explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:2752: Salt Dome

2023-03-21T09:22:53Z

Arachrah:

Made a guess. [[User:No Idea If There's A Character Limit LMAO|By me.]] ([[User talk:No Idea If There's A Character Limit LMAO|talk]]) 22:39, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

Odd that Beret Guy’s not the one doing it. We’ve seen White Hat act a normal extra character before, but having Beret Guy in a comic not doing anything strange feels wrong. [[User:Intara|Intara]] ([[User talk:Intara|talk]]) 04:09, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
: Agree. [[User:Elektrizikekswerk|Elektrizikekswerk]] ([[User talk:Elektrizikekswerk|talk]]) 08:37, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

The text mentions the UK Salt reserve, used to prevent black ice on roads. I assume that US states that get sufficient snowfall also maintain reserves of salt and grit to keep their roads open. Or does it simply get too cold for ice to be of any use?

2747: Presents for Biologists

2023-03-08T23:31:01Z

Arachrah:

{{comic
| number = 2747
| date = March 8, 2023
| title = Presents for Biologists
| image = presents_for_biologists_2x.png
| imagesize = 396x353px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = A lot of these are actually non-venomous, but I can see which species you mistook them for. If you pause the crane for a sec I can give you some ID pointers for next time!
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a SUPERVILLAIN - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

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

{{comic discussion}}

Talk:2710: Hydropower Breakthrough

2022-12-13T20:47:55Z

Arachrah:

ChatGPT sez:
:The comic depicts Beret Guy, a character known for his expertise in science and engineering, standing on a podium and announcing that their hydroelectric dam has achieved a level of efficiency greater than one, producing more water than was fed into it. This is cause for celebration, as it indicates that the dam is functioning properly and efficiently. However, the second off-panel voice raises a question, suggesting that there may be more to the situation than initially thought.
:The title text adds further information by revealing that a hydroelectric dam is also known as a heavy water reactor. This suggests that the dam may not be operating in the traditional way, but rather may be using a different type of technology, such as nuclear power, to produce the excess water. This could raise concerns about safety and the potential risks associated with this type of technology.
Meh. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.45|172.69.33.45]] 03:44, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

It *is* possible. All Beret Guy has to do is use the electricity to run air conditioners, which will have one side condensing water from the atmosphere, ergo more water coming out than went in. [[User:SDSpivey|SDSpivey]] ([[User talk:SDSpivey|talk]]) 04:00, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
:I think there's a conservation of energy violation here, but can't model the entire system. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.134.97|172.70.134.97]] 14:31, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Considering that he phrases it "more water than we fed into it" in the past tense, it might just be that there's a leak in the dam.
[[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.19|172.69.33.19]] 04:06, 13 December 2022 (UTC) mraction

More variation: "more water than *we* fed into it" ie not counting water from the river that feeds it, or rainfall. There's also the title text turn of phrase "heavy water reactor". "heavy" could refer to either the "water" (in the sense of gravity, or deuterium passing through), or the "reactor" (as in its mass) - [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.242|172.70.210.242]] 05:43, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

If Q is only barely >1 it could square the circle by converting atoms to oxygen by fusion in order to create water but the whole energy of the dam is used to make the fusion of a few oxygen atoms.

"Another member of audience, who is presumably familiar with regular physics, says "Wait.", because conservation of mass usually applies to water such that a dam should produce the same amount of water as that fed into it. That said, for a regular dam in a natural valley like the one shown in this comic, it is entirely normal for the dam to "produce" more water than input in the sense that in addition to water from upstream rivers, the dam will also output any "unofficial" inflow from direct rainfall above and from uncharted sources of groundwater below." 
I thought that the "Wait" comment was in relation to the fact that the announcement, although achieving something that was not achieved so far, is impractical. As the power plants are expected to produce energy, announcement that they produce additional water is irrelevant, and the "wait" comment indicated that they have missed the point. {{unsigned ip|172.68.50.204}}

Given the title of ''Hydropower Breakthrough'', is a possible interpretation that the dam is just about to fail? --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.171|172.68.110.171]] 10:35, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

My immediate thought was that he was using the generated electricity to ignite a hydrogen cell, but my immediate thoughts are always weird. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.134.97|172.70.134.97]] 14:31, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I feel Randall's comic is strongly indicative of a fair degree of skepticism around recent fusion power hype (many existing ''fission'' reactors produce an energy surplus, but fail to meet their cost of operations)... Yet, the comic's explanation currently reads as a guileless exhortation of fusion's possibilities, making no mention of the many other challenges faced by fusion reactors, besides this critical ''first step'' of generating more power than required to sustain the reaction. The comic is clearly making light of the recent publication\marketing push, yet the explanation gives no sign that fusion power is anything but practical & just around the corner. Fusion still has many remaining challenges to overcome, before reaching practicality as an energy source even for military applications (moreso still, for public utility); wind & solar are the top KWh:$ producers & another 10 or 100 billion spent researching fusion are very unlikely to change that in the next couple decades. In fact, solar research returns more Watts per dollar. The comic should probably mention the other challenges involved in nuclear fusion power, besides raw output quantity?
[[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 16:00, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I think the explanation is overthinking it. The joke is that there's a leak in the dam.
[[User:Nico31415926|An idiot]] ([[User talk:Nico31415926|talk]]) 16:37, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

The explanation says nothing about the effect this would have downriver from the dam. [[User:Inquirer|Inquirer]] ([[User talk:Inquirer|talk]]) 16:51, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

I wonder if the image depicts Vajont Dam, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam, which was overtopped by a massive wave generated by a landslide--briefly outputting MUCH more water than was input. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.150.3|172.71.150.3]] 18:38, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Is not counting rain, equivalent to only counting the energy released by the laswers, not the energy fed into the lasers? [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 20:47, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2662: Physics Safety Tip

2022-08-23T08:14:03Z

Arachrah:

To be fair, many physicists are excited about habitable planets. And fluid dynamics, which would include Earth's atmosphere and hydrosphere. A friend's son is a "condensed matter" physicist, meaning he studies ordinary matter. [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 02:42, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

When I was an undergraduate, the diamond press was exciting - it creates the pressures near the core of the Earth - being a hydaulic press it was very sensitive to temperature, it was the only air conditioned lab in te building. made it quite popular on summer days. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 08:14, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

I had to laugh more from the explanation than from the comic. Kudos! [[User:Elektrizikekswerk|Elektrizikekswerk]] ([[User talk:Elektrizikekswerk|talk]]) 06:36, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2657: Complex Vowels

2022-08-11T12:55:12Z

Arachrah:

Spoken symbol bears resemblance to 🜏, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%9F%9C%8F
:Not really, it's closer to 'əG.' [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.25|172.69.33.25]] 01:15, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
::Looks like ꬱ to me. Plus some diacritics sprinkled over it, of course. It does look ''similar'' to 🜏 when you include the zalgo. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.98.99|172.71.98.99]] 06:53, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

sscchhwwaa is easy, say it like the x in "fire" and the silent p in "bath"[[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.13|172.70.85.13]] 21:42, 10 August 2022 (UTC)
:What? There is no 'x' in "fire." [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.25|172.69.33.25]] 01:17, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Ideas: bellows-, reed-, and lucite-based voiced phone production tracts typical in science museums; {{w|diphone}}s as an alternative to phomemes (a diphone is the second half of one phoneme followed by the first half of the next -- NOT two adjacent phomemes as the Wikipedia article claims. Two adjacent phomemes are a biphone, not a diphone); the relationship of the position of the tongue in two dimensional place × closedeness space to the fundamental and second {{w|formant}} frequencies of speech audio; {{w|diphthong}}s; {{w|Mel-frequency cepstrum|cepstral}} representation such as {{w|MFCC|mel-frequency ceptstral coefficients}}; and {{w|Zalgo text}} IPA. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 22:41, 10 August 2022 (UTC)
: Roger. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.149|172.69.33.149]] 03:25, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

The vowelspace is depicted in two dimensions for convenience, but it has at least three dimensions. Look at the IPA vowel diagram (already added to this page). The third dimension is roundedness.
:Yes, of the lips; apart from the two dimensions (out: place, and up: closedeness) of the tongue. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.95|172.70.206.95]] 22:59, 10 August 2022 (UTC)
::Does roundedness also involve the tongue and cheeks to any extent? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.199|172.69.33.199]] 23:36, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

This linguist character has appeared 3 times now. Will there be a new character page dedicated to Gretchen or "The Linguist"? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.225|172.69.33.225]] 00:21, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Can someone please create and paste in a zalgostring for the fancy 'əG' ligature shown twice in the comic? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.134|172.70.211.134]] 01:10, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
:Is this another example of Randall trolling Explainxkcd as in [[2619: Crêpe]]? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.37|172.69.33.37]] 01:45, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Someone please remind me how to Zalgo a top horizontal bar over √-1. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.134|172.70.211.134]] 02:34, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
: Slow way = Windows Character Map --> Group by: unicode subrange... Group By: Combining Diacritical Marks. 6th character from the top left (U+0305:Overline) yields √-̅1̅.
:Fast way = HTML character entities, ''{character it combines with}&#{character number code};'' (773:Overline) yields √-̅1̅
:Ignore other codes as they are either non-combining or have height relative to combining character (ie Macron) -- [[Special:Contributions/172.69.70.201|172.69.70.201]] 04:35, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
::Are you sure? Those aren't wide enough to connect along the top for me. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.34.10|172.69.34.10]] 07:57, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

I don’t think what Randall is trying to do is provide a “roundness” dimension, but that’s how the explanation reads to me right now (“such” a dimension, e.g.) [[User:Szeth Pancakes|Szeth Pancakes]] ([[User talk:Szeth Pancakes|talk]]) 05:13, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
: Agreed - rearranged it a bit to deal with the real-life dimensions first, then be more explicit that the proposal is to add to the existing dimensions in a way analogous to how imaginary numbers expand the domain of real numbers. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.128|172.70.91.128]] 08:19, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Being an Englishman of a certain age, I had a panic flash back to the ITA. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 12:55, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2642: Meta-Alternating Current

2022-07-07T11:32:58Z

Arachrah: HVDC

And today, we are reminded that [[Randall]] used to be a physicist (or at least has a physics degree). Not worth mentioning in the article, but while inverters can't reverse each other, transformers can. (Has Randall done the transformer/Transformer pun yet as an excuse to mock the movies?) [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 11:10, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Long distance links, especially those between separate unsynchronized grids, use high voltage DC. There is a 2,000-mile link in China running at 1 MV. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 11:32, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2626: d65536

2022-05-31T15:13:14Z

Arachrah:

I wonder: can we even make a fair polyhedron with 65536 faces? In Randal's illustration, the faces seem to be irregular hexagons. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.105|172.70.130.105]] 21:37, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
: This is better than my question, which was simply if you could tile a sphere with these. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 23:01, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
:Definitely possible, just create two identical right pyramids with a 32768-gon base and glue the bases together. [[User:Clam|Clam]] ([[User talk:Clam|talk]]) 23:53, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
: Would this design be fair? Consider a set of 256 lines of latitude overlapping another set, with the second set's polar axis at the equator of the first. Cut flat quadrangles between the intersection points of the lines of latitude. Doesn't use hexagons like the comic does though. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.110.121|172.70.110.121]] 09:41, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
:: Fairness is a given for pyramids (if that's what you're asking). As long as there's enough 'rolling energy' to get either of the pyramids 'facing up', any N-agon base to the pyramids should have enough indeterminate impetous to then finally roll around a bit to end up with any of those exposed faces on top.
::(Interesting to note that for odd-numbered N-agonal bases, like that in a D10, you need to offset the bases and instead of sticking to the triangular faces base-to-base you now have kite-shapes that interlock in a serration that is no longer strictly planar along the axis's perpendiculars.)
::That might need a selection of the pyramidal slope. A very wide pair of bases with very little tip-'elevation' (to fit tightly within an oblate spheroid) should transition very well between same-pyramid faces, like a bulgy button, but one with highly acute tip-angle (prolate, likewise) might find the dominant behaviour to be tip-to-tip tipping, more like a toggle-fastener. OTOH, for odd-numbered end-agons it would probably ratchett to subsequent sides as it tips back and forth so long as it has enough energy to it.
::If you're asking about lines of latitude intersecting, consider that near the poles of either latitudinal reference the division of the other reference-system is going to be spliced more irregularly and thus give varying degrees of stability to rest upon.
::(Also, do you have a latitudinal line that crosses ''both'' pairs of poles, or are you deliberately moving them by half a phase (1/512th of the relevent circumference) so that you at least don't have them entirely coincident.)
::I believe the suggested scheme would be to take a dodecahedron or icosohedron (either of the two duals can be used to start with) and then subdivide each face in such a manner that equally-sized (but differently distorted) hexagons – and 12 little regular pentagons of identical area fitting in at the old dodecahedron centre/the old icosahedron vertex – emerge from the required segmentation/vertex-truncation and readjustment the radiality of all new mid-edge vertices (or maybe the newer-edges' centres or the newer-faces' centres) to touch the unit sphere. If done symmetrically, it should be entirely fair.
::The face-count might be troublesome, though. The twelve necessary pentagonal faces leaves 65524 hexagons, to split evenly between* either 12 or 20 zones, and it should be obvious that neither is possible**, in whole numbers, given the starting point of 2n faces...
:::(* - you can, and probably will in this design, have some that cross between two of the top-level polygons, but you can fully 'donate' as many as you then fully ''get'' donated from the next face around, so it might as well be just counted as a group of whole tiles on an a set of Escher-like interlocking 'rough' polygons.)
:::(** - If you're using 12 zones, that's 3x4x(however many in the zone + one corner each) and there's no factor of 3 in ''any'' value that is 2n. Arranging into 20 symmetrical zones (5x4), you will find that 65524 isn't divisible by 5, either...)
::You could probably arrange an N-ahedron with the number of faces being 12+(12a) or 12+(20b), for some higher value (a bit of mental arithmatic suggests 65592 might be that value) and mark all the 'excess' faces (56?) with "Roll Again!". Or perhaps some pithy motivational slogans that also convey roughly the same meaning... :P [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.5|172.70.162.5]] 11:32, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
::Postcript: Ok, so this is my idea for face-placing. Take a D8 (octahedron) and divide each of its 8 originally triangular faces into 8192 smaller faces (alternatively, start with a cube and progressively truncate its corners towards the same end). This is not a divisible by three number (neither can you put one in the centre, the rest are divisble by three and can surround it symmetrically), but you don't need strict rotational symmetry in any way. The opposing side can reflect/copy the non-symmetry as required to create any useful symmetry across the whole of the structure (and make floored-base/upmost-face pairings, amongst other things).
::As long as you make the faces equally likely to land on ''and stay on'' (could be hyperstellated as a slightly flat irregular 8192agon-based right-pyramid with the pyramid-faces of adjacent sides matching or meshing edges with those of each other, or a complicated mostly-hexagonal mesh, or a triangular one that's a limited fragment of a fine geodesic-like bulged pattern) by some suitable scheme governing area, aspect ratio and inter-face angle of incidence (probably normalising features to touch the unit sphere, for a start) then it should do it fairly and with ''exactly'' 65536 faces. I leave the fine-tweaking up to someone else. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.5|172.70.162.5]] 12:59, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

I don't know why it's so big? Seems like it should have a diameter of approx. 1 meter. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.105|172.70.130.105]] 21:37, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
: Cueball is 50 pixels high. The ball is 340 px high. Assuming Cueball is an average-height male (1.7m), and is standing the same distance from the viewer as the center of the ball, roughly how large is each face of the polygon? Area of a sphere is 4.pi.r.r, r=0.85, so 9.08 m^2 or 9080000 mm^2, divide by number of faces, get 277 mm^2, so we get 1.6cm to a side. If I did that right, then you're right: those are fairly large faces. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.70.39|172.69.70.39]] 05:58, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
:I ran the calculations for the Trivia section. I used 12pt font which gave each number an area of 1/6 square inch (about 1 square cm) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.237|162.158.106.237]] 06:57, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Should the title and picture file use "d" or the comic's difficult to type "ᴅ"?
[[User:While False|While False]] ([[User talk:While False|talk]]) 21:55, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
:Since xkcd uses small caps as lowercase letters, the "ᴅ" should just be considered xkcd-font for "d", and as such need not be used on the title, which is not using the xkcd font.
:: Ah! [[User:While False|While False]] ([[User talk:While False|talk]]) 06:15, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

If you really did want to generate a 16 bit integer with physical dice, it would be much simpler to roll a [https://www.thediceshoponline.com/impact-opaque-hexidice-d16-hexadecimal-dice hex die] four times. [[User:Clayot|Clayot]] ([[User talk:Clayot|talk]]) 23:30, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
:Rolling a binary die 16 times would also work. You can get binary dice for 1¢ each. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.69|108.162.245.69]] 01:31, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
::The lowest-value coin of all is the Tiyin from Uzbekistan. Some 3,038 equate to one UK penny (and 2,000 tot up to one US cent) from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21572359. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 15:13, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
::Those 1¢ "dices" are not exactly guaranteed to be random. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 06:12, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
:::They seem as random as other dice? Am I wrong? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.230.63|172.70.230.63]] 09:33, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
:::: You can reduce bias by taking two not quite fair coins. Flip them together. If both heads, or both tails, then record a 0. If different, record a 1. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 15:13, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

I think the hardest part (or maybe second-hardest part) is figuring out which facet is the one on top. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.109|162.158.78.109]] 00:46, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
:Roll it on a glass table, check from below which face it's landed on instead. Wait until it has settled safely, though, or it might land on ''your'' face! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.227|172.70.90.227]] 04:58, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
:: Good plan. Assuming standard dice design, subtract the value from 65537 to get the value of the uppermost face. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.70.39|172.69.70.39]] 05:58, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

What material should it be to be light enough to easily roll it but cheap enough that doing the 1,5 meters doest cost a fortune ? Sorry if the question is not clear. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.69.30|141.101.69.30]] 05:50, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
:I recommend making it hollow. You could probably do something like this for $3000 if you made it out of 1/8th inch acrylic plate. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.237|162.158.106.237]] 07:02, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
:At first I thought aluminum for sturdiness, but really you could make this out of cardboard for dirt cheap, lasercutting precise shapes, but you'd have to design its structural frame to keep it intact, exchanges design effort for price. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.230.63|172.70.230.63]] 09:32, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

I disagree with this dice being really random. Like, sure, if thrown correctly, but that's going to be quite hard. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 06:12, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

:True. For a rolled die to be random, it needs to roll far enough so that the initial orientation no longer governs the outcome. Say, ten times the circumference, or about 150 meters? -- [[User:Dtgriscom|Dtgriscom]] ([[User talk:Dtgriscom|talk]]) 10:28, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
::Interesting to consider the 'necessary minimum'. Simplify to a "wheel of fortune" (just one axis of continual rotation) it would depend upon the potential variation of imparted rotation. If (say) 'aiming' at two whole rotations has a (perhaps 'normal') spread of variance that relates to ±½ rotational uncertainty at the 1st and 3rd quartile of probability then the sub-first and above-third 'tails' might wrap around to (roughly) equalise the chances that 2±(whatever fraction) spins lands just about anywhere just about equally. Aiming at four whole rotations (similary ±1 spin at the given quartiles, and the tailing chancs 'filling in' above 5 rotations and below 3) would smooth things out, all else equal, but takes twice as much perceived/attempted effort for not much more 'randomising'.
::Similarly, requiring 10 full rolls (maybe honestly aiming for 10, but allowing it to be 7.5 or less if not obviously 'just nudged') seems overkill, in the single dimension.
::Except, of course that you also need enough distance (on top of whatever factor you consider practical as a variation-wrapping value, which might not be the ½-in-2 I give) to also roll ''sideways''. If for some reason you really don't want to roll 65536 or 1 (or is it 65535 and 0?), which may be on polar-opposite faces, you might make sure that they are directly to the left and right before you propel the die forwards ''a little'', not caring which distribution of numbers is on/near the rolling-equator (2 is acceptible to you, and 65533, etc; other very low/high values conceivably placed on that thin band of "wheel-like chance" but you're just avoiding the very largest and smallest, or specifically just the one of them) but knowing that it's more unlikely to easily present the exact face(s) you dislike than it might be in a truly 'fair' roll.
::Perhaps the best thing is to have a rolling track to send the thing down that puts it the required "two or so rotations" forward to then either hit a wall or climb slightly up a slope (at a roughly 45 degree angle) that then sends it back roughly sideways to the original vector for a similar distance with a perpendicular or even composite moment of rolling rotation, to bring 'initially axial' numbers fully into play... And that dog-leg would require a sligthly shorter length from launch-position to where the thoroughly mixed-up final stopping point should be, whilst significantly foiling the master-manipulators who actually try to arrange an initial setup that favours better final results (rather than just nudge it, uncaring, for a result not as totally random but certainly not more predominently of desired-for ranges than otherwise). [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.8|141.101.99.8]] 12:28, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
::At what point does the structural material the die is composed of, combined with its mass, create a smoothing effect that will destroy the fairness of the die. I mean a small plastic die is no problem. A 2-ton acrylic die would start grinding off the edges of some faces with every roll, would it not? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.69.122|172.69.69.122]] 13:35, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Should it be related to https://xkcd.com/221/ ? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.183.246|162.158.183.246]] 08:07, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm going to wait, I think - I don't think there's room in my attic for this as well as all the Betamax kit, my drawers full of MiniDiscs and my Zune collection. No, I'll sit tight - I'm hearing encouraging things about the introduction of the Magic 65536-Ball... [[User:Yorkshire Pudding|Yorkshire Pudding]] ([[User talk:Yorkshire Pudding|talk]]) 09:41, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2217: 53 Cards

