc/?__lsa=98a7-5c61 Oil may run out by 2060: HSBC]
|
|-
| 2061
| Halley's comet returns
| Halley's comet returns to the inner solar system (the vicinity of earth and the sun) every 75.3 years. The last time it was near earth was in 1985-1986. When it next returns, its closest approach to the sun will occur on [https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi 28 July 2061.]
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2062
| Uganda hosts World Cup
| [https://shillingscents.blogspot.co.nz/2010/07/uganda-to-host-world-cup-in-2062.html Uganda to host world cup in 2062]
|
|-
| The Jetsons
| {{w|The Jetsons}} was an animated science fiction sitcom that first aired in 1962. The show was set in the year 2062.
|
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2063
| First human clones reach adulthood
| [https://au.ign.com/articles/2004/04/28/the-fall-last-days-of-gaia-diary-2 The Fall - Last Days of Gaia Diary #2]
|
|-
| Population of Moon reaches 100,000
| Reading Eagle newspaper article from July 17, 1963 - [https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1955&dat=19630717&id=PhgrAAAAIBAJ&sjid=B50FAAAAIBAJ&pg=4055,6599008 Moon Population of 100,000 Is Predicted for 2063] and [https://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2008/3/14/air-force-predictions-for-2063-1963.html Air Force Predictions for 2063 (1963)]
|
|-
| Population of Mars reaches 10,000
| [https://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2008/3/14/air-force-predictions-for-2063-1963.html Air Force Predictions for 2063 (1963)]
|
|-
| Spacecraft exceed speed of light
| Physics as currently understood states that it is impossible to exceed the speed of light. A monumental shift in our physics would have had to have occurred for this to come true. This is a reference to the 8th Star Trek feature Film: "Star Trek: First Contact" where Zefram Cochrane performs the first human Warp Flight on April 5, 2063.
|
|-
| 2064
| Clean Air Act finishes reducing haze in national parks to natural levels
| [https://www.cleanhouston.org/air/features/hazyfuture.htm State plan guarantees a hazy future for Texas’ wilderness areas]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2065
| Last coral reefs die out
| From an [https://www.edgeofexistence.org/coral_reef_conservation/coral_reef_video.php article about a video called Reefs on the Edge] set in 2065 where a 15-year-old girl tells her grandfather's stories of coral reefs, and their demise.
|
|-
| Chernobyl cleanup complete
| [https://rt.com/politics/chernobyl-clean-in-55-years-time/ Chernobyl clean in 55 years time?]
|
|-
| 2066
| Cyprus achieves its goal
| This is from some [https://www.cyprus-forum.com/cyprus33608-110.html#p665612 forum posts on the decendants of Cypriots] that lends support to the autonomy of Cyprus from Greek or Turkey.
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2067
| Americans live in domed cities and watch 3D TV
| The article at [https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/ncm/index.php/2013/11/15/artifact-of-the-month-slide-rule-1916/ Artifact of the Month: Slide rule, 1916] includes information from the International Slide Rule Museum that "in 1967, Keuffel & Esser Co. commissioned a study of the future, predicting that Americans in 2067 would live in domed cities and watch 3D television."
|
|-
| Redheads go extinct
| [https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/redhead-extinction.htm Are redheads going extinct?]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2068
| Ozone hole over Antarctic finishes recovering
| [https://www.theozonehole.com/recovery.htm NASA Study Finds Clock Ticking Slower On Ozone Hole Recovery]
|
|-
| Lord Jesus rules the Earth from Throne in Jerusalem.
| [https://myth-one.com/chapter_8.htm The Resurrections -- What Really Happens]
|
|-
| Entire world population gay due to chemicals in the water
| [https://thedailybanter.com/2013/01/alex-jones-the-government-is-trying-to-make-more-gay-people/ Alex Jones talks about chemicals that make people gay]
|
|-
| 2069
| Public masturbation legalized
| [https://uncyclopedia.com/wiki/UnNews:It's_still_not_okay_to_Pull_Your_Penis_out_in_Public It's still not okay to Pull Your Penis out in Public]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2070
| World population peaks
| [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1108-global-population-to-peak-in-2070.html Global population to peak in 2070]
|
|-
| City-scale flooding disasters
| [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/3317033/City-scale-flooding-disasters-predicted-by-2070.html City-scale flooding disasters predicted by 2070]
|
|-
| 60% of world's energy comes from renewable sources
| [https://www.ssisolarenergy.com/solar-alternative-energy/ What Is Alternative Energy All About?]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2071
| Europe's temperatures rise by 3 °C
| [https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/climate-energy/climate-change-adaptation/adaptation-tools/project-catalog/peseta-projection-of-economic-impacts-of-climate Projection of Economic impacts of climate change in Sectors of the European Union based on bottom-up Analysis]
|
|-
| World summer temperatures rise by 5 °C
| [https://www.climateadaptation.eu/denmark/climate-change/ See "Air temperature changes in the 21st century"]
|
|-
| 2072
| US retirement age is set to 75
| [https://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/articles/2012/06/11/how-high-will-the-retirement-age-go Up to 70-80 years]
|
|-
| 2073
| Oceans do not rise one foot
| [https://www.skepticalscience.com/sea-level-rise-predictions.htm More like 2 feet]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2074
| Number of 100-year-olds reaches one million
| [https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-8848188.html UK to have 1 million centenarians by 2074]
|
|-
| Supertyphoons hit Japan
| [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/09/08/national/super-typhoons-in-store-as-seas-warm/ Super typhoons in store as seas warm]
|
|-
| 2075
| US retirement age set to 69
| [https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2010/1112/Retirement-age-at-69-Deficit-plan-hits-Social-Security Retirement age at 69? Deficit plan hits Social Security]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2076
| Average scientific paper has more than 24 authors
| [https://doclib.uhasselt.be/dspace/bitstream/1942/871/1/yitzhaki373.PDF Multiple Authorship in Biochemistry and Other Fields] (PDF)
|
|-
| Social Security trust fund exhausted
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}}
|
|-
| 2078
| Newspapers become obsolete and die out
| The same prediction was made for 2017 and 2022. Even when most prognosticators agree that something will happen, there can still be much disagreement about ''when'' it will happen.
|
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2079
| US debt reaches 716% of GDP
| {{w|US Debt}}
|
|-
| Lodgepole pines disappear from Northwest
| [https://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2011/feb/climate-change-causing-demise-lodgepole-pine-western-north-america Climate change causing demise of lodgepole pine in western North America]
|
|-
| Floods commonplace
| [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090108101627.htm Floods To Become Commonplace By 2080]
|
|-
| Religion marginalized
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11347073
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2080
| Federal spending reaches 70% of GDP
| [https://crfb.org/sites/default/files/our_debt_problems_are_far_from_solved_updated_2.pdf Our debt problems are far from solved] (PDF)
|
|-
| UK population doubles
| [https://forums.canadiancontent.net/international-politics/69603-britains-population-hit-110-million.html Britain's population to hit 110 million]
|
|-
| 2082
| World population declines to one billion
| [https://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html Population: The Elephant in the Room]
|
|-
| 2084
| Robot policemen introduced
| [https://www.thetechherald.com/articles/Robotic-cops-set-to-stamp-out-crime-by-2084 Robotic cops set to stamp out crime by 2084]
|
|-
| 2085
| US deficit reaches 62% of GDP
| [https://moneybob.com/2010/06/28/paul-krugman-throws-in-towel-says-were-headed-for-another-depression/ Paul Krugman Throws In Towel, Says We’re Headed For Another Depression]
|
|-
| 2088
| Japan becomes all-robot country
| [https://www.theretributioners.tv/erics-blog/2009/11/25/-japan-to-become-all-robot-country-by-2088.html Japan To Become All Robot Country By 2088]
|
|-
| 2089
| World halts fossil fuel use
| {{w|Fossil Fuels}}
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2090
| Global warming hits 7 °C
| [https://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/models-warn-of-7c-dangerous-climate-change-by-2090.html Models warn of 7C dangerous climate change by 2090]. Climate change, especially global warming, is a [[:Category:Climate change|recurring theme]] in xkcd.
|
|-
| Global warming hits 4 °C
| Summarized [https://www.global-warming-forecasts.com/2090-climate-change-global-warming-2090.php here]. In reference to Andy Bowers, “Analysis: Scientists say global warming could affect California's drinking water supply,” NPR All Things Considered, June 22, 2001
|
|-
| rowspan="11"| 2100
| Global warming around 5-7 °C
| [https://grist.org/article/bau-fd/ Hadley Center study warns of ‘catastrophic’ 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path]
|
|-
| Sea levels have risen by a meter or more
| {{w|Future sea level}}
|
|-
| Joshua trees nearly extinct
| [https://news.discovery.com/earth/joshua-trees-climate-change-110325.htm Joshua Trees Nearly Wiped Out by 2100?]
|
|-
| Earth's climate resembles that of the Cretaceous
| [https://www.pnas.org/content/107/2/576 Atmospheric CO2 concentrations during ancient greenhouse climates were similar to those predicted for A.D. 2100]
|
|-
| Germany tropical
| [https://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/climate-change-predictions-a-tropical-germany-by-2100-a-463378.html Climate Change Predictions: A Tropical Germany by 2100?]
|
|-
| Emperor penguins extinct
| [https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7851276.stm Emperor penguins face extinction]
|
|-
| Arctic permafrost thaws
| [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surface-permafrost-could/ Surface Permafrost Could Disappear by 2100]
|
|-
| Rising seas flood coastal cities
| [https://uanews.org/story/rising-seas-will-affect-major-us-coastal-cities-2100 Rising Seas Will Affect Major U.S. Coastal Cities by 2100]
|
|-
| Rain forests mostly gone due to climatic shifts
| [https://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/08/06/890970/-Massive-Loss-of-Rainforest-Species-by-2100-eKos-Earthship-Friday Massive Loss of Rainforest Species by 2100]
|
|-
| All coral reefs gone
| [https://planetsave.com/2010/10/15/coral-reefs-gone-by-2100/ Coral Reefs Gone by 2100?]
|
|-
| Gillette introduces 14-bladed razor
| Each iteration of the Gillette line of safety razors has one more blade than the previous one. MadTV has also [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FAP8o5ZEo0 parodied] this. Over five years before MadTV did so, the Australian comedy group the D-Generation parodied the first two-bladed razor as the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YleuLyCUx28 Gillette 3000] with 16 blades.
|
|-
| 2101
| WAR WAS BEGINNING
| References {{w|Zero Wing}}, a 1989 Japanese computer game set in 2101, famous for poorly translated English and the source for "{{w|All your base are belong to us}}". See [[286: All Your Base]]
|
|}

