explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

1709: Inflection

2016-07-22T13:46:51Z

173.245.52.68: /* Explanation */ Minor correction of typos

{{comic
| number = 1709
| date = July 20, 2016
| title = Inflection
| image = inflection.png
| titletext = "Or maybe, because we're suddenly having so many conversations through written text, we'll start relying MORE on altered spelling to indicate meaning!" "Wat."
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|The discussion that Cueball and Megan has are not discussed. The whole emoji segment and the fact that they are in color and are like Chinese pictogram is not even mentioned. Also needs wiki link for the main explanation. Maybe the table should be a subsection of the explanation, with link from the main body of the explanation?}}

While walking, Megan tells Cueball that in inflected languages -- such as English -- changes in the spelling of a word changes its' meaning, in a predictable way. Megan exemplifies this with how plural forms of nouns are created by sticking an 's' at the end, and past tense of a verb is done by the suffix 'ed'. Megan then explains that this works well in languages which build on alphabets, compared to pictographic languages where a picture show a whole word (since it's more difficult to slightly alter a picture then to add some letters). After hearing that English is becoming less inflected then it used to be, Cueball asks if English might transition into becoming a pictographic language. Instead of using traditional words, Megan replies by the three emojis "Thumbs up" (like), "Applause" and a smiley -- thus showing a pictographic version of the language which has become more popular in the last years.

Pictographic languages are written using graphics in place of words, so are not usually suitable for "spelling" changes to show slight variance in meanings. Examples of pictographic languages include ancient Egyptian and Chinese (ancient and modern).

Early modern English (think Shakespeare or the KJV Bible) used more forms for the tenses than we do today, which can help illustrate the trend away from inflected forms. In contrast, verbs in English today are often conjugated with auxiliary verbs. Here a sample of a modern verb conjugation in English:

{| class="wikitable"
|+ Verb: Walk
!Voice->
!colspan="2"|Active
!colspan="2"|Passive
|-
!Tense
!Singular (he/she/it)
!Plural (they)
!Singular (he/she/it)
!Plural (they)
|-
|Present
|walks
|walk
|is walked
|are walked
|-
|Present progressive
|is walking
|are walking
|is being walked
|are being walked
|-
|Present perfect
|has walked
|have walked
|has been walked
|have been walked
|-
|Present perfect progressive
|has been walking
|have been walking
|has been being walked
|have been being walked
|-
|Past
|walked
|walked
|was walked
|were walked
|-
|Past progressive
|was walking
|were walking
|was being walked
|were being walked
|-
|Past perfect
|had walked
|had walked
|had been walked
|had been walked
|-
|Past perfect progressive
|had been walking
|had been walking
|had been being walked
|had been being walked
|-
|Future
|will walk
|will walk
|will be walked
|will be walked
|-
|Future progressive
|will be walking
|will be walking
|will be being walked
|will be being walked
|-
|Future perfect
|will have walked
|will have walked
|will have been walked
|will have been walked
|-
|Future perfect progressive
|will have been walking
|will have been walking
|will have been being walked
|will have been being walked
|-
|Conditional
|would walk
|would walk
|would be walked
|would be walked
|-
|Conditional progressive
|would be walking
|would be walking
|would be being walked
|would be being walked
|-
|Conditional perfect
|would have walked
|would have walked
|would have been walked
|would have been walked
|-
|Conditional perfect progressive
|would have been walking
|would have been walking
|would have been being walked
|would have been being walked
|}

In all of these conjugations, the only inflections on the main verb "walk" are "-s", "-ed", and "-ing". (The highly irregular helper verbs, "be" and "have", have somewhat more interesting inflections.) And although this table shows only the third person, the first and second person would not introduce any additional words whatsoever; similarly, the table shows only the indicative mood, but the subjunctive and imperative moods would not introduce any additional words, and the conditional mood would only introduce the helper verb "would" (an inflection of the irregular helper verb "will") without any additional inflections on the main verb "walk". If instead we made this table in Spanish (for example), then there would be many more inflections on the main verb (12 in the third-person indicative alone, 45 including all persons and moods, if I didn't miscount).

The title text points out that some intentional misspelling are used in Internet slang to alter the meaning of a word: "what" becomes "wat" to express confusion, disgust or disbelief [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wat][http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wat]. The title text also uses the intentional misuse of grammar to emphasise the word MORE. Such emphasis is difficult to show with inflected language alone.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball and Megan, holding a hand up, are seen walking together from afar in silhouette.]
:Megan: Inflected languages change words to add meaning, like "-s" for plurals or "-ed" for past tense.
:Megan: Alphabets—where symbols stand for sound instead of words—work well for them, since you can show the changes through spelling.

:[Zoom in on the two as Megan turns her head back towards Cueball and spreads her arms out.]
:Megan: Our language family is inflected, but the English branch has lost most of its inflection over the millennia. It's why we don't have all those Latin conjugations.

