explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:2063: Carnot Cycle

2018-10-27T22:18:29Z

198.41.226.34: information on isometric/isotonic contractions

The Carnot cycle is a theoretical construct from thermodynamics describing an ideal way to produce work using a temperature differential. The shape of the diagram matches diagrams of said cycle. The different stages in the Carnot cycle are either isentropic or isothermal. 'Isometric', 'Isotonic', and 'Isopropyl' all play on the 'iso' prefix. 'Isometric' also describes the shape of the diagram. 'Isotonic' seems to have something to do with muscles... which I suppose have some relation to engines as well—they both do work.
[[Special:Contributions/172.69.218.52|172.69.218.52]] 16:11, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
: Indeed, isotonic and isometric are types of exercises for muscle contraction. Isotonic means that they provide constant force, isometric that they produce no movement in the joints. Maybe the joke is that this are muscle constractions on a expanding phase of a cycle [[Special:Contributions/198.41.226.34|198.41.226.34]] 22:18, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Did anyone notice that there is a note on the top of XKCD about how to register to vote? [[User:Zachweix|Zachweix]] ([[User talk:Zachweix|talk]]) 17:18, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
:Randall often gives some hints to elections, in this case it's the {{w|United States House of Representatives elections, 2018}} on November 6, 2018. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 17:30, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
::There are other things being voted on, aside from the House of Representatives. One third of the United States Senate is also up for election (as happens every two years), as well as numerous state offices.[[Special:Contributions/173.245.48.171|173.245.48.171]] 20:35, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Please read the [[explain xkcd:Editor FAQ|Editor FAQ]] about tables, this here was a good example where tables should not be used (check the history at this comic for the former layout.) Furthermore we should explain the comic but not the real Carnot Cycle, that's done in the Wiki link or at least it should be done in a separate chapter. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:06, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
:I'm sure it doesn't need a full explanation, but because the pairings of the stages are part of the joke, I think it's necessary to explain what each stage is. But just enough to explain the contrast. –[[User:P1h3r1e3d13|P1h3r1e3d13]] ([[User talk:P1h3r1e3d13|talk]]) 18:39, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
::I agree. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:46, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
:::Thermodynamics is the hell! I've always hated it. But I entered the essential original terms with a short explanation. And now I feel we should reverse-translate Randalls words to the real thing, or more precise: a similar sentence using accurate words. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 20:36, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Decline and Fall could also reference Evelyn Waugh - though it is a stand alone novel, his first, not part of a cycle. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 12:13, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

'''Inflation is probably wrong explained'''

One section before dark energy is mentioned, in Cosmology this energy causes the ''cosmic inflation''. I'm sure Randall talks about this. But maybe we just should mention both. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:12, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
:The ''cosmic inflation'' is badly presented at Wikipedia. There was a Nobel Prize in 2011 exactly about this, but it's hard to find this at the corresponding Wiki articles. That's because I'm linking an article from National Geographic. Nonetheless, as a physicist I'm sure not the Nobel Prize but the conclusions will be proven as over-interpreted, but that's not part of the actual explanation here. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 20:34, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Is there a pun in the title text on token-ring (Tolkien ring) networks? [[User:Mlv|Mlv]] ([[User talk:Mlv|talk]]) 18:39, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
:Nice idea, but I don't see that because there is no IBM here. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 20:40, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

Wagner Ring Cycle probably refers to a part of the Five-Minute Comics: Part 1 in which Cueball and Bach are running away from Wagner, who is on his ring cycle. {{unsigned ip|172.68.211.10}}

'''Decline and fall'''

Current explanations for this reference don't seem to adequately explain why it would be a stage in a four-part cycle. Actually, the first thing which comes to mind is the [https://bycommonconsent.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/pridecycle.gif four-stage pride cycle] (repentance, prosperity, pride, destruction, repentance ''et cetera''), which is often referenced when analysing the plot of the Book of Mormon (though I don't see why it would be limited to that context). However, the precise term "decline and fall" doesn't seem to be used in the diagrams that first come up in a search for that (though it would be a fitting description for the destruction stage), and I don't know how well known that device is outside of LDS circles, so I'm not sure if that's being directly referenced.

The other thing which comes up is the [http://biology-igcse.weebly.com/uploads/1/5/0/7/15070316/408075.jpg?380 lag, growth, stagnation, decline] model which is often used for describing the development of a bacterial culture, though I've also been taught a remarkably similar model in the context of popularity over time of seaside resorts (with the addition of a possible rejuvenation stage), so it's not limited to biology. Although while it is a four-stage model with a "decline" stage, it's not inherently a cycle.

I suspect those might not the only things that have "decline and fall" as one of four parts ("cyclic", in either sense, or otherwise).