2022-04-08T19:54:06Z

Arachrah: Barach Tarski

"This page was last edited [tomorrow]." Okay, good to know. Tomorrow starts three hours from now, my time. This comic reminded me of this article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/corkscrewing-bouncy-ion-drive-would-provide-thrust-in-different-universe/ [[Special:Contributions/172.68.38.88|172.68.38.88]] 00:44, 19 October 2019 (UTC)

I can do this, but my flowchart would be different and involve secretly inserting a joker, using the shuffling as cover for the move.
Collect a deck of 52 cards and have a spectator count the cards. - Secretly hide a joker from the deck in your off-hand (the one without the deck). - Shuffle the cards, letting the hidden card drop on top of the deck. - Keep shuffling, so the inserted joker is well mixed into the deck. - Have a spectator count the cards, looking only at the backs. - 53.
[[User:Nutster|Nutster]] ([[User talk:Nutster|talk]]) 04:56, 19 October 2019 (UTC)

Actually this is also what encryption scientists have to face talking to not so few encryption enthusiasts who just invented their own encryption method[[Special:Contributions/162.158.234.112|162.158.234.112]] 07:01, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
:Ohg V unir na haornnoyr pvcure! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.253|162.158.158.253]] 13:52, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
:: Shouldn't that be Ohg V unir na haorn'''g'''noyr pvcure! I'm pretty sure that a character got lost.[[User:Jtoebes|Jtoebes]] ([[User talk:Jtoebes|talk]]) 01:47, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
:The difference is that those "own excryption methods" usually work ... not well, but at least little. Now, the algorithms which claim to compress ANY input to smaller size, those tend to be suspicious ... -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 22:15, 19 October 2019 (UTC)

Wait, isn't perpetual motion (w.r.t. a inertial reference frame) possible, at least according to Newtonian mechanics? Just launch something into space at high enough speed and "watch" it wander away forever. Extracting (an unbounded amount of) energy from that object is a totally different story... --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.234.94|162.158.234.94]] 10:11, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
:Not really, as even in vacuums particles randomly come into existence. Eventually enough would be in the path to slow it to a stop. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.151|162.158.62.151]] 17:37, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
::Not in Newtonian mechanics. Those random particles are result of quantum physics - and in quantum physics, EVERYTHING is possible, just unlikely (there is extremely small but nonzero probability that all particles in macroscopic object would exhibit tunneling effect moving them in same direction, for example). -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 22:15, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
:::Even in Newtonian mechanics, the energy would be sapped from the object eventually. Space isn't completely empty. The object will occasionally hit particles that will alter its kinetic energy. Also, as it encounters gravitational fields, there will be stresses and strains in the material of the object and the objects creating the gravitational fields. As an example, think of the Earth rotating in space. It's actually slowing down because of the tidal effect caused by the Moon. Some of the rotational energy is being imparted to the Moon, but some of it is let as heat through friction from the movement of tides. [[User:Jeremyp|Jeremyp]] ([[User talk:Jeremyp|talk]]) 13:39, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
:Vacuum fluctuation (particles), i.e. quantum weirdness, cannot cause trouble. This is because all working QFT, where these vacuum fluctuations appear, take as assumption the strict local conservation of energy-momentum 4-vector, which is the generalisation of what our OP is asking about. This is a fundamental backbone of all modern physics, not just Newtonian mechanics, and the only known violation is in cosmology. Needless to say, when we talk about perpetual motion machines, we have to start by omitting this trivial class. That is, we do not call systems that achieve perpetual motion by exploiting the conservation of linear or angular momentum alone, as perpetual motion machines. Some machines of that form that convert the energy and momentum from one part to the other could be a perpetual motion machine, because in those cases it is possible for the efficiency of conversion to be imperfect, in which case it will always practically be imperfect, leading to the eventual failure. Luckily, on Earth and in practice, there is no need to be careful, because even the linear or angular momentum special case, would be interacting with air---the best vacuum we can get, are still not perfect; it is not perfect even in actual space outside Earth. It just doesn't exist anywhere. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.165.118|162.158.165.118]] 20:49, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
::Uhhh, and what about ''Ptolemaic'' Mechanics? SOMETHING is keeping the spheres rotating. Seems Randall hasn't really thought this comic through. Someone should challenge him to prove that his comic is true in all idealistic conceptions of the real world. (Please sign off, and make edits separate from others'.)
:::This was a reply to earlier comments. Randall's comic stands funny as-is. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.125|162.158.166.125]] 19:25, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

Getting a 53 card deck from a 52 card deck is easy. First, cut the deck twice. Then, shuffle all parts together; be sure to suffer thoroughly. Finally, take off the top 5 cards, sneak in the Joker on the bottom while nobody's looking, and put the five cards at the "middle". Because of skewed philosophy, you will have gotten a 53 card deck![[Special:Contributions/162.158.122.186|162.158.122.186]]

“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” -Alberto Brandolini [[User:Menoshe|Menoshe]] ([[User talk:Menoshe|talk]]) 22:03, 19 October 2019 (UTC)

Note that while it shouldn't be possible to obtain energy from nowhere, there ARE methods which makes hard to find where the energy comes from, and some may be useful (say, perhaps as a new kind of battery?). Also, anything involving not-completely-understood phenomena, like black hole for example, might actually generate energy from source we don't know about yet (parallel universe or something like that). Meanwhile, lot of theoretical designs of perpetual motion machines without working prototype only contain steps which can't possibly get energy anywhere and are completely useless ... -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 22:15, 19 October 2019 (UTC)
: Black hole physics are one of the best understood. No part of understanding them requires parallel universes. The thing that is really a headache in General Theory of Relativity is that we still do not have a good, localised, way to express the energy stored in the gravitational field. Landau-Lifshitz pseudo-tensor is proved to be unique given the assumptions, but starts with a subtraction of the matter stress-energy tensor, and violates precisely this comic---it says that some gravitational wave situations don't carry away energy, when in fact we know those have to carry away energy. Better defined notions, like ADM energy, are global energy, not localised energy, so that we do not know what they mean, practically. However, even though we are still not fully understanding what mathematical quantity would correctly map to gravitational field energy in the theory, we still do know that it has to be gravitational field energy, and that it has nothing to do with parallel universes. Just to hammer down the singular mistake in your nice comment. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.165.118|162.158.165.118]] 21:01, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

In the picture it seems that he cuts the cards into a pile of 21 cards and 38 cards (thus making 59 cards) I'm sure that helps his argument (or he can't count.
: Yeah, I noticed that mismatch too! Actually, I interpreted the "cut" as referring to that one old trick where rectangular objects (usually banknotes) would be cut in half and then rearranged with small pieces missing, making one more object than there used to be. This of course would not be a case of "rearranging and shuffling". (If you're wondering why this doesn't work for ''actual'' banknotes, that's because the existence of serial numbers makes this trick far harder, and the ''repeated'' serial numbers on most modern notes make it effectively impossible. But back in the 19th century this actually used to be a problem.) --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.54.33|172.69.54.33]] 19:26, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Perpetual motion is so easy that we've already done it. The universe isn't going to stop expanding anytime soon, afterall. Also, Voyager (and some other space probes). Everything is perpetual motion in space at solar escape velocity until/unless it hits something. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.214.88|162.158.214.88]] 18:35, 20 October 2019 (UTC)
: This case is by definition excluded from the discussion of perpetual motion. See above for my longer version on it. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.165.118|162.158.165.118]] 21:03, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

You can always rearrange the matter making up the 52 cards, into 53 smaller cards. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.212.17|108.162.212.17]] 19:21, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

It's easy to prove, using the Banach-Tarski theorem [[User:Cellocgw|Cellocgw]] ([[User talk:Cellocgw|talk]]) 12:39, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
:If you show me how to dissolve the cards into subatomar theoretical dots by shuffling, I agree. --[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 13:36, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Sigh... I really don't like having to keep challenging Kynde, who I believe is a well-intentioned contributor... but as soon as I saw the rewritten explanation with confusing phrasing and broken English, I knew that it was him who did it, and honestly... it just makes the article worse. It's harder to read and comprehend, contains irrelevancies, and swings between explanatory points incoherently. It was, honestly, okay as it was (specifically [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2217:_53_Cards&oldid=181494 this version]). I don't really know what to do about it. I'm of the "be bold in making edits" school of wiki-ing, but I don't want to just flush away other people's well-meant contributions. [[User:Hawthorn|Hawthorn]] ([[User talk:Hawthorn|talk]]) 15:01, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately, plenty of physicists make the same mistake, losing sight of the fact that math is only a model that must conform to reality, a-la Zeno's Paradox. That's how you end up with silly claims of "if you can [go faster than light] [travel through a wormhole between two distant points in an expanding universe] you'll go backward in time". Or how about the pseudoscience of explaining failed models by assuming that there must be "dark" matter or energy, instead of acknowledging that the model, itself, must be fundamentally wrong the way an actual scientist would. — [[User:Kazvorpal|Kazvorpal]] ([[User talk:Kazvorpal|talk]]) 16:53, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
: What are the chances that the global scientific community, who are setup to attack each other to win funding, would require outsiders to tell them that dark matter and dark energy are indications that their models are "fundamentally wrong"? It just goes to show how rarely you talk to scientists. Cosmologists are always apologising for not knowing what dark energy is, treating them only as the cosmological constant (other alternatives are always explored, but none offer significant improvements upon cosmological constant simplicity). But the dark matter situation already merit a few observational wins, and are starting to look more and more like postulating neutrinos, which is a winning precedent. For two examples, firstly, we have observed localised dark matter causing gravitational lensing. Secondly, we see some galaxy collisions that have dark matter in the wrong place due to the collisions. These evidences are enough to convince most astrophysicists that the basic picture seems correct. Other than this, you should also work on understanding more about how theory and experiment interact in physics, before commenting more upon the matter. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.165.118|162.158.165.118]] 21:17, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
::You fail to understand: Even if something eventually turned up that they could claim is the equivalent of dark energy or matter, it would be an accident, and change nothing about how anti-scientific they had been. The methodology they use is not only wrong, but essentially identical to that used by advocates of the geocentric model when prosecuting Galileo. Dark matter and energy are epicycles and deferents, ridiculous tweaks to models that fail to naturally match observation. Any model that can't hold up to the simplest, barely-scientific benchmark of simply matching observation naturally is a failure. Any adjustments made are a departure from its fundamental premises. At that point it might as well be astrologers tweaking star sign analyses. — [[User:Kazvorpal|Kazvorpal]] ([[User talk:Kazvorpal|talk]]) 01:26, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
:::Well, do ''you'' have a model that matches reality better than what we have? Please enlighten us. Even the geocentric model matched observations and was regarded as ok for a few centuries until we got a better model. Since we don't have a better model, we should try to find evidence or otherwise for the model/s we currently have. {{unsigned ip|162.158.158.213}}

:::What part of "Cosmologists are always apologising for not knowing what dark energy is" do you not understand? That you have a fundamental lack of understanding what the scientific method says upon such conundrums does not mean that you are correct, or that the scientific community should abandon ship and all go ape nuts. You also show your ignorance by trying to link the dark duo to Galilean trials, for they are different in fundamental ways. Not least that scientists today are openly asking for outside ideas to give a better description of dark energy and entertaining all promising leads, as opposed to the closed-minded "Earth isn't moving" of Galilean trials.

:::The actual Galilean trials were an unholy trinity of a) paradigm shift b) leading questions style biasing via unnatural restriction of focus c) doctrinal dangers. A paradigm shift is already exceedingly difficult to bridge the conversational gap, but importantly, at the time, people believed that celestial mechanics behaved differently from earthly mechanics, whereas Galileo's strongest arguments come from pointing out that Aristotelian mechanics and Ptolemy's cosmology had to be abandoned and unified into one complete mechanics. Their narrowing of scope only to celestial mechanics is thus already biasing them into a failure mode that they were ill-equipped to understand.

:::This cannot be compared with the issue today, because opponents of dark matter are free to work on modifications to Newtonian/Einsteinian gravity (MoND), or others. There is neither a paradigm shift, nor indoctrination at play, nor ad hoc separation of concerns. Now, physical theories are allowed to have some free parameters, as long as not so many as to eliminate the possibility of predictions. It is thus telling that dark matter is wildly successful compared to MoND in its predictive powers---we even know that the dark matter cannot be hot type, i.e. not neutrinos, for example, and must be cold dark matter. They also move normally according to Einsteinian gravity, so no shenanigans. These show that the dark matter scheme is scientific and totally could be used to kill off dead ends. Like your ridiculous ignorance, that obviously failed to see how your own argument about "Even if something eventually turned up" already failed the neutrino test, which was why I brought it up the last time around. Leave science to the professionals and stop repeating stupidities---we know everything you are talking about, and have analysed them to be of negative value. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.93|172.69.134.93]] 20:00, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

Well, since it's a non-closed system that is receiving energy... and matter is just solidified energy... :) I'm going to say that Cueball is right so long as his flowchart also contains a StarTrek replicator somewhere. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.90.64|172.68.90.64]] 20:08, 21 October 2019 (UTC)SiliconWolf

Where's the Banach–Tarski reference! There should totally be an earth-shattering Banach–Tarski reference. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.58.219|162.158.58.219]] 21:36, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
: I agree. Reading this comic led me to google for Banach-Tarski, even if it wasn't mentioned by name. Saibot84 03:25, 23 October 2019 (UTC) {{unsigned|Saibot84}}

Agreed: There should totally be some sort of Axiom of Choice joke here as well. {{unsigned ip|172.68.70.34}}

See also Sam Loyd's "Get Off The Earth" puzzle (and similar illusions where shifting pieces of a larger picture changes the number of objects by redistributing pieces of each one). {{unsigned|SteveMB}}

Something, something, infinite chocolate {{unsigned ip|162.158.166.109}}

Fairly sure if I put enough pressure when forcing cards together I can create additional cards by cutting one down the center (splitting the face and the back) [[Special:Contributions/172.68.174.22|172.68.174.22]] 20:56, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

I feel like [[Special:PermanentLink/207087|the present explanation]] misses the mark a bit.

The thing about magnets and electricity and water and levers and marbles and so on is that we understand these things and we understand how they shuffle energy around - these things can be accurately and precisely described by the laws of physics we have and are deeply familiar with and have thoroughly tested. If you know how shuffling, cutting, and rearranging playing cards works, then you can prove, mathematically, that shuffles and rearrangements cannot create or destroy cards ... and if you know how Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, general relativity, and so on work, then you can prove, mathematically, that no machine described by these laws can create or destroy energy.

Historically, however, essentially all proposed perpetual motion machines - all over-unity free-energy machines - propose to function using magnets, electricity, water, levers, marbles, and so on. In fact, these machines are often described ''by their proponents'' using the very equations of Newtonian physics and the like; their proofs attempt to use, like Cueball does with playing cards in the comic, understood operations from theories where energy is conserved to create new energy. We know how shuffling a deck of cards work and we know how moving a magnet through a coil of wires work, and neither of these operations can do what they are claimed to do in the way they are claimed to do it.

And yes, when challenged, the proponents will demand their critic find the error in their proof. But the fact that the theory says 52 cards at the top and 53 cards at the bottom when ''everything between'' is shuffles and cuts and rearrangements is proof enough that something is wrong, because you can't make new cards or new energy by shuffling the stuff you already have around. [[User:Packbat|Packbat]] ([[User talk:Packbat|talk]]) 12:42, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Convert one of the cards into a unit sphere, invoke the axiom of choice and apply Barach Tarski Paradox to transform it into two spheres, then reverse the first step to get two cards. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 19:54, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

2595: Advanced Techniques

2022-03-20T14:49:25Z

Arachrah: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2595
| date = March 18, 2022
| title = Advanced Techniques
| image = advanced_techniques.png
| titletext = A blow from Emmy's Cutlass of Variations will transport the dragon to a corresponding symmetric position in the Noetherworld.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by AN EULISH CLAUSS- Please slay the CORRECT dragon when editing this page. Do NOT travel to the Noetherworld. Do NOT pass Go. Do not collect the square root of minus one pounds}}

[[Miss Lenhart]] is teaching a maths class. She outlines a process by which a mathematical result is achieved through steps which sound suspiciously like magical 'RPG logic'. One of her students asks if this is a metaphor for the technique, but her rather tetchy reply that she's not teaching English, implies that actual dragons and arrows will be employed in the resolution of the problem. Whilst metaphor is an important part of many languages, and so definitely taught in English, French and {{w|Tamarian}} classes, the process of algebra denoting variables with letters could be considered related to metaphorical thinking.

This comic plays on mathematical terms which have other meanings, using them in different contexts from the ones intended for the terms. In doing so it invokes the third of {{w|Clarke's three laws}} that any highly advanced technology could be considered magic.

The caption states that this approach describes "All advanced math techniques." This is probably a reference to Artur C. Clarke's third law that All sufficiently advanced technologies are indistinguishable from magic, but reframed for maths.

{{w|Hilbert space}} converts subsets of an infinite vector space into a complete metric space, allowing the use of linear algebra & calculus methods which might otherwise be applicable only to finite Euclidean spaces.

{{w|Conway chained arrow notation}} (2️⃣➡️3️⃣➡️4️⃣) is a means of expressing extremely large numbers.

Magical arrows are frequently used to slay dragons, in myth and Role-Playing Games. Magical items in RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons, are often named after a creator or famous user; hence, a magical 'Arrow of Hilbert', might traverse infinite spaces and\or affect targets of which one or more stats are effectively infinite.

Presumably this arrow is useful in slaying the "Dragon" of {{w|Gauss-Kuzmin-Wirsing operator|Gauss's operator}}.

Invocations are a common classification for spoken or vocalized types of spell. In the logic Miss Lenhart used, 'invoking' Gauss's operator may refer to casting a magical spell with verbal components (such as [https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/True%20Polymorph True Polymorph]).

The title text contains two puns and a reference. The phrase "{{w|Cutlass}} of Variations" is a pun on the mathematical technique called "{{w|Calculus of variations}}". The word "Noetherworld" is a pun on "{{w|underworld|netherworld}}". The reference is to the mathematician {{w|Emmy Noether}}, who was a (figurative){{citation needed}} giant in the field of Abstract Algebra. Furthermore, so-called {{w|Noether's Theorem}} is used in the Calculus of Variations.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[Miss Lenhart is using a stick to point at a whiteboard with a drawing of a dragon, an archer, and rows of text on it, while facing, presumably, a crowd of students.]
:Miss Lenhart: To solve this equation, we invoke Gauss's operator to transform it into a dragon.
:Miss Lenhart: Then we slay the dragon with Hilbert's Arrow, and transform its corpse back into the solution.
:Voice off-screen: Just to be clear, this is a metaphor, right?
:Miss Lenhart: Does this '''look''' like English class?!