==Transcript==

:<big>'''THE FUTURE'''</big>
:'''According to Google search results'''
:Events for each year determined by the first page of Google search results for the phrases:
:"By <year>" "In year"
:"By the year <year>" "In the year <year>"
:"Will * by the year <year>" "Will * in the year <year>"
:"In <year>, * will" "By <year>, * will"
:
:;2012
::World population reaches 7 billion
::Flying cars reach market
::Canada cuts greenhouse emissions to 6% below 1990 levels as per Kyoto
::Apocalypse occurs
:;2013
::National debt paid off through President Clinton's plans
::Microchipping of all Americans begins
::Homelessness ended in Massachusetts
::Health care reform law repealed
:;2014
::US leaves Afghanistan
::GNU/Linux becomes dominant OS
:;2015
::New Horizons reaches Pluto
::Health care law causes hyperinflation
::192 UN member nations achieve millennium development goals:
::*Extreme poverty and hunger eradicated
::*Universal primary education implemented
::*Women empowered, gender equality reached
::*Environmental stability ensured
:;2016
::Baby boomers begin turning 65
::Android takes 38% of the smartphone market
::Android takes 45% of the smartphone market
::Windows Phone overtakes iOS in smartphones
:;2017
::China completes unmanned Lunar sample-return mission
::Social Security stops running surplus
::US budget balanced
::Newspapers become obsolete and die out
::Cosmetic surgery doubles
:;2018
::Social Security stops running surplus
::Jesus returns to Earth
:;2019
::Social Security stops running surplus
::Every baby has genes mapped at birth
:;2020
::Solar power becomes cheaper than fossil fuels
::Keyboards and mice become obsolete
::New Tappan Zee bridge constructed
:;2021
::US debt reaches 97% of GDP
::US unemployment falls to 2.8%
::Restored caliphate unifies Middle East
::Lake Mead evaporates
:;2022
::Kilimanjaro snow-free
::HTML 5 finished
::Newspapers become obsolete and die out
:;2023
::Jesus returns to Earth (again)
::US debt passes 100% of GDP
::All unprotected ancient forests gone from Pacific Northwest
:;2024
::Atlantis begins to reappear
::Orangutans extinct in wild
::China lands men and women on the moon
::NASA sets up permanent moon base
::Female professionals pass males in pay
:;2025
::World population reaches 8 billion
::Two billion people face water shortages
::62 MPG cars introduced
::US power fades
:;2026
::Atlantis emerges completely
::Rock Bands die out
::US debt paid off
::Car accidents cease
::West coast falls into ocean
:;2027
::Japan introduces new fastest maglev train
::Lyndon Larouche-planned Mars colony established
::Social Security stops running surplus
:;2028
::Tobacco outlawed
::40% of coral reefs gone
::US debt paid off
::Social Security stops running surplus
:;2029
::Social Security trust fund exhausted
::Computers pass the Turing Test
::Aging reversed
::Wikipedia reaches 30 million articles
:;2030
::Half of Amazon rain forest lost to logging
::Cancer deaths double from 2008 levels
::Arctic ice-free in summer
:;2031
::Computers controlled by thought
::Realtors replaced by technology
::Social Security trust fund exhausted
:;2032
::"Big One" hits San Francisco
::US elects first married lesbian president
::Entire world converted to Christianity
:;2033
::Kilimanjaro ice disappears
::India becomes superpower
::Europe reaches Mars
:;2034
::US diabetes cases double, treatment costs triple
::US builds autonomous robot army
:;2035
::80% of America's energy comes from renewable sources
::Himalayan glaciers down 80% in size
::Arctic sea lane opens
:;2036
::80% of US has access to high-speed rail
::Asteroid Apophis hits/misses Earth
:;2037
::Arctic ice-free in September
::Social Security trust fund exhausted
:;2038
::32-bit timestamps role over, causing Y2K-level chaos
::"Big One" hits California
:;2039
::US population hits 400 million
::Severe heat waves become commonplace
::Scientology becomes majority religion in US
:;2040
::Arctic summers ice-free
::Nanotechnology makes humans immortal
:;2041
::Social Security trust fund exhausted
:;2042
:;2043
::World population passes 9 billion
:;2044
::Mankind genetically engineered to be happy
::Childhood obesity reaches 100%
:;2045
::Humans and machines merge
:;2046
::World's natural resources depleted
:;2047
::World ruled by banks and corporations
::Tobacco industry fails
::US begins using autonomous attack drones
:;2048
::Salt-water fish extinct from overfishing
::Unisex bathing suits cover body from shoulder to ankle
::Entire US population overweight
:;2049
::$1.000 computer exceeds computational ability of humanity
::Singularity occurs
::Fishing industry collapses
:;2050
::80% of Earth's population lives in urban centers
::China controls space
::Sex with robots possible
::Cars banned from European cities
::One million species extinct from climate change
:;2051
::Atmosphere escapes into space
:;2052
::Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security spending exceed total US revenue
:;2053
::US budget balanced
::Majority of Americans in prison
::Cars driven by dogs
:;2054
::Hunger becomes unimaginable global problem
:;2055
::Atmospheric CO2 doubled
::Oil runs out
::Copper, tin, lead, gold, and nickel all exhausted
:;2056
::RFID-tagged driverless cars
::Robots given same rights as humans
:;2057
::150 Japanese settlers on Mars
::Colorado River runs dry
:;2058
::Smoking ends in New Zealand
:;2059
::Humans have domesticated robots
:;2060
::Human race lives in peace
::Extreme droughts across much of Earth
::Global temperature rise reaches 4°C
::Oil runs out again
:;2061
::Halley's comet returns
:;2062
::Uganda hosts World Cup
::The Jetsons
:;2063
::First human clones reach adulthood
::Population of Moon reaches 100,000
::Population of Mars reaches 10,000
::Spacecraft exceed speed of light
:;2064
::Clean Air Act finishes reducing haze in national parks to natural levels
:;2065
::Last coral reefs die out
::Chernobyl cleanup complete
:;2066
::Cyprus achieves its goal
:;2067
::Americans live in domed cities and watch 3D TV
::Redheads go extinct
:;2068
::Ozone hole over Antarctic finishes recovering
::Lord Jesus rules the Earth from Throne in Jerusalem.
::Entire world population gay due to chemicals in the water
:;2069
::Public masturbation legalized
:;2070
::World population peaks
::City-scale flooding disasters
::60% of world's energy comes from renewable sources
:;2071
::Europe's temperatures rise by 3°C
::World summer temperatures rise by 5°C
:;2072
::US retirement age is set to 75
:;2073
::Oceans do not rise one foot
:;2074
::Number of 100-year-olds reaches one million
::Supertyphoons hit Japan
:;2075
::US retirement age set to 69
:;2076
::Average scientific paper has more than 24 authors
::Social Security trust fund exhausted
:;2077
:;2078
::Newspapers become obsolete and die out
:;2079
::US debt reaches 716% of GDP
::Lodgepole pines disappear from Northwest
::Floods commonplace
::Religion marginalized
:;2080
::Federal spending reaches 70% of GDP
::UK population doubles
:;2081
:;2082
::World population declines to one billion
:;2083
:;2084
::Robot policemen introduced
:;2085
::US deficit reaches 62% of GDP
:;2086
:;2087
:;2088
::Japan becomes all-robot country
:;2089
::World halts fossil fuel use
:;2090
::Global warming hits 7°C
::Global warming hits 4°C
:;2091
:;2092
:;2093
:;2094
:;2095
:;2096
:;2097
:;2098
:;2099
:;2100
::Global warming around 5-7°C
::Sea levels have risen by a meter or more
::Joshua trees nearly extinct
::Earth's climate resembles that of the Cretaceous
::Germany tropical
::Emperor penguins extinct
::Arctic permafrost thaws
::Rising seas flood coastal cities
::Rain forests mostly gone due to climatic shifts
::All coral reefs gone
::Gillette introduces 14-bladed razor
:;2101
::WAR WAS BEGINNING

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Large drawings]]
[[Category:Timelines]]
[[Category:Google Search]]
[[Category:Earthquakes]]
[[Category:Climate change]]
[[Category:Singularity]]
[[Category:Renewable energy]]
[[Category:Smartphones]]
[[Category:Wikipedia]]

Category:Pages with math render errors

2024-07-31T00:05:45Z

172.69.214.39:

Oh dear... Hard[
== http://www.example.com link title ==
[[''Link title'''''
== Bold text ==
[[File:
== Example.jpg ==
[[File:
== Example.jpg ==
[[File:[[Media:Example.jpg]]<nowiki>
----
Insert non-formatted text here[[Media:Example.ogg]]</nowiki>]]]]]]''']]] to explain or discuss symbols without being able to display them.
[[Media:Example.ogg]]
[[Category:Problematic pages]]

Talk:2960: Organ Meanings

2024-07-18T14:05:49Z

172.69.214.39:

how is thymus formed [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.102|172.70.85.102]] 07:00, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
: It grows from seed.[[Special:Contributions/172.69.194.97|172.69.194.97]] 12:23, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

You think Randall might have made this one as a ploy to have explain xkcd educate him on the organs and metaphors mentioned? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.146.33|162.158.146.33]] 07:59, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Why is 'Liver' so high up on the metaphor scale? The only one I can think of is 'lily-livered', which doesn't appear to make much sense at all. On the other hand, I'd have 'Spleen' nearer the top, and 'Tongue' fairly high up as well. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.185|172.70.162.185]] 08:06, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
:Agreed; personally I’d have liver and tongue switch places, and I’d guess the one who added silver-tongued and biting one’s tongue would probably agree also. But that might be because I understand the biological function of a liver better than the average person does. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.5|172.70.210.5]] 08:21, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
:: Are those really metaphors, though? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.40.152|162.158.40.152]] 09:24, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
::: They aren't, or at least not metaphors to the tongue. Just done an edit, before having read this, to remove the visibility of "silver tongue" (a tongue that is metaphorically as silver... or maybe even quicksilver) and a "bitten tongue" (the tongue as if restrained by biting). Though there are other forms, the metaphor to biological function must be of the general "it is the tongue of the <something else>" type, maybe such as a tongue of lava or the tongue of an oil-can (one being an extending appendage, the other additionally being a contact depositor of liquid - though not always consistent in application).
::: Something can more easily be understood as the metaphorical heart/nerves/spine/etc of something, and we also have a good understanding of what the originals do. A sewage treatment plant can be considered the kidneys of a town (arguably more understood than a liver of one, for example, so I'd have personally switched the two), but it gets more complex with some of them. In the case of the appendix, we pretty much ''only'' know (in lay-use) that it's a spare fleshy bit that might or might not have any use, so the metaphorical 'equivalent biological function' of a "town's 'appendix'" is probably more understood than a body's ''actual'' appendix, for most people, the opposite of the situation with metaphorical/actual tongues. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.64|172.70.91.64]] 10:06, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
:::: Your understanding of metaphors is... unique. A "silver tongue" certainly is a tongue-based metaphor; we're referring to someone's manner of speech as their "tongue".{{unsigned|Collapsinghrung}}
: The one I think of is "What am I chopped Liver". Though according to google that is usually a Jewish metaphor (which I am) {{unsigned ip|162.158.158.103}}

I'm not convinced that 'Metaphor meaning' is going to work as a column in the table - several of these have multiple metaphors associated, often with varied and little-related meanings.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.160.249|172.70.160.249]] 12:20, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

I just added the line about anatomical metaphors varying from culture to culture. Would people like to include any examples of culturally variable metaphors? I think it was Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated" where an Eastern European character kept shouting out "spleen". [[Special:Contributions/172.70.46.172|172.70.46.172]] 12:58, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
:One example off the top of my head - and might need a proper reference to add - is the common use of Kidneys in metaphor. Afaik, the most common-slang in NA for that is "ow my kidneys" as in "I laughed so hard, my kidneys hurt now." Meanwhile, in Chinese (and some other East Asian) culture, 'kidneys' is most commonly used as a metaphor for sexual performance due to the connection to traditional medicine, where having sex is seen as 'exerting/damaging the kidneys.'[[Special:Contributions/172.69.214.38|172.69.214.38]] 14:05, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Talk:285: Wikipedian Protester

2024-05-19T23:29:33Z

172.69.214.39: rv, the comment makes no sense otherwise.

[http://www.google.com link title]I wanna sneakily add {{Citation needed}} to EVERYTHING on the article -- [[Citation Needed on Wheels]]
: There is too much seemingly-spam edits that attempt to insert "citation needed" on various pages on this wiki. Many of these attempts got reverted. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.173|162.158.166.173]] 06:14, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
:: It seems to amuse some people, who may have just discovered the idea. More annoying than the attempt to tag every paragraph (at least once!) in every article, or so it seems, is not understanding that the tag goes on the ''other'' side of the punctuation (comma, and/or sentence/parenthetical ending), or plonking it down mid-sentence with seemingly no thought to "why there?".
:: As we have had a recent string of misplaced zeal (an IP, like me and you, so hard to tie down or try to tell them where they're going wrong), I suspect a newbie to the site. But it seems we have some people (other than me) who either edit or revert such 'errors'. Which is nice. Maybe newbie'll take note and pick up the art of subtlety. Or at least the conventional style. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.35|172.70.90.35]] 09:51, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
::: This appeared again twice in [[2466]]. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.22.220|172.69.22.220]] 09:55, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Does this need a citation? --[[User:Dalonacueball|Dalonacueball]] ([[User talk:Dalonacueball|talk]]) 16:30, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
:No.{{Citation needed}} [[User:SuperSupermario24|Just some random derp]] 03:54, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
My favorite {{Citation needed}} joke was the fact that the Wikipedia article for "{{w|List of cetacean species|List of Whales}}" used to have "Cetacean Needed" if it was missing an image or scale diagram of the creature in question. -Pennpenn [[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.162|108.162.250.162]] 05:11, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
:Still does! Thanks for pointing that out. [[User:Zeusfaber|Zeusfaber]] ([[User talk:Zeusfaber|talk]]) 18:41, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
:Checked last week, there's still a cetacean needed for the page to be complete. [[User:ChessCake|ChessCake]] ([[User talk:ChessCake|talk]]) 22:20, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
:Some anonymous wikipedia editor was enjoying themselves far too much when writing that wiki. Its so genius that no-one has changed it yet! Wikipedia is normally maintained pretty well for the big pages{{Citation needed}}. sam0fc 14:49, 2 May 2019 (UTC)
::Amazingly, it's still there! There's 12 of them still! [[User:Lettherebedarklight|aoijgpisbHtejsykl7ekderhtsjk6r64os4kys\\\[]jsrtjgdrghtvgwrhtejyku5dli6;78t7l6rk5j4h|||||#Rty-----WWWWWWfflfllfllfllfeogk0q9wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww4-cv;c;;c;c[;]z\]d;v[\]????????OH GOD IT'S CRASIHNG MY PC��]] ([[User talk:Lettherebedarklight|talk]]) 12:22, 5 November 2020 (UTC)
::If you check the discussion, people have tried to change it before. But, strictly speaking, "cetacean needed" goes where they need an image of a cetacean. No citation is needed at all, and it is 100% fair to say that (an image of) a cetacean is, in fact, needed. [[User:Tsumikiminiwa|Tsumikiminiwa]] ([[User talk:Tsumikiminiwa|talk]]) 08:28, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Is it just me or does the politician in this comic (from almost nine years ago) look suspiciously like Mr. Trump?--[[Special:Contributions/162.158.85.129|162.158.85.129]] 22:09, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
:Nah, this one has better hair.[[Special:Contributions/173.245.56.29|173.245.56.29]] 00:25, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
:Plus, this came out a long time before he became...big.{{Citation needed}} [[User:Dontknow|Dontknow]] ([[User talk:Dontknow|talk]]) 19:42, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
::Don't know how you define "big," but by most definitions Trump has in fact been "big" since *long* before this comic. {{Citation needed}} [[User:Abcasada|Abcasada]] ([[User talk:Abcasada|talk]]) 22:20, 25 September 2018 (UTC)
Huh, in my memory, this comic specifically included the phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident". I guess not - but I wonder if some Wikipedians would consider a {{Citation needed}} for that one? [[User:Cosmogoblin|Cosmogoblin]] ([[User talk:Cosmogoblin|talk]]) 19:42, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

