explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

1337: Hack

2025-01-22T18:14:27Z

172.71.223.38: I changed a minor typo: "blag" to "blog"

<noinclude>:''"1337", this comic's number, redirects here. For the series of the same name, see [[:Category:1337]].''</noinclude>
{{comic
| number = 1337
| date = March 3, 2014
| title = Hack
| image = hack.png
| titletext = HACK THE STARS
}}

==Explanation==
This comic is an imagined project to re-position the {{w|International Cometary Explorer|ISEE-3/ICE}} probe, and a parody of the 1995 movie ''{{w|Hackers (film)|Hackers}}''.

The history of the probe, as laid out in the comic, is true. The probe did, indeed, return to signal range in 2014, and seemed capable of being controlled, but NASA declined to devote the resources necessary to re-establish communication. The proposed, independent project to take control of the probe and send it on a new mission didn't exist at the time of the comic, but has since [http://spacecollege.org/isee3/ become reality], as [[Randall]] noted in a [http://blog.xkcd.com/2014/05/30/isee-3/ blog post]. See [[#Background for ISEE-3/ICE|details below]].

The film ''Hackers'' was about the exploits of a group of teenage computer hackers, and their adventures in gaining unauthorized access to various systems. Like many fictional depictions of hacking, the film was heavily criticized for its lack of technical accuracy, but it did a lot to interest mainstream youth at the time in hacker culture. The primary protagonist goes by the handle "Crash Override", and his rival (and love interest) goes by "Acid Burn". The film ends with the two of them in a swimming pool, on their first date, with the lights in several nearby buildings spelling out "Crash And Burn", in Crash's latest hack/romantic gesture.

The strip depicts a scene in the satellite's control room, which plays out like many of the hacking scenes in the movie, with the system operators being shocked and flummoxed at being locked out of their own system, while an unauthorized party takes control and sends alternative instructions. The screen displays the phrase "mess with the best, die like the rest", which was Crash's signature phrase in the film.

The final row depicts a recreation of (or sequel to) the final scene of the film, with Crash and Burn once again swimming together. This time, however, Burn tells Crash to "make a wish", immediately before a shooting star appears in the sky (there's a tradition of making wishes when shooting stars appear in the sky). The implication is that Burn is the one who hacked the satellite controls and that she placed the satellite on a course for earth, causing it to burn up in the atmosphere in exactly the right time and place to create her own shooting star. This is arguably a much more impressive feat than controlling building lights, and definitely one-ups his previous romantic gesture. Since the ability to do something so dramatic by hacking computer systems depended on a very specific and rare set of circumstances, it's unlikely that he'll ever be able to top it.

The comic number is 1337, which stands for "leet", short for "elite hacker" and "leetspeek" in {{w|leetspeak}}. Leetspeak is a form of symbolic writing that substitutes various numbers and {{w|ASCII}} symbols for letters. It originates from the hacker subculture, where words were converted to leetspeek e.g., to avoid filters and triggers on chat rooms. "1337" for "leet" can most likely be explained as {{w|calculator spelling}}.

The title text "Hack the stars" is also an allusion to ''Hackers'', where the phrase "Hack the planet!" is used on multiple occasions.

==Transcript==
:[A black image shows an image of the ISEE-3/ICE spacecraft in white. Text is written in white above it]
:The ISEE-3/ICE probe was launched in 1978.
:Its mission ended in 1997 and it was sent a shutdown signal.

:[The text continues, black on white, without a frame around it, between the first frame and the next.]
:In 2008, we learned-to our surprise-that the probe didn't shut down.
:It's still running and it has plenty of fuel.
:...and in 2014, its orbit brings it near earth.

:[Megan holding up one hand and Ponytail are talking to each other.]
:Megan: We could send it on a new mission...
:Megan: Except we no longer have the equipment to send commands to it.
:Ponytail: Can't we—

:[Zoom in on Megan's head and torso as she looks towards Ponytail off-panel to the right.]
:Megan: NASA won't rebuild it. "Too Expensive"
:Ponytail (off-panel): ''Seriously?''
:Megan: I know, right?
:Megan: So the internet found the specs
:Megan: And we went to work.

:[Megan and Ponytail are walking towards right, between Hairbun facing left and Cueball (with head phones) facing right. They are sitting at desks working on their laptops. Megan speaks, as indicated both by the story line and by her hand which is lifted up, but there is not speech line from her to the text.]
:Megan: We've convinced them to give us time on the Madrid DSN transmitter and hacked the maser to support the uplink.
:Megan: And today's the big day.