:[Caption below the panel:]
:All advanced math techniques

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Miss Lenhart]]
[[Category:Math]]

Talk:2595: Advanced Techniques

2022-03-19T16:24:46Z

Arachrah:

The title text refers to [[wikipedia:Noether's theorem|Noether's theorem]]. [[User:Trimeta|Trimeta]] ([[User talk:Trimeta|talk]]) 04:24, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

This is my first explanation [[User:GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e|GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e]] ([[User talk:GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e|talk]]) 05:41, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

This sounds a lot like Laplace or Fourier transforms, converting a function into a different where it is easier to manipulate then reversing the transformation. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.173|108.162.245.173]] 06:28, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure that it's proper to refer to someone as a "giant" while explaining a comic that references mythological creatures. Unless it was literal of course, but as far as I'm aware giants never existed. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.111.12|162.158.111.12]] 11:28, 19 March 2022 (UTC)
:I think she may actually have been a wizard-giant.[[User:Iggynelix|Iggynelix]] ([[User talk:Iggynelix|talk]]) 13:41, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Not my area, but I am passingly familiar with the [[:wikipedia:Gauss–Kuzmin–Wirsing_operator|Gauss–Kuzmin–Wirsing Operator]], [[wikipedia:Dragon curve|Dragon Curves]], and [[wikipedia:Hilbert spaces|Hilbert ''Spaces'']] (guessing that the "arrow" refers to scalar vector?). Some type of iterative/recursive conversion that yields to analysis of the period? Probably not pertinent to the joke which is more about the fanciful names attached to mathematical concepts, constructs, and processes [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.173|108.162.245.173]] 11:53, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

I find it inteteresting that despite now being the day after release (or well into the next day, my time, which is usually sufficient — and I'm not in a DST zone yet) the site explanation hasn't explained (or thought it has explained) every single element of the in-comic 'explanation' — even if not established the (probably) nonsensical whole. As an example, I don't yet see the obvious {{w|Dragon_curve|dragon}} element that is both alluded to ''and'' seemingly illustrated upon the board-notes. Leaving this here to help near-future editors who might have time to bullet-point/tabulate/sub-heading these things and just need that extra bit of info. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.125|162.158.159.125]] 15:01, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

There is the misquote of Arthur Clarke "All sufficiently advanced [strike]technologies[/strike] mathematical techniques are indistinguishable from magic." [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]])

Talk:2594: Consensus Time

2022-03-17T21:31:54Z

Arachrah:

What if there's, like, a group of trolls that all press the button at like 9:00 pm? [[User:Sarah the Pie(yes, the food)|Sarah the Pie(yes, the food)]] ([[User talk:Sarah the Pie(yes, the food)|talk]]) 17:20, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Less than a day should be enough time for a team of people to notice and override the trolls' attempt to game the system.
Unless the trolls decide to push the button right before midnight.
--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.147|172.70.162.147]] 23:11, 16 March 2022 (UTC)
:Presupposes that an executive decision that "oh, that was just sabotage, we can ignore all those 'votes'" by an oversight panel is deemed ok to occasionally enforce. As with actual election votes, that shouldn't be taken lightly (for fear of top-down skewing of the actual sincere wish of those casting their opinions).
:As it's a median (in itself a good idea, as there's no reason to cast very extreme outliers — it doesn't do anything more to the result than a barely marginal outlier) all you need to do is ask enough people (in excess of any counter-aiming participation, if there's a fight over it) to merely adjust their 'feeling' to half an hour later (or earlier, if that's your aim) than they normally would.
:Added to the 'natural' variation in feeling (spread statistically amongst your participating group) it would be practically impossible to decide that a distinct tapering-lump of results exists, to possibly disqualify. Whereas if results show clear 'lumps' hours apart (e.g. around 3AM and/or 9PM, as well as the standard bunch around the 'honest' opinion point), there might be a case to officially intervene. Or at least officially review the procedure. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.86.64|172.70.86.64]] 09:14, 17 March 2022 (UTC)
: It's basically Wiki-Time, the same principles apply as a Wiki... and Wikis are always 100% accrate, rite? --[[User:192·168·0·1|192·168·0·1]] ([[User talk:192·168·0·1|talk]]) 18:42, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Probably a reference to the Senate DST thing[[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.237|172.70.210.237]] 17:46, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

I feel like this could supersede time-zones as well, by weighting reports by relative longitude, so you could have a kind of continuous change in time as you travel. I'm sure this wouldn't cause any problems at all, since every single computer would effectively be in its own mini time-zone, with its clock going at a slightly different speed, and both current time and speed of time would vary continuously with position.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.11|162.158.159.11]] 17:53, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

I have to feel that the night shift people would really not like this. [[User:SDSpivey|SDSpivey]] ([[User talk:SDSpivey|talk]]) 19:35, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

My take on this is that Midnight is a fixed point, it's always at the same time, and the day compresses and expands around it based on the median 9AM location. So, some days will have long hours in the morning, then compressed hours in the afternoon and evening. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.52|162.158.107.52]] 20:37, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

See also consensus new year https://xkcd.com/2092/ [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.237|172.70.210.237]] 20:43, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

I think he's also ripping on the concept of "wisdom of the crowd". [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 21:31, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

If someone makes this app, I'd use it. I might not follow its clock, but I'd be interested in seeing what happens. [[User:Draco18s|Draco18s]] ([[User talk:Draco18s|talk]]) 00:01, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

The sociologist in me wants to see this... The computer scientist in me could not be reached for comment and only mumbled something about "checking stock in the bomb shelter" [[Special:Contributions/108.162.246.62|108.162.246.62]]

Hmm... Does this probably mean 9AM today could theoretically be '''after''' 9AM tomorrow in some cases!? Talk about a new approach to time travel. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.147.9|172.70.147.9]] 05:12, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Working example: https://matthewminer.name/projects/consensus-time/
: 👏 excellent work --[[User:192·168·0·1|192·168·0·1]] ([[User talk:192·168·0·1|talk]]) 18:46, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

I've often thought the answer to the arguments about daylight saving time could be solved by going back to something like the old Canonical Hours with the period from sunrise to sunset divided into 12 hours, with short hours in winter and longer ones in summer. Incidentally, in the late sixties, an experiment was tried in the UK to keep the country on daylight saving all year round, called British Standard Time. I remember going to school in the north of England in December and it was still dark to well past nine o'clock in the morning. It apparently reduced road deaths, but it was abandoned after three years. --[[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.147|172.70.162.147]] 09:09, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Re. "the next vote would occur sooner or later respectively": This doesn't make sense - by definition, the vote takes place at no fixed time. Everybody votes at different times, depending on when they feel like it's 9am. They could, if they wished, do this capriciously, with no relation at all to the previous day's vote. One possible outcome of this is that the consensus view could drift so far from that of some individual views that it becomes impossible to determine which 'day' they're voting in respect of, and therefore which vote they should be counted in.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.34.239|162.158.34.239]] 11:25, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Of course, before mechanical clocks, hours varied across the year. With 12 short hours each day, and long ones over night in winter and 12 long ones in summer, with shorter hours overnight. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 21:31, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2589: Outlet Denier

2022-03-05T22:47:44Z

Arachrah:

== UK ==

All you need is a US to UK adapter to block three outlets. It is why I bought a US to micky-mouse lead so as not to be greedy.

== undersde ==

A missing i in the title text
[[User:While False|While False]] ([[User talk:While False|talk]]) 21:47, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
:It's fixed now. I'm not sure what the policy is about updating here, I think we try to keep the original in a history page. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 22:46, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
:Try a Trivia? As last seen [[2587:_For_the_Sake_of_Simplicity#Trivia]], for reference.
:(Hmmm, I wonder how many (noticed!) re-edits there are. Not all will be exactly so marked, but every Trivia section can be checked - when someone has time.) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.86.64|172.70.86.64]] 02:46, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
The cursed connectors series is alive again! [[User:GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e|GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e]] ([[User talk:GcGYSF(asterisk)P(vertical line)e|talk]]) 06:05, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

== Actually exists ==

Outlet deniers are a real thing. For example, the Instant Pot air fryer attachment has one of these on its plug to discourage people from using it at the same time as the main pot (which would be bad). Photo here: https://www.adventurousway.com/images/i/fzjll58c5a77/1536w/gear-reviews/instant-pot-air-fryer-lid-review/air-fryer-lid-plug.webp

: Came her to say this. But, it's also to keep anything from using the second outlet, as the air fryer lid is 1500W, and just about anything else would trip a breaker. -- [[User:Dtgriscom|Dtgriscom]] ([[User talk:Dtgriscom|talk]]) 18:25, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

== D shape? ==

Any idea what the D shape might be? Is it to deny some specific shape of power connection I'm having trouble visualizing, or simply a handle (though I also have trouble visualizing the designers of this adding such a convenient feature). [[Special:Contributions/172.70.135.78|172.70.135.78]] 23:32, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

:It might be the way to block the other outlet on a wall plug. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.253|172.70.114.253]] 00:01, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

::Wouldn't the long bars on the top and bottom already do that? [[User:N-eh|N-eh]] ([[User talk:N-eh|talk]]) 01:12, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

:I'm amused by the plug orientation. Over here, I'm used to 'horizontal spread' configuration, [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Protected-Extension-Socket-Electric-Protection-White/dp/B08R2ZMJNY like this], with the occasional rare [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Invero%C2%AE-Extension-Adapter-British-Approved-White/dp/B01NASNRLT diagonally-skewed vertical assembly].
:But the 'Denier' seems to be only marginally-denying (possibly the D-handle will be awkward, but not more than the straight edge is a basic trip-hazard or full preventer of using 'badly'-placed sockets because of the floor).
:Of the three plugs currently in the 5-way I've got sitting flat on the bench next to me, one has the USB-charger-cable poking straight up (coaxial to the pins), one has the USB cable jutting out of the 'top' of the plug (towards me, as the strip has its Earth slots towards me) and the third is a standard pre-moulded plug (leading to a cloverleaf end plugged in a laptop power-supply module) and so the cable nuts out of the bottom (away from me) - this all being BS1363-compatible.
:But although there might be tricky situations for each plug (the coax-out wouldn't plug so easily into the socket on the wall in the other room, with the sofa up against it, though the up/down-cabled ones don't have problems.
:This denier (assuming UK-standard pins, but same orientation as shown) would actually plug into just ''one'' of my household wall-sockets (either of the two switched outlets it has, though it might block one of them if I choose the wrong one to plug to) because that's half way up a wall. I could probably get three of them in this 5-way 'extension strip' I mentioned, certainly two (and one other plug?). Depends upon the size of the D bit.
::''edit, for something other than a typo/misformat: ...the 'T-bar' would actually deny the half-up-wall-double-socket-unit's second socket, I realise, , though I may be able to put my coax-USB-plug through the D-hole. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.147|172.70.162.147]] 03:29, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
:But obviously there are weird things with US sockets. I've been to the states, and also know the plugs from the ones that sometimes come in boxed goods - usually supplemented with a UK version ''as well'', by the official distributor in this country. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.147|172.70.162.147]] 03:20, 5 March 2022 (UTC)
The D shape might be to even defeat something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Protector-Outlets-Office-Travel/dp/B07T83PY3F?th=1 [[Special:Contributions/172.70.131.122|172.70.131.122]] 12:36, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

== Anti-expander? ==

This is basically the opposite of an outlet expander. Is that worth mentioning? [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 23:51, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

== Rocker Switch ==

in the article it says "Many (most?) power strips have a rocker-style power switch at one end". this might be the case in the US but it is definitely not a global thing. whole power board switches are pretty uncommon here in Australia where most of them have switches per socket or none at all. would it make sense and be correct to edit this to say something like "It is common in the US have a rocker-style power switch at one end of a powerboard"? [[User:TomW1605|TomW1605]] ([[User talk:TomW1605|talk]])

:Rocker switchs are very common all over the world with the exception of the commonwealth, where most (all?) countries require switches on the sockets. But e.g. in continental Europe, USA and all Asian and Middle Eastern countries I have visited so far, sockets with integrated switches do not exist at all. So you either have none or one on the power strips, making the latter option very common. (Though of course rockerless exist for all applications where you totally do not need a switch and want to save half a buck or 3 cm of length.)

:: It's not uncommon in the US to see a switch that controls an outlet. You can also get an outlet/switch combo (one of the outlets is replaced with a standard switch), which can be - but aren't necessarily - used to control the connected outlet. And then there are outlets (typically required outdoors or near taps) that have cutoff switches to prevent shorts. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.238.22|108.162.238.22]] 19:56, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

::: Of Course you can always install a switch an have it control a socket. Comined panels with switches and sockets are common all over the world. I have one in half of my rooms, but the switch is always used for lighting and doing otherwise is much, much rarer and not standard at all whereever I've been so far. With exception of UK and Malta (have not been to Australia so far), where almost every socket has a switch directly integrated (and those who do not seemed pretty old). With such solutions beeing the norm on every outlet it is of course unecessary to have switches on power strips, making this type rare. But most parts of the world I know off have exactly the opposing relation: Switch on socket very rare, switch on power strips very common. Stores around here often offer 20 types of strips with switch to any 1 type without. Personally, I only buy the latter because the switches usually lit up when on and that sucks.

Talk:2570: Captain Picard Tea Order

2022-01-20T08:46:53Z

Arachrah:

...{{w|Builder's tea|Builders}}. I mean, Picard is French and Trek(/Randall) is 'Merican but I suspect it would still be a valid option to give the Ready-Room replicator... [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.126|172.70.91.126]] 23:31, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

In ''Star Trek: Picard'', Picard is seen requesting "tea, earl gray, decaf". [[Special:Contributions/172.69.68.202|172.69.68.202]] 03:33, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Presumably infinite tea could be the beverage to accompany [[1099|Endless Wings]]. [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 03:45, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

I showed it to a friend an their response was: "[In early 20th century England] they added condensed beef stock to their tea for breakfast", so ''meaty'' tea is very much a possibility. Then they linked some brand promotional materials for "Vimbos: The Prince of Fluid Beef" and "Vimbos: an ox in a teacup". Because I was just about to sign off for the evening, I'm not going to do the due diligence to research, cite, and edit the main article to reflect this discovery--but I thought it should at least be written here to see if others found it interesting enough to add. [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 04:21, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

{{w|Bovril|Bovril}} is a standard beef tea [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.79|172.70.85.79]] 07:40, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

The concept of iced tea is not normal, especially as Picard is English. Almost but not quite, totally unlike tea. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 08:46, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

2570: Captain Picard Tea Order

2022-01-20T08:44:02Z

Arachrah: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2570
| date = January 19, 2022
| title = Captain Picard Tea Order
| image = captain_picard_tea_order.png
| titletext = We can ask the Earl for his order once he's fully extruded from the dispenser.
}}
*This was the fifth comic to come out after the [[Countdown in header text]] started.

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by EXTRUDED EARL GREY- Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

Captain {{w|Jean-Luc Picard}} is the captain of the starship ''USS Enterprise'' in the TV series ''{{w|Star Trek: The Next Generation}}''. {{w|Earl Grey tea}} is a beverage that he requests many times in the series, with the exact phrase "[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaAT6-dY1QI Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.]" Randall is parodying this expression with other words that could follow "Tea. Earl Grey.", from "most normal" to "least normal".

The machine that Picard is using is a {{w|Replicator (Star Trek)|replicator}}, which can create objects, such as Picard's requested Earl Grey tea. The title text refers to the last item, "Tea for him, too." which presumes that the replicator has produced a regular (unspecified) tea and "Earl Grey", a person (either one of the {{w|Earl Grey}}s or a person named Grey with the title of {{w|earl}}), and Picard has requested a tea for him. And so Picard also will ask the Earl for his exact order of tea after he is fully created.

{| border =1 width=100% cellpadding=1 class="wikitable"
! Word !! Explanation
|-
| Hot
| A fairly normal word to be used when ordering tea. Although that it even needs specifying is itself a clue that other variations (such as "Iced", below) are available.
The act of requesting this is illustrated, though not of the appearance of the tea itself.
|-
| Iced
| {{w|Iced Tea}} is a 'normal' variation of tea.[Citation Needed]
|-
| Decaf
| Traditional teas (from {{w|Camellia sinensis}}) tend to have caffeine in them. Asking for {{w|Decaffeination|decaffeinated}} tea is not particularly uncommon if the drinker requires it.
|-
| Good
| A normal, subjective term. Most people drinking tea would want it to be good, but to specify it like this would perhaps be strange.
|-
| Lukewarm
| While this is a temperature that tea can be at, most people do not want their teas to be lukewarm.
|-
| Tasty
| Similar to good, most people would want their tea to be tasty, or at least flavorsome.
|-
| Boiled
| Boiling the water used to make the tea is a common and normal way to increase the flavor and nutrients extracted from the tea leaves, though it is suggested that the actual ideal temperature of hot water is 75-98°C (167-210°F), according to whether it is a light tea or a dark one, and that perhaps it should be sipped at around 65°C/150°F-ish if desired 'hot'.
Having made a tea and ''then'' bringing it back to the boil (especially after adding milk/etc) may destroy some of the desirable qualities previously imbued.
|-
| Watery
| Tea is a drink that often involves water, but this perhaps suggests over dilution or under infusion in some way.
|-
| Sour
| Many people do not enjoy a sour taste, which can indicate rot and is a strange thing to specify when ordering Earl Grey tea. Although lemon juice is often an additive used in the same way (but as a complete alternative) to milk.
|-
| Meaty
| Most teas are plant-based.
|-
| Solid
| Tea is usually drunk as a liquid. It would be strange to ask for solid tea.
|-
| Dry
| Tea is a liquid typically made with water and may have milk. A dry version might be either unmade (e.g. tea leaves in their un-infused form) or freeze-dried back into a dehydrated form.
("Dry" can also be used to describe {{w|Dryness (taste)|less-sweet varities of wine}} ''or'' {{w|Prohibition|enforced alcohol-free scenarios}}. For either option, it assumes a default serving with an {{w|Hot_toddy#Variations|alcoholic component}}, or an entirely {{w|Long Island iced tea|alternate basis}} for the beverage, which the request needs to be specify it is not.)
|-
| Raw
| This describes tea that has not been "cooked", so it would just be tea made with room-temperature water. This is {{w|Iced_tea#Sun_tea|possible}} but generally takes many hours.
|-
| Deep-fried
| Tea is not usually deep-fried. But you'll probably {{w|Deep-fried Mars bar|find someone}} who has tried it, [https://www.pitco.com/blog/deep-fried-liquids-trend one way or another].
|-
| Sticky
| Perhaps significantly dehydrated, or thickened with enough of a hydrophilic substance, this would produce something very unlike most teas that would usually be requested.
This scenario is illustrated to show a clearly messy product that awkwardly sticks to and drips from the replicator as well as Picard.
|-
| Grilled
| Tea is not usually grilled.
|-
| Fossilized
| Since tea is a liquid, it would be tricky to figure out how to fossilize it.
|-
| Magnetic
| Tea is not magnetic. Magnetic metals would have to be added to the tea, which would not be pleasant to drink.
|-
| Ballistic
| Usually, the replicated beverage is deposited in a stationary cup, but Picard could ask for it to be dropped or thrown out instead.
|-
| Unstable
| This word is often used to refer to radioactive materials, which hopefully is not a property that would apply to something meant to be ingested.
|-
| Blessed
| Tea is a beverage, and it may be strange to ask a machine to create 'blessed' tea.
In role-playing games, items can be Blessed, i.e. having greater positive or lesser negative effects. This includes potions, a class of drinks that do not include any teas but could contain the "potion of water", which may therefore be the basis of this blessed brew.
|-
| Blurry
| Being blurry is not a normal state for tea to have.
|-
| Loud
| While molecules in tea (especially hot tea, and vitally so in an {{w|The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (novel)|Infinite Improbability Drive}}) do move vigorously, this does not usually result in distinct audible effects.
However, as illustrated, it seems the requested cup of tea is produced capable of emitting a high-pitched, high-volume whining sound that entirely dominates the vicinity.
|-
| Virtual
| Virtual tea cannot be produced physically, so asking a physical tea machine for it would be very strange.
|-
| Intravenous
| This means the tea would be injected directly into the customer's veins, likely a very painful experience if the tea comes out boiling.
|-
| Expanding
| In a sense, most hot tea is expanding: as the water in the tea evaporates, it becomes much less dense, increasing in "size".