{{Citation needed}}. [[User:AnonymousSub61|AnonymousSub61]] ([[User talk:AnonymousSub61|talk]]) 15:32, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Does this mean you can play [https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/game SMBC's game] using this website? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.89.250|162.158.89.250]] 15:00, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
: I had the same idea! [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.193|108.162.221.193]] 14:31, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

[http://smbc-comics.com Funtime Activity]: Create citations for all pages with {{citation needed}} in them. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.68.88|172.69.68.88]] 02:35, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

== xkcd Volume 0 (book) ==

The page with this strip (11011) also contains a note to a character"

GHNHIYTOTNNNBSFOEVYYVT

NAQGYIUAEIEAIAEURFYV

GULGBIREOUKEGEAEEPFQ

VQYLEDVYSRNVNJULRNAQTVZOY

RVEYOHRHEWSWHAGURJNO

RNYYZVZFDESFYIEIOPELJR

ERGUROBEBRLGNVNLSDKETEBI
{{unsigned ip|172.69.214.108|23:21, 11 January 2024}}

:FYI, the character is Reddit's snoo mascot. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.214.72|172.69.214.72]] 02:25, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

== Alternatives for use on Wikipedia talk pages ==

Alternatives for use on Wikipedia talk pages (don't use these in articles; that would be vandalism): These alternatives are formatted to look exactly like the normal citation needed, but lead to other uses of the words. This tends to remain as an undiscovered easter egg because pretty much nobody actually clicks on citation needed links. You can test these without actually changing Wikipedia bu\y using the show preview button and not using the save changes button.

For use in a Wikipedia talk page comment:

<pre><nowiki>[</nowiki>[[Citation (horse)|Citation]] [[Northern European Enclosure Dam|Need]][[ed (text editor)|ed]]<nowiki>]</nowiki></pre>

<pre><nowiki>[</nowiki>[[Edsel Citation|Citation]] [[Northern European Enclosure Dam|Need]][[ed (text editor)|ed]]<nowiki>]</nowiki></pre>

<pre><nowiki>[</nowiki>[[Citation (horse)|Citation]] [[Nee!|Nee]][[Ded Moroz|ded]]<nowiki>]</nowiki></pre>

<pre><nowiki>[</nowiki>[[Edsel Citation|Citation]] [[Nee!|Nee]][[Ded Moroz|ded]]<nowiki>]</nowiki></pre>

For use as the edit summary (no formatting needed) when adding the above:

<pre>[[Citation (horse)|Citation]] [[Northern European Enclosure Dam|Need]][[ed (text editor)|ed]]</pre>

<pre>[[Edsel Citation|Citation]] [[Northern European Enclosure Dam|Need]][[ed (text editor)|ed]]</pre>

<pre>[[Citation (horse)|Citation]] [[Nee!|Nee]][[Ded Moroz|ded]]</pre>

<pre>[[Edsel Citation|Citation]] [[Nee!|Nee]][[Ded Moroz|ded]]</pre>

[[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.174|172.69.33.174]] 15:24, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:2916: Machine

2024-04-07T20:17:20Z

172.69.214.39: comment

rather late for an april fools comic innit? also there doesn't seem to be anything exciting in this one lol, none of the usual cool exploration easter eggs, as far as i could tell at least [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.76|172.71.178.76]] 16:41, 6 April 2024 (UTC)Erfaniom

: We're exploring crowdsourced human creativity here, in a way, so it can be a lot more interesting then Randall's exploration comics, at least for me, because i did take two years of GCSE psychology and enjoyed it. [[Special:Contributions/172.64.238.130|172.64.238.130]]

Just popped over using Chrome on Android and all I see is four "missing picture" logos spinning around, plus another down the bottom right... [[Special:Contributions/141.101.68.193|141.101.68.193]] 18:13, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
:Okay, followup: it behaves quite differently on the non mobile site. You get two entry points with red balls and yellow balls and you need to place the various gizmos to direct the balls to the correct exit point. Once enough have correctly passed to turn the red X into a green tick, you have the option to submit. If you do, once you have named your design it will be added to the grid with other submissions all of which exist to push red and yellow balls around. (if you come across "Memories of Ragnarok", that's mine) [[Special:Contributions/172.71.134.207|172.71.134.207]] 18:27, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
::The number of inputs appears to vary between 1 and 4, each of a different color, with one color-coded output for each. [[User:Claire Kholin|Claire Kholin]] ([[User talk:Claire Kholin|talk]]) 18:49, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

On the "machine" section, you see lots of "under construction cells". Perhaps this will develop as more are submitted. I notice the "under construction tape" has "DJIA" and "31415", perhaps a reference to "dow jones industrial average" and the first five digits of pi. [[User:Zeimusu|Zeimusu]] ([[User talk:Zeimusu|talk]]) 18:37, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
:Whenever someone submits a cell, it fills in one of the under construction cells. [[User:Claire Kholin|Claire Kholin]] ([[User talk:Claire Kholin|talk]]) 18:49, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

I wanted to add an image for each object, but do not have the necessary access, can someone who has access add the images that I linked in the table so they can be included? [[User:Claire Kholin|Claire Kholin]] ([[User talk:Claire Kholin|talk]]) 18:49, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

I found a discussion with some guy talking about the API at https://euphoria.leet.nu/room/xkcd/ ; this could be useful for the wiki.

<code>
[c+1] now time to try fucking with the api
[c+1] https://incredible.xkcd.com/
[userwithnoaccount] 404
[c+1] it seems there are numbered machines under incredible.xkcd.com/machine/x
[c+1] returns a grid of individual machinlets
[c+1] which are uids like 3a7af27c-5389-5dcb-b660-3feab6be2ceb
[c+1] they're stored at urls like incredible.xkcd.com/folio/3a7af27c-5389-5dcb-b660-3feab6be2ceb
[c+1] there appear to be 33 machines total
[c+1] the json it returns seems to refer to these as "versions"
[c+1] $ curl -s https://incredible.xkcd.com/machine/21 | jq ".version"
21
[c+1] there is a machine/0, but it's all null
[c+1] going to https://incredible.xkcd.com/machine/current redirects to the current machine
[c+1] $ curl -sL https://incredible.xkcd.com/machine/current | jq ".version"
35
[c+1] wait, is that the *total* number of mahcines?
[c+1] i would've thought there'd be more
[c+1] this whole think is rather esoteric
[c+1] Written in rust, too: https://rapier.rs/
[c+1] Uh oh.
https://i.hypercone.us/?v=8e283d
[c+1] HMMM
https://i.hypercone.us/?v=079f8f
[c+1] it seems there is no limit
[c+1] i've uploaded a ~50M title
</code>

[[Special:Contributions/172.70.57.146|172.70.57.146]]

Had quite a lot of fun, added a few 'successful' machines to the grid. Noted that whenever I try to use the Prism that (after a short delay) the comic-pane blanks and I need to refresh the page/get a completely new 'challenge' to start from scratch, so I'm just not using the prism at all (used most of the other items, in combination or 'just the one across the whole board', whichever seems most fun). But it doesn't seem to do what I'd like it to do, which is sort multiple colours from the same inflow into different outflow directions. Which would be ''very'' useful in a 'crossroads' situation, the general solution of directing them cross-path being too prone to random collisions. Also might be useful in the 'submitted machine grid', as I note that errors propagate, whereas adding a filter on all inputs would clean out (dispose of/send off to a valid gate?) the rogue balls. Anyway, gonna have to come back to this later when there's more time... Maybe then I'll even have something useful to add to the Explanation. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.163.31|172.70.163.31]] 19:03, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

The balls appear to be different weights. I just saw a machine that used fans to separate yellows from greens and blues in a sort of 'wheat from the chaff' manner to direct them to their correct outputs. I wonder what other hidden tricks are included. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.1.159|172.68.1.159]] 19:40, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

They're not all accepted, though it makes you think they are. Or something else more complex is going on we haven't realized yet. I made a machine that was working reliably, submitted it, and saw it on the overall grid. Reloading from a different browser I found the same location of the machine, with the same surroundings, but my machine had been replaced. It's nowhere else on the grid either. The first browser still shows it (but not after a reload with a cache clear). I'm not sure if there's some kind of "save" event that needs to happen beyond seeing your machine in the broader one, or if all user collaboration is an illusion, or if the system changes its mind about us somehow.

: Yeah, i've been seeing this too. Please tell me if you find any of my machines, images at https://i.hypercone.us/?v=22d562 , https://i.hypercone.us/?v=ad8e3a , and https://i.hypercone.us/?v=8d4d6a . I want to be one of the few to have added Catalan and Spanish to the grid. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.134.164|172.71.134.164]] 20:56, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

I've added some more observations to the page. Also, a guess which is too uncertain to put on the main page: The ball launcher for the yellows on the far left side misses a lot, and the yellow container isn't the one on the left. So I think the whole machine with crossing streams will result in the colors being sorted in their container order, and possibly have the streams combined and deposited at the bottom just above the containers. --[[Special:Contributions/172.71.147.100|172.71.147.100]] 21:07, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

has anyone seen the boat at the very bottom? [[User:Mushrooms|Mushrooms]] ([[User talk:Mushrooms|talk]]) 21:21, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

trying to see it on Firefox for Ubuntu and it just tells me to "visit xkcd.com to view" - THAT'S WHERE I AM?! Tried clearing website data (but not my entire cache) and that didn't help. Is there something I'm missing?

Oooh, just had one with four ball-entries (four colours) and ''three'' exits (one caters for two arrows). Pity it's rather complicated to get entries to exits (even if I can merge two of the streams). Might have to give up on it, but I'd like to have seen how it fits in with the 'submited grid'. i.e. someone else gets a two-colour introduction spot. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.119|162.158.74.119]] 22:37, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
:Me again. I'm just refreshing the page, looking at the pattern of entries/exits (just a dozen or so screens in, getting some repeats of pattern, indicating that it's going back to tiles it was suggesting before, probably depends on how many others are contributing and extending...)
:Found another 'double-colour' example. Two yellows ''from the same side'', which probably means that there's a two-yellows been asked to exit from the neighbour (will check shortly).
:Quickly adapting from my spreadsheet notation, "R, Y, G, B" in order, each "(Entry, Exit)", I've been using <dir> of L/R/T/B and a number (nominally percentage, though seems to include only values of 20, 30, 50, 70 and 80, so it ''might'' be more 1/6..5/6?) relating to the distance along from L to R (for T/B) or T to B (for L/R).
:This line is therefore (0,0)(L20+L70,R30+B70)(R80,L80)(T70,L50) ... no reds, two yellow pairings, a red pairing, a blue pairing. Would require at least two path-crossings (but I was going to calculate those things later, and double-colours might confuse my intended simple line-intersection calculation).
:...anyway, spent some time on this message, which might mean I'll get into a 'new batch' of available patterns as people have succeeded some of the challenges that I've been 'swiping left'. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.20|172.70.162.20]] 19:28, 7 April 2024 (UTC)
:...very next click: (0,0)(T30+L20,R20+R70)(R80,L80)(R50,B50), which is clearly the actual left-neighbour of the above. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.19|172.70.162.19]] 19:32, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

If you combine a bunch of these silly claw things in the middle by just spamming it, it begins to lag and do some chaotic collisions, even without balls colliding on it. It's curious how it does that seemingly randomly though. I wonder how calculations are added and if there's a tiny sprinkle of RNG. (Also, errors occur and say something about damaging recursion in the Rust programming language, so I guess we know how it was made. It's also pretty weird how there's not a lot of opening combinations? It's possible that the machine loops over in chunks of gears or something (that's what I'll call them). ([[User talk:Leo|talk]]) 13:15, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

If you place a black hole in the centre of a wheel, it makes the wheel behave unpredictably between resets. Sometimes it's almost normal, sometimes it's a lot faster than usual, and sometimes it's stopped but launches balls that touch it with extreme force. I was able to use this to submit a machine which didn't actually let a single ball through after being submitted. https://i.hypercone.us/?v=928bcd [[Special:Contributions/162.158.33.149|162.158.33.149]] 01:19, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

