explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

3046: Stromatolites

2025-02-04T23:08:38Z

172.70.131.91: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 3046
| date = February 3, 2025
| title = Stromatolites
| image = stromatolites_2x.png
| imagesize = 581x505px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = If only my ancestors had been fortunate enough to marry into the branch of the bacteria family that could photosynthesize, like all my little green cousins here.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by THE MISSING LINK'S OSTRACIZED ANCESTOR - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic makes fun of claims to 'special' ancestry, such as some old royal family or similar, that may be made after doing research on a {{w|family tree}} site. These services allow the user to input the names and other information of family members and cross reference with various documents to trace lines of descent. Often, those who find a connection to a historically significant individual are quite excited about this, and may feel that it somehow makes them special. However, in reality, once you go back more than a few generations there will be many thousands of such connections, and once you get back more than a thousand years or so, anyone you could be related to will also be related to pretty much everybody else still alive in some way or other.

While out for a walk, [[Beret Guy]] is explaining to [[Cueball]] how he has been on such a site and kept clicking back until he found an ancestor from "a few billion years back". These services typically do not allow the user to track their familial history prior to written records{{citation needed}} (although some do provide genetic sequencing which allows for more information to be acquired, but this isn't accurate enough to track on a wide scale individual people who lived before such technology existed), but with his [[:Category:Strange powers of Beret Guy|strange powers]] it is no wonder that Beret Guy could make this work! This would also explain how he is able to do all the clicks needed to go back that far in the past, as at even at a rate of 10 to 15 clicks per second, it would still take thousands of years — maybe even more due to how fast cells can reproduce — to do enough clicks.

Beret Guy found out that he is related to {{w|stromatolites}}. They are layered sedimentary formations created by microorganisms, predominantly the oxygenic-photosynthetic {{w|Cyanobacteria|cyanobacteria}}. The organisms produce adhesive compounds that cement sand and other rocky materials to form mineral "microbial mats" (Cueball calls them ''bacterial mats''). A succession of these mats through time forms the layers ("stromata") characteristic of both fossil and modern stromatolites. Some fossil stromatolites in Australia from 3.48 billion years ago contain the oldest undisputed evidence of life on Earth, though people have also claimed {{w|Earliest known life forms|other, older evidence}} for this record. Since this is some of the first life on Earth it is basically a given that all life that came after (not even just all humans) is related. Beret Guy only claims he is related to their {{w|Alphaproteobacteria|cousins}} and that it is from their cousin bacteria that he got his {{w|mitochondria}}. His aside that he also got his cell nuclei in this way is odd, as, according to the {{w|Cell_nucleus#Evolution|leading contemporary theory}}, the ancestral archaeon ("my archaean ancestors") themselves contributed the nucleus to the original eukaryotic cell. In this model, both the archaeon and the alpha-proteobacterium were endosymbionts in a third cell, which is not consistent with Beret Guy's claim that the mitochondrion began as an archaeon's endosymbiont. Perhaps all that clicking addled even Beret Guy's brain. Anyway, he is not claiming to be a direct descendant from [the cyanobacterial component of] stromatolites, which makes sense since they can photosynthesize, and as he mentions in the title text, he cannot!

Cueball asks if he would like to contact his distant relatives, since there are still living stromatolites today (or at least something very similar to those from billions of years ago). But Beret Guy imagines they are busy so he will not bother them. When asked by Cueball what he would use his newfound knowledge for, he lies down on the hill they have climbed to bask in the sun. Because as he says, "Lying on a hill in the warm sun is an old family tradition." This is basically the only thing stromatolites can do, but they are doing it all the time and could thus be said to be busy with this. It seems, however, like Beret Guy is going to enjoy this tradition.

In the title text Beret Guy muses about how great it would have been if his distant relatives had married into the branch of the bacteria family that could photosynthesize... and then refers to the grass he is now lying on as "my little green cousins here". If this had happened he would either have been able to lie on the hill without eating since [https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2014/10/28 he would be able to photosynthesize] getting energy directly from the sun (instead of eating some of his small green cousins' closer relatives). Or else he would actually have been a plant instead.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball and Beret Guy, seen from afar in silhouette, are walking up a grassy hill.]

:[They continue walking up the hill, reaching its grassy summit. Now with normal lighting. Beret Guy is a bit ahead of Cueball.]
:Beret Guy: I learned something today.
:Beret Guy: I went on one of those family tree sites and kept clicking back, and it turns out I'm related to stromatolites!

:[Closeup on Cueball. Beret Guy's reply comes off-panel from a starburst on the right edge of the panel.]
:Cueball: The bacterial mats?
:Beret Guy [off-panel]: Yeah! A few billion years back, on my mitochondria's side.

:[Cueball and Beret Guy standing on the top of the grassy hill facing each other. Berety Guy holding a hand out towards Cueball.]
:Beret Guy: My Archaean ancestors absorbed some bacteria that were cousins of stromatolites. That's how I got mitochondria.
:Beret Guy: Cell nuclei, too.

:[Cueball is standing behind Beret Guy who is now sitting down in the grass leaning back on one arm with the other arm resting on his bent knee.]
:Cueball: I think there are still living stromatolites. You could get in touch.
:Beret Guy: Nah, they're probably busy. I don't want to bother them.

:[Cueball is sitting behind Beret Guy who is now lying down, both again shown in silhouette from a far, revealing they are on the top of the grassy hill.]
:Cueball: So what ''are'' you going to do with this knowledge? Nothing?
:Beret Guy: Lying on a hill in the warm sun is an old family tradition.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Beret Guy]]
[[Category:Biology]]

Talk:2791: Bookshelf Sorting

2023-06-21T00:47:36Z

172.70.131.91:

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)

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)

Talk:2791: Bookshelf Sorting

2023-06-21T00:45:55Z

172.70.131.91: fixed my reply

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 }}

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)

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)

Talk:2791: Bookshelf Sorting

2023-06-21T00:44:57Z

172.70.131.91:

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 }}

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)

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)
... books? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.90.135|162.158.90.135]] 06:51, 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 sheafs 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)

[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)