explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:768: 1996

2025-02-13T14:19:36Z

172.71.22.85:

The only problem with the N-Spire series is that you have to boot it up. Another problem (ok, the nspires are riddled with problems) is that they are still terribly underpowered compared to the modern mobile device. The last is that they are still objects of mass blunt-force trauma, meaning they are still unwieldy bricks, you now have to wait for 2 minutes while your calculator boots up (''!!''), it's still a low resolution screen, and the processor is still clocked somewhere under 500 MHz.
:Hey, I like the nspire, it does calculus and 3d graphing (even without the case model you can do definite calculus), displays up to 12 digits (which is plenty for most purposes), can be interfaced directly to some scientific instruments (more if you can find the software), can do lots of linear algebra, spreadsheets, companion software for easy download of apps if you can find them, can do way more with graphs than I even know how to ask it for, a filesystem for storing projects if you are that organized or need to refute back to things, and some models even have a touchscreen. It also has tons of constants and functions preloaded, copy/paste functionality, and can do unit conversions. I think it might even be able to do dimensional analysis, but I'm not certain. The battery on a first-gen nspire cx can last for days, and it only takes a couple of seconds to boot up, not two minutes. Plus, despite the fact that it is the premiere calculator for ti (and has been around for years) I've not encountered a lot of places where it is banned on tests, although that might be just me. Also, it doesn't need to have a fast processor, most, if not all, of what it is intended for is quite easy for a computer, it's not like you're running a 3d game [[User:Stardragon|Stardragon]] ([[User talk:Stardragon|talk]]) 00:20, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

Now, if T.I. made an android app that offered the entirety of their graphing and CAS functionality they could easily charge $70 and everyone I know (I go to an engineering university) would buy it with no regrets.

--[[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]<span title="I'm an admin. I can help.">_a</span> ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 23:04, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

:They'll never do that - profs (not to mention high school teachers) would freak out! If that's not yet the only reason dedicated-hardware graphing calculators still exist, it soon will be. {{unsigned ip|24.218.167.129}}
::Why? Why they would freak out? [[Special:Contributions/173.245.48.107|173.245.48.107]] 22:18, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
:::I can think of a couple reasons: I can't imagine many teachers or professors allowing students to use their smartphones in an exam scenario. (Honest sir, I'm only using my calculator app!). A large proportion of profs I've dealt with tend to be creatures of habit, with a certain resistance to change. Rightly or wrongly they know the existing calculators work, so why change. --[[User:Pudder|Pudder]] ([[User talk:Pudder|talk]]) 09:53, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
::::Wait. Are you telling me I can get a college degree for the price of a calculator case and someone to fit a phone in it?
[[User:Weatherlawyer| I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait]] ([[User talk:Weatherlawyer|talk]]) 21:22, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
:::::There has been someone who embedded a wi-fi transmitter into a graphing calculator case, and wrote programs to enable it to access the internet, break out of the "test" mode, and hide the fact that there were programs on it when the teacher inspects it [[User:Firestar233|guess who]] ([[User talk:Firestar233|if you desire conversing]] | [[Special:Contributions/Firestar233|what i have done]]) 05:13, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
:::On 'allowable calculators', I went into exams ({{w|General Certificate of Secondary Education|GCSE}}s) in the UK with a {{w|Casio FX-702P}}. I always showed the teacher/invigilator that it had no programs pre-stored in it (not that they'd have known if I'd written P0 to display the 'fact' that I hadn't any programs currently stored).
:::TI didn't seem to be as big a name over here, at the time (or not yet won the equivalent contest to the VHS/Betamax Wars, in which our family allegience was firmly allied with the technically superior {{w|Video 2000}} format!) and, though still low-powered when compared to the {{w|BBC Micro|BBC Acorn}} computer (as ubiquitous in schools as budgets allowed, i.e. one of them for a Primary School moved between classes on a trolley, while the Secondary School had maybe a half-dozen in one room, shared between 30+ kids at a time), it was a true miracle in the pocket.
:::But that was when having a digital watch with a 'driving game' on it (oversized buttons for left and right lane-switching, and LCD elements to simplistically show the road ahead and any 'cars' you had to avoid driving into at ever increasing refresh rates!) was the easiest way to become popular with the class. Never had one myself. Or the calculator watch, that someone else had. I think I had one that showed the temperature, but that was never as impressive as it might have seemed when I first got it from {{w|Argos (retailer)|Argos}}... Oh, crazy days! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.77|172.70.162.77]] 00:09, 3 January 2022 (UTC) [[User:Weatherlawyer| I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait]] ([[User talk:Weatherlawyer|talk]]) 21:22, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