The page says that (and I have taken note of) the ball hue is ''coded'' to certain values, but is there a logic to those values that might be derived from the colour (either as RGB triplet or HSV/other colourspace definition). For example, the two ball-types with zero green component in their makeup are 'unit density' (green is far heavier "green+red" is far lighter, so it's not a simple relationship, unless it converts from °hue, in some way) and the only secondary colour exhibits non-zero drag. There's the possibility that it just derived from "we need different properties, we need different colours, we have no reason to connect either with other deliberately" or even some non-mathematical symbology (fire=red, water=blue(?), earth=green, air(/sunlight?)=yellow). But it makes me wonder what combination of properties cyan/magenta balls might have, if added. (Or is the choice of those four colours constrained, anyway? Though R/G colorblindness is already something of an accessibility failure, if anyone suffers that.) [[Special:Contributions/172.69.194.205|172.69.194.205]] 17:02, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

[https://pastebin.com/7PAiLnyF Python script to get the URL and title of each Cell in the current machine]

[https://pastebin.com/xBhywGde Result of running that script at the moment] (encoded with ROT13 because pastebin wouldn't let me save it otherwise)

[https://pastebin.com/jN5MP2za Result of running that script on the first 42 machines], at least on these it looks like the only difference is that one cell is added each time? [[Special:Contributions/172.71.99.195|172.71.99.195]] 17:22, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

I've submitted four now, none of which was accepted. I tend to spend a lot of time getting them just right. Any hints as to what the acceptance criteria might be? Or do I just stink at this?
[[Special:Contributions/172.69.59.204|172.69.59.204]] 19:47, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

There appears to be a new object: a cat that bats things that touch it.
[[Special:Contributions/172.69.214.39|172.69.214.39]] 20:17, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:2907: Schwa

2024-03-21T16:28:29Z

172.69.214.39:

In what crazy dialect do these all use the same 1 vowel? [[Special:Contributions/172.68.210.73|172.68.210.73]] 22:10, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:I can think of several. I was immediately reminded of Lucy Porter's Hull accent ([https://www.google.com/search?q=hull+accent+oh+no some examples, including videos/audio, here]), but I can also think of New Zealand (more 'i'ish vowels, at least stereotypically), South African (down a couple of tones from that), and a number of state-side accents that ''conceivably'' are what Randall's drawing upon. [...as ninjaed, below, by 172.71.166.190 at 22:30]
:My own accent (when given its full reign) actually tends to be consonant-light ("o'er" for "over", such that my vowels tend to be ''two or three'' separate tones in a row), so it doesn't work so well. But if I shift my focus to try to impersonate people from ten miles to the north (or a dozen or so miles east) from where I grew up then I can actually get quite close to 'perfect monovowelism' (still suppressing the consonants!). [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.139|172.69.79.139]] 22:32, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:All of them? I had to read the explanation to get what constitutes a schwa, but then I read the comic again, and yeah, they're all roughly the same sound, in the average North American accent anyway. Only exception is the word "A", which people might often pronounce like the letter "A", which of course isn't a schwa, :) [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 05:57, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::'Round these 'ere parts, you'd never say "A"-to-rhyme-with-"Hay" (except to stress "that isn't just ''a(y)'' good song but ''the(e)'' best song ever!", e.g.). Still confused, me, though when at my first ever French class at school, the teacher (with not far off the local accent) told us that 'un' and 'une' were "the words for 'uh'...". Which only became clear when she clarified "...like 'uh book', 'uh table', 'uh window'...". This was actually how we all spoke. (More or less... Ah din't spake quart ser m'tch lahk dat, wot wi' mi mam'n'dad bofe bin frum a cupla tarns ovver, f'witch ah gut uh rep f'beyin "posch". Ur mebbe 'twuz cuz mi mam whir uh titch'r, ser ah gut lurnt t' spake proppah?) [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.3|172.71.242.3]] 17:23, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Personally I pronounce those pretty much all the same (I live in Boston like Randall but don't have an actual Boston accent)
--[[Special:Contributions/172.71.166.190|172.71.166.190]] 22:30, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:I too, living in the Pacific Northwest of the US, immediately saw all the vowels the same. [[User:RandalSchwartz|RandalSchwartz]] ([[User talk:RandalSchwartz|talk]]) 00:43, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

I didn't think it was considered schwa when stressed as in "up" and "love". But my dictionary has a schwa in its pronunciation guide for both, so I guess I was wrong. But this basically means the usual "short U" pronunciation is schwa. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 22:59, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:Some dialects split the vowel at the end of "comma" from the vowel in "strut," but most North American dialects don't. So in pronouncing dictionaries, you will sometimes see the strut vowel written ʌ and the comma vowel written ə even though they might be exactly the same in your accent. In vowels that split comma and strut, schwa is rarely stressed, but that's not a rule. This is sometimes confused by American teachers, who try to explain why they see two different symbols for the same sound. But they really are different sounds, and Americans just don't use /ʌ/ at all. [[User:EebstertheGreat|EebstertheGreat]] ([[User talk:EebstertheGreat|talk]]) 02:50, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::Plus, this "schwa is never stressed" mnemonic doesn't even make perfect predictions for dialects without the merger. I've heard that in ''undone'' /ʌnˈdʌn/, the unstressed vowel doesn't go to schwa. In the end, the IPA wasn't created just for English, and it only defines [ə] as a mid central vowel, not an unstressed one. Reduced vowels may often mid-centralize, but nothing says a language can't stress mid central vowels at other times, just like any other vowel quality can be stressed or unstressed. [[User talk:AgentMuffin|~AgentMuffin]] 21:53, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::As in science in general, there is no "true" description of language, but only models that are more or less useful. Conceptualizing the STRUT vowel as /ʌ/ or as stressed schwa are two possible models. The latter is more popular in writing about US English, and maybe less obvious in some other Englishes. But in the end, in the context of this cartoon, it's self-defeating (if we are being pedantic, which should be allowed in the xkcd universe), because even if we're categorizing them as the stressed and unstressed versions of the same vowel, they're sufficiently different that non-native speakers will still have to learn how to pronounce both of them, especially if their native language doesn't have word stress. [Quinn C, linguist] [[Special:Contributions/172.69.214.39|172.69.214.39]] 16:28, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

This all works in a generically american accent, except for the i vowel in onion, which cannot be schwa-ified in any english accent I've ever heard. [[Special:Contributions/
172.69.34.171|172.69.34.171]] 23:27, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:Depends. {{wiktionary|onion|Wiktionary says}} /ˈʌn.jən/ (any particular places?) or /ˈʌŋ.jɪn/ (Canada) (and an obsolete version that I'd imagine the Kiwis to use).
:If the /j/ ''isn't'' considered a vowel then you could definitely justify something like "un-yun" or "ern-yern" or even "in-yin" (amongst various ''other'' like-vowel versions)...
:If you do the /j*n/ more as in {{wiktionary|eon|/ˈi.ɑn/, /ˈeɪ.ɑn/, /ˈiː.ən/, /ˈiː.ɒn/ or /ˈeɪ.ɒn/}} then clearly you can't switch to "uhn-uh-uhn" quite so easily. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.69|162.158.74.69]] 23:52, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:It says every vowel SOUND, which is different than "how each vowel sounds". The sound of that I is a Y. The O following it indeed uses the schwa. :) That's my guess, anyway, I don't know these pronunciation things that deeply. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 05:57, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:This dipthong has a consonant in it. What is going on? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.65.182|172.69.65.182]] 12:15, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
: "''except for the i vowel in onion''" IMHO, there is no 'i' in onion. UN-YUN. The Y acts more of a consonant. -Me (born of a Missouri mom and a Connecticut father, babbled in Colorado, schooled in Calif then New Jersey within hearing of South Philly, yo!) [[User:PRR|PRR]] ([[User talk:PRR|talk]]) 20:18, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::Personally, I'd call onion a two-and-a-half syllable word. I've internalized the concept of half syllables ever since my Korean friend Hyun taught me how to properly pronounce her name. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.247.40|172.69.247.40]] 18:54, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
I can't read the words "love cult" without thinking of DHMIS 3. [[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|Trogdor147]] ([[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|talk]]) 00:10, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::The /j/ sound commonly found in "onion" is not generally considered a vowel. As a test, try to put it between two consonants to make a complete syllable: first try to say /np/, and notice you have to add a schwa (neutral vowel), /nəp/; then try to say /nyp/, and you'll add that same extra vowel, /nyəp/. It's sometimes called a "semivowel", because it has some properties of a vowel and some of a consonant; or sometimes a "glide", because of the way it sets at the edge a syllable. - [[User:IMSoP|IMSoP]] ([[User talk:IMSoP|talk]]) 16:01, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

If someone actually read this conversation to me using only schwa, I don't think I'd understand it. I usually consider myself a fluent English speaker, but my native language - Polish - doesm't have this vovel at all. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.103.231|162.158.103.231]] 07:16, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:Yeah, I think for us non-native speakers this is quite hard to replicate. I had to read the sentences out loud several times before I heard it. The standard British English I learned at school 35 years ago tends to have less Schwas in it, I guess. In German we do have some Schwas, mainly towards the end of words, but I don't think it is possible to construct whole sentence without any other vowels. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.155.157|162.158.155.157]] 07:56, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
I’m american (boston area) but some of these vowels do sound different from others to me, although it still seems it would be clear and ok if they’re all said the same. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.65.182|172.69.65.182]] 12:15, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Randall seems to have terminally confused the schwa [ǝ] with [ʌ] as in "cup". I've never seen such an incorrect xkcd. In the UK, the Manchester accent almost universally consists of [ǝ] and even they wouldn't be able to use [ǝ] for "onion" [[Special:Contributions/172.69.223.163|172.69.223.163]] 13:04, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:The explanation mentioned the {{w|strut–comma merger}} well before this comment. There's no need to jump to {{w|Linguistic prescriptivism|calling other dialects "incorrect"}}. [[User talk:AgentMuffin|~AgentMuffin]] 21:53, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Maybe a better symbol could be used than an apostrophe in the explanation? It's difficult to read/spot, and the quote is surrounded in quotation marks, which makes it a little confusing. I'm not sure what though. --[[User:Mushrooms|Mushrooms]] ([[User talk:Mushrooms|talk]]) 15:24, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

:Maybe an underscore? “D_gs c_s(_)n, th_ _n fr_m L_nd_n, r_ns _ B_mbl l_v c_lt.” - 16:01, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

It's a shame Schwa isn't pronounced with a schwa. [[User:Kev|Kev]] ([[User talk:Kev|talk]]) 16:47, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:Apparently it was pronounced 'shuwa' at some point, with a schwa for the 'u'. The sound just kind of faded over time since people barely pronounced it. Don't have a source, just remember hearing it somewhere (in a Youtube video, probably).[[Special:Contributions/172.71.98.193|172.71.98.193]] 10:54, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

For an example of where people mispronounce vowels for comic effect, here's a 40 year old and occasionally very impolite/politically incorrect BBC comedy which used people speaking in different accents as their conceit for different languages. So an englishman speaking very bad french comes across very like these XKCD characters https://youtu.be/ycqc0L4a2wQ?si=KO_qvZqMJH-3Gy1N&t=90 [[User:Kev|Kev]] ([[User talk:Kev|talk]]) 16:52, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

This is highly inconsistent both with my experience and the diction/IPA I studied in college as part of a vocal music education degree. The short U [ʌ] and schwa [ǝ] are different vowels, and the difference is most obvious (in words used in the strip) in "cousin" and "obstruction" which would sound ridiculous if you pronounced all the vowel sounds exactly the same. I would have failed an assignment I turned in marking this strip full of schwas. They're almost all [ʌ] except in those words and "a" and "of". {{unsigned ip|172.70.131.119|13:10, 17 March 2024}}
:Diction ('correct' diction, e.g. RP or other elevated standards) is one thing, but this is everyday casual speech. Maybe your vocal music emphasis is on something like RADA's high-baseline 'standard' accent, beating out the provincial drawl (like they certainly used to, yet anyone in a Ken Loach film is expected to use more highly local inflections (as suited to themselves and their intended character). Accents in music are going to be different (either hyper, in 'folk'/regional, suppressed in easy-listening or stylised for partifular wide genres), but again hard to compare with casual (lazy?) speech.
:Ironically "of" is the one word I might not 'schwaify' so quickly. For something "I would've done it", there's a schwa in the "d'v", but "I would of course have done it" has none in the "d of" (even run together). [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.190|172.71.178.190]] 14:48, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

We should make this post able to be spoken only using ə. I'll have a go tomorrow if no-one does first. [[User:SqueakSquawk4|SqueakSquawk4]] ([[User talk:SqueakSquawk4|talk]]) 22:30, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I like how this is one of the most controversial comics in recent memory and it's about pronunciation. [[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|Trogdor147]] ([[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|talk]]) 18:15, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
:"Pron''ou''nciation"! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.43.161|172.69.43.161]] 04:41, 19 March 2024 (UTC) ;)

Talk:2907: Schwa

2024-03-21T16:26:41Z

172.69.214.39:

In what crazy dialect do these all use the same 1 vowel? [[Special:Contributions/172.68.210.73|172.68.210.73]] 22:10, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:I can think of several. I was immediately reminded of Lucy Porter's Hull accent ([https://www.google.com/search?q=hull+accent+oh+no some examples, including videos/audio, here]), but I can also think of New Zealand (more 'i'ish vowels, at least stereotypically), South African (down a couple of tones from that), and a number of state-side accents that ''conceivably'' are what Randall's drawing upon. [...as ninjaed, below, by 172.71.166.190 at 22:30]
:My own accent (when given its full reign) actually tends to be consonant-light ("o'er" for "over", such that my vowels tend to be ''two or three'' separate tones in a row), so it doesn't work so well. But if I shift my focus to try to impersonate people from ten miles to the north (or a dozen or so miles east) from where I grew up then I can actually get quite close to 'perfect monovowelism' (still suppressing the consonants!). [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.139|172.69.79.139]] 22:32, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:All of them? I had to read the explanation to get what constitutes a schwa, but then I read the comic again, and yeah, they're all roughly the same sound, in the average North American accent anyway. Only exception is the word "A", which people might often pronounce like the letter "A", which of course isn't a schwa, :) [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 05:57, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::'Round these 'ere parts, you'd never say "A"-to-rhyme-with-"Hay" (except to stress "that isn't just ''a(y)'' good song but ''the(e)'' best song ever!", e.g.). Still confused, me, though when at my first ever French class at school, the teacher (with not far off the local accent) told us that 'un' and 'une' were "the words for 'uh'...". Which only became clear when she clarified "...like 'uh book', 'uh table', 'uh window'...". This was actually how we all spoke. (More or less... Ah din't spake quart ser m'tch lahk dat, wot wi' mi mam'n'dad bofe bin frum a cupla tarns ovver, f'witch ah gut uh rep f'beyin "posch". Ur mebbe 'twuz cuz mi mam whir uh titch'r, ser ah gut lurnt t' spake proppah?) [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.3|172.71.242.3]] 17:23, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Personally I pronounce those pretty much all the same (I live in Boston like Randall but don't have an actual Boston accent)
--[[Special:Contributions/172.71.166.190|172.71.166.190]] 22:30, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:I too, living in the Pacific Northwest of the US, immediately saw all the vowels the same. [[User:RandalSchwartz|RandalSchwartz]] ([[User talk:RandalSchwartz|talk]]) 00:43, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

I didn't think it was considered schwa when stressed as in "up" and "love". But my dictionary has a schwa in its pronunciation guide for both, so I guess I was wrong. But this basically means the usual "short U" pronunciation is schwa. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 22:59, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:Some dialects split the vowel at the end of "comma" from the vowel in "strut," but most North American dialects don't. So in pronouncing dictionaries, you will sometimes see the strut vowel written ʌ and the comma vowel written ə even though they might be exactly the same in your accent. In vowels that split comma and strut, schwa is rarely stressed, but that's not a rule. This is sometimes confused by American teachers, who try to explain why they see two different symbols for the same sound. But they really are different sounds, and Americans just don't use /ʌ/ at all. [[User:EebstertheGreat|EebstertheGreat]] ([[User talk:EebstertheGreat|talk]]) 02:50, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::Plus, this "schwa is never stressed" mnemonic doesn't even make perfect predictions for dialects without the merger. I've heard that in ''undone'' /ʌnˈdʌn/, the unstressed vowel doesn't go to schwa. In the end, the IPA wasn't created just for English, and it only defines [ə] as a mid central vowel, not an unstressed one. Reduced vowels may often mid-centralize, but nothing says a language can't stress mid central vowels at other times, just like any other vowel quality can be stressed or unstressed. [[User talk:AgentMuffin|~AgentMuffin]] 21:53, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::As in science in general, there is no "true" description of language, but only models that are more or less useful. Conceptualizing the STRUT vowel as /ʌ/ or as stressed schwa are two possible models. The latter is more popular in writing about US English, and maybe less obvious in some other Englishes. But in the end, in the context of this cartoon, it's self-defeating (if we are being pedantic, which should be allowed in the xkcd universe), because even if we're categorizing them as the stressed and unstressed versions of the same vowel, they're sufficiently different that non-native speakers will still have to learn how to pronounce both of them, especially if their native language doesn't have word stress. [Quinn C, linguist]

This all works in a generically american accent, except for the i vowel in onion, which cannot be schwa-ified in any english accent I've ever heard. [[Special:Contributions/
172.69.34.171|172.69.34.171]] 23:27, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:Depends. {{wiktionary|onion|Wiktionary says}} /ˈʌn.jən/ (any particular places?) or /ˈʌŋ.jɪn/ (Canada) (and an obsolete version that I'd imagine the Kiwis to use).
:If the /j/ ''isn't'' considered a vowel then you could definitely justify something like "un-yun" or "ern-yern" or even "in-yin" (amongst various ''other'' like-vowel versions)...
:If you do the /j*n/ more as in {{wiktionary|eon|/ˈi.ɑn/, /ˈeɪ.ɑn/, /ˈiː.ən/, /ˈiː.ɒn/ or /ˈeɪ.ɒn/}} then clearly you can't switch to "uhn-uh-uhn" quite so easily. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.69|162.158.74.69]] 23:52, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:It says every vowel SOUND, which is different than "how each vowel sounds". The sound of that I is a Y. The O following it indeed uses the schwa. :) That's my guess, anyway, I don't know these pronunciation things that deeply. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 05:57, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:This dipthong has a consonant in it. What is going on? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.65.182|172.69.65.182]] 12:15, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
: "''except for the i vowel in onion''" IMHO, there is no 'i' in onion. UN-YUN. The Y acts more of a consonant. -Me (born of a Missouri mom and a Connecticut father, babbled in Colorado, schooled in Calif then New Jersey within hearing of South Philly, yo!) [[User:PRR|PRR]] ([[User talk:PRR|talk]]) 20:18, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::Personally, I'd call onion a two-and-a-half syllable word. I've internalized the concept of half syllables ever since my Korean friend Hyun taught me how to properly pronounce her name. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.247.40|172.69.247.40]] 18:54, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
I can't read the words "love cult" without thinking of DHMIS 3. [[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|Trogdor147]] ([[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|talk]]) 00:10, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::The /j/ sound commonly found in "onion" is not generally considered a vowel. As a test, try to put it between two consonants to make a complete syllable: first try to say /np/, and notice you have to add a schwa (neutral vowel), /nəp/; then try to say /nyp/, and you'll add that same extra vowel, /nyəp/. It's sometimes called a "semivowel", because it has some properties of a vowel and some of a consonant; or sometimes a "glide", because of the way it sets at the edge a syllable. - [[User:IMSoP|IMSoP]] ([[User talk:IMSoP|talk]]) 16:01, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

If someone actually read this conversation to me using only schwa, I don't think I'd understand it. I usually consider myself a fluent English speaker, but my native language - Polish - doesm't have this vovel at all. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.103.231|162.158.103.231]] 07:16, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:Yeah, I think for us non-native speakers this is quite hard to replicate. I had to read the sentences out loud several times before I heard it. The standard British English I learned at school 35 years ago tends to have less Schwas in it, I guess. In German we do have some Schwas, mainly towards the end of words, but I don't think it is possible to construct whole sentence without any other vowels. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.155.157|162.158.155.157]] 07:56, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
I’m american (boston area) but some of these vowels do sound different from others to me, although it still seems it would be clear and ok if they’re all said the same. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.65.182|172.69.65.182]] 12:15, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Randall seems to have terminally confused the schwa [ǝ] with [ʌ] as in "cup". I've never seen such an incorrect xkcd. In the UK, the Manchester accent almost universally consists of [ǝ] and even they wouldn't be able to use [ǝ] for "onion" [[Special:Contributions/172.69.223.163|172.69.223.163]] 13:04, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:The explanation mentioned the {{w|strut–comma merger}} well before this comment. There's no need to jump to {{w|Linguistic prescriptivism|calling other dialects "incorrect"}}. [[User talk:AgentMuffin|~AgentMuffin]] 21:53, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Maybe a better symbol could be used than an apostrophe in the explanation? It's difficult to read/spot, and the quote is surrounded in quotation marks, which makes it a little confusing. I'm not sure what though. --[[User:Mushrooms|Mushrooms]] ([[User talk:Mushrooms|talk]]) 15:24, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

:Maybe an underscore? “D_gs c_s(_)n, th_ _n fr_m L_nd_n, r_ns _ B_mbl l_v c_lt.” - 16:01, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

It's a shame Schwa isn't pronounced with a schwa. [[User:Kev|Kev]] ([[User talk:Kev|talk]]) 16:47, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:Apparently it was pronounced 'shuwa' at some point, with a schwa for the 'u'. The sound just kind of faded over time since people barely pronounced it. Don't have a source, just remember hearing it somewhere (in a Youtube video, probably).[[Special:Contributions/172.71.98.193|172.71.98.193]] 10:54, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

For an example of where people mispronounce vowels for comic effect, here's a 40 year old and occasionally very impolite/politically incorrect BBC comedy which used people speaking in different accents as their conceit for different languages. So an englishman speaking very bad french comes across very like these XKCD characters https://youtu.be/ycqc0L4a2wQ?si=KO_qvZqMJH-3Gy1N&t=90 [[User:Kev|Kev]] ([[User talk:Kev|talk]]) 16:52, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

This is highly inconsistent both with my experience and the diction/IPA I studied in college as part of a vocal music education degree. The short U [ʌ] and schwa [ǝ] are different vowels, and the difference is most obvious (in words used in the strip) in "cousin" and "obstruction" which would sound ridiculous if you pronounced all the vowel sounds exactly the same. I would have failed an assignment I turned in marking this strip full of schwas. They're almost all [ʌ] except in those words and "a" and "of". {{unsigned ip|172.70.131.119|13:10, 17 March 2024}}
:Diction ('correct' diction, e.g. RP or other elevated standards) is one thing, but this is everyday casual speech. Maybe your vocal music emphasis is on something like RADA's high-baseline 'standard' accent, beating out the provincial drawl (like they certainly used to, yet anyone in a Ken Loach film is expected to use more highly local inflections (as suited to themselves and their intended character). Accents in music are going to be different (either hyper, in 'folk'/regional, suppressed in easy-listening or stylised for partifular wide genres), but again hard to compare with casual (lazy?) speech.
:Ironically "of" is the one word I might not 'schwaify' so quickly. For something "I would've done it", there's a schwa in the "d'v", but "I would of course have done it" has none in the "d of" (even run together). [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.190|172.71.178.190]] 14:48, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

We should make this post able to be spoken only using ə. I'll have a go tomorrow if no-one does first. [[User:SqueakSquawk4|SqueakSquawk4]] ([[User talk:SqueakSquawk4|talk]]) 22:30, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I like how this is one of the most controversial comics in recent memory and it's about pronunciation. [[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|Trogdor147]] ([[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|talk]]) 18:15, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
:"Pron''ou''nciation"! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.43.161|172.69.43.161]] 04:41, 19 March 2024 (UTC) ;)

Talk:2907: Schwa

2024-03-21T16:25:37Z

172.69.214.39:

In what crazy dialect do these all use the same 1 vowel? [[Special:Contributions/172.68.210.73|172.68.210.73]] 22:10, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:I can think of several. I was immediately reminded of Lucy Porter's Hull accent ([https://www.google.com/search?q=hull+accent+oh+no some examples, including videos/audio, here]), but I can also think of New Zealand (more 'i'ish vowels, at least stereotypically), South African (down a couple of tones from that), and a number of state-side accents that ''conceivably'' are what Randall's drawing upon. [...as ninjaed, below, by 172.71.166.190 at 22:30]
:My own accent (when given its full reign) actually tends to be consonant-light ("o'er" for "over", such that my vowels tend to be ''two or three'' separate tones in a row), so it doesn't work so well. But if I shift my focus to try to impersonate people from ten miles to the north (or a dozen or so miles east) from where I grew up then I can actually get quite close to 'perfect monovowelism' (still suppressing the consonants!). [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.139|172.69.79.139]] 22:32, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:All of them? I had to read the explanation to get what constitutes a schwa, but then I read the comic again, and yeah, they're all roughly the same sound, in the average North American accent anyway. Only exception is the word "A", which people might often pronounce like the letter "A", which of course isn't a schwa, :) [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 05:57, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::'Round these 'ere parts, you'd never say "A"-to-rhyme-with-"Hay" (except to stress "that isn't just ''a(y)'' good song but ''the(e)'' best song ever!", e.g.). Still confused, me, though when at my first ever French class at school, the teacher (with not far off the local accent) told us that 'un' and 'une' were "the words for 'uh'...". Which only became clear when she clarified "...like 'uh book', 'uh table', 'uh window'...". This was actually how we all spoke. (More or less... Ah din't spake quart ser m'tch lahk dat, wot wi' mi mam'n'dad bofe bin frum a cupla tarns ovver, f'witch ah gut uh rep f'beyin "posch". Ur mebbe 'twuz cuz mi mam whir uh titch'r, ser ah gut lurnt t' spake proppah?) [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.3|172.71.242.3]] 17:23, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Personally I pronounce those pretty much all the same (I live in Boston like Randall but don't have an actual Boston accent)
--[[Special:Contributions/172.71.166.190|172.71.166.190]] 22:30, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:I too, living in the Pacific Northwest of the US, immediately saw all the vowels the same. [[User:RandalSchwartz|RandalSchwartz]] ([[User talk:RandalSchwartz|talk]]) 00:43, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