But most people would probably argue that the evaporated water is no longer part of the tea. Water, like most materials, usually expands as it increases in temperature—except between freezing and about 4° C, where it has the unusual property of {{w|Water_%28molecule%29#Density_of_water_and_ice|''contracting slightly''}} as temperature increases. If tea behaves similarly despite the extra dissolved compounds, then "expanding tea" would describe any tea between 4° C and boiling point. Possibly beyond, and explosively so, if {{w|Superheating|superheated}} and then nucleating points are introduced.
|-
| Ironic
| How tea could be ironic is a mystery.
|-
| Segmented
| Tea is usually served in a cup. It tends to stick together and form one liquid. Separating the tea into segments would not be possible.
|-
| Verbose
| This describes using lots of words and language, and would not likely be used for tea, because it cannot speak.{{citation needed}} Command-line computer programs often run in a 'silent' mode without displaying every step of what happens on the screen. Such programs may have a {{w|Verbose mode|''-verbose'' parameter}} that disables the silent mode. As the replicator is run by a computer, the verbose parameter could be applied to the process of tea-making, with the replocator providing an info-dump on the molecular arrangement of the tea, together with the cup pf liquid.
|-
| Cursed
| As with "Blessed", above, items can be Cursed in role-playing games, i.e. having greater negative or lesser positive effects; while there are strategic uses for Cursed items, generally the player would prefer uncursed ones (neutral or blessed). Amongst the curseable items are potions, a class of consumables that do not include any teas but does contain the "potion of water", which may therefore be the cause of this cursed cuppa.
Cursed items have featured in xkcd previously: [[2332: Cursed Chair]], [[2376: Curbside]], and [[:Category:Cursed Connectors]].
|-
| Unexpected
| By definition, Picard is asking for tea, expecting it promptly. Perhaps the request for it to be "unexpected" would cause it to be delivered at an unknown time in the future, or to have some alteration.
|-
| Bipedal
| Tea does not walk.{{citation needed}} This would be a very strange term to use when describing tea.
|-
| Afraid
| Tea does not have feelings. Although [https://www.quotes.net/mquote/901305 water may consider some things to be unpleasant].
|-
| Infinite
| The scope of this request is unclear. It could mean endless production (a steady stream of tea, without obvious limits so long as servicing the request remains practical) or an instantaneous production of an infinite volume of tea (possibly more immediately shown to be flawed in its method of execution). Either could result in an infinitely ''dense'' tea (eventually?), but this may no longer be {{w|No-hair theorem|identifiable as tea}} so might be one of the less practical options, even amongst those on this list.
Indeed, Randall ranks it as the least 'normal', except for just ''one'' further named order.
|-
| Tea for him, too
| {{w|Earl Grey tea|Earl Grey}} is a tea blend.
Taken along with the context of the title text, this Replicator order is for "Tea" (not otherwise qualified), a replicated version ''of'' the Earl Grey (one or other of those {{w|Earl Grey|of that name}}, possibly the {{w|Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey|2nd Earl}} for whom the tea blend was supposedly named) and a second such beverage for him to later drink.
|-
! colspan="2" | Descriptions included in comic, but not on the line
|-
| Cold
| Like Iced tea, asking for cold tea is a relatively normal request.
|-
| Pink
| Earl grey is usually an orange-brown color, not pink.
|}

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[There is a line going towards the bottom of the panel in a curve with marks and words next to them. Various pictures of Captain Picard, are displayed next to the curves.]
:[Caption at top of the panel:]
:Other words Captain Picard tried at the end of his tea order before settling on "hot"
:[Subtitle below the caption:]
:From most normal to least
:[Picard stands next to a machine labeled 'REPLICATOR', giving a command. Some options such as 'Good,' 'Cold,' 'Dry,' and 'Pink' are displayed perpendicularly adjacent to 'Hot', the latter clearly selected.]
:Picard: Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
:[Below, another version of Picard standing next to the replicator is displayed. Picard is holding a cup, with sticky lines connecting his hands and the machine]
:Picard: Tea. Earl Grey. Sticky.
:[This time, Picard is holding a vibrating cup and large letters are displayed in the background to the exclusion of all else.]
:Picard: Tea. Earl Grey. Loud.
:Teacup: '''TEEEEEEEEEEEEEE'''
:[Words on the arrow from start to finish. The tail of the arrow is labeled 'Normal.' There is a parallel arrow pointing in the same direction labeled 'Less normal.']
:Hot
:Iced
:Decaf
:Good
:Lukewarm
:Tasty
:Boiled
:Watery
:Sour
:Meaty
:Solid
:Dry
:Raw
:Deep-fried
:Sticky
:Grilled
:Fossilized
:Magnetic
:Ballistic
:Unstable
:Blessed
:Blurry
:Loud
:Virtual
:Intravenous
:Expanding
:Ironic
:Segmented
:Verbose
:Cursed
:Unexpected
:Bipedal
:Afraid
:Infinite
:Tea for him, too

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Star Trek]]
[[Category:Food]]

Talk:2553: Incident Report

2021-12-10T23:09:03Z

Arachrah:

It seems that "juggling pins" is also a common term for them. Many websites selling them call them pins. Wikipedia says they "sometimes are referred to as pins or batons by non-jugglers". Presumably the technician writing the IR is not a juggler. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 23:00, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm going to assume that 12/10/2021 is the [https://xkcd.com/1179/ flawed American date system]? [[User:Kev|Kev]] ([[User talk:Kev|talk]]) 23:01, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

You have read The Leaky Establishment. Dave Langford always claims he did not smuggle nuclear material out, but will admit to a filing cabinet. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 23:09, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Talk:2551: Debunking

2021-12-07T10:08:24Z

Arachrah:

feels like we should address the factual accuracy of the headlines in this comic, ie point out which actual headlines/claims are being referred to by each, if any? - [[User:Vaedez|Vaedez]] ([[User talk:Vaedez|talk]]) 05:35, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

If CNN comments on Santa's skin situation, doesn't that implicitly mean they are claiming Santa to be real (Spoiler alert: he isn't){{Citation needed}}? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.88.103|162.158.88.103]] 08:49, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
:or else they're simply avoiding "giving away the secret" to younger readers; though yes, in that case why publish the counterargument at all? - [[User:Vaedez|Vaedez]] ([[User talk:Vaedez|talk]]) 08:53, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

i'm sorry I seem to have lost my place [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 10:08, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Talk:2542: Daylight Calendar

2021-11-17T18:04:28Z

Arachrah:

When did y'all in the US "fall back" your clocks? It has a look of being (askewedly) inspired by DST reversal, and I know you did one of the switches at a different typical weekend than us (UK BST>GMT was last weekend of October), but I thought it was 'first weekend of month-after-(the-month-that-it-is-our-last-weekend-of)'. You know, I could have just looked this up. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.227|172.70.85.227]] 00:11, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Second question, more easily expressed and less obviously answered, which sun-up/sun-down is this calculated by? Nautical, civil, etc? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.227|172.70.85.227]] 00:11, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

I think at the equator, you get one day per day.
At the pole you get two days per day in summer, then one six month long day.{{Unsigned}}
:Ah, I just mentioned that, in my edit. Though it depends upon how close to the pole as to how long you wouldn't get one full day for (and how the shifting boundaries align, possibly). I haven't worked out if those "further north" people are necessarily Arctic, or merely Canadian/northern-States even. I know that in the UK we're north enough to technically never get beyond civil twilight in the 'summer' months (the Sun isn't low enough below the horizon, as it passes below the northern rim, to be proper 'night') but we're still short of the actual Arctic Circle and true days-without-night/light, accordingly. I'm still not sure what edge-case is imagined. Perhaps intentionally left vague? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.20|141.101.99.20]] 00:59, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Is this supposed to be about whether it's cloudy? [[Special:Contributions/172.68.132.30|172.68.132.30]] 00:17, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
:I think not. If cloud cover were taken into account, the date would fail to ever sync up from place to place, and in heavily-overcast areas (*cough* Cleveland *cough) you'd only have a few days a year. Whereas, if cloud cover is irrelevant and a "day" is simply defined as the sun being above median horizon level (whether visible or not) for a total of 12 hours, then the date in each time zone will sync up once a year. Presumably you would arrange things so that this happens on New Year's Day. (If you don't arrange things and just switch to the calendar at some point in time, the date would sync up on the anniversary of the switch, assuming everyone switches at once.) Additionally, timezones would work roughly as they do now, if you travel due east or due west: driving west from Eastern time to Central, for example, would take you to a place where it's one hour earlier on the same date. Things would only get really weird if you go north or south at all, and even that would be sufficiently regular and formulaic that school children could be taught how to calculate it. --[[User:Tsadok|Tsadok]]

If I knew where to start (too many assumptions needed), I'd be tempted to make an "xkcd Calendar" that works like the [[1335|xkcd Clock]], but there are so many possible configurations (e.g. when is the 'epoch' of synchronisation? When do you count daylight from/to? Do you assume 6AM day-starts and work up from there?) before you then have to plug in your lat/lon to get your highly personalised datetime result that may well differ significatly even from someone a few miles away, when the time-boundaries involved have misaligned just enough and haven't shifted back together again (perhaps!) by the next epoch-point... [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.20|141.101.99.20]] 01:34, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
:If you use the same epoch for everyone, the date and time would sync up within each timezone once a year, on the anniversary of the epoch. If everyone just naively starts at their then-current date/time on the switch date, then the switch date is the epoch. The ideal epoch and switch date for minimizing confusion would be midnight January 1st; this also has precedent (e.g., the Unix epoch is midnight January 1st 1970). This leaves the question of whether to start each day's time at 00:00:00, or start it at whatever you have to start it at to make noon happen at 12:00:00. The latter would mean starting the clock at negative times in the summer, positive in winter, and any given latitude's start-of-day times would average out pretty close to 00:06 over the course of a year. (The average wouldn't be _exactly_ 00:06 with infinite precision over a single year, because you're only averaging a finite number of days. But the average would asymptotically approach 00:06 over large numbers of years (unless the DST change being not-at-midnight or leap days being not-at-New-Year throws it off in a systematic way; but I am guessing this proposed calendar would replace and obviate DST; leap seconds *are* added at midnight, so they're ok; that leaves leap days as a potential monkey wrench if they aren't moved to align with the epoch), and it would be "close enough" for garden variety everyday purposes even after just one year.) --[[User:Tsadok|Tsadok]]
::Ok, maybe go with this, start it at Unix timestamp 1609459200 (Midnight Jan 1st 2020, GMT), and you'd need to look up sunrise/sunset (0 degrees with respect to horizon) in the location (possibly round to the nearest degree of latitude for the closest conurbation, except when in the ocean) for the year. There may be a formula for that, or there may just be an API you can hit. Things wouldn't quite sync up, because the orbit isn't a unit number of sidereal days long. I'm wondering how bad the drift gets in 400 years. [[User:Thaledison|Erin Anne]] ([[User talk:Thaledison|talk]]) 17:14, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

I know it is released close to daylight saving change. But has it actually anything to do with that? It is not mentioned at all, and only the darkness of November has any relation to the change. I'm not sure I would include it in the DST category... Randall has often made it clear that he dislikes DST but this new calendar is no guarantee they would not also include DST anyway. Hopefully we will stop with the DST in Europe from next year, so that we will not change back to summer time next spring! --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 07:53, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
:I thought it would have been closer to (US) changeover to be directly related. But perhaps Randall took a week to 'run some numbers' after being inspired, to get some (implausibly) plausible scenario to depict.
:As for stopping putting the clocks forward... You could do that, but I'd suggest waiting a few years to see if people accept that before you also stop turning them back again in autumn, just in case... ;) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.85|162.158.159.85]] 10:53, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
:The conversation is clearly a parody of the kinds of conversations that occur regularly after the change to/from DST. I was at the eye doctor yesterday, and when she asked me about night driving I mentioned that this didn't really become an issue until the DST change, because now it's dark in the early evening. So these conversations do occur more than a week after the change. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 17:18, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Has anyone noticed the different style of Megan in this comic? I think that it may not be her… --[[User:Obscure xkcd reference|Obscure xkcd reference]] ([[User talk:Obscure xkcd reference|talk]]) 16:50, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

=== Three-Day Days ===
What I want to know is, what latitude do you have to be at, to get three-day days in November? --[[User:Tsadok|Tsadok]]
:Anywhere north of the tropic, probably, if you count partial days (if a day starts before sunset, goes over anything even a smidgen less than 12 hours of daylight the next day, then completes itself soon after sunrise the day after).
:But a bit of looking around suggests that today anywhere around 70°N has less than 4 hours of daylight so would easily need three ''full'' daylights in a row (or all-but) and possible unconsidered fractions of the neighbouring days depending on how the modified day-boundries land, which you may wish to ignore if you're strict). Wainwright, AK, would qualify, amongst other US settlements (most with native-names) and a number of Canadian ones, assuming you mean North from the US. There's Denmark (i.e. Greenland), Norway/Sweden/Finland and of course Russia with places too. Murmansk is slightly too far south today, I think, but I haven't checked for later dates in November and I'm sure it'll get included before too much longer.
:Looking for a current six-hour daylight (i.e. any daylight not included in the period the day trips over upon is exactly made up for at the beginning of the third day touched before the new-calendar day ends) suggests reaching ~65°N will suffice, which adds a fair few other places 'up north' that would apply to right now.[[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.32|141.101.99.32]] 21:15, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Of course, before mechanical clocks, all days were 12 hours long. It is just that the length of the hour varied, as it was always one twelfth of the day, or night. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 18:04, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Talk:2542: Daylight Calendar

2021-11-16T00:16:37Z

Arachrah:

Talk:2538: Snack

2021-11-05T22:26:28Z

Arachrah:

IRB is Institutional Review Board. IRB approval is needed for biomedical research involving human subjects.
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/institutional-review-boards-frequently-asked-questions
[[Special:Contributions/172.69.34.91|172.69.34.91]] 20:51, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

I was wondering what the International Rugby Board had to do with the price of fish. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 22:26, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't know who changed the bot's name to "Apple Cookie," but now I really want to know what that would taste like... -mezimm [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.115|108.162.221.115]] 20:52, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
: Simply Google it (or possibly your favourite alternate of Bing, DuckDuckGo, AskJeeves, AltaVista, Yahoo, whatever else is actually around and hasn't been fatally out-Googled). One of the first things I got just now suggests a 20 mins bake using Brown sugar, apple, egg, baking soda, all purpose flour... but there are several others.
:(I wasn't the Bot-changer, I must add, but I too now want some sort of apple biscuity-snack. And I only have some of the above ingredients at hand.) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.185|172.70.85.185]] 21:41, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Is altruism the only thing that psychologists study? It seems like psych students should be suspicious of just about any interactions. For instance, if they're invited to play in a game of chance, it could be a study of how they assess risk. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 21:11, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Talk:2505: News Story Reaction

2021-08-21T08:13:46Z

Arachrah:

It's worth mentioning that unless we're talking an industrial shredder, the Mona Lisa can't be, since unlike most stereotypical paintings, it's actually on glued together pieces of wood and not on Canvas.

Not to say that it wouldn't be damaged heavily by a band of wild rabid dogs, but not "shredded".

Why yes, I am using my art degree, why do you ask?

[[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.5|108.162.245.5]] 19:22, 20 August 2021 (UTC) Steve

: Nothing in the original says the dogs are rabid. Mind you, I would expect rabid dogs to go directly after people, not inanimate paintings. [[User:Nutster|Nutster]] ([[User talk:Nutster|talk]]) 22:07, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
:: Our dog shredded our front door once when left alone during a thunderstorm or such. There was even blood left on the broken shards of wood :-(. But I don't think Randall knew that the Mona Lisa was on wood. [[User:Baffo32|Baffo32]] ([[User talk:Baffo32|talk]]) 00:04, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

I don't have an art degree but knew that the painting was on wood. Also, it's "J.C. Penney". I'm guessing Randall was in a hurry on this one.

Pete 19:31, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

It make much more sense if the wild dogs didn't get in there by coincidence. Making it about himself would be acceptable if he was the indirect cause of the situation. Revenge successful? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.71.55|172.69.71.55]] 22:03, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Just checking - I'm not the only one who saw this and immediately googled to see if it was an actual news story, am I? I'm so not plugged into the news that I could honestly have believed that I missed it. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.239|172.70.130.239]] 22:09, 20 August 2021 (UTC)
:I also cannot find anything about this. As mentioned above, the painting also cannot really be shredded, as it is on wood, rather than canvas. Edit: Can be shredded, but not really by a pack of dogs. [[User:Theusaf|theusaf]] ([[User talk:Theusaf|talk]]) 23:55, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Uhh, WHAT? Wood can't be shredded?? Huh/ Tha's news to me . . . . [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.198|162.158.74.198]] 00:16, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm not convinced it would be THAT big loss for humanity. Sure, the original has some emotional value, but I'm sure we have plenty of backup copies. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 06:01, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

Any fule know the Jagaroth made Da Vinci paint six versions and the one in the Louvre is one of the five with Fake written on the back in felt tip by the Doctor. 08:13, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

I don't know if it's a coincidence, and if it's worth mentioning, but the Mona Lisa was stolen on 21 August 1911, almost exactly 90 years before the publication of this comic. --[[Special:Contributions/141.101.69.186|141.101.69.186]] 07:10, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

2480: No, The Other One

2021-06-24T09:18:42Z

Arachrah: /* Explanation */ Hence the pharoah in Joseph and the Technicoloured Dream Coat being an Elvis impersonation. He is "the king" at Memphis.

{{comic
| number = 2480
| date = June 23, 2021
| title = No, The Other One
| image = no_the_other_one.png
| titletext = Key West, Virginia is not to be confused with Key, West Virginia.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by HOUSTON. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This is a map of the United States, showing cities or towns with the same name as other more famous cities. For example, the map has a dot for a place called Los Angeles in Texas, not to be confused with Los Angeles, California.

Few place names are unique, and there may be {{w|List of the most common U.S. place names|many places with the same name}}. However, names can become associated with specific places on a national level, where the best-known example is usually the biggest or otherwise the most significant. The name of this comic indicates the contextualization required to specify one of the less-famous exemplars of a given name. Someone might say they are from "Los Angeles" and would have to say "no, the other one" since the listener would assume they are from Los Angeles, California.

The [[title text]] references {{w|Key, West Virginia}} and {{w|Key West, Virginia}}, two places that, when spoken aloud, are only distinguishable by the pause (comma) location. Neither are to be confused with {{w|Key West|Key West, Florida}}, which is a well-known national location.

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Place name in comic
! Well-known place
! Notes
|-
| {{w|Albany, Georgia|Albany, GA}}
| rowspan="3" | {{w|Albany,_New_York|Albany, NY}}
| rowspan="3" | Albany is the capital of New York state. Albany is also a suburb of Washington Tyne and Wear.
|-
| {{w|Albany, Minnesota|Albany, MN}}


|-
| {{w|Albany, Wyoming|Albany, WY}}

|-
| {{w|Alexandria,_Louisiana|Alexandria, LA}}
| {{w|Alexandria,_Virginia|Alexandria, VA}}
| Alexandria, VA is known for being George Washington's hometown. It is not named after {{w|Alexandria|Alexandria, Egypt}}.
|-
| {{w|Anchorage, Kentucky|Anchorage, KY}}
| {{w|Anchorage,_Alaska|Anchorage, AK}}
| Anchorage is Alaska's most populous city.
|-
| {{w|Atlanta,_Delaware|Atlanta, DE}}
| rowspan="6" | {{w|Atlanta|Atlanta, GA}}
| rowspan="6" | Atlanta is the capital of Georgia, a center of the civil rights movement in the 1950's and 60's, and a major air transportation hub.
|-
| {{w|Atlanta,_Michigan|Atlanta, MI}}

|-
| {{w|Atlanta,_Idaho|Atlanta, ID}}

|-
| {{w|Atlanta,_Nebraska|Atlanta, NE}}

|-
| {{w|Atlanta, Texas|Atlanta, TX}}
|
|
|-
| {{w|Atlanta, Wisconsin|Atlanta, WI}}
|
|
|-
| {{w|Atlantic City, Wyoming|Atlantic City, WY}}
| {{w|Atlantic City, New Jersey|Atlantic City, NJ}}
| Atlantic City, NJ is a famous coastal resort town in New Jersey known for its casinos, boardwalk and beaches.
|-
| {{w|Austin, MN}}
| {{w|Austin, Texas|Austin, TX}}
| Austin is the capital of the state of Texas, and the 11th largest city (by population) in the US.
|-
| {{w|Baton Rouge, South Carolina|Baton Rouge, SC}}
| {{w|Baton Rouge, Louisiana|Baton Rouge, LA}}
| Baton Rouge is the capital of the state of Louisiana.
|-
| {{w|Beaumont, California|Beaumont, CA}}
| {{w|Beaumont, Texas|Beaumont, TX}}
| Beaumont is best known for the oil discovery that sparked the Texas oil boom of the early 1900s.
|-
| {{w|Beverly Hills, Illinois|Beverly Hills, IL}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Beverly Hills, California|Beverly Hills, CA}}
| rowspan="2" | Beverly Hills is a city in Los Angeles County, CA and is home to many celebrities, luxury hotels, and the Rodeo Drive shopping district.
|-
| {{w|Beverly Hills, Texas|Beverly Hills, TX}}