::TI has, in fact, already made a [http://education.ti.com/en-GB/aus-nz/nspire-family/ipad TI-Nspire iPad app] (but there's nothing official for Android). --[[User:Qwach|Qwach]] ([[User talk:Qwach|talk]]) 19:21, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
::: If we're talking about apps, then Maxima for Android is all you need. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.212.196|108.162.212.196]] 23:45, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

This explanation misses an important point of the comic's punchline: back in the mid-'90s, you would spend lots of cash for something that, by today's standards, is underpowered. While the observation about the state of changing technology between then and now is valid, the punchline to the comic is that in the case of TI calculators, not only has the *technology* not moved forward, but the *price* hasn't changed either! Nobody would nowadays pay 3000 dollars for the 100MHz Pentium machine mentioned in the comic, but people still spend 100 dollars on a 10MHz calculator. Madness. This is why the characters stumble over the "Times sure have changed" sentiment because, in the TI case, nothing has changed at all. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.81.216|141.101.81.216]] 09:18, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

My TI-84 Plus is 95 x 63 pixels, rather than 96 x 64. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.246.209|108.162.246.209]] 02:21, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

:Did you look under the battery holder? Perhaps a pixel broke loose and slipped under there. {{unsigned ip|199.27.133.123}}

::The operating system hides the last row and column of pixels from you, particularly on the graph screen, giving the appearance that it's 95x63, but it really is 96x64. Also, the original version of this comic had the dimensions at 96x62, but Randall later fixed it to the correct 96x64.
[[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.216|108.162.237.216]] 20:33, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

It is worth noting that it takes exactly 768 bytes to store an image of the screen, and there are several 768 byte buffers used by the OS for saving the screen. I don't know the comic number is on purpose, but it's certainly quite appropriate. --[[Special:Contributions/73.176.149.27|73.176.149.27]] 03:16, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

reminds me of the SMBC comic proposing that the price of graphing calculators is so stable they could be used as a backup currency --[[Special:Contributions/172.70.230.197|172.70.230.197]] 07:55, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

Hmmm... In 1995 (or, at the latest, early 1996?), I got a P133 of otherwise seemingly similar spec for approximately '''GBP'''2000. I had a free choice of Win3.1 or Win95 (went with '95, despite trepidation... broke it a bit, then fixed it, due to not being used to LFNs now being possible on the FS). Without checking historical £/$ rates, I think I paid significantly less for more ooomph than Cueball/Randall would have had to pay. (Before I upped the RAM to a 'huge' 40MB and added the ''second'' 1GB disk, and later gave it an All-In-Wonder Pro video/TV card and some additional 3D-accelerator... Probably the last time I had pretty much the vroomiest bit of hardware I could possibly get, but it remained powerful enough for my purposes for well over half a decade.) [[Special:Contributions/172.69.195.162|172.69.195.162]] 00:19, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

The comic isn't very accurate. The TI-83 has a 6 MHz CPU and 32 KB of RAM (some used by the OS), which is off by almost 2 years according to Moore's Law. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.22.85|172.71.22.85]]

3042: T. Rex Evolution

2025-01-27T15:26:33Z

172.71.22.85: Still needs a citation but it's a much less insistent piece of speculation now

{{comic
| number = 3042
| date = January 24, 2025
| title = T. Rex Evolution
| image = t_rex_evolution_2x.png
| imagesize = 418x378px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = Unfortunately, body size and bite force continue to increase.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a BOT WITH NEGATIVE LIMBS, CURRENTLY LIVING IN LOCH NESS - fact-check the graph's "early" claim and flesh things out a bit. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

The small and commonly supposed useless forelimbs of ''{{w|Tyrannosaurus rex}}'' have often been used as a source of humor in works of fiction that feature dinosaurs. [[Randall]] claims that the ancestors of ''T. Rex'' had (relatively) longer forelimbs, and hypothesizes that — had non-avian dinosaurs not suffered an {{w|Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event|extinction event}} — this trend of "reduced limbs" would have continued until present-day descendants of ''T. Rex'' were limbless creatures not unlike a giant snake.

{{w|Evolution|Evolutionary theory}} indicates that different selection pressures cause the development or loss of characteristics, as those characteristics which enable better survival to continuation of the species are emphasised and those which don't (such as wasting nutrients on growing unnecessary limbs) are not.