:[Zoom in on Cueball's head and torso, he holds a hand up to his speaker on his head phones and watches his lit screen (as indicated by lines emanating from it).]
:Cueball: Transmitting...
:Cueball: We have a signal!
:Cueball: We have control!

:[Zoom in on Megan's head and torso. She has turned away from Cueball to the right towards Hairbun.]
:Megan: OK, transmit the new comet rendezvous maneuver sequen—
:Cueball (off panel): What ''the hell?''
:Megan: What?

:[Same setting as when Megan and Ponytail entered the control-room, but Ponytail just stands there and Megan puts a hand out towards Cueball.]
:Cueball: My console went dead!
:Hairbun: ''Mine too!''
:Megan: What's happening?!

:[Another zoom in on Cueball's head and torso and glowing screen. He has both hands down.]
:Cueball: There's a new signal going out over the transmitter!
:Megan (off panel): A bug?
:Cueball: ''Someone else is in the system!''

:[Zoom in on Hairbun's head and torso. She is also working on her laptop, with the glowing screen visible.]
:Hairbun: Kill the connection!
:Cueball (off panel): ''I can't find it!''
:Hairbun: ''They're firing the probe's engines!''
:Cueball (off panel): ''No!!''

:[Back to a zoom in on Cueball. He points at his screen.]
:Megan (off panel): ''Who's '''doing''' this??'' Stop them!
:Hairbun (off panel): ''I'm trying!''
:Cueball: ''Look! My screen!''

:[Same setting as when Megan and Ponytail entered the control-room, but Ponytail has a hand to her mouth and she and Megan stand close to Cueball who has taken his hands off the keyboard. The text on Cueball's laptop screen is shown above the setting, indicated with zigzag lines:]
:M-E-S-S-W-I-T-H-
:T-H-E-B-E-S-T

:D-I-E-L-I-K-E-
:T-H-E-R-E-S-T

:[The last four panels is outside night scenes with a black sky above. In the first of these a woman (Burn) with long hair (Megan like) and a hairy man (Crash) is seen in a swimming pool with blue water.]

:[A zoom out reveals that the pool is on top of a skyscraper in a vertically developed, downtown setting with lots of light in all the skyscrapers, one of which is even taller than the one with the pool. From the top of the central skyscraper speech lines come which indicate that the two from the pool is up there speaking, and we get their names from this panel.]
:Burn: Crash?
:Crash: Yeah, Burn?

:[Same setting but only one speech line.]
:Burn: Make a wish.

:[The last panel shows the same setting, but with the spacecraft streaking across the sky as it enters the Earths atmosphere and burns up in a way that is indistinguishable from a meteoroid.]

==Trivia==

===Background for ISEE-3/ICE===
The {{w|International Cometary Explorer|ISEE-3/ICE}} probe was launched in August 12, 1978 and tasked to study Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind. Before completing its original mission the probe was repurposed on June 10, 1982 to study the interaction between the solar wind and a cometary atmosphere. By flying through the comet {{w|21P/Giacobini–Zinner|Giacobini-Zinner}}'s tail, it became the first probe to do so. This put ISEE-3 in a {{w|heliocentric orbit}}. Its trajectory will bring it close to Earth on August 2014.

The Deep Space Network (DSN) detected the probe again in 2008 because NASA mistakenly left its transmitters on. However, the probe was only transmitting the carrier signal at that time. A status check of the spacecraft has revealed that many of its instruments are still working and that it contains plenty of fuel.<ref>Lakdawalla, Emily (2014-02-07). [https://www.planetary.org/articles/02070836-isee-3 "ICE/ISEE-3 to return to an Earth no longer capable of speaking to it"]. ''The Planetary Society''. Retrieved 2024-06-17.</ref>

It was reported that the hardware to communicate with ISEE-3/ICE had been decommissioned. The Madrid DSS complex still has the special filter required to communicate with the ICE satellite, but because of frequency conflicts S-band uplink is not supported.<ref>{{W|Jet Propulsion Laboratory}}. [https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsndocs/810-005/101/101E.pdf "70-m Subnet Telecommunications Interfaces"] (PDF). {{w|Deep Space Network}}. 810-005, 101, Rev. E.</ref>

On March 1 and 2, 2014 radio amateurs were able to detect the beacon signal from the retired NASA deep space probe ICE (International Cometary Explorer) using the 20 m radio telescope at the Bochum Observatory (Germany).<ref>[https://amsat-uk.org/2014/03/09/radio-amateurs-receive-nasa-isee-3ice-spacecraft/ "Radio amateurs receive NASA ISEE-3 / ICE Spacecraft"]. ''AMSAT-UK''. 2014-03-09. Retrieved 2024-06-17./</ref>