|-
| {{w|Bloomington, Minnesota | Bloomington, MN}}
| {{w|Bloomington, Indiana | Bloomington, IN}}
| Bloomington is the location of Indiana University.
|-
| Boston, MO
| {{w|Boston|Boston, MA}}
| Boston is a port in Holland Lincolnshire, the point of departure for the Mayflower. It may also be the capital of Massachusetts and the scene of several key events of the American Revolution.
|-
| Bowling Green, FL
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Bowling Green, Kentucky|Bowling Green, KY}}
| rowspan="2" | Bowling Green, KY is the largest city of this name, and the 3rd most populous city in Kentucky.
|-
| Bowling Green, OH
|-
| Bridgeport, WV
| {{w|Bridgeport, Connecticut|Bridgeport, CT}}
| Bridgeport is the most populous city in Connecticut and fifth most populous in {{w|New England}}.
|-
| Buffalo, TX
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Buffalo, New York|Buffalo, NY}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Buffalo, WY
|-
| Cambridge, OH
| {{w|Cambridge, Massachusetts|Cambridge, MA}}
| Cambridge is a village in Gloucestershire and also a city in Cambridgeshire known as the home of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin Universities. Cambridge, Massachusetts is a city in the Boston - not the one in Lincolnshire - metropolitan area known as the home of {{w|Harvard University}} and {{w|Massachusetts Institute of Technology}} among others.
|-
| Cedar Rapids, NE
| {{w|Cedar Rapids, Iowa|Cedar Rapids, IA}}
|
|-
| Charlestown, NY (?)
|
|
|-
| Cleveland, UT
| {{w|Cleveland|Cleveland, OH}}
| Cleveland is a range of hills in North Yorkshire.
|-
| Columbus, GA
| {{w|Columbus, Ohio|Columbus, OH}}
|
|-
| Dallas, GA
| rowspan="4" | {{w|Dallas|Dallas, TX}}
| rowspan="4" |
|-
| Dallas, NC
|-
| Dallas, OR
|-
| Dallas, SD
|-
| Dayton, NV
| {{w|Dayton, Ohio|Dayton, OH}}
|
|-
| Des Moines, NM
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Des Moines, Iowa|Des Moines, IA}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Des Moines, WA
|-
| {{w|Detroit,_Alabama|Detroit, AL}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Detroit|Detroit, MI}}
| rowspan="2" | Detroit is best known as the center of the U.S. automobile industry.
|-
| Detroit, KS
|-
| Disney, OK
|
|
|-
| Fayetteville, TN
|
|
|-
| Gettysburg, OH
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Gettysburg, Pennsylvania|Gettysburg, PA}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Gettysburg, SD
|-
| Grand Rapids, MN
| {{w|Grand Rapids|Grand Rapids, MI}}
| The second most populous city in the state of Michigan
|-
| {{w|Houston,_Alaska|Houston, AK}}
| rowspan="6" | {{w|Houston|Houston, TX}}
| rowspan="6" | Houston is the most populous city in Texas and the fourth-most populous in the United States.
|-
| {{w|Houston,_Alabama|Houston, AL}}
|-
| Houston, FL
|-
| Houston, IN
|-
| Houston, MO
|-
| Houston, OH
|-
| Indianapolis, IA
| {{w|Indianapolis|Indianapolis, IN}}
|
|-
| {{w|Jackson,_Alabama|Jackson, AL}}
| {{w|Jackson,_Mississippi|Jackson, MS}}
| Jackson is the capital of Mississippi, but there are {{w|Jackson|many other}} states with Jacksons. This one is likely particularly notable due to its proximity to Jackson, MS.
|-
| {{w|Jamestown,_California|Jamestown, CA}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Jamestown,_Virginia|Jamestown, VA}}
| rowspan="2" | Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas.
|-
| Jamestown, ND
|-
| Jersey Shore, PA
|
| Jersay is one of the Channel Islands that were part of the Duchy of Narmandy put passed to the English throne.
|-
| Key West, VA
| {{w|Key_West|Key West, FL}}
| Key West is an island off the tip of Florida that is popular with tourists and contains the southernmost point of the continental states.
|-
| Knoxville, IA
| {{w|Knoxville,_Tennessee|Knoxville, TN}}
|
|-
| Las Vegas, NM
| {{w|Las_Vegas|Las Vegas, NV}}
|
|-
| {{w|Lincoln,_California|Lincoln, CA}}
| rowspan="4" | {{w|Lincoln,_Nebraska|Lincoln, NE}}
| rowspan="4" | Lincoln is a cathedral city in Lincolnshire. It is also the capital of Nebraska.
|-
| Lincoln, IL
|-
| Lincoln, MT
|-
| Lincoln, RI
|-
| Lisbon, ME
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Lisbon,_Portugal|Lisbon, Portugal}}
| rowspan="2" | Lisbon is the capital of Portugal, in Europe
|-
| Lisbon, NH
|-
| Long Beach, NJ
|
|
|-
| Los Angeles, TX
| {{w|Los_Angeles|Los Angeles, CA}}
|
|-
| {{w|Louisville, Colorado|Louisville, CO}}
| {{w|Louisville, Kentucky|Louisville, KY}}
| Louisville is the largest city in Kentucky
|-
| Manhattan, KS
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Manhattan|Manhattan, NY}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Manhattan, MT
|-
| Memphis, NE
| {{w|Memphis,_Tennessee|Memphis, TN}}
| Memphis is a city in Egypt.
|-
| {{w|Mesa,_California|Mesa, CA}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Mesa,_Arizona|Mesa, AZ}}
| rowspan="2" | Mesa is a suburb of Phoenix, and the largest suburban city by population in the United States.
|-
| Mesa, CO
|-
| {{w|Miami,_Arizona|Miami, AZ}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Miami|Miami, FL}}
| rowspan="2" | Miami is the seventh largest city in the United States and a major tourism hub.
|-
| Miami, TX
|-
| Mountain View, HI
| {{w|Mountain_View,_California|Mountain View, CA}}
| Mountain View is the birthplace of Silicon Valley, and is the location of many high technology companies, such as Google.
|-
| {{w|Nashville,_Arkansas|Nashville, AR}}
| {{w|Nashville,_Tennessee|Nashville, TN}}
| Nashville is the capital of Tennessee and a major center for the country music industry.
|-
| New England, ND
|
|
|-
| New Haven, KY
| {{w|New Haven, Connecticut|New Haven, CT}}
| New Haven is the second largest city in Connecticut, and is known for its distinctive {{w|New Haven-style pizza|pizza}}. It also home to {{w|Yale University}}
|-
| New York, TX
| {{w|New_York_City|New York, NY}}
|
|-
| Newark, DE
|
| Newark is a town in Nottinghamshire.
|-
| North Pole, NY
| {{w|North_Pole|North Pole}}
| North pole is the point in the Northern Hemisphere where the Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface.
|-
| Oakland, OR
| {{w|Oakland,_California|Oakland, CA}}
| Oakland, CA is currently the home to three professional sports teams including the {{w|Oakland_Athletics|Oakland Athletics}} and is the former home of several more, including the {{w|History_of_the_Oakland_Raiders|Oakland Raiders}}, now in Las Vegas.
|-
| Orlando, OK
| {{w|Orlando,_Florida|Orlando, FL}}
|
|-
| Ottawa, KS
| {{w|Ottawa| Ottawa, Ontario, Canada}}
| Ottawa is the capital of Canada
|-
| Pasadena, MD
| rowspan="2" | {{w| Pasadena, CA}}
| rowspan="2" | Pasadena, California is the home of {{w|California Institute of Technology}} and the NASA {{w|Jet Propulsion Laboratory}}
|-
| Pasadena, TX
|-
| {{w|Peoria,_Arizona|Peoria, AZ}}
| {{w|Peoria, Illinois|Peoria, IL}}
| Peoria is known for being considered an "Average American Town", in the phrase {{w|Will_it_play_in_Peoria%3F|"Will it play in Peoria?"}} It is actually smaller than Peoria, AZ.
|-
| Philadelphia, MS
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Philadelphia|Philadelphia, PA}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Philadelphia, NY
|-
| Phoenix, MD (?)
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Phoenix,_Arizona|Phoenix, AZ}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Phoenix, OR
|-
| {{w|Plano,_Illinois|Plano, IL}}
| {{w|Plano,_Texas|Plano, TX}}
| Plano is part of the {{w|Dallas–Fort_Worth_metroplex|Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex}}, and the home of many corporate headquarters.
|-
| {{w|Plymouth,_California|Plymouth, CA}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Plymouth,_Massachusetts|Plymouth, MA}}
| rowspan="2" | Plymouth was the site of the colony founded in 1620 by the Mayflower Pilgrims. Named after the city in the South West of England which was the final port of departure.
|-
| Plymouth, IN
|-
| {{w|Portland,_Maine|Portland, ME}}
| {{w|Portland,_Oregon|Portland, OR}}
| Portland, OR was {{w|Portland,_Oregon#Establishment|named after}} Portland, ME
|-
| Princeton, ID
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Princeton, New Jersey|Princeton, NJ}}
| rowspan="2" | Princeton, NJ is famous for being the home of the eponymous {{w|Princeton University}} and the {{w|Institute for Advanced Study}}
|-
| Princeton, MA
|-
| {{w|Richmond, Vermont|Richmond, VT}}
| {{w|Richmond, Virginia|Richmond, VA}}
| The Virginian Richmond was named after {{w|Richmond,_London|the suburb of London, UK}} due to an observed similarity of the river. London's Richmond was named for the palace built there by Henry VII, itself named after the {{w|Richmond,_North_Yorkshire|market town}} and castle in the north of England that was a childhood home. That was in turn named for the {{w|Richemont,_Seine-Maritime|Normandy}} area from which the noble family came who were gifted this land for their part of the Norman Conquest of England in the 11th century. There are more than fifty settlements called Richmond across the world, directly or indirectly taking their names from one or other of the English 'originals'.
|-
| Roswell, GA
| Roswell, NM
| Roswell, New Mexico is the site of one of the most famous “alien coverups” in American history, and is well known for its alien-themed tourism.
|-
| Saint Louis, MI
| rowspan="2" | {{w|St._Louis|St. Louis, MO}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Saint Louis, OK
|-
| rowspan="2" | Salem, CT
| {{w|Salem,_Oregon|Salem, OR}}
| Capital of Oregon
|-
| {{w|Salem,_Massachusetts|Salem, MA}}
| Location of the {{w|Salem_witch_trials|Salem witch trials}}
|-
| San Diego, TX
| {{w|San_Diego|San Diego, CA}}
|
|-
| Santa Fe, TX
| {{w|Santa_Fe,_New_Mexico|Santa Fe, NM}}
|
|-
| Savannah, MO
| {{w|Savannah|Savannah, GA}}
|
|-
| South Bend, TX
| {{w|South_Bend|South Bend, IN}}
| South Bend, IN is the location of {{w|University_of_Notre_Dame|Notre Dame}}.
|-
| Texas, NY
| State of Texas
| Located in Mexico township, NY. North of the village of Mexico. No plans for a wall {{fact}}.
|-
| Vienna, ME
| {{w|Vienna, Austria}}
| Vienna is the capital and largest city of Austria
|-
| Washington, NC
|
| Washington was a a village in County Durham, now a new town in Tyne and Wear.
|-
| White House, TN
|
|
|}

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

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:US maps]]

2480: No, The Other One

2021-06-24T09:07:58Z

Arachrah: /* Explanation */ Anyone would think the English settlers came from the East midlands.

{{comic
| number = 2480
| date = June 23, 2021
| title = No, The Other One
| image = no_the_other_one.png
| titletext = Key West, Virginia is not to be confused with Key, West Virginia.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by HOUSTON. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This is a map of the United States, showing cities or towns with the same name as other more famous cities. For example, the map has a dot for a place called Los Angeles in Texas, not to be confused with Los Angeles, California.

Few place names are unique, and there may be {{w|List of the most common U.S. place names|many places with the same name}}. However, names can become associated with specific places on a national level, where the best-known example is usually the biggest or otherwise the most significant. The name of this comic indicates the contextualization required to specify one of the less-famous exemplars of a given name. Someone might say they are from "Los Angeles" and would have to say "no, the other one" since the listener would assume they are from Los Angeles, California.

The [[title text]] references {{w|Key, West Virginia}} and {{w|Key West, Virginia}}, two places that, when spoken aloud, are only distinguishable by the pause (comma) location. Neither are to be confused with {{w|Key West|Key West, Florida}}, which is a well-known national location.

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Place name in comic
! Well-known place
! Notes
|-
| {{w|Albany, Georgia|Albany, GA}}
| rowspan="3" | {{w|Albany,_New_York|Albany, NY}}
| rowspan="3" | Albany is the capital of New York state. Albany is also a suburb of Washington Tyne and Wear.
|-
| {{w|Albany, Minnesota|Albany, MN}}


|-
| {{w|Albany, Wyoming|Albany, WY}}

|-
| {{w|Alexandria,_Louisiana|Alexandria, LA}}
| {{w|Alexandria,_Virginia|Alexandria, VA}}
| Alexandria, VA is known for being George Washington's hometown. It is not named after {{w|Alexandria|Alexandria, Egypt}}.
|-
| {{w|Anchorage, Kentucky|Anchorage, KY}}
| {{w|Anchorage,_Alaska|Anchorage, AK}}
| Anchorage is Alaska's most populous city.
|-
| {{w|Atlanta,_Delaware|Atlanta, DE}}
| rowspan="6" | {{w|Atlanta|Atlanta, GA}}
| rowspan="6" | Atlanta is the capital of Georgia, a center of the civil rights movement in the 1950's and 60's, and a major air transportation hub.
|-
| {{w|Atlanta,_Michigan|Atlanta, MI}}

|-
| {{w|Atlanta,_Idaho|Atlanta, ID}}

|-
| {{w|Atlanta,_Nebraska|Atlanta, NE}}

|-
| {{w|Atlanta, Texas|Atlanta, TX}}
|
|
|-
| {{w|Atlanta, Wisconsin|Atlanta, WI}}
|
|
|-
| {{w|Atlantic City, Wyoming|Atlantic City, WY}}
| {{w|Atlantic City, New Jersey|Atlantic City, NJ}}
| Atlantic City, NJ is a famous coastal resort town in New Jersey known for its casinos, boardwalk and beaches.
|-
| {{w|Austin, MN}}
| {{w|Austin, Texas|Austin, TX}}
| Austin is the capital of the state of Texas, and the 11th largest city (by population) in the US.
|-
| {{w|Baton Rouge, South Carolina|Baton Rouge, SC}}
| {{w|Baton Rouge, Louisiana|Baton Rouge, LA}}
| Baton Rouge is the capital of the state of Louisiana.
|-
| {{w|Beaumont, California|Beaumont, CA}}
| {{w|Beaumont, Texas|Beaumont, TX}}
| Beaumont is best known for the oil discovery that sparked the Texas oil boom of the early 1900s.
|-
| {{w|Beverly Hills, Illinois|Beverly Hills, IL}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Beverly Hills, California|Beverly Hills, CA}}
| rowspan="2" | Beverly Hills is a city in Los Angeles County, CA and is home to many celebrities, luxury hotels, and the Rodeo Drive shopping district.
|-
| {{w|Beverly Hills, Texas|Beverly Hills, TX}}

|-
| {{w|Bloomington, Minnesota | Bloomington, MN}}
| {{w|Bloomington, Indiana | Bloomington, IN}}
| Bloomington is the location of Indiana University.
|-
| Boston, MO
| {{w|Boston|Boston, MA}}
| Boston is a port in Holland Lincolnshire, the point of departure for the Mayflower. It may also be the capital of Massachusetts and the scene of several key events of the American Revolution.
|-
| Bowling Green, FL
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Bowling Green, Kentucky|Bowling Green, KY}}
| rowspan="2" | Bowling Green, KY is the largest city of this name, and the 3rd most populous city in Kentucky.
|-
| Bowling Green, OH
|-
| Bridgeport, WV
| {{w|Bridgeport, Connecticut|Bridgeport, CT}}
| Bridgeport is the most populous city in Connecticut and fifth most populous in {{w|New England}}.
|-
| Buffalo, TX
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Buffalo, New York|Buffalo, NY}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Buffalo, WY
|-
| Cambridge, OH
| {{w|Cambridge, Massachusetts|Cambridge, MA}}
| Cambridge is a village in Gloucestershire and also a city in Cambridgeshire known as the home of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin Universities. Cambridge, Massachusetts is a city in the Boston - not the one in Lincolnshire - metropolitan area known as the home of {{w|Harvard University}} and {{w|Massachusetts Institute of Technology}} among others.
|-
| Cedar Rapids, NE
| {{w|Cedar Rapids, Iowa|Cedar Rapids, IA}}
|
|-
| Charlestown, NY (?)
|
|
|-
| Cleveland, UT
| {{w|Cleveland|Cleveland, OH}}
| Cleveland is a range of hills in North Yorkshire.
|-
| Columbus, GA
| {{w|Columbus, Ohio|Columbus, OH}}
|
|-
| Dallas, GA
| rowspan="4" | {{w|Dallas|Dallas, TX}}
| rowspan="4" |
|-
| Dallas, NC
|-
| Dallas, OR
|-
| Dallas, SD
|-
| Dayton, NV
| {{w|Dayton, Ohio|Dayton, OH}}
|
|-
| Des Moines, NM
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Des Moines, Iowa|Des Moines, IA}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Des Moines, WA
|-
| {{w|Detroit,_Alabama|Detroit, AL}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Detroit|Detroit, MI}}
| rowspan="2" | Detroit is best known as the center of the U.S. automobile industry.
|-
| Detroit, KS
|-
| Disney, OK
|
|
|-
| Fayetteville, TN
|
|
|-
| Gettysburg, OH
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Gettysburg, Pennsylvania|Gettysburg, PA}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Gettysburg, SD
|-
| Grand Rapids, MN
| {{w|Grand Rapids|Grand Rapids, MI}}
| The second most populous city in the state of Michigan
|-
| {{w|Houston,_Alaska|Houston, AK}}
| rowspan="6" | {{w|Houston|Houston, TX}}
| rowspan="6" | Houston is the most populous city in Texas and the fourth-most populous in the United States.
|-
| {{w|Houston,_Alabama|Houston, AL}}
|-
| Houston, FL
|-
| Houston, IN
|-
| Houston, MO
|-
| Houston, OH
|-
| Indianapolis, IA
| {{w|Indianapolis|Indianapolis, IN}}
|
|-
| {{w|Jackson,_Alabama|Jackson, AL}}
| {{w|Jackson,_Mississippi|Jackson, MS}}
| Jackson is the capital of Mississippi, but there are {{w|Jackson|many other}} states with Jacksons. This one is likely particularly notable due to its proximity to Jackson, MS.
|-
| {{w|Jamestown,_California|Jamestown, CA}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Jamestown,_Virginia|Jamestown, VA}}
| rowspan="2" | Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas.
|-
| Jamestown, ND
|-
| Jersey Shore, PA
|
| Jersay is one of the Channel Islands that were part of the Duchy of Narmandy put passed to the English throne.
|-
| Key West, VA
| {{w|Key_West|Key West, FL}}
| Key West is an island off the tip of Florida that is popular with tourists and contains the southernmost point of the continental states.
|-
| Knoxville, IA
| {{w|Knoxville,_Tennessee|Knoxville, TN}}
|
|-
| Las Vegas, NM
| {{w|Las_Vegas|Las Vegas, NV}}
|
|-
| {{w|Lincoln,_California|Lincoln, CA}}
| rowspan="4" | {{w|Lincoln,_Nebraska|Lincoln, NE}}
| rowspan="4" | Lincoln is a cathedral city in Lincolnshire. It is also the capital of Nebraska.
|-
| Lincoln, IL
|-
| Lincoln, MT
|-
| Lincoln, RI
|-
| Lisbon, ME
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Lisbon,_Portugal|Lisbon, Portugal}}
| rowspan="2" | Lisbon is the capital of Portugal, in Europe
|-
| Lisbon, NH
|-
| Long Beach, NJ
|
|
|-
| Los Angeles, TX
| {{w|Los_Angeles|Los Angeles, CA}}
|
|-
| {{w|Louisville, Colorado|Louisville, CO}}
| {{w|Louisville, Kentucky|Louisville, KY}}
| Louisville is the largest city in Kentucky
|-
| Manhattan, KS
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Manhattan|Manhattan, NY}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Manhattan, MT
|-
| Memphis, NE
| {{w|Memphis,_Tennessee|Memphis, TN}}
|
|-
| {{w|Mesa,_California|Mesa, CA}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Mesa,_Arizona|Mesa, AZ}}
| rowspan="2" | Mesa is a suburb of Phoenix, and the largest suburban city by population in the United States.
|-
| Mesa, CO
|-
| {{w|Miami,_Arizona|Miami, AZ}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Miami|Miami, FL}}
| rowspan="2" | Miami is the seventh largest city in the United States and a major tourism hub.
|-
| Miami, TX
|-
| Mountain View, HI
| {{w|Mountain_View,_California|Mountain View, CA}}
| Mountain View is the birthplace of Silicon Valley, and is the location of many high technology companies, such as Google.
|-
| {{w|Nashville,_Arkansas|Nashville, AR}}
| {{w|Nashville,_Tennessee|Nashville, TN}}
| Nashville is the capital of Tennessee and a major center for the country music industry.
|-
| New England, ND
|
|
|-
| New Haven, KY
| {{w|New Haven, Connecticut|New Haven, CT}}
| New Haven is the second largest city in Connecticut, and is known for its distinctive {{w|New Haven-style pizza|pizza}}. It also home to {{w|Yale University}}
|-
| New York, TX
| {{w|New_York_City|New York, NY}}
|
|-
| Newark, DE
|
| Newark is a town in Nottinghamshire.
|-
| North Pole, NY
| {{w|North_Pole|North Pole}}
| North pole is the point in the Northern Hemisphere where the Earth's axis of rotation meets its surface.
|-
| Oakland, OR
| {{w|Oakland,_California|Oakland, CA}}
| Oakland, CA is currently the home to three professional sports teams including the {{w|Oakland_Athletics|Oakland Athletics}} and is the former home of several more, including the {{w|History_of_the_Oakland_Raiders|Oakland Raiders}}, now in Las Vegas.
|-
| Orlando, OK
| {{w|Orlando,_Florida|Orlando, FL}}
|
|-
| Ottawa, KS
| {{w|Ottawa| Ottawa, Ontario, Canada}}
| Ottawa is the capital of Canada
|-
| Pasadena, MD
| rowspan="2" | {{w| Pasadena, CA}}
| rowspan="2" | Pasadena, California is the home of {{w|California Institute of Technology}} and the NASA {{w|Jet Propulsion Laboratory}}
|-
| Pasadena, TX
|-
| {{w|Peoria,_Arizona|Peoria, AZ}}
| {{w|Peoria, Illinois|Peoria, IL}}
| Peoria is known for being considered an "Average American Town", in the phrase {{w|Will_it_play_in_Peoria%3F|"Will it play in Peoria?"}} It is actually smaller than Peoria, AZ.
|-
| Philadelphia, MS
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Philadelphia|Philadelphia, PA}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Philadelphia, NY
|-
| Phoenix, MD (?)
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Phoenix,_Arizona|Phoenix, AZ}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Phoenix, OR
|-
| {{w|Plano,_Illinois|Plano, IL}}
| {{w|Plano,_Texas|Plano, TX}}
| Plano is part of the {{w|Dallas–Fort_Worth_metroplex|Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex}}, and the home of many corporate headquarters.
|-
| {{w|Plymouth,_California|Plymouth, CA}}
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Plymouth,_Massachusetts|Plymouth, MA}}
| rowspan="2" | Plymouth was the site of the colony founded in 1620 by the Mayflower Pilgrims. Named after the city in the South West of England which was the final port of departure.
|-
| Plymouth, IN
|-
| {{w|Portland,_Maine|Portland, ME}}
| {{w|Portland,_Oregon|Portland, OR}}
| Portland, OR was {{w|Portland,_Oregon#Establishment|named after}} Portland, ME
|-
| Princeton, ID
| rowspan="2" | {{w|Princeton, New Jersey|Princeton, NJ}}
| rowspan="2" | Princeton, NJ is famous for being the home of the eponymous {{w|Princeton University}} and the {{w|Institute for Advanced Study}}
|-
| Princeton, MA
|-
| {{w|Richmond, Vermont|Richmond, VT}}
| {{w|Richmond, Virginia|Richmond, VA}}
| The Virginian Richmond was named after {{w|Richmond,_London|the suburb of London, UK}} due to an observed similarity of the river. London's Richmond was named for the palace built there by Henry VII, itself named after the {{w|Richmond,_North_Yorkshire|market town}} and castle in the north of England that was a childhood home. That was in turn named for the {{w|Richemont,_Seine-Maritime|Normandy}} area from which the noble family came who were gifted this land for their part of the Norman Conquest of England in the 11th century. There are more than fifty settlements called Richmond across the world, directly or indirectly taking their names from one or other of the English 'originals'.
|-
| Roswell, GA
| Roswell, NM
| Roswell, New Mexico is the site of one of the most famous “alien coverups” in American history, and is well known for its alien-themed tourism.
|-
| Saint Louis, MI
| rowspan="2" | {{w|St._Louis|St. Louis, MO}}
| rowspan="2" |
|-
| Saint Louis, OK
|-
| rowspan="2" | Salem, CT
| {{w|Salem,_Oregon|Salem, OR}}
| Capital of Oregon
|-
| {{w|Salem,_Massachusetts|Salem, MA}}
| Location of the {{w|Salem_witch_trials|Salem witch trials}}
|-
| San Diego, TX
| {{w|San_Diego|San Diego, CA}}
|
|-
| Santa Fe, TX
| {{w|Santa_Fe,_New_Mexico|Santa Fe, NM}}
|
|-
| Savannah, MO
| {{w|Savannah|Savannah, GA}}
|
|-
| South Bend, TX
| {{w|South_Bend|South Bend, IN}}
| South Bend, IN is the location of {{w|University_of_Notre_Dame|Notre Dame}}.
|-
| Texas, NY
| State of Texas
| Located in Mexico township, NY. North of the village of Mexico. No plans for a wall.
|-
| Vienna, ME
| {{w|Vienna, Austria}}
| Vienna is the capital and largest city of Austria
|-
| Washington, NC
|
| Washington was a a village in County Durham, now a new town in Tyne and Wear.
|-
| White House, TN
|
|
|}