In reality, while some animals have evolved to lose the use of the limbs of their predecessors — such as the hind legs of a whale — there is no particular reason to think that the ''T. Rex'' was on the way to its forelimbs becoming vestigial, as opposed to being well adapted to the niche it filled in the form they had. In fact they appear to have been extremely powerful, which would be an unusually wasteful trait if they were not much used. There is even less reason why the shrinking of one set of limbs would necessarily apply to other limbs. A ''T. rex'' would continue to have substantial need for its hind legs, which it used for running and chasing prey, and would have no reason to lose legs unless environmental factors favored a limbless lifestyle. Loss of all limbs has happened multiple times in the order {{w|Squamata}} (the lizards and snakes), where limbless body plans have evolved convergently over and over, such as in {{w|Common_slow_worm|blindworms}} as compared to true {{w|snake}}s. However, the circumstances that encourage such lifestyles were not likely to happen to the large predatorial Tyrannosaurus. With that said, it is plausible Tyrannosaurus could have eventually lost its arms if it had never gone extinct.{{acn}}

The title text make a similar claim that, as ''T. Rex'' was also larger than its ancestors, the same trend in growth would continue, such that the hypothetical limbless present-day descendant would be even larger than the [https://what-if.xkcd.com/78/ famously elephant-sized] ''T. Rex''. In reality animals do not grow in size linearly, and a modern descendant of Tyrannosaurus would not necessarily be dramatically larger and could easily have become somewhat smaller, even with the same body plans and lifestyle. Though it is unlikely that the constraints of {{w|insular dwarfism}} could have applied to such creatures across the continental range they may have remained alive to inhabit, many unknown factors might have influenced their descendants' body shapes, and probably even induced further speciation to render all surviving branches of the tyrannosaur family tree as distinct, probably to include both growing and re-shrinking lineages. (It is a common misconception, used here for humorous purposes, that an individual personally evolves into a particular form, or that a single descendent represents the only evolutionary track taken 'towards perfection' from a less evolved ancestor.)

This comic may be tangentially related to the fact that birds are dinosaurs that survived the KT extinction, which is a recurring theme on xkcd.

Extrapolation was first the subject of a comic in [[605: Extrapolating]] and has since become a [[:Category:Extrapolation|recurrent topic]] on xkcd.

==Transcript==
:[A graph is shown. The Y-axis is labelled and has two labeled ticks at the top and halfway up from the X-axis:]
:Limbs
:4
:2

:[The X-axis is not labelled but represents time and it has ticks every 10 million years, from 180 million years ago until present time. Every fifth tick is a bit larger and has a label beneath it. Except the one at the present time. Below the last tick is an arrow pointing to that tick with a label. There is another arrow that points to about 65 million years ago and this also has a label:]
:150 million years ago
:100 MYA
:50 MYA
:Now
:Extinction

:[The graph shows three animals positioned from the top left, to the middle to the bottom right of the graph.]
:[The first animal is a regular dinosaur walking on its hind legs, with fairly long front legs. It is positioned at 4 limbs and 150 million years ago. A label is written above and right of it:]
:4 normal limbs

:[An arrow goes along the diagonal of the chart down and right and points to the second animal, a Tyrannosaur Rex, which is located in the middle of the chart next to 2 limbs and, just left of the "extinction" arrow. Larger than the first and with almost no front legs. A label is written above and right of it:]
:Barely more than 2

:[A dashed arrow with a label in the middle continues along the diagonal of the chart to the last animal: A leg-less "dinosaur" with a big open mouth. The animal lies on its belly but with the head part and the tail lifted from the ground. A label is written above it.]
:?
:???

:[Caption below the panel:]
:If T. Rex hadn't gone extinct
:(Linear extrapolation)

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Charts]]
[[Category:Timelines]]
[[Category:Extrapolation]]
[[Category:Dinosaurs]]

3009: Number Shortage

2024-11-11T17:00:53Z

172.71.22.85: /* Continuation */

{{comic
| number = 3009
| date = November 8, 2024
| title = Number Shortage
| image = number_shortage_2x.png
| imagesize = 284x269px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = "10 minutes ago we were down to only 2 0s!" "How many do we have now?" "I ... don't know!!"
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a BOT WITH 11 0S AND 10 1S. NO, WAIT... - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic presents a situation where the ability to use numbers is a limited resource. Even quantifying how many numbers are left uses up some of those numbers when stating it.

