explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

1660: Captain Speaking

2023-07-02T14:26:08Z

172.69.59.153: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 1660
| date = March 25, 2016
| title = Captain Speaking
| image = captain_speaking.png
| titletext = Oh dang, you have to pay? Hey, has anyone else paid already? If so, can I borrow your phone for a sec?
}}

==Explanation==
At periodic intervals on a commercial flight, the captain of the plane will address the passengers with information about the flight. Typically this will begin with "This is your captain speaking..." and go on to describe the progress of the flight, expected arrival time and other information about the flight such as if or when refreshments will be brought to passengers.

This comic takes this cliché and inverts it. Instead of the captain providing information, the captain tells the passengers that he has apparently forgotten everything about the flight, even down to what kind of plane he is supposed to be flying – although he does think it is a {{w|Boeing}}. He at least discovers the flight number and then plans to use the consumer app {{w|Flightaware}} that is made for tracking flights. He thus hopes to be able to find out what the destination of “his” plane is. But Flightaware requires {{w|Wi-Fi}} access, so he goes on to ask the passengers if anyone know how to access the Wi-Fi. This app was earlier referenced in [[1363: xkcd Phone]].

This even gets worse in the title text where he realizes that you have to pay for using the on-board Wi-Fi, which means he is trying to access the same Wi-Fi that the passengers have access to instead of using the on-board Wi-Fi that must be in the cockpit (to which he is supposed to have free access). Instead of just paying he then asks the passengers if someone has already paid, because then he would like to borrow their smartphone so he can check the Flightaware app to find out where they are going.

Options for explaining this scenario are:
#The "captain" is not a genuine pilot, but has somehow found himself in the position of being in charge of an airplane (this could be a reference to this earlier comic: [[726: Seat Selection]]).
#The captain has genuinely fallen asleep and has forgotten what plane he is on...but he has thus also forgotten how to navigate, determine his flight plan, or communicate with air traffic control. In the USA (where xkcd cartoons are normally set), there is normally at least a first officer and a flight attendant on the plane to support the captain.
#The captain has been drugged and shanghaied onto the plane. He is now expected to fly and land it for his "employer", but he has chosen to disclaim this fact to his passengers in the least reassuring manner possible.
#After taking-off, the captain enters a {{w|dissociative fugue}} state losing his personal identity.
#The captain had been possessed by some external entity, such as {{w|Sam Beckett}}.
#This may be in the future, where auto-pilot is so smart and do so much of the previous job of the pilot that future pilots might forget how to fly altogether.
#The captain knows exactly where he is and where they are going, and is playing a [[Black Hat]]-style prank on his passengers.

Seeing as how planes cannot take off on {{w|auto-pilot}} (nor can they taxi, but some can actually land), and require a skilled, awake human at the controls, it is unlikely that this captain was responsible for take-off; which must mean this auto-pilot is much more advanced than current models, likely a future model, or that their first officer took off and then went away or asleep. In the event a pilot falls asleep, on medium sized planes, ground- or proximity-, radar would set off an alarm waking the captain if they are on a collision course.

Whilst it is normal for the captain to sleep part of a long flight, this can only occur if there are multiple pilots on the plane. Most flights are on auto-pilot for hours at a time, and the pilots serve primarily for takeoff, landing, and emergencies. They are completely clueless, having to use a consumer app and asking the passengers to get flight details, instead of radioing for help as he probably should. They would easily be able to get the information of where they are going by just asking any of the passengers though.

The fact that the captain is not sure of the flight number is not hard to imagine. Commercial pilots fly multiple flights per day and the numbers all run together after a while. Every radio communication starts with the flight number, but if the captain has been out of commission for some time, the flight number could easily be forgotten. However, he would probably know the aircraft type, as commercial pilots are type-rated for a specific aircraft type and with rare exceptions (e.g. Boeing 757/767) the type is specific to an airframe type. This makes it more likely that he is not professionally qualified, although he could just be rated for so many types of aircraft that it takes him a moment to determine which one is at hand (though such a veteran pilot would be unlikely to have slept through takeoff or forget how to look up flight information from the cockpit).

Three weeks later another plane related joke was released with [[1669: Planespotting]] where it is also an open question if the plane in the comic is actually a Boeing plane...

==Transcript==
:[The text is written above a Boeing 737 Next Generation seen from below as it turns left. The text emanates from the cockpit.]
:Captain: This is your captain speaking.
:Captain: Gonna be honest-I just woke up and have no idea where I am. Looks like a Boeing of some kind?
:Captain: Oh, hey, it says the flight number here.
:Captain: Okay, I'm gonna check FlightAware to figure out where we're going.
:Captain: Anyone know how to get on the wifi?