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

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:US maps]]

Talk:2420: Appliances

2021-02-04T09:31:28Z

Arachrah:

This seems related to [[1890: What to Bring]]. [[User:Bubblegum|bubblegum]]-[[User_talk:Bubblegum|talk]]|[[Special:Contributions/Bubblegum|contribs]] 02:55, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

I actually disagree with the stove and washing dishes. In a large pot with water and with some stirring one can remove stains from cloths and kill germs. --[[Special:Contributions/141.101.96.28|141.101.96.28]] 07:08, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

It's interesting that all green squares are mirrored along the diagonal, with one exception, but no yellow ones at all. Usually you would assume that somewhat similar things result in a yellow square on both sides. [[User:Fabian42|Fabian42]] ([[User talk:Fabian42|talk]]) 07:35, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

== A washing mashine can (and does) spin-dry clothes ==

A spin-drying program can usually be selected separately without getting the clothes wet. While this is not effective as a dryer, still much better than nothing.
----

I microwave can boil eggs, you just nweed to wrap them in foil and ensure they are covered by the boiling water. The foil acts as a faraday cage and ensures they only cook by conduction from the outside and the water stops arcing.
You cvan also make scrabled eggs and omlettes. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 09:31, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Talk:2398: Vaccine Tracker

2020-12-15T12:31:57Z

Arachrah:

🎵 A B C D E F G H I've got a cure! 🎶
[[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.85|162.158.74.85]] 02:53, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Maybe he needs a [[2382: Ballot Tracker Tracker|vaccine tracker tracker]] [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.40|162.158.78.40]] 03:24, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
:And if that goes missing, a vaccine tracker tracker finder? Then a—[[952: Stud Finder|shut up]].
:Or a [[2376: Curbside|vaccine tracer tracer]], but then if he loses it [[1504: Opportunity|AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA]] and that transmission, at 05:52, 15 December 2020 (UTC) was the last we ever heard from Sonata. [[User:Bubblegum|bubblegum]]-[[User_talk:Bubblegum|talk]]|[[Special:Contributions/Bubblegum|contribs]]

And this on a day when I was mindlessly updating the pointless Electoral College votes just to double check that there were no faithless voters throwing the thing into more confusion. And I am not even American. Iam in priority group eight. My wife is in group nine - but might be in group eight before they get to her. The only things I know about kalamazoo are payroll and guitars - but I believe one is long superceded and the other left. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 12:29, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Just learnt that Kalamazoo Payroll is owned by Dominion, the plot deepens. They were not corrupting the election, they were messing with the vaccine trackers. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 12:31, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Talk:2398: Vaccine Tracker

2020-12-15T12:29:42Z

Arachrah: wittering

Talk:2391: Life Before the Pandemic

2020-11-27T15:06:02Z

Arachrah:

This reminds me of the Four Yorkshiremen from At last the 1948 show. Tell that to youngsters nwadays. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 15:06, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Talk:2315: Eventual Consistency

2020-06-04T08:47:14Z

Arachrah:

The current explanation says that "Cueball's employer wants him to continue his work in the COVID-19 pandemic," but that's a "citation needed" sort of statement. Even if the comic is taken to be literally occurring on the day it is published (which is not always the case as comics have taken place in the past, the future, alternate presents, and even spanning large periods of time), there are perhaps multiple things adding up together to make it "hard to focus right now." In the USA, there's hot temperatures, civil unrest, economic woes springing from or accelerated by the pandemic, and even political considerations that may make it hard to focus (governmental responses to current events potentially being out of proportion with the events, etc). If Cueball is elsewhere in the world, there may be other local conditions that might make things hard to focus. There's stuff going on in Hong Kong, the Middle East, Brazil, Somalia, and all over the world that could be making it hard for someone in those locales to concentrate on their work even if the pandemic weren't a possible contributing factor.
: Is it me, or is "continue his work *in* the COVID-19 pandemic" also incorrect? It's a database, not (necessarily) anything to do with COVID-19. Perhaps "in" should be "during" (leaving aside the other arguments)? [[User:John.Adriaan|John.Adriaan]] ([[User talk:John.Adriaan|talk]]) 01:37, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
::Hi, this is the "makes an edit before checking if anyone already thought to comment about it" contributor. Same again, with added complication of an edit-conflict (someone posted whilst I was trying to identify bicycles, fire-hydrants and traffic lights in the CAPTCHA). Reworded the thing to identify the situation as being ''popularised'' (not the right word!) by the pandemic. Though if Cueball were an existing home-based worker, I'm surprised they didn't fire him at the first hint of an excuse to do so. Anyway, moved the Citation Needed that the conflicter edited into the midst of my chosen edit, hopefully a mutually agreeable spot. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.194|141.101.98.194]] 02:02, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Just shows that the database needs more testing - as the page is obviously not reaching consistancy. I must admit that I have not looked at this for a dozen years, but I thought it was an unsolved problem in the general case as there was no way of resolving conflicts like these. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 08:47, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Then, of course, since the comic doesn't specify what is causing it to be hard to concentrate, it's a bit deictic, and the comic can be linked as a response to multiple future situations (not all of them bad -- having a baby, for instance, can make it hard to concentrate on work.) [[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.52|108.162.216.52]] 20:58, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

Side note: YouTuber Tom Scott explained ''eventual consistency'' in one of his ''[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL96C35uN7xGLLeET0dOWaKHkAlPsrkcha The Basics]'' videos: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY_2gElt3SA "Why Computers Can't Count Sometimes"]. --[[User:Aaron of Mpls|Aaron of Mpls]] ([[User talk:Aaron of Mpls|talk]]) 21:30, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

The current explanation says "His boss retorts that in a heat death, nobody can work" which is completely missing what I assume is intended by "maximum entropy means no useful work can be done!" This statement is likely a reference to the relationship between entropy and the useful work that can be extracted from a thermodynamic system. --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.206.40|172.68.206.40]] 04:13, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Purely coincidental, but The Infinite Monkey Cage podcast just had an episode on the end of the universe: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08dy6ym. ...and I'd like to add, in that regard, that I predict it'll be Death-By-CAPTCHA (more hydrants, more bicycles, then motorcylcles, when I made a comment above. Let's see what it thinks I need to pursuasively do ''this'' time, eh?) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.96|141.101.98.96]] 02:10, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Can we agree that this is one of the most Dilbert-like of all xkcds? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.69.91|141.101.69.91]]Eric

Talk:2306: Common Cold

2020-05-15T14:01:50Z

Arachrah: colds may be good for us

WHEN COVID19 IS DONE KEEP UP WITH THE HAND WASHING![[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.122|108.162.216.122]] 23:16, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

I saw a thing reshared some time last month claiming that after the hand-sanitizer-and-masks outbreak in Japan, some regions were recording record low numbers of influenza hospitalisations for this time of year. Thought that would be nice; but could only find unsourced claims. Would be nice to think there really was that kind of silver lining. [[User:Angel|Angel]] ([[User talk:Angel|talk]]) 23:30, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
:Since people are really staying away from each other, the only way flu and common cold can spread has also been eliminated. So of course the rate has dropped. But yes, would be nice to see some citations. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:13, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
::Found this [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-17/coronavirus-numbers-flu-tracking-data/12134082 Coronavirus isolation measures are reducing all flu-like diseases, not just COVID-19].--[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:15, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
::And this is more up to date: [https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/coronavirus-doctors-see-huge-drop-in-flu-common-cold-diarrhoea-and-conjunctivitis Coronavirus: Doctors see huge drop in flu, common cold, diarrhoea and conjunctivitis cases since circuit breaker measures]. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:16, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
:::While this SEEMS good news, I have wondered for a while now if, by eliminating harmless cold viruses that our immune systems are more or less accustomed to as "collateral damage", we might not accidentally open up new ecological niches, which then get occupied by MORE new pathogens that our immune systems are NOT accustomed to. So, it may actually a good idea to consider that deal.... --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.122|162.158.159.122]] 13:50, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
::::I don't think cold viruses are thought to be part of healthy gut flora (or [[1471: Gut Fauna|gut fauna]]), but the "{{w|hygiene hypothesis}}" posits that failure to properly seed the microbiome in early childhood (i.e. not enough dirt in life) may lead to increased prevalence of allergies and other autoimmune disorders, because (perhaps) the immune system is under-exercised and so some of its regulatory mechanisms are under-developed. --[[User:NotaBene|NotaBene]] ([[User talk:NotaBene|talk]]) 15:02, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
::::: Stepping up the speculativeness up a notch, an immune systeme permanently on the alert by flu might be good against cancer. That said, maybe the poor virii should just try to look more cute? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.90|162.158.159.90]] 08:09, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

::::By social distancing, we are not harming cold viruses more than anything else ; what we are doing is basically shrinking the ecological niche containing it. So, no ... unless we will be so good in it we really eliminate cold viruses and when we do, we will then stop social distancing and grow the ecological niche again. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 22:16, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

You guys are engaging in uneducated speculation. PLEASE STOP! Viruses are nothing at all like bacteria (which make up the gut biome). The mere fact that we need new influenza vaccines every year should make it clear that exposure to flu virus does nothing to generate "multi-capable antibodies" . Yes, playing in dirt may build up the immune system's ability to handle bacterial loads, but no it has nothing to do with viruses. [[User:Cellocgw|Cellocgw]] ([[User talk:Cellocgw|talk]]) 11:08, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

According to Taiwan National Infectious Disease Statistics System, the [https://nidss.cdc.gov.tw/en/SingleDisease.aspx?dc=1&dt=4&disease=487a&position=1 number of severe influenza cases in Taiwan] was 109 on week 1 of 2020, then drop to zero since March. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.34.58|172.69.34.58]] 04:54, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Based on the railroad's Twitter feed which announces when service is suspended because someone got hit by a train, it seems that deaths from being hit by trains are down where I live. I'd expect some reduction in accidental deaths due to fewer trains per day running. However, the reduction in deaths is greater than the reduction in train service, so that's not the full explanation, especially since most of the deaths were suicides.[[Special:Contributions/108.162.215.250|108.162.215.250]] 05:27, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
: Has the general rate of suicide changed? [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 16:35, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
:: In Finland the sucide rate has been up [https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11351803 15% this spring].

Was this comic posted a day late? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.130.10|172.69.130.10]] 11:36, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
:No. But the DGBRt bot that uploads the comic is in the wrong time zone and there it was May 14th. But in the archive on xkcd it is listed as a May 13 release. I have corrected the wrong date. This has happened with two comics now over the last few releases. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:11, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Current transcript indicates he is shouting the "no" in the last frame. I read this significantly more as an extremely forceful spoken word, not so much "THIS IS SPARTA!" [[User:OhFFS|OhFFS]] ([[User talk:OhFFS|talk]]) 16:04, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
:Agree. Fixed. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 21:21, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

I AM THE DREAD FAUCET ROBERTS. THERE WILL BE ''NO SURVIVORS''! [[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.67|108.162.250.67]] 00:45, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

In the end, the only way to eliminate it *finally,* for good, is either almost everyone has immunity, or social distancing, contact tracing and similar measures. No matter how difficult. If immunity doesn't last long, then you've got a permanent problem unless social distancing can be maintained INDEFINITELY. And I want to point out that the problem becomes not just permanent but gains the potential to kill faster than people can breed. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.246.251|108.162.246.251]] 10:26, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Now it seems there are correlations between antibodies to common colds and to C-19

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2820%2930610-3&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=LNCH%20%2020200515%20%20Facebook%20%20SM+CID_262b5ad3cf7ba8cf30318d3392774724

Talk:2303: Error Types

2020-05-07T11:28:42Z

Arachrah:

As of the time of this post, the title text is "Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman neumerals". Is "neumerals" a typo, or is there a joke in there that I'm missing? [[User:Cosmogoblin|Cosmogoblin]] ([[User talk:Cosmogoblin|talk]]) 22:52, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
:Looks like a typo to me. Randall's patrons should have caught this for him!
:[[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 23:07, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

::That particular mistake is actually just called a type error.
::[[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.221|162.158.62.221]] 23:12, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
:::Or, surely, a Type-0. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.82|162.158.159.82]] 01:09, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
::::I am Type-O and as a Type-O Negative, I'm VERY popular at the blood bank! (Universal Donor) [[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.48|108.162.216.48]] 01:25, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
::I was hoping it could be bent to be a tribute to John von Neumann. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.189.223|172.68.189.223]] 05:00, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
::Looks like same type of typo he made at word "blag": [[https://explainxkcd.com/148/ Intentional.]] [[Special:Contributions/172.69.54.189|172.69.54.189]] 08:04, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
:: Perhaps a reference to {{w|Neume|Neumes}}? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.211|162.158.158.211]] 09:47, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

[[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.48|108.162.216.48]] 01:24, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
The explanation builds on definitions of terms in statistics. That's fine, but there are also non-statistical usages, just for example whether someone has now (or had before) the COVID-19 virus. A false positive is a test result which incorrectly indicates that a particular condition or attribute is present, and a false negative is a test result which incorrectly indicates that a particular condition or attribute is absent. A particular test is useful when its incidence of Type I and II errors is low. Types III and IV in that context would be given by poorly designed tests which, even if they give correct results, do it for unsupportable reasons and are therefore unreliable for future results. Types V, VI, VII, and VIII are necessary fillers in the sequence, once you decide that calling The Rise of Skywalker a mistake has to be error type IX simply because it's the ninth film in the series. [[User:JohnB|JohnB]] ([[User talk:JohnB|talk]]) 00:54, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
I could convince myself that the errors are a reference to each Star Wars movie. Definitely a stretch but I'd believe it.
[[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.24|162.158.106.24]] 02:00, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

Surely an Error of the Third Kind is when an Alien gets lost and lands on Earth. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 11:28, 7 May 2020 (UTC)

Talk:2270: Picking Bad Stocks

2020-02-20T09:29:32Z

Arachrah:

clearly nobody told Randall about shorting stocks [[Special:Contributions/162.158.18.160|162.158.18.160]] 20:57, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

I was going to say that [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 09:29, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Can someone create a "stock market" category, or "economics"? There are a lot of comics referencing this. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.89|172.69.33.89]] 23:21, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Talk:2269: Phylogenetic Tree

2020-02-17T17:01:55Z

Arachrah: colours?

Because of timezones this comic was released on Sunday in some areas [[Special:Contributions/172.69.34.228|172.69.34.228]] 07:21, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
:Well, it's always either that or Tuesday in some areas, right? However, yes, this again was up quite early. But the exact upload times seem to fluctuate heavily all the time. --[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 07:40, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

I don't know much about basketball (only heard about march Madness here/xkcd and on HIMYM before), but where is Gonzaga coming from? shouldn't it be either UVA, Kansas or FSU? or is it a different name for one of those 3 teams? Also: Do we need a march madness category? maybe as a subcategory of bracket tournaments? It seems to be quite reocurring. --[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 07:43, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
:Gonzaga is on here as a joke. In 2019, late night host Jimmy Kimmel humorously refused to believe that they were a real college from the start of the tournament. They lost in their division finals.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.241|162.158.74.241]] 16:01, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
::While you are correct, I think the question is how they show up in the tree without being shown on any of the lower branches. Since this tree is about genetics, my guess is it's supposed to be a mutation that just appears out of nowhere. Gonzaga has had a few good years in the past, most notably this detail from Wikipedia: "Gonzaga advanced to the Elite 8 of the 2015 NCAA tournament, losing to eventual national champion and No. 1 ranked Duke." I suspect it's no coincidence that they lose to Duke in this tree! [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 16:25, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Could someone explain what a "March Madness Bracket" is? It appears to be something to do with American college basketball, but why does it have the same structure as a phylogenetic tree? What does the word 'Bracket' mean here? {{unsigned ip|141.101.98.148|07:48, 17 February 2020}}
:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket_(tournament) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.214.82|162.158.214.82]] 07:51, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
:Seconded. The explanation as it stands assumes that the reader is from the USA and understands American sports. Neither of these is true for me. Can we please have concise one-line explanations of:
* what sport?
* what teams?
* what a bracket is?
* what tournament this refers to?
I was a biologist; the science part is clear to me. It needs an explanation akin to that about phylogeny, for non-sports-followers and non-US-sports followers. [[User:Lproven|Lproven]] ([[User talk:Lproven|talk]]) 09:02, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
:: Getting better! Terms now undefined: "NCAA", "ABA", "NBA", "Division 1", "single elimination", "bracket pool", "college basketball". [[User:Lproven|Lproven]] ([[User talk:Lproven|talk]]) 11:05, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
::: NCAA = National Collegiate Athletic Association, but it doesn't cover all colleges -- just the bigger ones. NBA national Basketball Association, the (main?) pro basketball grouping of mens' teams (as opposed to the WNBA). ABA is _probably_ the American Basketball Association, of which I know nothing (but guessing by analogy with NBC/ABC television networks; National/American Broadcasting Company. And college basketball is, well, basketball played by college teams. For the rest of it, I'm out of my league. {{unsigned ip|162.158.74.55|06:41, 17 February 2020}}
:::: From what I understand, the NCAA categorize teams into divisions, with Division 1 being the highest. "Single elimination" is a type of tournament bracket where once you lose a match, you're done. A bracket pool is where people get together and each makes a prediction of the bracket. Whoever is closest to what actually happened wins. The ABA is the American Basketball Association. {{unsigned ip|108.162.212.173|09:02, 17 February 2020}}

The three prominent "Duke"s in the center of the chart, made me look for the logical continuation "of Earl." I didn't see it... :( {{unsigned ip|162.158.74.55|06:41, 17 February 2020}}

* Likewise. Also, duck fuke. {{unsigned ip|173.245.52.85|07:52, 17 February 2020}}

SO is the displayed bracket last seasons? a prediction for this season? completely random? Are they even real universities? Or is Randall embedding more jokes? What is Basketball? why do universities play it? why do we care? It is only February - why are we discussing March? Mind you May Week is in June and the Octoberfest in September so March Madness could be in February for all I know? [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 16:59, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

And what is with the colours?

Talk:2269: Phylogenetic Tree

2020-02-17T16:59:55Z

Arachrah: Questions

2262: Parker Solar Probe

2020-02-03T13:51:15Z

Arachrah: /* Explanation */ Table alignment

{{comic
| number = 2262
| date = January 31, 2020
| title = Parker Solar Probe
| image = parker_solar_probe.png
| titletext = It will get within 9 or 10 Sun-diameters of the "bottom" (the Sun's surface) which seems pretty far when you put it that way, but from up here on Earth it's practically all the way down.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a FRIED ROBOTIC SOLAR PROBE. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This is an informative comic meant to represent the relative distances of astronomical objects relative to the {{w|Parker Solar Probe}}. It also shows where the probe will be in 2025 if its mission continues going according to plan.

The Parker Solar Probe is a robotic spacecraft launched by NASA in 2018 with the mission of repeatedly probing and making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. It travels in an elongated orbit that passes close to the Sun and sometimes passes near Venus, arranged such that Venus nudges the orbit slightly in each pass to bring the probe's perihelion (the lower end of its orbit) closer and closer to the Sun. Two days before this comic was published {{w|Parker_Solar_Probe#Timeline|the probe again passed through perihelion}}, establishing new records for closeness to the Sun (11.6 million miles) and speed (244,225 mph).[https://blogs.nasa.gov/parkersolarprobe/2020/01/29/parker-solar-probe-completes-fourth-closest-approach-breaks-new-speed-and-distance-records/] By the end of the probe's planned lifetime in 2025, it will pass within 4.3 million miles (6.9 million km), or about 5 solar diameters, of the Sun's surface, at a speed of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h).

