explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:1219: Reports

2013-05-31T17:25:00Z

178.98.255.57:

Shouldn't it be 2000th St? --[[Special:Contributions/81.23.24.56|81.23.24.56]] 06:41, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Shouldn't it be a 25,000 mi/h speed limit if multiplied by 1000? Afterall, I have never heard of a 2.5 mi/h speed limit... Think I could get a speeding ticket whilst walking with that limit. Definitely while jogging. [[Special:Contributions/99.195.243.220|99.195.243.220]] 07:04, 31 May 2013 (UTC) Aaron

Lol exactly the first two comments I had in mind were made here. [[Special:Contributions/80.101.91.220|80.101.91.220]] 07:07, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

:Also beaten to the 25,000 comment. The lowest I've think I've ever seen indicated is 5mph (mostly in car parks) and except in one locale(1) that's wishful thinking at best, given that at this point you find that on an analogue standard speedo that potentially sweeps far further(2), it's definitely a crap-shoot as to whether you're able to hover the needle barely off of the zero-stop with any accuracy... Even assuming reasonable calibration at the higher speeds. I suspect that 5km/h (3.1-ish mph(3)) might be the minimum I've seen in metric-tied countries, making that just an arbitrary low figure.
:(1) A local bus station that has "Your speed is..." matrices to show a presumably calibrated digital measurement to the drivers of any said bus entering/exiting the site, and flashes in red if they exceed this. Not sure if there's a penalty accumulation, but I suspect there'd be the capability to link to the CCTV systems that also cover the site so that post-incident enquiries would record any driver errors should the worst come to the (painfully slow) worst.
:(2) 120mph on smaller cars, 240mph or more on anything that promises way-over-the-top performance for a country with a top-end national speed limit of 70mph in force. Not that anyone believes that, but even the unofficial publicly-used "I'll get away with it..." 80mph line is 1/3rd of 240. Of course they could go over to Germany to try out on the unlimited Autobahns, or burn rubber at a 'track day' somewhere, but still it irks me that people think like that...
:(3) I can never remember the 'standard' conversion factor. I just remember that it's 93 million miles to the Sun or 150 million kilometres and work it out from that. ;) [[Special:Contributions/178.98.255.57|178.98.255.57]] 08:14, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

So, anyway, I put my hand to writing an explanation, making it impressively brief compared with what I usually write (see above). I've put some <nowiki></nowiki> in, especially next to the potentially disputed numbers, so that future editors can zero in on things that I think might need to be changed, or could be expanded upon. Or redo it all from scratch, as I probably won't notice anyway. ;) [[Special:Contributions/178.98.255.57|178.98.255.57]] 09:20, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Looks like Randall corrected his title-text. So I completed the necessary edit (half done already, with the edit comment "(2500 / 100 = 25, not 2.5)", which I won't argue with...) and removed the related comments. Tempted to add an "in the original version..." addendum, but then anyone who's bothered with that sort of detail has read up to here in the Talk bit, right? ;) [[Special:Contributions/178.98.255.57|178.98.255.57]] 17:25, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

1219: Reports

2013-05-31T17:15:44Z

178.98.255.57: Changed the whole lot to reflect the corrected title-text (and removed related HTML comments).

{{comic
| number = 1219
| date = May 31, 2013
| title = Reports
| image = reports.png
| titletext = If that fails, just multiply every number by a thousand. 'The 2nd St speed limit were set at 25,000 mph, it would likely have prevented 1,000 of the intersection's 3,000 serious accidents last month.'
}}

==Explanation==
The quoted text of the report could (and indeed probably ''would'', given the apparent contents) be stereotypically read out loud by the author, or internally by the reader, in an essentially monotonal manner, as exhibited by any number of popularised film and TV characters such as 'Arthur Pewtey' from the {{w|Marriage Guidance Counsellor|Monty Python sketch}}. But this comic asks us to imagine it instead voiced in the shrill voice of an upset (soon-to-be-'ex-'?) wife, presumably berating her husband on various real or imagined infractions, and it works just as well. The jagged nature of the speech bubble could be because it was being remotely conveyed over Skype, or similar, but also helps to re-enforce the shrieking/nagging internal voice.

The title text joke relates to an alternative plan, namely to proportionally exaggerate everything you read. What would have been one serious accident that would have been prevented in the previous month had the speed limit been 25mph, out of the three that actually occurred under the current limit, now becomes one ''thousand'' people saved! And ''all'' those lives would have been saved by reducing the speed limit to a 'mere' 25,000 miles per hour. (Of course, around 2000 people would ''not'' have been helped, but if people ''will'' try to mess with vehicles that are moving at hypersonic velocities...)