==Trivia==
*Real World Parallels:
**This comic coincided with [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/british-man-goes-out-for-quiet-drink-in-essex-wakes-up-in-barcelona-a6951756.html a newspaper story] of British man, Alex Caviel, who after a night out had a vivid dream of being on a plane only to wake up to find himself on a plane landing in Barcelona.
**The comic was also published shortly after the [https://www.rt.com/news/337113-flydubai-scandal-leaks-fatigue/ Flydubai scandal], in which many pilots and former pilots accused the airline of overworking its pilots and causing massive fatigue and stress, shortly after the crash of the flight FZ981. These claims were later waged against the FlyDubai airline. The comic could portray a scenario in which one of the fatigued pilots wake up mid-flight, still suffering from lack of sleep.
**The comic was released a year and a day after the {{w|Suicide by pilot|suicide by pilot}} crash of {{w|Germanwings Flight 9525}} on 2015-03-24. This is probably a coincidence as there is no real relation to a pilot that forgets where he is, and then one that deliberately decides to crash a passenger plane killing 150 people, himself included. But for this particular flight the first officer, who crashed the plane, was left alone in the cockpit by the captain, and this was what enabled him to commit the deed. This event thus lead many companies to adopt a rule that there should always be at least two people in the cockpit at all times. But this was not always the case before, and this could explain the situation of the captain in this comic being alone in the cockpit when he "wakes" up.
**Though rare, pilots [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47691478 sometimes may not (correctly) know where they are going].
{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Aviation]]

Talk:2791: Bookshelf Sorting

2023-06-21T17:58:52Z

172.69.59.153: /* Number of covers */

Oh wow, literally 14 captchas to save my edit? Sorry if someone else was working on it too, apparently someone added transcript while I was doing captchas, and when it finally went through it might have overwritten something. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.97|141.101.98.97]] 22:05, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

I fixed a lot of the typos, but should we use color or colour? [[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|Trogdor147]] ([[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|talk]]) 22:11, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
:Because Randall is 'Merkin, full Webster-inspired leftpondian spelling tends to be the norm. (Including people editing correct-for-the-author Discussion contributions... which they really shouldn't!) But I'm happy to see "colour", "centre", "aluminium", etc for as long as nobody has yet decided to normalise(/normalize) everything. ;) [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.184|172.69.79.184]] 23:06, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
::Have no idea what the previous means but Randall is American so this page uses American English spelling. So color, center and aluminum etc (and Normalize) --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 06:03, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
:::I just said what you said, but additionally putting in my oar in about non-standard (to me!) English spelling occasionally forced on us by them damnyankees. :P [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.34|172.70.85.34]] 09:29, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Does the mirroring of the order of the covers mean that there is a secondary sort order? The longest book is first. {{unsigned ip|172.70.91.65 }}
:Good eye that the small books are nested inside the large. Should go in the explanation imo. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.131.91|172.70.131.91]] 00:47, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