{{w|Helios (spacecraft)|Helios 2}} was a solar probe launched in the 1976 that formerly held the records for closest man-made object to the Sun and fastest man-made object. Both records were surpassed by the Parker probe in 2018.

[[File:Animation of Parker Solar Probe trajectory.gif|thumb|right|Animation of Parker Solar Probe's trajectory from August 7, 2018 to August 29, 2025 {{Color|magenta|Parker Solar Probe}} • {{Color|RoyalBlue|Earth}} • {{Color|Cyan|Venus}} • {{Color|Lime|Mercury}} • {{Color|#dbd81d|Sun}}]]

[[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] are standing on Earth. The way this diagram is drawn, they look like they could fall off Earth toward the Sun -- hence the comment "Careful!" -- though the joke is that in real life they would fall toward the center of the Earth, not toward the Sun. Also the surprise for many people is that it is much harder to reach the sun than Pluto. Because we already travel so fast here on Earth, and to reach the sun this speed has to be reduced, which is a larger speed difference than the one needed to escape the Sun's gravity well. If you could "fall" off Earth, you would just keep the approximately same distance to the Sun, but drifting slowly away from Earth.

The title text says the probe will get within 9 or 10 Sun-diameters of the Sun's surface. This is a bit of a mistake: it will actually get {{w|Parker Solar Probe|within that many Sun-''radii''}} -- only 4½ or 5 Sun-diameters. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is approximately 106 Sun-diameters.

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a FRIED ROBOTIC SOLAR PROBE. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This is an informative comic meant to represent the relative distances of astronomical objects relative to the {{w|Parker Solar Probe}}. It also shows where the probe will be in 2025 if its mission continues going according to plan.

The Parker Solar Probe is a robotic spacecraft launched by NASA in 2018 with the mission of repeatedly probing and making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. It travels in an elongated orbit that passes close to the Sun and sometimes passes near Venus, arranged such that Venus nudges the orbit slightly in each pass to bring the probe's perihelion (the lower end of its orbit) closer and closer to the Sun. Two days before this comic was published {{w|Parker_Solar_Probe#Timeline|the probe again passed through perihelion}}, establishing new records for closeness to the Sun (11.6 million miles) and speed (244,225 mph).[https://blogs.nasa.gov/parkersolarprobe/2020/01/29/parker-solar-probe-completes-fourth-closest-approach-breaks-new-speed-and-distance-records/] By the end of the probe's planned lifetime in 2025, it will pass within 4.3 million miles (6.9 million km), or about 5 solar diameters, of the Sun's surface, at a speed of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h).

{{w|Helios (spacecraft)|Helios 2}} was a solar probe launched in the 1976 that formerly held the records for closest man-made object to the Sun and fastest man-made object. Both records were surpassed by the Parker probe in 2018.

[[File:Animation of Parker Solar Probe trajectory.gif|thumb|right|Animation of Parker Solar Probe's trajectory from August 7, 2018 to August 29, 2025 {{Color|magenta|Parker Solar Probe}} • {{Color|RoyalBlue|Earth}} • {{Color|Cyan|Venus}} • {{Color|Lime|Mercury}} • {{Color|#dbd81d|Sun}}]]

[[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] are standing on Earth. The way this diagram is drawn, they look like they could fall off Earth toward the Sun -- hence the comment "Careful!" -- though the joke is that in real life they would fall toward the center of the Earth, not toward the Sun. Also the surprise for many people is that it is much harder to reach the sun than Pluto. Because we already travel so fast here on Earth, and to reach the sun this speed has to be reduced, which is a larger speed difference than the one needed to escape the Sun's gravity well. If you could "fall" off Earth, you would just keep the approximately same distance to the Sun, but drifting slowly away from Earth.

The title text says the probe will get within 9 or 10 Sun-diameters of the Sun's surface. This is a bit of a mistake: it will actually get {{w|Parker Solar Probe|within that many Sun-''radii''}} -- only 4½ or 5 Sun-diameters. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is approximately 106 Sun-diameters.
{|
! Object
! Perihelion
|-
| Earth
| style="text-align:right;" | 147,095,000 km
|-
| Venus
| style="text-align:right;" | 107,477,000 km
|-
| Mercury
| style="text-align:right;" | 46,001,200 km
|-
| Helios 2
| style="text-align:right;" | 43,432,000 km
|-
| PSP (now)
| style="text-align:right;" | 18,600,000 km
|-
| PSP (2025)
| style="text-align:right;" | 6.900.000 km
|-
| Sun Radius
| style="text-align:right;" | 696,342 km
|}

==Transcript==
:[A tall, but very narrow box with Earth at the top, with Cueball and Megan standing precariously "on top" of Earth on each side of the center, trying to keep their balance. At the very bottom is shown a slice of the Sun. Between Earth and the Sun the two inner planets and two spacecraft are depicted with relation to their distance from the Sun. The spacecraft closest to the Sun is shown two times at different times, as it moves closer and closer to the sun. All 7 objects have labels close to them. The largest distance is between Venus and Mercury, with the Earth-Venus distance the second longest. The distances between the objects below Mercury are much shorter. There is a caption above the slim panel:]

<big>Looking down toward the Sun</big> and the Parker Solar Probe 
(Distances are to scale, sizes are ''not'' to scale)

:Earth
::Cueball: ''Careful!''

:Venus

:Mercury

:Helios 2 (1976)

:Parker Solar Probe (today)

:Parker Solar Probe (2025)

:Sun (Not to scale)

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Astronomy]]
[[Category:Space probes]]

2262: Parker Solar Probe

2020-02-03T12:21:42Z

Arachrah: Added table of perihelion distances

{{comic
| number = 2262
| date = January 31, 2020
| title = Parker Solar Probe
| image = parker_solar_probe.png
| titletext = It will get within 9 or 10 Sun-diameters of the "bottom" (the Sun's surface) which seems pretty far when you put it that way, but from up here on Earth it's practically all the way down.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a FRIED ROBOTIC SOLAR PROBE. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This is an informative comic meant to represent the relative distances of astronomical objects relative to the {{w|Parker Solar Probe}}. It also shows where the probe will be in 2025 if its mission continues going according to plan.

The Parker Solar Probe is a robotic spacecraft launched by NASA in 2018 with the mission of repeatedly probing and making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. It travels in an elongated orbit that passes close to the Sun and sometimes passes near Venus, arranged such that Venus nudges the orbit slightly in each pass to bring the probe's perihelion (the lower end of its orbit) closer and closer to the Sun. Two days before this comic was published {{w|Parker_Solar_Probe#Timeline|the probe again passed through perihelion}}, establishing new records for closeness to the Sun (11.6 million miles) and speed (244,225 mph).[https://blogs.nasa.gov/parkersolarprobe/2020/01/29/parker-solar-probe-completes-fourth-closest-approach-breaks-new-speed-and-distance-records/] By the end of the probe's planned lifetime in 2025, it will pass within 4.3 million miles (6.9 million km), or about 5 solar diameters, of the Sun's surface, at a speed of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h).

{{w|Helios (spacecraft)|Helios 2}} was a solar probe launched in the 1976 that formerly held the records for closest man-made object to the Sun and fastest man-made object. Both records were surpassed by the Parker probe in 2018.

[[File:Animation of Parker Solar Probe trajectory.gif|thumb|right|Animation of Parker Solar Probe's trajectory from August 7, 2018 to August 29, 2025 {{Color|magenta|Parker Solar Probe}} • {{Color|RoyalBlue|Earth}} • {{Color|Cyan|Venus}} • {{Color|Lime|Mercury}} • {{Color|#dbd81d|Sun}}]]

[[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] are standing on Earth. The way this diagram is drawn, they look like they could fall off Earth toward the Sun -- hence the comment "Careful!" -- though the joke is that in real life they would fall toward the center of the Earth, not toward the Sun. Also the surprise for many people is that it is much harder to reach the sun than Pluto. Because we already travel so fast here on Earth, and to reach the sun this speed has to be reduced, which is a larger speed difference than the one needed to escape the Sun's gravity well. If you could "fall" off Earth, you would just keep the approximately same distance to the Sun, but drifting slowly away from Earth.

The title text says the probe will get within 9 or 10 Sun-diameters of the Sun's surface. This is a bit of a mistake: it will actually get {{w|Parker Solar Probe|within that many Sun-''radii''}} -- only 4½ or 5 Sun-diameters. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is approximately 106 Sun-diameters.

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a FRIED ROBOTIC SOLAR PROBE. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This is an informative comic meant to represent the relative distances of astronomical objects relative to the {{w|Parker Solar Probe}}. It also shows where the probe will be in 2025 if its mission continues going according to plan.

The Parker Solar Probe is a robotic spacecraft launched by NASA in 2018 with the mission of repeatedly probing and making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. It travels in an elongated orbit that passes close to the Sun and sometimes passes near Venus, arranged such that Venus nudges the orbit slightly in each pass to bring the probe's perihelion (the lower end of its orbit) closer and closer to the Sun. Two days before this comic was published {{w|Parker_Solar_Probe#Timeline|the probe again passed through perihelion}}, establishing new records for closeness to the Sun (11.6 million miles) and speed (244,225 mph).[https://blogs.nasa.gov/parkersolarprobe/2020/01/29/parker-solar-probe-completes-fourth-closest-approach-breaks-new-speed-and-distance-records/] By the end of the probe's planned lifetime in 2025, it will pass within 4.3 million miles (6.9 million km), or about 5 solar diameters, of the Sun's surface, at a speed of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h).

{{w|Helios (spacecraft)|Helios 2}} was a solar probe launched in the 1976 that formerly held the records for closest man-made object to the Sun and fastest man-made object. Both records were surpassed by the Parker probe in 2018.

[[File:Animation of Parker Solar Probe trajectory.gif|thumb|right|Animation of Parker Solar Probe's trajectory from August 7, 2018 to August 29, 2025 {{Color|magenta|Parker Solar Probe}} • {{Color|RoyalBlue|Earth}} • {{Color|Cyan|Venus}} • {{Color|Lime|Mercury}} • {{Color|#dbd81d|Sun}}]]

[[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] are standing on Earth. The way this diagram is drawn, they look like they could fall off Earth toward the Sun -- hence the comment "Careful!" -- though the joke is that in real life they would fall toward the center of the Earth, not toward the Sun. Also the surprise for many people is that it is much harder to reach the sun than Pluto. Because we already travel so fast here on Earth, and to reach the sun this speed has to be reduced, which is a larger speed difference than the one needed to escape the Sun's gravity well. If you could "fall" off Earth, you would just keep the approximately same distance to the Sun, but drifting slowly away from Earth.

The title text says the probe will get within 9 or 10 Sun-diameters of the Sun's surface. This is a bit of a mistake: it will actually get {{w|Parker Solar Probe|within that many Sun-''radii''}} -- only 4½ or 5 Sun-diameters. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is approximately 106 Sun-diameters.
{|
| Object
| Perihelion
|-
| Earth
| 147,095,000 km
|-
| Venus
| 107,477,000 km
|-
| Mercury
| 46,001,200 km
|-
| Helios 2
| 43,432,000 km
|-
| PSP (now)
| 18,600,000 km
|-
| PSP (2025)
| 6.900.000 km
|-
| Sun Radius
| 696,342 km
|}

==Transcript==
:[A tall, but very narrow box with Earth at the top, with Cueball and Megan standing precariously "on top" of Earth on each side of the center, trying to keep their balance. At the very bottom is shown a slice of the Sun. Between Earth and the Sun the two inner planets and two spacecraft are depicted with relation to their distance from the Sun. The spacecraft closest to the Sun is shown two times at different times, as it moves closer and closer to the sun. All 7 objects have labels close to them. The largest distance is between Venus and Mercury, with the Earth-Venus distance the second longest. The distances between the objects below Mercury are much shorter. There is a caption above the slim panel:]

<big>Looking down toward the Sun</big> and the Parker Solar Probe 
(Distances are to scale, sizes are ''not'' to scale)

:Earth
::Cueball: ''Careful!''

:Venus

:Mercury

:Helios 2 (1976)

:Parker Solar Probe (today)

:Parker Solar Probe (2025)

:Sun (Not to scale)

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Astronomy]]
[[Category:Space probes]]

Talk:2251: Alignment Chart Alignment Chart

2020-01-06T16:52:27Z

Arachrah:

OK, hope someone will now explain it after I created this page. I'm lost on this one ;-) --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 10:49, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Arrgh, edit conflict! [[User:Kev|Kev]] ([[User talk:Kev|talk]]) 11:55, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

I think the Omnispace Classifier is meant to be a horrific Frankenstein amalgamation of the other 8 kinds of chart. Theoretically it can "classify anything" since it can classify anything the other 8 can, but practically it would obviously be totally useless, or at least a lot less useful than just using the specific chart that works for the situation. [[User:Pureawes0me|Pureawes0me]] ([[User talk:Pureawes0me|talk]]) 12:09, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

I vaguely remember Randall to refer to the clay-sand diagram (or whatever it is called) as his all time favorite diagram on what-if somewhere. --[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 12:35, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

I fear any attempt to "explain" the CIE chromaticity diagram will devolve into arguments about why Randall chose it. I have found that folks outside the world of optics or neurooptical studies have a hard time understanding why the raw colors available in single wavelengths comprise that short curvy line inside the full colorspace. The way our brain processes the relative signal strengths from the different types of retinal cones is quite amazing. [[User:Cellocgw|Cellocgw]] ([[User talk:Cellocgw|talk]]) 12:57, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm only familiar with 4th and 5th edition, but should the "Good/neutral/evil:" axis eplanation be changed to "selfless deeds or selfish deeds"? Good and evil are highly subjective ("One person's 'freedom fighter' is another person's 'terrorist'.") but at least in 5e the axis is explained as risking/sacrificing yourself for the benefit of others (Good) vs. sacrificing others for your own benefit (Evil). Also, the explanation of the CN character may benefit from dividing which parts of the explanation are "chatoic" vs "neutral". Finally the "lacking rhyme or reason" part of chaotic is highly debated within D&D circles. There are certainly people who play that way, but there are also others who feel that chaotic characters have just as much motivation and goals as a lawful or neutral character just that part of their motivation is to act contrarily to Tradition/Authority. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.186.54|162.158.186.54]] 14:37, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

I am not sure the phase diagram is for Water - that has nine solid phases. Surely it is merely a simple example.
[[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 16:52, 6 January 2020 (UTC)
: It seems from this page that even nerds tend to interpret the alignment system by the ‘common sense’ meaning of the names instead of the detailed explanation. I once simply went through the Wikipedia article, which cited the second edition IIRC: ‘lawful’ means sticking to ''some'' code of conduct, whereas ‘chaotic’ is a pure opportunist or behaves randomly. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ indeed mean selfless vs selfish deeds, but afaik in one of the official explanations ‘evil’ meant exercising authority over others—so all managers would be ‘evil’ automatically. [[User:Aasasd|Aasasd]] ([[User talk:Aasasd|talk]]) 16:42, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Talk:2186: Dark Matter

2019-08-07T14:30:14Z

Arachrah:

If dark matter were squirrels, they ''wouldn't'' set off the bird feeders because dark matter can't interact with feeders at all! Especially since it's not to the squirrels' advantage to set them off. Unless, of course, the dark matter squirrels do exist and steal from our feeders freely, but we can't notice because dark matter is unobservable at this scale. In fact, it's entirely plausible that some squirrels evolved to be dark matter for this specific advantage, so I wouldn't rule that out. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.244.174|172.68.244.174]] 12:12, 7 August
2019 (UTC)
:Well if they can't interact with the feeders, they won't be able to steal the food either.[[Special:Contributions/141.101.107.66|141.101.107.66]] 13:28, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
::Not with that attitude. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.126.4|162.158.126.4]] 14:10, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

I have never seen a spinning bird - can they turn peanuts into gold.

2182: When I'm Back at a Keyboard

2019-07-29T15:14:14Z

Arachrah:

{{comic
| number = 2182
| date = July 29, 2019
| title = When I'm Back at a Keyboard
| image = when_im_back_at_a_keyboard.png
| titletext = [after typing 1,500 words on feathered dinosaurs, paleontology, sexism, lava, and dinosaurs as animals rather than movie monsters] Sorry to cut it short, I'm on my phone. When I'm back at a keyboard, I can give you another 5,000 words.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by someone who is away from their keyboard. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

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

{{comic discussion}}

Talk:2177: Gastroenterology

2019-07-17T16:23:17Z

Arachrah: another bad joke

I hope they are not eating italian, you never know what might happen if pasta and antipasta meet. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 16:23, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Talk:2162: Literary Opinions

2019-06-12T06:01:34Z

Arachrah:

let's see WS Burroughs = Tarzan, E.R. Burroughs = Naked Lunch.
CS Lewis Carol
Bruce Stirlling / SM Stirling

Talk:2157: Diploma Legal Notes

2019-05-31T13:50:00Z

Arachrah:

Can I please live on this universe?
*in

Why would waiting 6-8 weeks help with challenging the British royal family for the throne? Surely that just gives them more time to prepare... [[User:Hawthorn|Hawthorn]] ([[User talk:Hawthorn|talk]]) 12:41, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
:But it takes 6-8 weeks for you to recieve your lightsaber. --[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 12:51, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

I'd rather they sent me my lightsab(re|er) in a powered-down state. Much less fuss, damage to postal sorting/conveying/containing equipment, injury to the various employees involved, etc. Probably also saves on postage costs for the package. (And, as just pointed out, we might just get by the sorting office spies from the palace if the packaging isn't humming and glowing.) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.7|162.158.154.7]] 12:45, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
:Er, I think "working" means ready to use, not turned on! However, I think shipping regulations would require the unit to be shipped without the nuclear power pack installed, and the user would just need to insert the power unit in the handle before use. [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 13:01, 31 May 2019 (UTC)
::You read it your way, I'll read it my way. ;) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.7|162.158.154.7]] 13:12, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

I did not believe Kate Middleton did anything as genteel as light sabre, I thought she was a hockey player. While she and William graduated from St Andrews, I would have thought they got certificates not diplomas. Charles and Eddie have certificates from Cambridge. Northwestern may have issued a diploma to Meghan. Anyway they are more likely to use real Sabres or polo mallets.

Talk:2131: Emojidome

2019-04-03T21:11:43Z

Arachrah: /* Errors */

I've checked the network tab and console - nothing really seems to happen when you vote, which may be something we want to put on the explanation tomorrow - Myxoh

I suspect the real april fools joke is going to come on Wednesday when xkdc posts an app showing us our psychological profiles that they are now selling to marketing companies after data-mining our emotional preferences to marketing firms - Nosajimiki

@Nosajimiki: psychological profiles of xkcd fans. That might be some interesting marketing. - 5Cincinatus

@Myxoh: I came here to see if anyone else had noticed this! But, I do also see a websocket connection to emojidome.xkcd.com, I bet it's counting votes that way.

There is a websocket connection. A message is sent every time you vote. It looks like there are also status update messages every second (saying which emoji currently has exactly how many votes, i suspect this changes the amount of hearts that show up), and "bracket start" messages every so often. The bracket start message seems to contain hundreds of upcoming emoji pairs. Edit: a bracket start is sent at the start of every match (so every ~30 seconds). It also contains logs of which messages to show for previous matches, and which emoji are currently battling.[[Special:Contributions/172.69.138.10|172.69.138.10]] 16:30, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

There seems to be nothing stopping me from clicking multiple times. Do you think it actually counts it all those times? Can I click-spam to say "this is much better"? [[User:Fabian42|Fabian42]] ([[User talk:Fabian42|talk]]) 16:48, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:Randall just confirmed that you can vote multiple times, although if you click too fasr you get rate limited. (*warning: generic ip address assigned to phone data.*) [[Special:Contributions/172.69.70.47|172.69.70.47]] 22:35, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:Where did he confirm that? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.93.105|162.158.93.105]] 10:44, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Well this is fun. Look like there are 512 symbols, meaning 256 first-round contests. The first round would take (at 38 seconds / round) ~2.7 hours. The remaining rounds, from an estimate of geometric progression, would just under double this, meaning this comic will run for ~ 5 hours until we have our winner... ~alexandicity [[Special:Contributions/172.69.226.177|172.69.226.177]] 16:51, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Did he just add a scroll bar to the previous matches? I didn't notice it earlier [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.148|162.158.255.148]] 18:17, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:Nope, you were able to scroll before, too. At least about 2 hours ago. [[User:Fabian42|Fabian42]] ([[User talk:Fabian42|talk]]) 18:20, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

While some of the recaps of past battles are generic (taco vs sandwich: "One for the history books"), many seem to be specifically written for the battle (light bulb vs candle: "Some would argue that this one was settled in the 1800s"). I wonder if/how much this will continue into round 2.