I didn't think it was considered schwa when stressed as in "up" and "love". But my dictionary has a schwa in its pronunciation guide for both, so I guess I was wrong. But this basically means the usual "short U" pronunciation is schwa. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 22:59, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:Some dialects split the vowel at the end of "comma" from the vowel in "strut," but most North American dialects don't. So in pronouncing dictionaries, you will sometimes see the strut vowel written ʌ and the comma vowel written ə even though they might be exactly the same in your accent. In vowels that split comma and strut, schwa is rarely stressed, but that's not a rule. This is sometimes confused by American teachers, who try to explain why they see two different symbols for the same sound. But they really are different sounds, and Americans just don't use /ʌ/ at all. [[User:EebstertheGreat|EebstertheGreat]] ([[User talk:EebstertheGreat|talk]]) 02:50, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::Plus, this "schwa is never stressed" mnemonic doesn't even make perfect predictions for dialects without the merger. I've heard that in ''undone'' /ʌnˈdʌn/, the unstressed vowel doesn't go to schwa. In the end, the IPA wasn't created just for English, and it only defines [ə] as a mid central vowel, not an unstressed one. Reduced vowels may often mid-centralize, but nothing says a language can't stress mid central vowels at other times, just like any other vowel quality can be stressed or unstressed. [[User talk:AgentMuffin|~AgentMuffin]] 21:53, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::As in science in general, there is no "true" description of language, but only models that are more or less useful. Conceptualizing the STRUT vowel as /ʌ/ or as stressed schwa are two possible models. The latter is more popular in writing about US English, and maybe less obvious in some other Englishes. But in the end, in the context of this cartoon, it's self-defeating (if we are being pedantic, which should be allowed in the xkcd universe), because even if we're categorizing them as the stressed and unstressed versions of the same vowel, they're sufficiently different that non-native speakers will still have to learn how to pronounce both of them. [Quinn C, linguist]

This all works in a generically american accent, except for the i vowel in onion, which cannot be schwa-ified in any english accent I've ever heard. [[Special:Contributions/
172.69.34.171|172.69.34.171]] 23:27, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:Depends. {{wiktionary|onion|Wiktionary says}} /ˈʌn.jən/ (any particular places?) or /ˈʌŋ.jɪn/ (Canada) (and an obsolete version that I'd imagine the Kiwis to use).
:If the /j/ ''isn't'' considered a vowel then you could definitely justify something like "un-yun" or "ern-yern" or even "in-yin" (amongst various ''other'' like-vowel versions)...
:If you do the /j*n/ more as in {{wiktionary|eon|/ˈi.ɑn/, /ˈeɪ.ɑn/, /ˈiː.ən/, /ˈiː.ɒn/ or /ˈeɪ.ɒn/}} then clearly you can't switch to "uhn-uh-uhn" quite so easily. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.69|162.158.74.69]] 23:52, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
:It says every vowel SOUND, which is different than "how each vowel sounds". The sound of that I is a Y. The O following it indeed uses the schwa. :) That's my guess, anyway, I don't know these pronunciation things that deeply. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 05:57, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:This dipthong has a consonant in it. What is going on? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.65.182|172.69.65.182]] 12:15, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
: "''except for the i vowel in onion''" IMHO, there is no 'i' in onion. UN-YUN. The Y acts more of a consonant. -Me (born of a Missouri mom and a Connecticut father, babbled in Colorado, schooled in Calif then New Jersey within hearing of South Philly, yo!) [[User:PRR|PRR]] ([[User talk:PRR|talk]]) 20:18, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::Personally, I'd call onion a two-and-a-half syllable word. I've internalized the concept of half syllables ever since my Korean friend Hyun taught me how to properly pronounce her name. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.247.40|172.69.247.40]] 18:54, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
I can't read the words "love cult" without thinking of DHMIS 3. [[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|Trogdor147]] ([[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|talk]]) 00:10, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
::The /j/ sound commonly found in "onion" is not generally considered a vowel. As a test, try to put it between two consonants to make a complete syllable: first try to say /np/, and notice you have to add a schwa (neutral vowel), /nəp/; then try to say /nyp/, and you'll add that same extra vowel, /nyəp/. It's sometimes called a "semivowel", because it has some properties of a vowel and some of a consonant; or sometimes a "glide", because of the way it sets at the edge a syllable. - [[User:IMSoP|IMSoP]] ([[User talk:IMSoP|talk]]) 16:01, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

If someone actually read this conversation to me using only schwa, I don't think I'd understand it. I usually consider myself a fluent English speaker, but my native language - Polish - doesm't have this vovel at all. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.103.231|162.158.103.231]] 07:16, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:Yeah, I think for us non-native speakers this is quite hard to replicate. I had to read the sentences out loud several times before I heard it. The standard British English I learned at school 35 years ago tends to have less Schwas in it, I guess. In German we do have some Schwas, mainly towards the end of words, but I don't think it is possible to construct whole sentence without any other vowels. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.155.157|162.158.155.157]] 07:56, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
I’m american (boston area) but some of these vowels do sound different from others to me, although it still seems it would be clear and ok if they’re all said the same. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.65.182|172.69.65.182]] 12:15, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Randall seems to have terminally confused the schwa [ǝ] with [ʌ] as in "cup". I've never seen such an incorrect xkcd. In the UK, the Manchester accent almost universally consists of [ǝ] and even they wouldn't be able to use [ǝ] for "onion" [[Special:Contributions/172.69.223.163|172.69.223.163]] 13:04, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:The explanation mentioned the {{w|strut–comma merger}} well before this comment. There's no need to jump to {{w|Linguistic prescriptivism|calling other dialects "incorrect"}}. [[User talk:AgentMuffin|~AgentMuffin]] 21:53, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Maybe a better symbol could be used than an apostrophe in the explanation? It's difficult to read/spot, and the quote is surrounded in quotation marks, which makes it a little confusing. I'm not sure what though. --[[User:Mushrooms|Mushrooms]] ([[User talk:Mushrooms|talk]]) 15:24, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

:Maybe an underscore? “D_gs c_s(_)n, th_ _n fr_m L_nd_n, r_ns _ B_mbl l_v c_lt.” - 16:01, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

It's a shame Schwa isn't pronounced with a schwa. [[User:Kev|Kev]] ([[User talk:Kev|talk]]) 16:47, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
:Apparently it was pronounced 'shuwa' at some point, with a schwa for the 'u'. The sound just kind of faded over time since people barely pronounced it. Don't have a source, just remember hearing it somewhere (in a Youtube video, probably).[[Special:Contributions/172.71.98.193|172.71.98.193]] 10:54, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

For an example of where people mispronounce vowels for comic effect, here's a 40 year old and occasionally very impolite/politically incorrect BBC comedy which used people speaking in different accents as their conceit for different languages. So an englishman speaking very bad french comes across very like these XKCD characters https://youtu.be/ycqc0L4a2wQ?si=KO_qvZqMJH-3Gy1N&t=90 [[User:Kev|Kev]] ([[User talk:Kev|talk]]) 16:52, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

This is highly inconsistent both with my experience and the diction/IPA I studied in college as part of a vocal music education degree. The short U [ʌ] and schwa [ǝ] are different vowels, and the difference is most obvious (in words used in the strip) in "cousin" and "obstruction" which would sound ridiculous if you pronounced all the vowel sounds exactly the same. I would have failed an assignment I turned in marking this strip full of schwas. They're almost all [ʌ] except in those words and "a" and "of". {{unsigned ip|172.70.131.119|13:10, 17 March 2024}}
:Diction ('correct' diction, e.g. RP or other elevated standards) is one thing, but this is everyday casual speech. Maybe your vocal music emphasis is on something like RADA's high-baseline 'standard' accent, beating out the provincial drawl (like they certainly used to, yet anyone in a Ken Loach film is expected to use more highly local inflections (as suited to themselves and their intended character). Accents in music are going to be different (either hyper, in 'folk'/regional, suppressed in easy-listening or stylised for partifular wide genres), but again hard to compare with casual (lazy?) speech.
:Ironically "of" is the one word I might not 'schwaify' so quickly. For something "I would've done it", there's a schwa in the "d'v", but "I would of course have done it" has none in the "d of" (even run together). [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.190|172.71.178.190]] 14:48, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

We should make this post able to be spoken only using ə. I'll have a go tomorrow if no-one does first. [[User:SqueakSquawk4|SqueakSquawk4]] ([[User talk:SqueakSquawk4|talk]]) 22:30, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I like how this is one of the most controversial comics in recent memory and it's about pronunciation. [[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|Trogdor147]] ([[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|talk]]) 18:15, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
:"Pron''ou''nciation"! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.43.161|172.69.43.161]] 04:41, 19 March 2024 (UTC) ;)

2898: Orbital Argument

2024-02-28T17:37:29Z

172.69.214.39: Undo revision 336063 by 172.69.194.14 (talk) (this is a valid continuum (vector). See Word2Vec and sentence embeddings, for example)

{{comic
| number = 2898
| date = February 23, 2024
| title = Orbital Argument
| image = orbital_argument_2x.png
| imagesize = 448x323px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = "Some people say light is waves, and some say it's particles, so I bet light is some in-between thing that's both wave and particle depending on how you look at it. Am I right?" "YES, BUT YOU SHOULDN'T BE!"
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by an ARGUMENTATIVE ORBITAL ELEMENT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
In this comic, [[White Hat]] is using the {{w|Argument to moderation|middle ground fallacy}} to try to make a compromise between the positions of [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]].

Cueball appears to be asserting a {{w|geocentric}} viewpoint, whilst Megan adheres to a {{w|heliocentric}} one, both of which are flawed descriptions of the way things are, but the latter is much closer to reality. White Hat, however, considers it {{wiktionary|politic#Adjective|politic}} to 'split the difference' and declares his intention to compromise with a 'middle' option, to try to uncritically please both parties. (Though it's probable that he may instead just equally annoy them both!)

On a naive reading, which imagines a point of common orbit midway between the bodies, his thesis is simply wrong. However, by one way of looking at it, it happens that he is also correct. Because two bodies exert equal but opposite gravitational forces on each other, each orbits around the average location of the other, and therefore they both orbit a common center. This {{w|Barycenter (astronomy)|barycenter}} is located somewhere between the centers of mass of the two bodies; the distance of each body's center of mass from the barycenter is proportional to the other body's mass. This is most apparent in systems where the two bodies have similar masses, but it is present to an extent in all orbital pairs, even when one body is far more massive than the other. For this reason, Earth does not orbit the center of the stationary Sun as described by the heliocentric model. However, the Earth-Sun barycenter is only slightly different from the Sun's own true center, still well within the Sun. It is around this which the Sun wobbles, in contrast to the way the Earth orbits around this unequally proportioned midpoint.

That White Hat has worded his compromise solution in a way that (arguably) encompasses the deeper truth of the barycentric viewpoint is not treated as justifying his mediating approach. It is clearly understood, by someone who seems to understand the complexities (e.g. a {{w|Randall Munroe#NASA|NASA physicist}}) that White Hat's 'successful' conclusion is just accidental, and such a person may therefore find this vexatious. This seems to be a case of a {{w|Gettier problem}}: White Hat reaches a true statement via unjustified logic.

The title text extends the principle of the comic's astronomical viewpoint down to the correspondingly opposing 'quantum world'. For various well-studied reasons, light is often described ''either'' as particles ''or'' as waves. White Hat's approach would be to give both viewpoints equal credit and suggest a compromising middle-ground explanation. In this case, also, he would have the {{w|Wave–particle duality|correct answer}} but, in the continuing view of an increasingly exasperated witness to his chronic {{w|False balance|"half-and-half"ism}}, not through a logical proof (averaging predictions of experts is used to reliably improve the accuracy of the {{w|Ensemble learning|ensemble}}, and in {{w|consensus forecast|consensus forecasting}}, so his heuristic may have validity in some cases).

Another example of the middle ground fallacy was used in [[690: Semicontrolled Demolition]], although in that case the person offering the compromise solution was not portrayed as getting the right answer by accident.

Orbits of celestial bodies are quantified using a set of parameters called orbital elements. Some of these parameters are commonly known as arguments, such as the {{w|Argument of periapsis}}. However, these kind of arguments tend to lead to consensus rather than disagreements. Independent measurements of the arguments might indeed be combined by taking the mean (to discover the middle ground).

The Earth-Moon barycenter is located approximately ¾ of the way from Earth's center of mass to its surface, towards the Moon's center of mass. The equivalent Jupiter-Sun barycenter, meanwhile, is located just ''above'' the 'surface' of the Sun due to the masses involved being not as different (but still significantly so), and the much greater distance between them. Pluto-Charon barycenter is located completely outside of Pluto, in part because they are much more similar masses, and are thus considered to orbit each other (tidally locked) around a point approximately 5.4% along the distance between the surfaces of Pluto surface and Charon, or 11% of their center-to-center distance.