==Transcript==
:How to make boring technical reports more fun to read:
:Imagine they were written and sent in, unsolicited, by the estranged spouse of the head of the project.
:<Six guard rails have erratic reflector placement, and one even lacks reflectors entirely, despite rule G31.02(b) clearly mandating consistent usage.>
:Cueball: ...Sharon!

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]

Talk:1219: Reports

2013-05-31T09:20:54Z

178.98.255.57:

1219: Reports

2013-05-31T09:08:25Z

178.98.255.57: /* Explanation */ I hope this is Ok for starters... Note the commented edit points. Or feel free to scrub it entirely for something better.

{{comic
| number = 1219
| date = May 31, 2013
| title = Reports
| image = reports.png
| titletext = If that fails, just multiply every number by a thousand. 'The 2nd St speed limit were set at 2,500 mph, it would likely have prevented 1,000 of the intersection's 3,000 serious accidents last month.'
}}

==Explanation==
The quoted text of the report could (and indeed probably ''would'', given the apparent contents) be stereotypically read out loud by the author, or internally by the reader, in an essentially monotonal manner, as exhibited by any number of popularised film and TV characters such as 'Arthur Pewtey' from the [[Wikipedia:Marriage_Guidance_Counsellor|Monty Python sketch]]. But this comic asks us to imagine it instead voiced in the shrill voice of an upset (soon-to-be-'ex-'?) wife, presumably berating her husband on various real or imagined infractions, and it works just as well. The jagged nature of the speech bubble could be because it was being remotely conveyed over Skype, or similar, but also helps to re-inforce the shrieking/nagging internal voice.

The title-text joke relates to an alternative plan, namely to proportionally exagerate everything you read. What would have been one serious accident that would have been prevented in the previous month had the speed limit been 2.5mph, out of the three that actually occured under the current limit, now becomes one ''thousand'' people saved! And ''all'' those lives would have been saved by reducing the speed limit to a 'mere' 2500 miles per hour. (Of course, around 2000 people would ''not'' have been helped, but if people ''will'' try to mess with vehicles that are moving supersonically...)

==Transcript==
:How to make boring technical reports more fun to read:
:Imagine they were written and sent in, unsolicited, by the estranged spouse of the head of the project.
:<Six guard rails have erratic reflector placement, and one even lacks reflectors entirely, despite rule G31.02(b) clearly mandating consistent usage.>
:...Sharon!

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]

Talk:1219: Reports

2013-05-31T08:14:23Z

178.98.255.57:

Talk:1209: Encoding

2013-05-31T00:51:57Z

178.98.255.57:

He may have lost control whilst trying to fly in squares... What‽ --[[User:DanB|DanB]] ([[User talk:DanB|talk]]) 13:36, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

I've always thought that "interrobang" was one of the coolest words in the English language. Don't ya think?! --[[User:Dangerkeith3000|Dangerkeith3000]] ([[User talk:Dangerkeith3000|talk]]) 15:32, 8 May 2013 (UTC)
:Coolest? Not the ''cool''est, but a good word by some other measure, certainly. I might as well insist that... thingummy... oh... whatsit... ah, yes, that's it... "Lethology" is as cool. [[Special:Contributions/178.98.255.57|178.98.255.57]] 00:51, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

I think the "C0 Block" text may also be a skywriting double meaning, as skywriters use something called "Corvus Oil" to make the smoke.[[Special:Contributions/24.234.164.78|24.234.164.78]] 18:27, 8 May 2013 (UTC) Dustin

Saying that the C0 block ‘is there’ makes me think that the skywriter already wrote it; perhaps they hired the skywriter to write out all of Unicode in order‽ The interrobang ''is'' followed by a diacritic (overline), but unfortunately it's ''not'' combining. (The combining overline comes later.) —[[User:TobyBartels|TobyBartels]] ([[User talk:TobyBartels|talk]]) 20:02, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

== Just from real life ==

Many of the web servers I am responsible for are using [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC]EBCDIC].
Browsers are on [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII]ASCII].

I can tell you that this is the hell.

--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 20:38, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

"Skytyping" uses five or more planes flying in formation to skywrite in a dot-matrix format. It is computer controlled, so it really could have codepage issues.[[Special:Contributions/68.3.11.239|68.3.11.239]] 23:36, 11 May 2013 (UTC)