:[Cueball speaks as they walk on and Megan replies with three orange-yellow emoji: Thumbs Up Sign pointing right, Clapping Hands Sign pointing up left with two times three small lines to indicate the clapping and Smiling Face With Blushing (red) Cheeks and Smiling Eyes. Below given the closest match possible as of the release of the comic.]
:Cueball: Could that mean English writing is ripe to become more pictographic?
:Megan: <font color="orange">👍 👏 😊</font>

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Language]]

1545: Strengths and Weaknesses

2015-07-02T00:26:12Z

173.245.52.68: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1545
| date = July 1, 2015
| title = Strengths and Weaknesses
| image = strengths_and_weaknesses.png
| titletext = Do you need me to do a quicksort on the whiteboard or produce a generation of offspring or something? It might take me a bit, but I can do it.
}}

==Explanation==
[[Cueball]] is in a job interview and is being asked prototypical job interview questions by [[Ponytail]], "What is your greatest weakness?", "What is your greatest strength?" and "Where do you see yourself in five years?"

In a roundabout way, Cueball answers that he is a living organism, and as such he has inherent flaws which could cause him to die. This is a reference to the fact that biological systems are "messy" and are not always optimal in design or operation. For example, cancer is a disease where the cellular machinery that governs cell replications breaks down and prolific cell division happens, endangering the organism tumors. While this is a true weakness, it is also a weakness of all biological organisms and is not likely to help the interview determine if he is right for the job.

For the second question Cueball answers that he will one day be the ancestor to all living humans or none of them. As you go farther and farther into the future the ratio of people alive will either go to 0% or 100% of the descendants of the character. The {{w|Most_recent_common_ancestor| most recent common ancestor (MRCA)}} for humans is estimated to have been alive between 2,000 and 4,000 years ago. If the MRCA's ancestors are traced back, the {{w|Identical_ancestors_point|Identical Ancestors Point}} can be found, at which point the entire population are either ancestors all living humans or no living humans. For humans, this point is estimated to be between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago.

For Cueball to be the ancestor to all living humans within 5 years means that all the humans who are not his children or grandchildren, must have died in a near total extinction of the human race. His apparent optimism about the possibility of this occurring is therefore worrisome.

The overarching joke is that Cueball assumes that the interviewer is assessing his fitness as an organism from a genetic perspective rather than his fitness for performing a particular job. The biggest limitation on fitness is survival time and mortality.

The title text takes this further, equating producing offspring during an interview (which would be awkward for all involved) with something that may actually help assess a candidate's efficacy as an employee, namely writing out a sorting algorithm on the spot, another prototypical interview question (see also [[1185: Ineffective Sorts]], especially the bottom left panel).

==Transcript==
:[Ponytail is shown sitting on a swivel chair, to the left of a desk.]
:Ponytail: What would you say is your biggest weakness?

:[The view expands to show Cueball sitting on another swivel chair, on the opposite side of the desk.]
:Cueball: Probably that I'm a giant tangle of parts that don't always work right, so I can die easily.

:Ponytail: Biggest strength?
:Cueball: There will come a day when I'm either an ancestor to ''all'' living humans, or to ''none'' of them.

:Ponytail: Where do you see yourself in five years?
:Cueball: Probably not the ancestor of all living humans yet. But you never know!

{{comic discussion}}

Talk:1441: Turnabout

2014-11-02T22:05:25Z

173.245.52.68:

In the few seconds the photons take to get to the moon and back, the earth has moved enough on its axis that the reflected beam from a perfect retroreflector is not gonna hit the protagonist.

The retroreflectors for the Apollo missions were deliberately spoiled so they return six slightly offset beams, angled such that photons from one of them will go back near enough to the source.

Oh, and of course there's also the whole r^4 thing too. {{unsigned ip|‎108.162.250.208}}
:Citation needed. And did you mean the inverse square law? [[Special:Contributions/103.22.201.195|103.22.201.195]] 07:37, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
:Since you acknowledge that the reflectors for the Apollo missions were constructed to take this into consideration and the photons will return near enough to the source, the cartoon is still valid. Now, whether the photons would retain sufficient energy upon their return to cause harm when they did not have enough power to destroy the reflector in the first place is a subject for another discussion .[[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.94|108.162.216.94]] 07:49, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
::The photons will retain the same power (more or less...), but there will be less ''of'' them. The laser (e.g. the one from the Apache Point observatory) spreads out on its way to the Moon (perfect collumation into a millimetre-wide laser beam is neither practical nor desirable, given the need to 'flood' the vicinity of the reflector in leiu of impossible accuracy, including to account for asymmetric atmospheric distortion on the beam and its return) so that only a small proportion of the beam hits a reflector unit (one of the largest being 0.6m²) and the returning beam (for reasons already mentioned) is again much wider than the collecting telescope (3.5m diameter, possibly). There's usually no more than a dozen photons (per each short pulse of the laser) that actually make the return trip to be detected, and often it's well down into single-figures, requiring many such pulses to gather enough photons to make a statistically significant analysis.
::All this, of course, does render even more ridiculous the concept of manually firing even a ''combat''-strength laser beam across the necessary void and back again to such a precise hit (and, BTW, the What-If someone was mentioning is http://what-if.xkcd.com/13/ and shows a possibly less-tightly-collumated-than-Apache-Point laser having a diameter of almost half that of the Moon itself). But what the hey? ;) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.112|141.101.99.112]] 10:04, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Superimposing the 3rd and 5th panels over each another shows the beam does not come back exactly to its source
http://xbehome.com/uploads/retroreflector.png [[User:Defaultdotxbe|Defaultdotxbe]] ([[User talk:Defaultdotxbe|talk]]) 08:09, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Can anyone comment on how likely/unlikely it would be to accidently hit a retroreflector on the moon? The moon takes up only a very small proportion of the sky (when visible at all of course), and so the likelyhood of that wild shot even hitting the moon at all has to be pretty low. (I'm sure there was a What-If on this...) --[[User:Pudder|Pudder]] ([[User talk:Pudder|talk]]) 09:22, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