As each of the planets and the Sun are simultaneously orbiting/'being orbited' (and every planet also measurably pulls on every other, etc, even discounting every smaller and/or more distant body in the universe), the combined solar-system's barycenter is a less simply-defined point (that being more likely to be within the Sun, at any given point of time), which can often be considered to more simply average out to "<each planet> orbits the Sun" for most purposes.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[From left to right, Cueball, White Hat and Megan standing. Cueball and Megan are arguing. Cueball is raising a finger while Megan's arms are outstretched. White Hat stands between them, both hands out in an equivocal gesture.]
:Cueball: The sun orbits the earth!
:Megan: The earth orbits the sun!
:White Hat: When two people disagree, the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Maybe the earth and the sun orbit a common center!

:[Caption below the panel:]
:It's annoying when people are right by accident.
{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Astronomy]]
[[Category:Physics]]
[[Category:Logic]]
[[Category:Compromise]]

985: Percentage Points

2024-01-03T22:32:34Z

172.69.214.39: /* Explanation */ casing

{{comic
| number = 985
| date = December 2, 2011
| title = Percentage Points
| image = percentage_points.png
| titletext = Grayton also proposed making college scholarships available exclusively to sexually active teens, amnesty for illegal immigrants who create room for themselves by killing a citizen, and a graduated income tax based on penis size. He has been endorsed by Tracy Morgan, John Wilkes Booth's ghost, and the Time Cube guy.
}}

==Explanation==
Cueball is watching a news story about a (fictional) Senator Grayton and his campaign for the then-upcoming 2012 election. After a series of absurd statements Grayton has lost a substantial number of prospective voters, but the news anchor's failure to specify between percentage and percentage ''points'' causes a little ambiguity that gets on Randall's nerves.

Senator Grayton is a fictional character, made up for this comic; which is unusual for xkcd, as it typically uses real-world references (indeed, three real-world names are mentioned in the title text). Given the frankly absurd, and in some cases illegal nature of Grayton's campaign promises, using a fictional character was probably necessary to avoid defaming any real world politicians.

The issues that Grayton supports:

*Tax Breaks to Drunk Drivers: Grayton proposes giving those who have been convicted of a {{w|DUI}} or DWI (i.e. Driving Under the Influence or Driving While Intoxicated) money back on their taxes, when those infractions are typically severely penalized, as drunk driving has resulted in numerous deaths.
*{{w|Predator drones}} and the {{w|Christmas controversy|War on Christmas}}: The War on {{w|Christmas}} is not a real war; it is simply the perception by some {{w|Christian}}s that non-Christians are trying to replace traditional Christmas imagery with more inclusive and generic holiday customs. No politicians have explicitly announced their support of the "War on Christmas," and the idea that one would not only do so, but would also want to use drones—ostensibly to harm or possibly kill people—in the effort is an absurd exaggeration of a relatively harmless culture war.

The term {{w|percentage point}} is used to overcome an ambiguity when comparing two percentages.

'''Reduction of a stated number by a percentage'''
:When the original value is given as a number, there is no ambiguity. If that 20% were of a sample size of 1 million, the starting number could be directly stated at 200,000. And thus, in the statement below, the only possible conclusion is that now only 162,000 people (81%, i.e. 100% minus that 19%, of the 200,000) approve of Grayton.
:''Previously 200,000 people approved of Senator Grayton, and then his approval rating dropped by 19%.''

'''Reduction of a percentage by a percentage'''
:When the original approval rating is given as a percentage (20% in the comic), then a reduction of 19% has two possible meanings:
:1) Of the 20% who previously approved (200,000 people), 19% ''of those'' no longer approve. In this case the result is 162,000 as in the above example.
:2) Compared to the original results, 19% fewer of the entire original sample approve. In this case only 1% of the 1 million now approve, equal to 10,000 people.

If using the second method of comparing percentages, the approvals rating should be described as having dropped by 19 percentage points. In reality, the distinction between the two methods is often overlooked, leading to confusion.

The caption's issue with "percentage" versus "percentage points" is that if Grayton's 20% approval rating drops by 19%, that means that his support has only dropped 3.8 percentage points since 19% of 20% is only 3.8%. That would mean that even after all his outrageous statements, his support dropped only from 20% to 16.2%. However, if the news reports that his 20% approval rating dropped 19 ''percentage points'', that means his support has dropped to 1%, which appears to be more accurate given Grayton's egregious policy decisions and the description of his campaign as having "imploded."

The punchline to all this is that Randall is more bothered by the "percent" ambiguity than by Grayton's appalling policy plans.

References in the title text:

*{{w|Tracy Morgan}} is an actor who plays Tracy Jordan in the TV Show ''{{w|30 Rock}}''. He has been reprimanded for controversial comments on homosexuals and {{w|Sarah Palin}} (in separate incidents).
*{{w|John Wilkes Booth}} is the person who assassinated {{w|Abraham Lincoln}}. He was a {{w|Confederate}} sympathizer and supported slavery. The mention of his ghost could also be a reference to King Falls AM, an audio drama which features his ghost multiple times.
*"The {{w|Time Cube}} Guy" would be Otis Eugene "Gene" Ray. To put things ''very'' politely (as Mr. Ray was a very angry man with severe schizophrenia), he created a website known as Time Cube where he set out his personal model of reality, which he called Time Cube. He suggested that all of modern physics is wrong, in addition to claiming that religion is evil, specifically Christianity, and that the idea of family is poisoning children. Ray passed away in 2015.
*College scholarships to sexually active teens: Many people think adolescents should not engage in sexual activity, let alone be encouraged to do so by college scholarships. This is the opposite of {{w|Abstinence-only sex education|abstinence programs}}, which encourage teens not to be sexually active until marriage.
*Illegal immigrants who create room for themselves by killing a citizen: {{w|Illegal immigration to the United States|Illegal immigration}} is a highly controversial topic in the United States. One argument against illegal immigration is that illegal immigrants are taking jobs away from American citizens. Proponents of immigration assert that this is not the case, since more people in the overall economy creates jobs and brings in more tax revenue. Neither group would be in favor of illegal immigrants murdering citizens even though it would cause no net gain or loss in population.
*Graduated income tax based on penis size: Many people are sensitive about their penis size and would probably consider the measurement of their penises for tax assessment purposes an enormous embarrassment and invasion of privacy. Even the scenario in which those with relatively smaller penises would be levied less tax than those with larger penises would probably not be sufficient for them to accept this policy, and even if they did, those with larger penises would probably consider this policy to be unfair. And the alternative—a scenario in which ''larger'' penises pay less taxes—would be both unfair and incredibly demeaning. Additionally, it is also entirely unclear as to how tax laws would apply to anyone without a penis in this scenario.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball is sitting in an armchair watching TV while listening to a news report coming from the TV as shown by a zigzag line.]
:Voice from TV: Senator Grayton's campaign has imploded following the candidate's promise to give tax breaks to drunk drivers and to authorize the use of unmanned Predator drones in the War On Christmas. Grayton had been polling at 20%, but his support has since plunged by 19%.

:[Caption below the panel:]
:I hate the ambiguity created when people don't distinguish between percentages and percentage points.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]] 
[[Category:Politics]]
[[Category:Math]]
[[Category:Penis]]

2873: Supersymmetry

2023-12-28T05:15:58Z

172.69.214.39: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2873
| date = December 27, 2023
| title = Supersymmetry
| image = supersymmetry 2x.png
| imagesize = 313x375px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = High-speed collisions at the Baby Park track may support the hypothesis that Daisy is her own evil twin, a theory first suggested by Nintendo in the game Majorana's Mask.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by A RELATIVISTIC WALUIGI ANNIHILATING AN UNSUSPECTING LUIGI - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic suggests that the theoretical physics concept of supersymmetry is related to something else commonly known to use "super" in its name, namely Super Mario Bros. and Super Nintendo, and giving an explanation improperly combining the two unrelated topics

Protons, Neutrons, Antiprotons, Antineutrons, Electrons, and Electron Neutrinos are subatomic particles. Typically, an atom is made up of nucleus (Protons and Neutrons), with a cloud of electrons.

Protons: Positive charge, mass is ~1 amu, p+g
 Neutrons: No Charge, mass is slightly greater than 1 amu, n0
 Antiprotons: Negative Charge, same mass as a proton, -p
 Antineutrons: No Charge, same mass as a neutron, -n
 Electrons: Negative Charge, 1/2000 amu, e-
 Electron Neutrinos: No Charge, mass 10 -36, ve

Note: there are Positrons (Antielectrons), which are the opposite of electrons, but they aren’t mentioned in the comic.

The right-handed Daisy (Electron Neutrino) means that Daisy’s direction of spin is the same as the direction of motion. A left-handed Daisy (Electron Neutrino) would be to the opposite.

The title text is a pun on the title of the Nintendo 64 game ''The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask'' and the {{w|Majorana fermion}}. It is referring to the fact that scientists cannot find an antiparticle for a neutrino, and that scientists wonder if a neutrino is its own antiparticle.

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

:Mario: Proton
:Luigi: Neutron

:Wario: Antiproton
:Waluigi: Antineutron

:Peach: Electron
:Daisy: Electron neutrino

:Free Luigi decay!
:[Label below Daisy:] (Right-handed)

:[Caption below the panel:]
:The theory of Supersymmetric Mario Bros suggests that each fundamental particle has a Super Nintendo partner.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Video games]]
[[Category:Physics]]

Talk:2646: Minkowski Space

2023-12-20T17:33:43Z

172.69.214.39: Added viewpoint of a mathematician.

I still don't get it. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.163|172.69.33.163]] 03:06, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
: It's definitely not in the top ten all-time funniest ever, but there are probably more than a few academic physicists it got a grin out of. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.233|172.70.210.233]] 03:38, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
:: It's been a long time since I had any sort of dealing with Minkowski diagrams, but it definitely got me chuckling... I suppose you just have to appreciate Randall's particular slant. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.86.10|172.70.86.10]] 04:45, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
::: You were just bound to make that kind of joke, weren't you? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.146.57|162.158.146.57]] 05:33, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

I don't think checking in to Hilbert's Hotel provides any comfort at all. After all you are required to pack up your belongings and move to a new room a possibly infinite number of times, thus leaving you no chance to get any sleep. [[User:MAP|MAP]] ([[User talk:MAP|talk]]) 05:46, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
:I agree, and removed "The fugitives of the first ship may enjoy a more comfortable getaway if they check into {{w|Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel|Hilbert's Hotel}}." because the hotel paradox has nothing to do with Hilbert space or anything else in the comic. I also think the subsection should be removed as misleading, but I'm waiting on someone to perhaps proofread it as maybe it's just poorly drafted. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.233|172.70.210.233]] 06:06, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
::If the pursuer knows what the prefered "move and insert" algorithm is (and 'arrival number(s)' used in that), then they can go ''immediately'' to the pursued's room, without bothering to book in themselves. So maybe that's a danger. But I'd rather be in a hotel room (that is an unknown one amongst a countably infinite whole) than in a quite obvious maybe-reachable tin can in the openness of space.
::(And any given insertion of new residents needs only a single move at a time, no matter how many nested infinities of arrivals/transports/etc. So moving every now and then isn't so onerous, so long as housekeeping has an infinite number of staff to clean and prepare each new room each time, which they probably can with evenly distributed live-in staff alone.)
::That said, it seems to be more the ubiquity of Hilbert in mathematical constructs than a direct link, him seemingly having an infinite number of fingers in an infinite number of infinite-pies. Probably no loss. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.137|162.158.159.137]] 12:14, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
:::An infinite housekeeping staff would either be able to so easily keep up with the rooms that the hotel could give them infinite paid vacation, or they'd all be working 24 hours a day and still getting farther and farther behind on the cleaning, depending on how the housekeeping staff's infinity is defined. [[User:Dansiman|Dansiman]] ([[User talk:Dansiman|talk]]) 21:19, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

On position alone, "Closer?" could be Voice 1, "Reference" is Voice 2 (both from the cockpit) and "Tell" a new voice (from further behind, passenger/engineer?). Which matches (and adds to) the original dialogue, with Voice 2 being the experienced captain reacting to the more worried copilot/operator next to him, etc. Except that Voice 2 says "On my mark" but then their presumed "Mark" emits elsewhere (to leave room for the actual click, which I'd expect Voice 1 to make). I have sympathy with Randall, if he actually wanted to put this story down in accurate visuals and yet ''positionally'' keep to conventions (having a top-down reading experience) he'd need to either wrap speech-lines around the nose of the craft or (...might need some intermediate frame showing some 'acrobatic' drawing...) have the evading craft flip inverted for the current second frame. Could get more complex than 'necessary', just to leave us with less of a voice-ID mystery where it probably matters very little in the long run. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.155|172.70.162.155]] 12:51, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Hilbert space sounds like the Infinite Probability Drive. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.238.16|108.162.238.16]] 13:46, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
: How long should I wait before getting worried about not returning to normality? [[User:15635176|15635176]] ([[User talk:15635176|talk]]) 15:30, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