In real life, being able to write or say digits is not a limited resource. However, the comic does parallel the {{w|Look-and-say sequence|Look-and-say sequence}} as well as many {{w|Math Blaster Episode I: In Search of Spot|educational video games}} for young children where numbers and mathematical concepts are treated as living people or factory goods, in order to give some sort of story or context to the math-related activities.

The comic conflates numbers with decimal digits. So when [[Miss Lenhart]] says "15 2s and 12 3s", that uses up two 2s (one in "2s" and one in "12") and one 3 (in "3s"). She adjusts the counts as she's speaking, so when she says "13 2s", that uses up another 3, leaving only 10 3s when she's completing the sentence.

In the title text, she uses two 0s when saying that they had two 0s left, so now they have no more 0s. But she can't use the number 0 to describe this situation because they're out of them.

===Continuation===

A continuation of the pattern would go:

* "We have only 15 2s and 12 3s left."
* "No, wait, 13 2s and 10 3s."
* "No, wait, 12 2s and 9 3s."
* "No, wait, 10 2s and 8 3s."
* "No, wait, 9 2s and 7 3s."
* "No, wait, 8 2s and 6 3s."
* "No, wait, 7 2s and 5 3s."
* "No, wait, 6 2s and 4 3s."
* "No, wait, 5 2s and 3 3s."
* "No, wait, 4 2s and 1 3."
* "No, wait, ? 2s and 0 ?s."

At that point, Miss Lenhart would lack the necessary 3s to articulate that there are "3 2s and 0 3s."

* "No, wait, 2 2s and 0 ?s."
* "No, wait, 0 ?s and 0 ?s."

Or perhaps at this point, she might just say "We have run out of some digits," since she can no longer articulate which ones or, indeed, how many.

==Transcript==
:[Miss Lenhart is standing on the left, facing Cueball and Megan on the right.]
:Miss Lenhart: The Math Department number shortage is getting worse. We have only 15 2s and 12 3s left.
:Miss Lenhart: No, wait, 13 2s and 10 3s.
:Miss Lenhart: No, wait...

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Miss Lenhart]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Math]]
[[Category:Comics with lowercase text]]

Talk:3007: Probabilistic Uncertainty

2024-11-05T15:15:24Z

172.71.22.85:

Emotional spirals are useless. I've been coping by pretending we're in scenario 1, it keeps me sane. If I'm wrong, I'll jump off that bridge when we come to it. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 20:23, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
:And I have a friend whose strategy is baking. It's both therapeutic and delicious. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 20:41, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

:I see I don't know US geography well: which bridge you can jump from to leave it? -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 02:34, 5 November 2024 (UTC)
::Most of them. Some of them may be 'caged in' for safety/anti-suicide/anti-DropThingsInThoseBelow purposes (or a {{w|covered bridge}}). Relatively few of the others will be ones that you would have no qualms about vaulting the railing, but (as well as it clearly being a witticism by Barmar) I think you could easily ''find'' a bridge that you could jump off. And the resulting falling part isn't at all the difficult bit. Landing safely (or, in extremis for those desperate enough, in a guaranteed immediately fatal manner) is more the challenge. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.86.206|172.70.86.206]] 14:48, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I can't help but think that at preparing for the negative outcome regardless of which outcome is more likely (unless that outcome is *very* unlikely) is a healthy thing to do. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.147.141|172.71.147.141]] 20:30, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
: "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst" is my usual approach to things. [[User:Elektrizikekswerk|Elektrizikekswerk]] ([[User talk:Elektrizikekswerk|talk]]) 07:45, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

This comic appeared the day before the 2024 United States Presidential Election. At publication time, polls were strongly suggesting about a 50/50 odds that either major candidate would win. Recent news items included advice from mental-health professionals on how to deal with election-related anxiety. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.167.195|172.71.167.195]] 20:32, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
:Definitely related. This should be in the text, not in the comments, frankly. The yanks are going nuts about the election right now. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.124.243|172.71.124.243]] 20:57, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
:Did the advice suggested narcotics? -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 02:34, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

My personal policy is to expect and prepare for the worst. That way I can be surprised when it doesn't happen, and not surprised when it does, rather than the other way around. I don't "do" emotions, so it's basically just planning and mumbling colloquialisms involving the digestive system... [[Special:Contributions/172.71.134.64|172.71.134.64]] 21:31, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
:As someone who used to think this way, this is obstructively cynical, and downright ''sad''. I mean, in theory you should be pleasantly surprised by the good, and prepared for the bad, but in practice you just dismiss anything good and focus exclusively on the bad. As someone with experience in this type of thinking, it isn't healthy. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.22.85|172.71.22.85]] 15:15, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