===Updates for ISEE-3/ICE===
After this comic was published, it was established that an 18-meter satellite dish at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory does still have the right hardware.
*April 4, 2014: Volunteers started a crowdfunding project on RocketHub to contact the probe and put it back into a {{w|halo orbit}} orbit around {{w|Lagrangian point}} L1.<ref>Wingo, Dennis; Cowing, Keith. [https://web.archive.org/web/20140417052853/https://www.rockethub.com/42228 "ISEE-3 Reboot Project"]. ''RocketHub''. Space College, Skycorp, and SpaceRef. Archived from [https://www.rockethub.com/42228 the original] on 2014-04-17. Retrieved 2024-06-17.</ref>
*May 23, 2014: First contact to the probe was established.
*May 29, 2014: NASA gave them approval to try to achieve contact.
*May 30, 2014: The project, led by [http://www.rockethub.com/profiles/68340-dennis-wingo Dennis Wingo] and {{w|Keith Cowing}}, had taken control of the spacecraft.
*July 2, 2014: The reboot project successfully fired the thrusters for the first time since 1987. The engines on ISEE-3 performed a successful spin-up burn. The spin rate was changed to 19.76 rpm which is inside of the original mission specifications at 19.75 +/- 0.2 rpm.
**Further attempts to change the trajectory into an earth bound orbit did fail. Despite the effort from experts and amateurs via the internet<ref>[https://spacecollege.org/isee3/we-are-borg-crowdsourced-isee-3-engineering-and-the-collective-mind-of-the-internet.html "We Are Borg: Crowdsourced ISEE-3 Engineering and the Collective Mind of the Internet"]. ''Space College''. 2014-07-14. Retrieved 2024-06-17.</ref> it was determined that the spacecraft had run out of nitrogen pressurant.
*Since the device was still communicating, and many of the instruments were still working, the ISEE-3 was intended to be used for the first citizen science, crowd funded, crowd sourced, interplanetary space science mission.<ref>[https://spacecollege.org/isee3/announcing-the-isee-3-interplanetary-citizen-science-mission.html "Announcing the ISEE-3 Interplanetary Citizen Science Mission"]. ''Space College''. 2014-07-24. Retrieved 2024-06-17.</ref>
*{{w|International_Cometary_Explorer#Contact_lost|Contact was finally lost}} on 2014-09-16.

See [http://spacecollege.org/isee3/ Space College: ISEE-3 Reboot Project Archives] for the coverage of this amazing project.

== References ==
{{reflist}}

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with inverted brightness]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairbun]]
[[Category:Space probes]]
[[Category:Astronomy]]
[[Category:Computers]]

Talk:2942: Fluid Speech

2024-06-06T05:51:12Z

172.71.223.38:

I've noticed that this doesn't seem to be the case in all languages. For example, when native Polish speakers talk rapidly (even when speaking English), they enunciate every sound accurately in quick succession while flattening out the tone and rhythm of their speech. I wonder if this is because Polish is an inflected language where the grammar of the sentence is determined by endings of words rather than word order. Does anyone know if there have been any studies on this? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.49|162.158.74.49]] 23:12, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

:I'm not linguists but based on how many those are, definitely. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 00:10, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

:Russian also has vowel reduction like English and it's a Slavic language like Polish, so I don't think so. Although someone who knows more than me might be able to chip in on whether the effect is stronger in English. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.114.198|162.158.114.198]] 03:24, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

I've just added a very barebones version of an explanation based on what I could understand from the comic. I can tell that the four diagrams depict that of the human mouth but since I am not a linguist, I lack the knowledge of various terms and thus, can't fully explain the comic. I understand what the comic is trying to convey, I just can't explain it. Looking forward to seeing how this progresses. [[User:OmniDoom|OmniDoom]] ([[User talk:OmniDoom|talk]]) 00:22, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't think #4 is a real IPA symbol, but as I am not a linguist, I have no idea. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.91.36|162.158.91.36]] 01:38, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

The hovertext joke is that every English speaker fully pronounces the first "t" in "Hot Potato". It's at the end of "hot". Nobody says "ha potato". [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 03:01, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

:Unless you mean "the glottal stop should be considered an allophone of <t> at the end of syllables" then yes they do. It's /hoʔ/, not /hotʰ/. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.114.198|162.158.114.198]] 03:24, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