At first I wondered if this was a reference to the Wolf 359 podcast ([https://wolf359.fm/]), which has a couple of characters named Minkowski and Hilbert. But it's likely that those names are references to these different kinds of space. [[User:ShifterCat|ShifterCat]] ([[User talk:ShifterCat|talk]]) 16:30, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
:that was what I thought too, then I had the same train of thought. At least I wasnt the only one lol [[Special:Contributions/172.69.71.30|172.69.71.30]] 03:28, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

I disagree with the explanation! We are not living in the Minkowski space but in the Minkowski spacetime. This little detail lead into misunderstanding of the joke. In Minkowski space there is one cordinate with different signature to others. We use this in relativistic physics for the time coordinate to explain many phenomenons in relativistic physics. But in this comics we swap into Minkowski SPACE. It is even more obvious from pictures that strange deferomation happens when we are closer to the diagonal direction. We know this deformation on the spacetime diagram but this one displays whole ship in its spece-like character. So it is not trivial to do such a jump into Minkowski space and it changes the situation! On top of that the distance is usually invariant and indepenedent on reference frame for the given geometry. So the last frame may be a bit strange becouse it looks like a false statement. But it makes sense if you think about it. If we think about "reference frame" in common comics language the reference frame in comics language basically means mention of different frames we picture. And we changed the goemetry between frames. So the geometry itself may cause that distance is independend on reference frame but the fact that we changed the geometry between frames causes that the distance of both ships may depend on such a thing as reference frame. The joke is ingenious! But for completely different reasons that are presented in here.[[User:MBas|MBas]] ([[User talk:MBas|talk]]) 10:29, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
: I really wish I understood what you're trying to say. Is there a source which explains the distinction between Minkowski space and Minkowski spacetime you're trying to draw? Even 1-D Minkowski space is always taken to mean a 2-D spacetime, isn't it? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.90|172.70.211.90]] 06:03, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

As a mathematician, jumping to "Hilbert space" is a weird comment is a weird comment as there's multiple Hilbert spaces. In fact, any finite dimensional space is Hilbert (a fact that's taught in math undergrads at R1s). Even if take it to mean that it's infinite dimensional, there are infinitely many Hilbert spaces, so the only joke to infer is the one referring to number of dimensions.

988: Tradition

2023-12-08T17:49:08Z

172.69.214.39: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 988
| date = December 9, 2011
| title = Tradition
| image = tradition.png
| titletext = An 'American tradition' is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice.
}}

==Explanation==
This comic uses the source of the {{w|American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers}} to say that the 20 most played {{w|Christmas music|Christmas songs}} in the US between 2000 and 2009 were all released between the 1930s and 1970s. It conspicuously excludes a number of more modern songs that seem ubiquitous, but this is because those songs do not appear on the ASCAP list.

"Popular release" in this context means release to the general public, not the version of the song which is most popular.

The {{w|Post–World War II baby boom|Baby Boomers}} were born in a period of time after {{w|World War II|the second World War}} when medical advances meant that infant mortality rates were low but common birth control methods were not very effective.

The data appears to come from [http://www.ascap.com/press/2009/1123_holidays_songs.aspx an ASCAP survey conducted in 2009].

The title text points out that many "traditions" actually have no historical precedent, they're just routines that have been spread by lots of people. The Baby Boomers, since they made up a ''huge'' fraction of the US population, were able to accidentally ground many "traditions" that their parents made up in American society just by consensus among themselves.

==Transcript==
:The 20 most-played Christmas songs (2000-2009 radio airplay) by decade of popular release
:[A bar chart labeled on the X-axis with the decades "1900s" through "2000s" labeled. Each bar has, as one unit, a labeled song. A section of the graph between 1947 and 1962 has a dark-gray extension column, containing the label "Baby Boom" between a pair of arrows pointing at the edges .
:"1900s", "1910s", "1920s", "1980s", "1990s", and "2000s" are empty.
:"1930s" has "Santa Claus is Coming to Town".
:"1940s" has "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", "Winter Wonderland", "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire", "Let it Snow", "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "I'll be Home for Christmas", and "White Christmas".
:"1950s" has "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree", "Jingle Bell Rock", "Blue Christmas", "Little Drummer Boy", "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus", "Silver Bells", "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas", "Sleigh Ride", and "Frosty the Snowman"
:"1960s" has "Holly Jolly Christmas" and "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year"
:"1970s" has "Feliz Navidad"
:The songs are coloured red and green, alternating between squares horizontally and vertically so that all tiles contrast against any direct neighbours in a check-pattern.
:Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, Blue Christmas, Winter Wonderland, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, Let It Snow, It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, I'll be Home for Christmas, Holly Jolly Christmas, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Frosty the Snowman, and Feliz Navidad are red.
:Jingle Bell Rock, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Little Drummer Boy, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, Silver Bells, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Sleigh Ride, White Christmas, and It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year are all green.]
:Every year, American culture embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmases of Baby Boomers' childhoods.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Bar charts]]
[[Category:Timelines]]
[[Category:Christmas]]

Talk:2863: Space Typography

2023-12-08T17:49:00Z

172.69.214.39: /* Outer Planets */ new section

Are the dot's actually roughly in line with the distances?

[[Special:Contributions/172.71.135.78|172.71.135.78]] 21:31, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes they are. I eyeballed with a screenruler and calculated

* 0.40 AU for Mercury (Should be 0.37)
* 0.72 AU for Venus (0.72)
* 1 AU for earth (reference)
* 1.54 AU for Mars (1.52)
* 5.24 AU for Jupiter (4.98)

[[Special:Contributions/162.158.202.94|162.158.202.94]] 21:48, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

But what size font?[[User:Danger Kitty|Danger Kitty]] ([[User talk:Danger Kitty|talk]])
:129 trillion pt, give or take. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.105.109|141.101.105.109]] 23:02, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
:: Thanks for the decimal-point check. This is my worksheet: [https://i.postimg.cc/tRsmk3c6/Oprimistic-AU.gif Image] (open in new tab) [[User:PRR|PRR]] ([[User talk:PRR|talk]]) 02:13, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

The number of "e"s between h and r required to make Saturn line up is about 59 (tested using 27.2 pt font) [[User:Digin|Digin]] ([[User talk:Digin|talk]]) 22:17, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
: There are currently three different figures in the explanation for how many "e"s are needed. One says the title text is correct as written, brackets and ellipsis and all. One says 59. One says 85. They can't all be right. [[User:LtPowers|LtPowers]] ([[User talk:LtPowers|talk]]) 13:22, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
:: "They can't all be right." Well, they can, if they don't correspond to the same thing. Are we using the font size from the comic, or from the hover text? [[User:Rexon Mobile|Rexon Mobile]] ([[User talk:Rexon Mobile|talk]]) 15:39, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

:: I think the [...] has to be condensing what should be a longer title text. If is was "correct as written", that's an extra 3 dots that don't correspond to planets or anything in that region of space. So unless someone can find some objects in that part of space, I think "correct as written" should be vetoed. Also, can't use periods, colons, or semicolons -- would need to separate the main sentence from the title text addition using perhaps a dash or a comma (as long as a comma isn't as comet). [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 17:22, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
::: The sentence is using only the dots that are part of 'i's. Although the comic's text refers to "dots" without specifying that restriction, we don't have to assume that 'j's and punctuation must also correspond to solar system bodies. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 20:06, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
:::: Who says only the dots over the i's are to be considered? The comic certainly doesn't specify that... it just says "use the dots as a map". Someone early on in the explanation made the ''assumption'' that only the dots on letters (i and j) could, but I don't believe that's a valid assumption. The fact that Randall doesn't end the sentence with a dot implies he knows that dot would count, so he didn't include it, though admittedly he did include a period on the title text. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 16:48, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

I’m curious whether randall brute forced this, trained a neural network, or did it by hand. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.175.179|172.70.175.179]] 22:31, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
:He would probably answer: [[2173: Trained a Neural Net]] [[Special:Contributions/172.70.42.217|172.70.42.217]] 22:45, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Trying to prep an image of a comparison between actual orbits and the comic, but it's taking longer than i'd like [[User:SomeoneIGuess|someone, i guess]]([[User talk:SomeoneIGuess|talk i guess]]|[[Special:Contributions/SomeoneIGuess|le edit list]]) 23:20, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

I assume brackets around (i) are for the Saturn's rings? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.102.71|162.158.102.71]] 23:26, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
:Ooh, good call. Put that in. [[User:LtPowers|LtPowers]] ([[User talk:LtPowers|talk]]) 13:22, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
:I assumed it was just a way to emphasize the i. In the comic, they are bolded, but that is not possible in title text. - [[Special:Contributions/172.68.27.133|172.68.27.133]] 22:28, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

The long, rambling diatribe about literature seemed odd at first, but I think Charlotte Brontë would be proud she was able to represent Pluto and Charon. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.247.56|172.69.247.56]] 04:07, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
:I don't understand. What's this about Charlotte Brontë? I don't see any reference to her in this comic.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.155.112|162.158.155.112]] 20:17, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
:: It's a joke about umlauts. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.247.48|172.69.247.48]] 06:37, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the asteroid belt spans the area covered by the word "measure" [[Special:Contributions/172.71.222.152|172.71.222.152]] 14:10, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
:It would be nice if the word gaps were aligned that way, but there is no obvious alignment with either the edges of the asteroid belt, or the location of the Kirkwood gaps. The asteroid belt would stretch from the middle of the M in "measure" to the P in "space", with the most prominent Kirkwood gaps corresponding roughly to the letters A, R and E. [[User:Rexon Mobile|Rexon Mobile]] ([[User talk:Rexon Mobile|talk]]) 15:33, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
:If he really wanted to represent the asteroids, I think he might have found a way to include a word like "riiii[...]iiight" so there would be lots of dots. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 15:51, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
::So '''a'''steroids are mostly between the As in "measure" and "space". Neat. --[[Special:Contributions/172.71.114.63|172.71.114.63]] 19:18, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

I added the table with the count of 'e's and adjusted the wording where it said 85 'e's from the Sun to say an extra 13 'e's in the word "here". I worked this out using an image from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System#/media/File:Solar_System_distance_to_scale.svg) in PowerPoint but don't have upload privileges to post. Would be nice if someone could do that. [[User:Denver87|Denver87]] ([[User talk:Denver87|talk]]) 15:30, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Amazingly (assuming my math was right so please someone check) the sun to scale would be very close to the size of the actual dots used to represents the planets. (Planets wouldn't be visible.)

I don't see why the mnemonic for the order of the planets would be relevant to this comic. Should it be removed? [[User:Rexon Mobile|Rexon Mobile]] ([[User talk:Rexon Mobile|talk]]) 17:40, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
: Absolutely. No relevance to the comic. removed [[User:SomeoneIGuess|someone, i guess]]([[User talk:SomeoneIGuess|talk i guess]]|[[Special:Contributions/SomeoneIGuess|le edit list]]) 18:18, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
:: I put it in because it was another mnemonic about the solar system. [*shrug*] [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 19:59, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
: what?! it should at least be mentioned. this comic wouldn't exist in a world without well-known solar system mnemonics :D
: [[User:Lordpipe|Lordpipe]] ([[User talk:Lordpipe|talk]]) 10:35, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
:: Maybe in a "Trivia" section? [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 16:53, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

The mnemonic scans as "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", with the one hiccup that the emph'''a'''sis lands on the second syl'''la'''ble of mea'''sure'''. --[[User:NotaBene|NotaBene]] ([[User talk:NotaBene|talk]]) 22:46, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm so glad "dark black" is specified in the description, lest anyone get confused by looking for light black instead. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.127.16|172.70.127.16]] 03:41, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Lots of people get lost in the inner solar system. That is, they get lost on Earth, and Earth is in the inner solar system. Yet I don't think this mnemonic would help them much. --[[Special:Contributions/172.70.178.187|172.70.178.187]] 07:47, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

== what if? news! ==

I can't find it anywhere here, but there is now an official what if youtube channel with (currently) two videos uploaded! Also, I think the most recent one *isn't* a duplicate of one already covered in other what if? media! (yeah i know this isnt related to the comic but this is where people will see it)[[Special:Contributions/162.158.175.61|162.158.175.61]] 23:38, 5 December 2023 (UTC)Bumpf
:No, it's been covered somewhere in one of Randall's books. But for anyone who's wondering, here's the link. https://www.youtube.com/@xkcd_whatif
:: If it's been covered already, i find it strange that its first upload was November 30, 2023... [[User:SomeoneIGuess|someone, i guess]]([[User talk:SomeoneIGuess|talk i guess]]|[[Special:Contributions/SomeoneIGuess|le edit list]]) 00:19, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
::: A quick reading of the video's comment indicate that it is taken from the first book, so "the most recent one *isn't* a duplicate of one already covered in other what if? media!" is incorrect, no matter when the free access was added on Youtube. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.233.107|162.158.233.107]] 08:35, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
:::: Oops :) that's what the "I think" was there for [[Special:Contributions/172.71.30.241|172.71.30.241]] 23:41, 6 December 2023 (UTC)Bumpf

== Outer Planets ==

We need a similar sentence for the outer planets. Jupiter is already in the first one, so it will provide a link connecting the two scales. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.214.39|172.69.214.39]] 17:49, 8 December 2023 (UTC)