-- HarJIT [[Special:Contributions/141.101.107.234|141.101.107.234]] 14:21, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Talk:545: Neutrality Schmeutrality

2018-09-06T20:51:11Z

198.41.226.34:

What if instead of word count, it was determined by letter count. so insert a word with multiple spellings like “colour/color” and people will repeatedly edit and re-edit the word over and over until the servers crashed ? --[[User:ParadoX|ParadoX]] ([[User talk:ParadoX|talk]]) 09:01, 26 June 2013 (UTC)ParadoX
::Yea, it doesn’t matter either way; let the sheeple have fun herding cats while I camp in the banquet for the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_sniping last snipe].[[User:Pacerier|Pacerier]] ([[User talk:Pacerier|talk]]) 12:54, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

I think that the idea is that the edit and re-editing would overload the servers without it being a change to a single word. [[User:Theo|Theo]] ([[User talk:Theo|talk]]) 21:06, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

:If Wikipedia’s aim is to take a neutral stance, and Wikipedia is being exploited to determine which of two opposing sides receives a donation, Wikipedia’s correct action would be to prevent the article from being written, thus enforcing Wikipedia’s stance on neutrality. [[User:Thokling|Thokling]] ([[User talk:Thokling|talk]]) 20:17, 26 September 2013 (UTC)
::If there is no article, the word count is 0, which is an even number, so it goes to pro-choice activists. :) [[Special:Contributions/173.245.51.209|173.245.51.209]] 13:03, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
:::No: if there is no article, the word count is undefined. You cannot determine anything about something that doesn’t exist. [[User:Rvighne|rvighne]] ([[User talk:Rvighne|talk]]) 04:50, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
:::: if the article existed, it would be deleted as not notable. [[User:Chess|Chess]] ([[User talk:Chess|talk]]) 00:42, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Lock the article mid-edit leaving a single word unfinished. That becomes a fraction of a word which is neit- [[Special:Contributions/173.245.55.217|173.245.55.217]] 16:02, 2 December 2013 (UTC)BK

What the hell is Schmeutrality? ''Schmeu…'' looks very German to me, but I still have no idea about its meaning on this portmanteau. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 21:39, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
:An old (read “pre-internet”) meme, probably Yiddish, is to say a word, then replace the initial consonant cluster of the word with “schm” (read “shm”) and say the altered word. This denotes an active apathy toward the subject, that is, the speaker is deliberately disregarding the authority (for that is usually what is “regarded”) and doing their own thing, as Black Hat is doing here, disregarding the authority of Wikipedia’s stance on neutrality. If you were skipping school, and wanted to justify, you would say “School, Schmool”. If you were disobeying you’re Aunt Josephine, you would justify, to a confidant, “Aunt Josephine, Schmaunt Josephine”. Other examples include “God, Schmod”, “Copyrights, Schmopyrights” and “Feds, Schmeds”.
:While I was familiar with this before him, Lemony Snicket’s third book of a Series of Unfortunate Events, ''The Wide Window’', explains it better than I do.
:Anonymous 04:56, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Easily fixed. Lock the article just before the deadline, flip a coin in a meeting of lots of Wikipedians, broadcast live. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.228.47|108.162.228.47]] 14:36, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Another idea. Include a fragment of a word at the end of the article and full-protect it indefinitley. [[User:Jake|Jake]] ([[User talk:Jake|talk]]) 13:46, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

Also, what about hyphenated compound words where it can be debated whether or not they’re a single word? [[User:SuperSupermario24|<span style="color: #c21aff;">Just some random derp</span>]] 23:49, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Maybe Black Hat is avoiding donating the money because he knows there will be a constant edit war. I am not quite sure enough to put it in the explanation. [[User:Jacky720|Jacky720]] ([[User talk:Jacky720|talk]]) 10:39, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

What if another speaker at the event (or afterwards) were to donate $1,000,000 at the same time as Black Hat, but the other way round based on the word count? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.60|141.101.98.60]] 12:04, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

…and 0’s an even number 😆[[User:SilverMagpie|SilverMagpie]] ([[User talk:SilverMagpie|talk]]) 04:02, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Even if the article wasn’t created or was deleted, it would remain true that Wikipedia couldn’t cover it neutrally, because it wouldn’t be covered. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.215.178|108.162.215.178]] 19:22, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

There is a way to circumvent notability: If the article’s wordcount is neither odd nor even (i.e. zero, i.e. the article does not exist) then the money will be given to a terrorist group or neo-nazis or some other concievably evil group. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.178.237|162.158.178.237]] 09:22, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

0 is even [[Special:Contributions/162.158.75.214|162.158.75.214]] 19:53, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

This is actually unclear, since word counts may count or not the title of the article, subsection titles, infoboxes. I’d go with paragraph count. [[Special:Contributions/198.41.226.124|198.41.226.124]] 20:49, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

I think Wikipedia could just create two articles for the event, one for each side. That’d be neutral. [[Special:Contributions/198.41.226.34|198.41.226.34]] 20:51, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

1683: Digital Data

2017-01-09T20:38:03Z

198.41.226.34: /* Explanation */ typo

{{comic
| number = 1683
| date = May 20, 2016
| title = Digital Data
| image = digital_data.png
| titletext = â€&oelig;If you can read this, congratulationsâ€”the archive youâ€™re using still knows about the mouseover textâ€!
}}

==Explanation==
{{w|Digital information}} has the potential to be copied such that the copy is 100% identical to the original. While physical media themselves (such as books, or hard drives) and information stored by analog means may degrade as the universe continues, digital information as expressed by specific values, such as combinations of binary zeros and ones, does not decay over time and can be copied indefinitely with no changes.