I can't help but feel that it's mostly Democrats that are anxious, where Trump winning is the bad case. Not being an American I don't have much perspective. Are many Republicans likely to also be anxious, and if so, why? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.60.170|172.69.60.170]] 21:55, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

From what I've seen the ones in public-facing forums seem pretty indifferent. They do talk a lot about election fraud though. {{unsigned ip|172.70.34.117|22:42, 4 November 2024 (UTC)}}

I like that the comic leaves "good" and "bad" open to interpretation.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.83|172.70.211.83]] 22:29, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
:He doesn't want to start fights in the comments/discussion pages/replies! Good to see him appealing to no specific demographic in this one. -[[User:Psychoticpotato|P?sych??otic?pot??at???o ]] ([[User talk:Psychoticpotato|talk]]) 22:40, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
::Considering that the "Harris for President" banner is still active, I'm not sure I agree with that. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.22.4|172.68.22.4]] 22:53, 4 November 2024 (UTC)
:::yeah, for that reason i think it's more just so the comic can have further longevity, as this way it can be applied to any number of things with two outcomes, not just the current election [[Special:Contributions/141.101.109.193|141.101.109.193]] 00:02, 5 November 2024 (UTC)
::Well, so far so good ... -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 02:34, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Re [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=3007:_Probabilistic_Uncertainty&oldid=355799 Further, with regards to N/A - the odds of "precisely" 50/50 are probabilistically zero]: Bear in mind that with the Electoral College system and the fact that only 7 US states are "likely in play," we are talking only hundreds or thousands of realistic possibilities. The odds of a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College are far more than 0. One possibility of a tie that is "on the radar" is if the Republicans take Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and the 2nd Congressional District of Nebraska (which is very likely to go Democratic) and the Democrats take Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. If you consider just the 7 "in play" states but Arizona "flips" from Republican to Democratic, there are 3 combinations that yield a 269-269 tie. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.249|172.70.210.249]] 01:29, 5 November 2024 (UTC)
: If there's a 269-269 tie, that's basically going to be a Trump win due to how the contingent election process works. (For that matter the far more plausible 270-268 to Harris, which happens if she wins Nevada but not Pennsylvania, is likely going to result in Trump getting the presidency as well, but let's ignore that.) However, many analysts, when faced with numbers like Nate Silver's 50.015%, are going to round it to 50% or 50.0% in the public-facing reports, resulting in apparent exact 50/50 odds even if mathematically they actually favor one side slightly. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.130.3|172.71.130.3]] 10:07, 5 November 2024 (UTC)
::There's little point in being so precise, since the fraction is far less than the margin of error in the polling. Anything between 49% and 51% is essentially a toss-up. If the 51% is in your favor you can feel hopeful, but hardly confident. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 15:11, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Re '''We contacted several researchers who are experts in emotional spirals to ask them, but none of them were in a state to speak with us''': Is it a stretch to think that the emotional-spiral experts were all "in Puerto Rico" (which is not a state), emotionally speaking? In the last week a supporter of one of the candidates insulted Puerto Rico and by extension, people of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican descent, causing an emotional uproar all over the inter-tubes. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.90.210|162.158.90.210]] 01:37, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Created an account just to say this; don't get mad at me but in my opinion, both candidates are equally bad, which has led to a weird sense of calmness in me due to my belief that we'll be equally screwed no matter what, just in different ways. Tbh in my opinion both candidates are in between what their supporters think of them and what their opponents think of them. Please be civil if you reply, no ad hominem please. [[User:BurnV06|BurnV06]] ([[User talk:BurnV06|talk]]) 05:24, 5 November 2024 (UTC)
:No, one of them is clearly worse than the other. How do you feel about LGBTQ+ rights? Abortion? Medicare? Teaching kids that racism and homophobia in schools is bad? Well, if Project 2025 is anything to go by, one side ''clearly'' is the unpreferable unless you're a white, Christian, rich, and male. This is not a "both sides" issue. One is clearly the worse option. And frankly, I wish centrists knew this. I can agree to disagree on some issues but I just cannot elect someone who wants to punish people for the egregious crime of, ''gasp'', not conforming to societal standard of gender and romance.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.22.85|172.71.22.85]] 15:15, 5 November 2024 (UTC)