:: Randall covered lasers hitting the moon in [https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/ what-if 13] --[[User:Pudder|Pudder]] ([[User talk:Pudder|talk]]) 09:45, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

What is a 'reflective' palindromic number like mentioned in an (early?) version of this explanation:
:Citation: "It is worth noting that the number of this comic is 1441: a 'reflective' palindromic number."
All I could find about reflective ~palindromes was that you should be able to mirror the number/word and still get the same. But you cannot mirror 4 into 4. So in that way it cannot be reflective... (1 maybe if the font is the correct one, else only 8 and 0 in numbers and some letters like A and X).
Of course it is a palindrome as it would read 1 4 4 1, also in reverse. But reflective - not so much?
If it is not reflective, then it has no relevance in the explain as it was this reflection that had a reference to the story... [[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 10:49, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
What

:I agree, the number is a palindrome, but not a reflective palindrome. I'm not quite decided on whether the fact it is a palindrome holds any relevance, or is simply a coincidence. --[[User:Pudder|Pudder]] ([[User talk:Pudder|talk]]) 11:10, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

I've removed a sentence about "continuity problems" and why the beam does not go right through the opponent (or hit the original shooter). No laser tag set that I know of is powerful enough to go right through someone, I imagine that would be regarded as a slight health & safety issue. You could argue that panel 1 shows the beam going through someone, but I think that is in fact behind him. As far as him being knocked over, I would guess that is to emphasise his being hit, rather than physically knocked over. --[[User:Pudder|Pudder]] ([[User talk:Pudder|talk]]) 13:35, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
:IMO, it's not laser-tag at all, but a full-strength offensive laser-blast (of at least 'stun' level). The first 'through the body' shot is actually a miss 'in depth' (rarely for XKCD comics without other explicit perspective cues to the image, like this one, it's in the <TwilightZoneMusic+Reverb>Third! Dimension!</TwilightZoneMusic+Reverb>...), neither harming nor impeded by the attacker. The rebounded shot at the end appears to have at least caused the same attacker to lose grip of his gun, if not caused physical damage to his back. (Although I suppose he could be wearing a "shocker" or vibrating-on-hit style of laser-tag kit, or is reacting to the sound-effect arising from the unexpected "hit detection".) No doubt a combat-level laser would be dialled up to damage your target without ''necessarily'' burning straight through.
:Also (regarding another comment), while I imagine it'd be useful to wear armour designed to be reflective (or even retroreflective!) all over, it would probably be impractical, whereas the lunar retroreflector array being used might possibly itself withstand the beam for at least long enough to get a decent amount of bounce-back. Anyhow, with such Improbable Aiming Skills, I suspect at least latent and subconcious Force abilities were in play, which can handwave all such niggling problems. Right guys? (And also opens the doorway for this being a universe with full-on Stormtrooper Armour... you know, the kind that's Reactive Armour, but assembled the wrong way round so it ends up hurting you more than if you were wearing no more than woven and leather fabrics...) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.112|141.101.99.112]] 14:24, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

As the earth is turning, the reflected beam would hit different spot. In that 2.5 secs it would take the beam to travel back to the earth, earth would have turned 1.160km at the equator. So even if the beam would stay collimated the beam would miss coming back. {{unsigned ip|173.245.51.196}}

Clearly black-hat stole an apollo reteoreflector and mounted it nearby. Panel 4 just happened really really fast [[Special:Contributions/108.162.217.137|108.162.217.137]] 18:28, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Why does the fourth paragraph mention signaling the reflector? You don't have to tell a mirror that there's a laser incoming. He's just claiming to have intentionally aimed at a reflector when it looked like he missed his shot. --[[Special:Contributions/173.245.52.68|173.245.52.68]] 22:05, 2 November 2014 (UTC)