However, in this comic, [[Randall]] points out that while digital information itself doesn't need to degrade, things that are on the Internet are often degraded through copying when the copy is not a 1:1 copy or changes are deliberately introduced. In addition, as technology advances, the method to save or call the information changes and the medium to view it changes, occasionally causing misinterpreted information. (This is also demonstrated with the title text.) As the frames continue, they gain the appearance of images which have been screenshotted repeatedly, with a resulting loss of quality due to compression of the original resolution and {{w|JPEG}} {{w|compression artifact|artifacting}}. (The JPEG format is intended for representing photorealistic grayscale or color images; when misused for line drawings, such as comic strips, any compression artifacts become particularly noticeable, as the background is normally of completely uniform color.) In the last frame, this is taken to an extreme, as the frame appears to have been very sloppily screenshotted off of at least two different smartphones (not the same device that uses the bottom frame in the third panel as the top border in panel four), and the final image is covered both with a watermark from an unregistered screenshot program, as well as references to at least two different web sites: {{w|9GAG}} (bottom right image) and {{w|Tumblr}} in the web address bottom left. 9GAG is an online platform and social media website where users upload and share content of their own, or of other networks. It is often accused of rehosting other sites' funny content without attribution and adding their own watermark to the image or video.


The title text is seemingly addressed to a reader in the future who will only be able to access xkcd through a {{w|digital archive}}. Digital information might not degrade with time, but it can't be properly displayed without knowledge of the encoding. As new encodings and file formats get developed and old ones abandoned, the webpage format of the comic might not be available in the future, when users would need special archives to view content from today's world. The title text contains seemingly {{w|mojibake|garbage characters}}, which typically result from data being interpreted according to a {{w|character encoding}} different from the one used to encode it. In this case, the characters are the result of encoding the string <tt>“If you can read this, congratulations—the archive you’re you're using still knows about the mouseover text”!</tt> using {{w|UTF-8}} (which represents non-{{w|ASCII}} {{w|Unicode}} characters as multibyte sequences) and then interpreting the resulting bytes as the still commonly used {{w|Windows-1252}} encoding (which uses only one byte per character, but utilizes the non-ASCII codepoints for a limited selection of extra letters and symbols such as "â" or "€"). This shows that degradation of digital data through conversions isn't restricted to images. Furthermore, as screen navigation moves away from the mouse toward touch, voice recognition, and modes still to be implemented, mouseover text will itself become archaic.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball and a White Hat are walking, Cueball holds both hands in front of him palms up.]
:Cueball: The great thing about digital data is that it never degrades.

:[They walk on in the next panel which shows jpeg compression artifacts, as if it is a screen shot of the actual image.]
:Cueball: Hard drives fail, of course, but their bits can be copied forever without loss.

:[They continue walking in the third panel which is now clearly pixelated, the white is slightly discolored, and it contains part of the interface of some program, probably supposed to be a screen shot from a smartphone. At the bottom there are three blue buttons and one gray. the first is a blue "<" indicating back in a browser. Then a grayed out ">" that is not active. And then three more standard buttons in blue to the right of those two. The interface matches that of an iPhone running Safari in iOS 9 (or other versions with the same Safari UI (probably iOS 7-9))]
:Cueball: Film degrades, paint cracks, but a copy of a century-old data file is identical to the original.

:[Still walking, now Cueball holds out both arms to the sides, and finally White Hat replies. This panel is heavily pixelated and discolored and has a distorted aspect ratio. It contains a clear watermark of 9GAG (although difficult to read all letters in the end of the first word), even more 'frame' elements, and text above the image at the bottom (where the last letter is obscured by the frame of the image). There is also an internet address at the bottom left, but it is not readable except for the .tumblr.com ending. In this panel it is clear that it is a screen shot from a smart phone. The frame around the image obscure the very top of Cueball's text and the half of the last letter in White Hat's reply.]
:Cueball: If humanity has a permanent record, we are the first generation in it.
:White Hat: Amazing

:Watermark: Screenshotpro 2
:Watermark: ~Unregistered~

:Top border: Verizon LTE '''4:45 PM'''
:Bottom text [slightly cut off]: 9GAG
:Internet address at the bottom [nearly unintelligible]: [ama].tumblr.com

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Self-reference]]