:(Edit conflicted with 162, above, so this is my own reply...) I thought it was that it isn't "ho T'p otato", with the "teh-peh" awkwardness. For me, the natural way to say it is to glottalstop the first T for more "ho'potato" (the other Ts, there I find awkward ''not'' to get the "t>s<" out of, the ">s<"-tail being what makes a full-T not a lazy one). But clearly a different accent involved, as "ha" doesn't work at all for me unless I try to use some sort of (probably awful) Goodfellas-type accent. And my native accent is notoriously good at glottlestopped Ts (that most people misinpersonate badly, by attaching them to the wrong adjacent syllable).
:As for "going to", experimentally holding my finger over the length of my tongue, it seems it barely has to move at all in "going" (the whole tongue wants to rise on the "i", but I can suppress that and do the tone-change from further back, if not straight from the vocal chords). Though continuing through to the "to", with my finger in there, it's no better than "going ku" as I prevent the tongue-tip doing the necessary small movement to fulfil any form of T. I can do better through basic gastromancy, but behind my unmoving jaw and lips (''without'' the finger almost down my throat, of course), I can feel the tongue tip doing it's small but vital "crossing the T" work. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.86.64|172.70.86.64]] 03:53, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Unless someone's willing to start an "explain explain xkcd", I think this explanation still needs a lot of work to be intelligible to non-linguists (myself included). That aside, I do appreciate whoever took the time to type all that up. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.210|162.158.166.210]] 03:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
The current explain reads, to me at least, more like a 102 lecture than an explanation of the comic. I of course have no idea what is in a 101 first week lecture so shrug. (Aside, wth? This keyboard doesn't have a tilda. Copy and paste ftw) [[Special:Contributions/172.71.223.38|172.71.223.38]] 05:51, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

2942: Fluid Speech

2024-06-06T01:31:44Z

172.71.223.38: /* Transcript */ replaced double acute (high pitch) with tilde (nasal)

{{comic
| number = 2942
| date = June 5, 2024
| title = Fluid Speech
| image = fluid_speech_2x.png
| imagesize = 740x406px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a a BOT POTATO that is Gonna' impersonate a human - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This comic starts with Randall stating that people often unconsciously shorten words in various ways when speaking to optimize the fluidity of speech.
He then presents four diagrams of the human mouth and paths depicting how it moves when saying increasingly fluid versions of "going to."

The first diagram depicts the pronunciation closest to the typical diaphonemic representation of the phrase, /ɡoʊɪŋ tu/. The tongue moves a lot in this rendering, with the point of articulation starting next to the velum with /ɡ/, moving slightly forward to the hard palate with /ɪ/, back to the velum with /ŋ/, forwards to the alveolar ridge with /t/, and back towards the velum again with /u/.

The second diagram shows a slightly more efficient pronunciation, in which the /ŋ/ assimilates location to the following /t/ and the /u/ weakens to a more neutrally positioned /ə/. This way, the point of articulation starts at the velum, moves forward to the palate and alveolar ridge, and then finally moves back to the position of schwa, between the palate, velum, and uvula.

The third diagram shows an even more efficient and very common pronunciation of the phrase, /ɡʌnə/. The /t/ assimilates and merges with /n/, while the vowel(s) of the first syllable are either unrounded from /o/ to /ʌ/ (between which the only difference is the rounding, or protrusion of the lips), or, more likely, given Randall Munroe's prior comics calling /ʌ/ schwa, to [ə]. This greatly reduces the amount of distance the articulators must travel.

The fourth diagram shows the most reduces pronunciation. The /n/ is lost as a consonant and is only left as a nasal element on the remaining vowel. This way, the only motions that must be made are pulling the tongue away from the velum to articulate the /ɡ/, and opening the nasal passage.

Lastly, he comments on the perception of reduced pronunciations, remarking that while they might out of context appear sloppy, in-context a full & unreduced pronunciation sounds stilted, forced, and unnatural.

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

:[Above the panel:]
:Fun fact: Experienced speakers constantly merge, drop, and alter sounds when talking at normal conversational speed to optimize for efficient mouth movement.

:[The panel shows four labeled side profiles of a mouth with paths of sounds made in different parts of the mouth. There is a label "More fluid" with an arrow pointing to the right. From left to right:]

:[Label:]
:Going to
:/ɡoʊɪŋ tu/
:[Path:] G O >> I >> NG >> >> >> T >> >> O

:[Label:]
:Goin' to
:/ɡoʊɪn tə/
:[Path:] G O >> I >> N T >> >> O

:[Label:]
:Gonna
:/ɡʌn.ə/
:[Path:] G O >> NN >> A

:[Label:]
:How fluent speakers ''actually'' say it when speaking rapidly
:/ɡə̃/
:[Path:] G >> >> ə̃

:[Below the panel:]
:If you think ''you'' don't do this, try to use "hot potato" in a sentence and fully pronounce the first "t" without sounding like an alien impersonating a human.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Fun fact]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Gretchen McCulloch]]