It looks like all of the front covers are at the left and the back covers are sorted by the number of pages in the book.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.222.139|172.71.222.139]]
:It looks like each group of pages is sorted randomly. Note that each book has a unique height. You can see the height distributions change as books end at their back covers and are no longer included in clumps. The books seem short? A careful eye may be able to identify the location of every page. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.59.154|172.69.59.154]] 01:53, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
::To me it looks like the longest books are really really long and that it doesn't match the size of the front. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 06:03, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
:::The last "pages and rear cover" is obviously the real thickness of the end bit of the last book (where it is the only representative). The penultimate pages section is therefore 2x the thickness of the pages from either book which has such pages (give or take paper-quality/weight), and so on until the first paper-bundle is eleven times the thickness of the books that all ''have'' pages one-to-whatever.
:::Which means it should be 'easy' (...FCVO) to reconstruct the uncollated and re-bound individual book widths from pixel measurements alone (and use the visibly cyclic nature of the initial 11-collated page 1s, 2s, etc to estimate the 'page density' to even get a good approximation of page-counts). But I must admit that there seems a lot more paper there than eleven books would normally have. Unless peculiarly short-and-fat.
:::In fact, I'm glancing at a bookshelf unit opposite where I'm sitting. It looks narrower than the drawing (just measured: 750mm, or 2'5½" internal to its sides; I reckon the comic bookshelf is the traditional 3ft/yard length, though obviously less the end bits where unobtrusive bookends could be for an 'open' version like that) and yet it has ''thirty'' books crammed in on one of its levels, and some of those being 'mighty tomes' (830 pages, 469, 454, 944, 778... just by 'last numbered'). Thinnest book in the sequence is 122 pages. The whole lot is a mixture of hardbacks, paperbacks and those intermediate 'card-bound' types that I forget the name of. If they were all hardback, I'd have to lose at least one (maybe two) of the thinner ones, but can't account for anything above a dozen of the difference, that way. Similar for the other levels of shelving, and I've got more (and thicker, at first glance) books on other shelves in this room and elsewhere.
:::So artistic licence, probably, but I get the impression that the mix of relative proportions are probably taken from RL, just exagerated for drawability.
:::And an unbound book, leaf torn assunder from fellow-folio leaf, probably gains a bit of 'air gap', now that it has no spine to help 'bookend the book', the standing-power of singular hardback covers alone can't be that stable to resist all that paper wanting to domino-lean outwards, like a reasonably long book or two can to retain thinner works within the central part of the shelving. It looks like an engineering problem, in miniature, working with tolerances and margins (NPI!) to not have everything decide to schluff sideways; and possible off the shelf entirely! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.34|172.70.85.34]] 09:29, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
::::Did you skillfully defuse my nerd snipe regarding mapping the page locations? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.131.91|172.70.131.91]] 00:47, 21 June 2023 (UTC)
::I added my observations about the order of the books to the explanation. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 17:10, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Why not sort by ISO 2108? {{unsigned|Hamslabs}}
:By ISBN? You mean order by the publishers' registration date? Lol. No, that's useless unless you're trying to make a point about publishing industry consolidation, which you could more effectively do by sorting on parent company identity. ([https://www.authorsalliance.org/2021/12/08/the-consolidation-of-publishing-houses-past-and-present/ But making that point would be a pretty good idea.][https://stevelaube.com/who-owns-whom-in-publishing/]) [[Special:Contributions/172.71.154.47|172.71.154.47]] 06:29, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

There are so many drawbacks from destroying books to sort the pages and zero advantages (except to horrify book people with the destruction of books), so all the crap about the good and bad is not relevant! I will delete it. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 06:06, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
:Go for it, [https://gizmodo.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-landed-gentry-1850546737 landed gentry]! [[Special:Contributions/172.71.155.22|172.71.155.22]] 06:09, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
:: I agree that adding supposed "advantages" to the sorting method is probably superfluous, but I instinctively added a summary of the disadvantages, since that is what we usually do on ExplainXKCD. It can often be illuminating to actually break down the reasons why something is bad - even if it seems obvious, I often discover nuances that I'd never even considered this way. [[User:Hawthorn|Hawthorn]] ([[User talk:Hawthorn|talk]]) 13:03, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
:The content of the shelf happens when somebody digitizes a personal library by cutting the bindings off books and feeding large clumps of their pages through a document scanner. You’ve already digitized them, so the loose pages are a novelty rather than the primary source for the content. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.131.91|172.70.131.91]] 00:44, 21 June 2023 (UTC)
... books? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.90.135|162.158.90.135]] 06:51, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

[https://www.semicoop.com/comic/color-coding/ There's a compromise between sorting by colour and sorting by topic.] --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.146.11|172.68.146.11]] 14:14, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Are there any famous books where the first line is "Aaaaaaahhhh", thereby making it first in Randall's bookshelf? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.175.226|172.70.175.226]] 18:15, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
:I don't know. But I haven't written any part of {{w|Earthly Powers}}. "Sorry, but we can't advertise your book."--[[Special:Contributions/172.71.114.11|172.71.114.11]] 21:30, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

I would think the obvious way to sort books would be alphabetically by most important word. For genre fiction, that would be the 40000th word, since that is the one that makes it eligible for a Nebula Award for Best Novel.[[Special:Contributions/172.69.247.45|172.69.247.45]] 05:13, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

== Number of covers ==

Can someone help me....count? The number of front covers don't match the number of back covers, correct?
:I count 11 front and 11 back covers. The last two books are around the same color and may look like a thicker book, but are actually one extra-skinny shorter book next to one taller one. Click on the picture (twice) for a larger version where you can see it more clearly. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 17:09, 21 June 2023 (UTC)
::That was the one, thanks. (although, I was secretly hoping that it was a secret in-joke) [[Special:Contributions/172.69.59.153|172.69.59.153]] 17:58, 21 June 2023 (UTC)