explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:2783: Ruling Out

2023-06-01T17:57:01Z

172.70.91.171:

Wow. the amount of citation needed tags is excessive. Here's a fun idea, do like that SMBC comic and actually find and give citations. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.70.72|172.69.70.72]] 19:41, 31 May 2023 (UTC)Bumpf
:Definitely. I fixed one (it should have been ''after'' the comma), during some other edits, but was sorely tempted to remove maybe two of them to just keep the funniest one(s). Whichever that(/they) might be. I expect they'll almost all evaporate in a future edit, though, as there's plenty of editting bound to be done. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.219|172.70.90.219]] 19:47, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
::Nice work to whomever on that! Xkcd never fails to make me smile if not LOL, and Explainxkcd never fails to teach cool facts. o7 [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.147|172.69.134.147]] 21:28, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure there has been serious scholarship about the habitable zone of some quasars. Let's see.... Here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2364/1/012057/pdf Not absolutely certain, but absolutely '''not''' ruled out. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.24|172.69.134.24]] 20:02, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
:I think that Cueball's scientific team did a study to discount the possibilities of quasars in the habitable zone of a star, not of a habitable zone around a quasar.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.166.249|172.71.166.249]] 20:52, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
::A quasar could exist in the habitable zone of a star, and if it was particularly dim, it wouldn't make the zone inhabitable. There's no minimum brightness for quasars, is there? For example, [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/728/1/26] defines quasars in terms of relative magnitude, so I don't see why a tiny black hole with a small but sufficient accretion disk in translunar orbit couldn't qualify. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.162|172.69.134.162]] 20:54, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
:::Relative to their ''entire galaxy!'' Fixed explanation. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.175|162.158.166.175]] 09:02, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't know how to properly describe the length of time the Moon's orbit of the Earth has been known. If you think that the moon orbits the earth, but you also think the sun, stars, and planets orbit the earth, do you actually have any way to justifiably say that you know that the Moon orbits the Earth? Also, is it worth pointing out the reasons that the moon is such an obvious thing to know about (i.e. its visibility and prominence to the naked eye, its cultural significance,...)?[[Special:Contributions/162.158.174.183|162.158.174.183]] 20:59, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
:Interesting xkcd (sort-of) reference here. Back when What-If questions started being solicited, I sent in something (roughly) like "When trying to justify the original geocentric theory of the solar system, it is said that it had always 'looked like everything went round the Earth'... What would it have looked like if it had always looked like everything, including the Earth, went round the Sun?" ...which I'm pretty sure never got answered. Probably didn't spark enough possible scope for that good old xkcd magic. But I saw plenty of other good stuff, so no regrets on my part. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.251|172.70.162.251]] 23:14, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
::I think your question was particularly difficult to answer in any way other than "Everything ''does'' go around the sun. To see what that looks like, look up." I suppose your question (if I'm understanding what you may be looking for) may be stated otherwise as "How different would the movement of our Solar System need to be in order to make it obvious that everything revolves around the sun (to a layperson observer on Earth)"? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.194|172.70.206.194]] 14:50, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
:::I don't see much difference between the two ways of putting it (unless you think your one means seeing the 'orbital rails' upon which everything encircles things, or something).
:::Maybe, though, a fairly visible (lunar-sized) satellite of Mars/Venus might be on the edge of discernability (not needing Galileo's assisted view of the Saturnian system, just the kind of patience that raw-eyeballing astronomers used with discerning 'close' stars from each other) thus demonstrating non-geocentrism much earlier and easier and somewhat more undeniable. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.128|172.71.242.128]] 17:29, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
::::My proposed question was meant to clarify, so it shouldn't be much different :-) I don't know what the answer would be, but my hope was to clear up that the question wasn't simply "What would it look like if the Earth revolved around the sun?" which is what I had originally interpreted the question as before I decided that it probably wasn't the question that was meant to be asked [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.90|172.70.210.90]] 17:40, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
:::::Maybe clunkily given here (really we need to see the original Q, not the half-recalled paraphrasing so many years after) but "in order to make it obvious that everything revolves around the [S]un" doesn't look like what you say you first read it as. So to bad writing (capital 'S'!) perhaps add bad reading, I suspect. But we're all fallible. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.171|172.70.91.171]] 17:57, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Y'know, I'm not entirely convinced that "tectonically active black holes" is something that we're actually capable of ruling out [[Special:Contributions/172.68.174.190|172.68.174.190]] 22:33, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
:Even if the black hole is tectonically active, its activity is in one direction only: forward, where you can never catch up to it. The damage is extreme, but it's held safely in the boundary of the singularity. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.203|172.70.130.203]] 01:10, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Did anyone else see the connection between this comic and the NASA briefing yesterday on UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, their term for UFOs)? In the briefing they discussed that the approach they'd need to take is one of ruling out everything else instead of saying for certain that "this is a UAP". I think that's the entire intent of this joke - to comment on the NASA briefing. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.175.113|162.158.175.113]] 11:50, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, the first two classes of object listed couldn't be 'ruled out' by a study, since they're non-existent by definition, and therefore can't be subject to any meaningful proof or disproof.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.87|172.71.242.87]] 15:58, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Talk:2782: Wikipedia Article Titles

2023-06-01T08:21:46Z

172.70.91.171:

Of course, I had to search for those keywords and found this: [https://www.playbill.com/article/bulletin-meryl-streep-in-talks-to-do-seagull-in-central-park-com-87578 Playbill: Bulletin: Meryl Streep in Talks to Do Seagull in Central Park]. Couldn't find anything about a Seagull *incident*, however. We may have to wait until the production has completed. [[User:Shamino|Shamino]] ([[User talk:Shamino|talk]]) 13:44, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
:Or doesn't happen at all. The incident might be a fight between Streep and someone involved in the production. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 14:07, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
::Whatever happens we need to somehow inject the name "Meyrl Street seagull incident" into the news coverage so that the Wikipedia article can be created. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.101|172.70.162.101]] 14:24, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

'''''Ah-HAH!''''' https://www.salon.com/2001/08/27/seagull/ "a 40-ish man was found dead in the bushes from a single gunshot wound near the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, just yards away from where Philip Seymour Hoffman offs himself with a single gunshot wound every night as Konstantin Gavrilovich in Anton Chekhov's ''The Seagull.''" (in which Streep was his co-star.) Thanks to ChatGPT-4's WebPilot plug-in, by the way. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.214|172.69.134.214]] 17:24, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Re the transcript: I don't think they're called checkmarks. Tick marks, maybe.
[[Special:Contributions/172.71.182.232|172.71.182.232]] 18:00, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
:{{done}} [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.96|172.69.134.96]] 18:14, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
::Well, given that {{w|Check mark}} and (redirected there, anyway) {{w|Tick mark}} don't actually refer to those things, I changed the transcript to use the {{w|Graduation (scale)}} terminology as the best(?) of various such terms that I'd more happily use. Which probably is going to annoy someone else, so maybe expect it to change again... [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.179|172.70.162.179]] 20:36, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
:::I did not do this transcript, but I have used the tick marks in numerous transcripts using charts like this. I'm not native English speaker, and there have never been anyone changing it before, and seems like another user also believed tick mark could be used... So it would be nice to find out of it is actually normal to use tick marks for the "ticks" on a graph axis, else there will be 100 of transcripts to fix (as I have been involved in writing most of them). I have never head of the graduation scale terminology...--[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 07:55, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
::::Quick serach came up with [https://grapherhelp.goldensoftware.com/Axes/Tick_Marks.htm this page] using tick marks as I have always done, first after the wiki article on check marks which I have never heard called tick marks before. I will correct back to tick marks --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 07:56, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
:::: Microsoft refers to them as Tick Marks - don't know whether or not that counts as supporting evidence.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.152|172.70.91.152]] 15:39, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
::::: (...not sure MS is an authority, but...) Personally, I read "tick" as a ✓. And "check" is either such a [[2445: Checkbox|tick]] or [[1448: Question|a cross]] (there's also one with a tick/cross ambiguity, prompting much speculation here about positive/nevative meaning, but I can't recall which that one is right now).
::::: I might accept a "tally" marker (vertically, across x-axis, it 'counts' similarly to "five-barred" tally-marks, without the barring). "Graduation" (Graduierung?) does mean both this and the event of graduating (or undertaking the Eksamen?), but has less semantic overlap than a two-stroke diagonal and a single-stroke perpendicular (both of which feature in various comics). I think I'd ignore/change prior "graph axis 'check/tick' marks", depending on context, but it ''would'' be better to be unambiguously a scale-marking and not a confirmatory "this exists" indicator. If the right word can be found. (Grad-mark? Unit-mark?) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.129|172.70.90.129]] 10:33, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
::::::just look at {{w|Hatch mark}} (which is what these are), first line claims they are also called Tick marks. The existing redirect is incorrect. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.70|108.162.245.70]] 10:49, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
:::::::Looks like that page also [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/1157853432 suffers from arguments about what means what], which I'm not at all inclined to get involved with myself. Hatching, to me is more strictly pen/pencil-line shading across an area, but that's just my understanding and it takes all sorts. (Also, you shaved off the datetime signature of the comment you replied to. Repairing that.) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.86.2|172.70.86.2]] 11:45, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
::::::::Hatching, Hash Marks and Hatch Marks, to me, are what the yanks call a "pound" symbol, and we call a hatch or hash mark. # (our "pound" is £, as it used to be our money before we moved on to Aussie dollars) the hatch mark does, I agree, look like pencil shading across an area. [[User:Thisfox|Thisfox]] ([[User talk:Thisfox|talk]]) 22:23, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
:::::::::The pound (#) is a different usage to the pound (£), as it refers to weight, not money, having evolved from a stylised 'lb', from the Latin for 'pound weight'.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.254|172.70.90.254]] 08:19, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

"User disambiguation pages" also exist. See http:/ /esolangs.org/wiki/User_talk:XKCD_Wrong_Times_Table and http://esolangs.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/XKCD_Wrong_Times_Table_(disambiguation) . [[Special:Contributions/172.69.22.126|172.69.22.126]] 02:07, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
:Those pages are not on Explain xkcd, is this spam? --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 07:55, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
::The first link looks like perhaps unintentional spam. I'm delinking it. In any case, the message is unclear. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.175|162.158.166.175]] 08:34, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I think that an important addition to the possible "incident" would be one where a seagull named Meryl Streep caused or was the victim of it. I'll let you work out how to word it. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.19.7|172.68.19.7]] 14:52, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
:I suppose it could also be some incident between a mononymous Meryl and a streep seagull, whatever that is, but it feels like we're stretching. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.247.43|172.69.247.43]] 21:15, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
::It could also reference an incident involving some (non-seagull) entity named 'Meryl Streep Seagull'. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.171|172.70.91.171]] 08:21, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

This is probably a reference to {{w|Jimmy Carter rabbit incident}} which has been previously referenced by xkcd. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.254.161|172.71.254.161]] 14:32, 31 May 2023 (UTC)