Round two has just begun, and the timeout has been bumped to 60 seconds. --[[User:Anarcat|Anarcat]] ([[User talk:Anarcat|talk]]) 18:41, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:If that trend continues, the full competition will take pretty close to 24 hours. [[User:Fabian42|Fabian42]] ([[User talk:Fabian42|talk]]) 18:45, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:It looks like it's 1:14/round, which is double what the time was in round one. Will round three be 2:28? 1:51?
::It's just over 1:15/round from the history JSON (plus some hundredths of a second, but it appears 1:15 is the intent)
:::Hadn't looked there. Round one concluded at 18:39:20-ish, 9560 seconds from 16:00:00. At 256 battles, that's 37.34 seconds/battle. However, it looks like the first battle ended at 15:59:57, which would add about 40 seconds, 9600 seconds/256=37.5 seconds exactly. Doubling for round 2 gives 75 seconds.
::2 minutes 30 seconds per battle now. Looks like each round will be 2 hours 40 minutes long.
:: Well it is after 5:00 PST and round 4 just started - and this thing is at exactly 5 minutes a round - which means another 160 minutes for the round. Will see in 2 hours and 40 minutes if the times go up to minutes. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.65|172.69.33.65]] 00:25, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

And while the match-ups winners are typically colored, and underlined, the losers are endgame grey.

Has anyone determined if multiple-voting is actually counted? For me at least the vote button fades back to gray after I click it, which implies you can/should click it again, but that may not actually be processed. We might add a clarification about that to the explanation. [[User:Jerodast|- jerodast]] ([[User talk:Jerodast|talk]]) 19:01, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: A reddit user on the r/xkcd thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/b84at1/xkcd_2131_emojidome_script_src2131comicjs/) claims to have attempted "vote stuffing via the console" with no noticeable change in vote totals. So it looks like it may be sending it client-side, but only counting the vote once server-side --l

::Just few minutes ago there was message in "fun facts" that you can click multiple times, although it's not counted if you click too many times (or something like that). I guess that vote stuffing was too much. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 22:34, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

It would appear that we are supposed to believe the commentary is live, and unscripted:
" {"This one is a true test of the audience today.",
"Just to stress this again. Live commentary, folks. Completely unscripted and coming in hot.} "--[[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.173|162.158.79.173]] 19:20, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:It's clearly live because the result of a previous round is affecting the next round's commentary - and the combinatorial explosion would prohibit that from being remotely plausible. We're watching live comedy here! [[User:SteveBaker|SteveBaker]] ([[User talk:SteveBaker|talk]]) 19:30, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: On the dog vs. wolf, he said "Again, we are getting a lot of questions on this today. This is live commentary, folks." Proof I guess. HI RANDALL! [[Special:Contributions/172.68.189.241|172.68.189.241]] 19:31, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Is there really anything we can put for the transcript? [[Special:Contributions/172.68.189.241|172.68.189.241]] 19:25, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: We can go into the socket data and pull out the commentary for each matchup. -- [[User:Bobson|Bobson]] ([[User talk:Bobson|talk]]) 04:05, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Any ideas on how the commentary is done? It seems to sort of match the emojis.
[[User:Svízel přítula|Svízel přítula]] ([[User talk:Svízel přítula|talk]]) 19:31, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: It seems that Randall is commentating this live, as he periodically says it's live in the robot commentator text. See above. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.189.241|172.68.189.241]] 19:36, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
::Perhaps not "live" as each round 2 matchup was known 160 minutes before it was voted on. He could comment on the battle itself, and/or provide a comment if one or the other combatant won. I think he's a couple hours ahead of us.
::: I dunno. Whenever a new battle starts, there is a default message, that is soon replaced by a more pertinent message. That seems to suggest that he's doing it on the fly. [[User:9yz|9yz]] ([[User talk:9yz|talk]]) 20:03, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
::::If that's live, Randall, and if you see this, give us a shout-out as proof. -Brent
::::: Just because it ''says'' it's live, doesn't mean that it really is. It's also possible that the actual clicks are being ignored and the reported numbers are all pre-generated. Much less likely than that it's actually counting and Randall is inserting commentary live (with default messages when he doesn't), but possible. -- [[User:Bobson|Bobson]] ([[User talk:Bobson|talk]]) 12:50, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
: He updated the title text to thank volunteers for commentating, so I guess we know that the commentary was live, just not necessarily all Randall. [[User:Moosenonny10|Moosenonny10]] ([[User talk:Moosenonny10|talk]]) 14:34, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

This is a quick piece of python to see the json results (and commentary):
<nowiki>import json, urllib.request
d = json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen("https://emojidome.xkcd.com/2131/socket ").read().decode('utf-8'))
for g in d['bracket']['played'][0]:
c1, c2 = g['game']
print(f"{c1['score']} {c1['competitor']}-{c2['competitor']} {c2['score']}")</nowiki>
[[User:Tammo80|Tammo80]] ([[User talk:Tammo80|talk]]) 19:42, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: or if you want to see the vote count live in browser: https://emojidome.playcode.io/ -Andy 22:01, April 2019
:: Awesome, thank you [[User:9yz|9yz]] ([[User talk:9yz|talk]]) 20:23, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

There must be some kind of manipulation going on with the votes. There is NO WAY the poop emoji would lose to the skull emoji in round two. It was my guess for the winner >:( [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.138|162.158.106.138]] 20:50, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: And the 100 emoji just lost to the shiny heart. :(

Well, there's the comment "How do you know for sure that your votes are doing anything?". For my side because every single one I voted for lost so far. Well, I'm not a lucky charm, apparently... [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.11|141.101.104.11]] 10:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

The second round bracket was released, but is hidden behind the bottom nav buttons: https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_256.png --[[User:Thefallen138|Thefallen138]] ([[User talk:Thefallen138|talk]]) 20:56, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

And now the third round has begun. Strangely, the bracket is not visible yet: https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_128.png. The delay has been bump to something above two minutes as well. --[[User:Anarcat|Anarcat]] ([[User talk:Anarcat|talk]]) 21:21, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

: It's here https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_round_3.png [[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.79|162.158.107.79]] 21:41, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

:: It seems to be he overwrote round_3.png with round_4.png (at least its the same picture)

Both the Emojidome and counter were brought together in iframes https://ducakedhare.co.uk/emojidome.html [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.17|141.101.99.17]] 23:39, 1 April 2019 (UTC)taikedz

Anyone have an IRC room for Emojidome discussion? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.146.10|162.158.146.10]]

So disappointed he left out the egg plant... :D --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Despite Spaaaaaaaaace winning the battle 🌌 (36285) vs 🚝 (17405), the current bracket chart https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_round_3.png shows 🚝 as having won. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.242.13|108.162.242.13]] 13:23, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

What if the April Fools joke of the whole bracket is that the "Vote" buttons were actually switched and all the losers are actually the winners??? [[Special:Contributions/172.68.59.84|172.68.59.84]] 15:24, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

In case the websocket ever goes down, here are the data: https://pastebin.com/YYgPS1FC
[[User:Svízel přítula|Svízel přítula]] ([[User talk:Svízel přítula|talk]]) 19:22, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== "Emoji" or "emojis" as the plural? ==

Due to the nature of the Japanese language, "emoji" is technically both the plural and the singular - however, the improper form "emojis" is used more as a plural frequently nowadays among English speakers. Which form should this explanation use? --[[User:Youforgotthisthing|Youforgotthisthing]] ([[User talk:Youforgotthisthing|talk]]) 22:27, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: For clarity, I think we should use emoji as the singular and emojis as the plural. I'm going to go fix this. [[User:9yz|9yz]] ([[User talk:9yz|talk]]) 19:34, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

The "friends in Australia" comment was made during the last round's wink vs upside down smile battle. This is probably a pun on how Australia is on the other side of the world from America; I don't think Randall was seriously saying he witnessed an influx of Australians inbound. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.82|108.162.219.82]] 00:47, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== Draws ==

What would happen if any of the fights resulted in a draw? (same number of votes for both)

Given the # of matchups, it's not actually that unlikely.

We should try to test this. Gotta keep Randall on his feet!

Pretty sure one early on resulted in a tie.

: The very first round was 0-0. I guess no one refreshed at exactly the right minute to see it. --[[User:Bobson|Bobson]] ([[User talk:Bobson|talk]]) 04:05, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

: Actually, Birthday Cake vs Cupcake was a tie at 3658:3658. Birthday Cake advanced. I wonder why? (from the socket: [{"score":3658,"competitor":"ðŸŽ‚"},{"score":3658,"competitor":"ðŸ§"}]) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.138|162.158.106.138]] 04:54, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Is Birthday Cake vs. Cupcake the draw referenced at the end of the "How it worked" section? Can we please have names added to all the emoji in the explanation text; I have never found a way to blow up emoji to a visible size, so frequently find I can't see them clearly enough to identify them, and in that bit at the end of "How it worked", the first one isn't rendering on my computer anyway. I'm guessing that the other is the birthday cake; really, I have come to hate emoji because they are so tiny. At least Randall made them nice and big on the voting screens. [[User:Yngvadottir|Yngvadottir]] ([[User talk:Yngvadottir|talk]]) 18:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I had assumed that the "score" was a not simple count of vote clicks - I'd imagine (especially with all the autoclicking etc) that the raw votes would be gigantic numbers. So it could be that these were not draws when calculated to full precision - just that the API was only sending out a rounded number?

== Emoji Fonts ==
Having an emoji font is required to see emoji displayed on sites such as http://srv-01.valo.media/ . If anybody else is looking for a way to display these, there's a good free emoji font available here:
https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-font
It includes a script to replace the default Windows emoji fonts to get them to display properly on windows. Unfortunately it's only black-and-white in chrome. If anybody knows any better options, please let me know!

: For Ubuntu Linux users: sudo apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji -- then restart Chrome/Firefox.
: [[User:SteveBaker|SteveBaker]] ([[User talk:SteveBaker|talk]]) 11:29, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

::I'm on Android here & many of the emoji do not show up. Notably, this includes the hedgehog, which... is not in the emoji set of any of my Android devices. Could somebody please add the emoji names next to their pictograms, where they appear the explanation? [[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 04:16, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

== Commentary Transcript ==

I've written a script that pulls the commentary history and transforms it into a wiki table. It's up to date as of right now, and I'll run it again in the morning and one last time after the final round. If you have formatting suggestions, just put them here and I'll incorporate it when I regenerate the table. -- [[User:Bobson|Bobson]] ([[User talk:Bobson|talk]]) 04:58, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

: Wonderful, thank you! Could you perhaps make the winner bold (or underlined like in the comic)? -Andy

== Successful Ballot-stuffing? ==

As I type this, I'm watching owl blast past 180000 votes in the owl-octopus bout. That means that in about 10 minutes, owl has earned more votes than all the votes earned in the entirety of any other individual bout. I could be totally off-base, but that seems vaguely suspicious to me. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.214.82|162.158.214.82]] 05:28, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I concur: that is highly suspicious. Fortunately, nothing of importance is at stake here, even if you were really pulling for the octopus. At this moment, we're ±10 minutes into bee vs pineapple and nothing comparable has happened. It may be an isolated incident. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.144|162.158.106.144]] 05:50, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I've seen enough hentai to...what? The *owl* has won? O RLY? I demand a recount! [[Special:Contributions/141.101.105.6|141.101.105.6]] 08:10, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

YOLO. You Obviously Like Owls. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.11|141.101.104.11]] 10:11, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

For the violin vs the curling stone ('classical vs house'), the stone was ahead, but in the last four minutes I spammed my discord server to vote and we just got it over the line. - fudgeforlife
: Rrrr. :angry face: I love curling, and of course I wanted the stone to win. With curling no-one complains if I fall asleep watching. But with classical music everyone complains... [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.89|141.101.104.89]] 12:49, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
: A similar thing happened for the "scared cat vs devil" bout - those two were consistently nearly tied until about T-10 minutes, whereupon the devil voting rate spiked and devil finished ~12000 votes ahead. The "cat vs hedgehog" bout was also similar - hedgehog had a consistent lead of ~1000 votes until about T-10 minutes, when the hedgehog voting rates spiked and hedgehog ended up finishing ~10000 votes ahead.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.214.28|162.158.214.28]] 14:39, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

What? It's possible the owl cheated? IT'S POSSIBLE OCTOPUS TOTALLY SHOULD HAVE WON IF THE MATCH WAS LEGITIMATE? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.75.226|162.158.75.226]] 12:02, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I love how owl getting 200 000 votes in 20 minutes is causing all this controversy when crayon got 40 000 in 75 seconds --[[User:Maple42|Maple42]] ([[User talk:Maple42|talk]]) 18:54, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== Avocado quote citation ==

I'm not sure where to put this. The "I like avocados because they taste pretty good and also they come with a cool wood ball you get to keep" quote is from here: https://twitter.com/jitka/status/236240801926086656 . [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.41|172.69.33.41]] 07:15, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== How sure are we the voting is real ==
I'm no expert at all, but it there any way that the websites that shows the number of votes live etc. can test whether these votes are real, or something Randall has pre-programmed? Not that I would not believe he was willing to stay up for the duration of this day, but it is an April Fools' Day comic, so he is completely "allowed" to have decided him self who should win all matched and have made up the commentaries in advance. Yes it would take along time, but not longer than doing it on the fly. It could just be that joke on us, that our votes does nothing and we just see how Randall has decided the dome should end. Can anyone go in to this, and explain why it is as it is either way (for sure made up, for sure real or uncertain if real or fake)? (PS I dislike these sections in the commentaries, but there are already 6...) --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

It should be noted that Milky Way won over Maglev by a long shot, but the bracket shows otherwise. - Brent [[Special:Contributions/172.69.50.58|172.69.50.58]] 13:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== Which picture should we use for the comic ==
The current picture shown is not relevant. That is only shown to web crawlers that pick new images up. Does anyone have a picture of the very first match? Not sure that is relevant either. Anything in between could be used. like this:
[[File:2131_Emojidome_example.png]]
--[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:43, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
:I’m assuming there’ll be a picture at the end. Show that when it finishes. [[User:Netherin5|“That Guy from the Netherlands”]] ([[User talk:Netherin5|talk]]) 13:53, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
::I added the current picture originally as a temporary solution since the bot didn't upload one. No one commented on the image so I kept it though I considered using something like this: [[File:emojidome_blank.png|400px]]
::--[[User:Asdf|Asdf]] ([[User talk:Asdf|talk]]) 14:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Right now, for me at least, the comic shows [https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/emojidome.png this image] with the hover-text "Thank you to the xkcd April 1st volunteers/commentators, including @Chromakode, Kevin, @Aiiane, Patrick, Kat, Reuven, @cotrone, @bstaffin, @zigdon, schwal, Stereo, and everyone who voted!" Just another option, though that image doesn't explain the comic set-out during the competition. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.133.84|172.68.133.84]] 19:12, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
:Yes for sure we should use that now. I should have thought of that. Can see it has already been uploaded, but it takes long time, hours, from these pictures have been changed to the change can be seen ion the site. I have no idea why, but have experienced it several times, so later today the final picture should be ready. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 18:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
::If we do that, we should add example pictures in the explanation of what it actually looked like during the competition. I vote for yours, Kynde. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.133.84|172.68.133.84]] 19:11, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
:::I added Kynde's image in the "How it worked" section as it is useful for people who missed the competition. --[[User:Asdf|Asdf]] ([[User talk:Asdf|talk]]) 19:22, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
::::Great, I also added it to the transcript section and transcribed the dynamic part of the image. As well as the final image, which is not on-line and added the error image we had to begin at the bottom of the transcript and kept that transcript as well. Tanscript is more or less done I think.--[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 21:29, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== References and jokes in the commentary ==
Should we start explaining some of the robot announcer's commentary lines? Some of them are clear references to things. For example, the "Kickpuncher vs. Punchkicker" line is a reference to Community (Kickpuncher is a character in an in-universe film series, and Punchkicker is one of the characters' OC based on it.)
:Maybe make extra pages like has been done for several of the previous years huge comics, especially April Fools' comics. And yes it would be interesting to explain them... But that is a huge job. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 13:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== Errors ==
There’s a mistake in the bracket, the genome won but is grayed out [[User:Netherin5|“That Guy from the Netherlands”]] ([[User talk:Netherin5|talk]]) 13:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
:Same with stars vs flying saucer --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 13:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
::The genome has been corrected, but not the stars. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 13:48, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
:::Yeah - stars is currently duelling volcano - but the bracket shows that stars was eliminated by monorail. This kinda suggests that the bracket is being manually generated! [[User:SteveBaker|SteveBaker]] ([[User talk:SteveBaker|talk]]) 13:59, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Speaking of errors, hearts no longer show up on mobile. [[User:Netherin5|“That Guy from the Netherlands”]] ([[User talk:Netherin5|talk]]) 14:31, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
:I think that was intentional, as, at least in my experience, the comic was a massive battery hit. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.4|108.162.241.4]] 17:11, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Disappointed no one thought to get the egg to at least the second round. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.142|162.158.255.142]] 15:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

: Many of the rounds were incredibly close - even the final was won by just a couple of percent. It was rare for there to be an overwhelming majority on either side. But it's incredible that 1,393,048 votes were cast in the final...given that all those people had to be there over just the 26 minute voting timeslot. I presume explainxkcd was taken down by overwhelming traffic? [[User:SteveBaker|SteveBaker]] ([[User talk:SteveBaker|talk]]) 16:44, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Why are brackets relevent to this time of year.
The FA Cup has reached the semi-final, the Champions League and UEFA have reached the qarter finals. The European Rugby Champions Cup and European Challenge have reached the semi-finals. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 17:02, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
:March Madness is under way, he has referenced this before, it is in the explanation. Do not post at the top but at the bottom, for continuity. I moved your post down here where it belonged --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 21:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

So it is to do with boxing hares.

In the mentioning of eggplant and peach, peaches represent butts, not the female sex organs. At least that is the far more common usage, including but not limited to the gay community. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/peach-emoji-%F0%9F%8D%91
[[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.76|172.68.54.76]] 16:50, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

== Stuffing ==

Did anyone else noticed these comments :
<blockquote>
*Honeybees vs. colony collapse disorder
*I’m looking at the totals, and this one is extremely close.
*🦠 fans need to click more and faster!
*I mean, 🐝 fans need to keep clicking!
*Fun fact: You can click more than once, although if you click too much it ignores you.
*No! Save the bees!
</blockquote>
I'm quite curious as to how many people did those 1.4 million clicks in final ! --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.226.131|172.69.226.131]] 11:43, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

== random object battles in popular culture! ==
Hee hee! All I could think of during this was the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n1YjN6z-7Q old Laurie Anderson recording about which thing was more macho] [[User:Jonwchgo|Jonwchgo]] ([[User talk:Jonwchgo|talk]]) 14:19, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

2132: Percentage Styles

2019-04-03T16:13:26Z

Arachrah:

{{comic
| number = 2132
| date = April 3, 2019
| title = Percentage Styles
| image = percentage_styles.png
| titletext = In a tribute to classical Latin, I started pronouncing it 'per-kent.' Eventually my friends had to resort to spritzing me with a water bottle like a cat to train me out of it.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a Classicist. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

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

{{comic discussion}}

Talk:2131: Emojidome

2019-04-02T17:02:16Z

Arachrah:

Why are brackets relevent to this time of year.
The FA Cup has reached the semi-final, the Champions League and UEFA have reached the qarter finals. The European Rugby Champions Cup and European Challenge have reached the semi-finals. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 17:02, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I've checked the network tab and console - nothing really seems to happen when you vote, which may be something we want to put on the explanation tomorrow - Myxoh

I suspect the real april fools joke is going to come on Wednesday when xkdc posts an app showing us our psychological profiles that they are now selling to marketing companies after data-mining our emotional preferences to marketing firms - Nosajimiki

@Nosajimiki: psychological profiles of xkcd fans. That might be some interesting marketing. - 5Cincinatus

@Myxoh: I came here to see if anyone else had noticed this! But, I do also see a websocket connection to emojidome.xkcd.com, I bet it's counting votes that way.

There is a websocket connection. A message is sent every time you vote. It looks like there are also status update messages every second (saying which emoji currently has exactly how many votes, i suspect this changes the amount of hearts that show up), and "bracket start" messages every so often. The bracket start message seems to contain hundreds of upcoming emoji pairs. Edit: a bracket start is sent at the start of every match (so every ~30 seconds). It also contains logs of which messages to show for previous matches, and which emoji are currently battling.[[Special:Contributions/172.69.138.10|172.69.138.10]] 16:30, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

There seems to be nothing stopping me from clicking multiple times. Do you think it actually counts it all those times? Can I click-spam to say "this is much better"? [[User:Fabian42|Fabian42]] ([[User talk:Fabian42|talk]]) 16:48, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:Randall just confirmed that you can vote multiple times, although if you click too fasr you get rate limited. (*warning: generic ip address assigned to phone data.*) [[Special:Contributions/172.69.70.47|172.69.70.47]] 22:35, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:Where did he confirm that? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.93.105|162.158.93.105]] 10:44, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Well this is fun. Look like there are 512 symbols, meaning 256 first-round contests. The first round would take (at 38 seconds / round) ~2.7 hours. The remaining rounds, from an estimate of geometric progression, would just under double this, meaning this comic will run for ~ 5 hours until we have our winner... ~alexandicity [[Special:Contributions/172.69.226.177|172.69.226.177]] 16:51, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Did he just add a scroll bar to the previous matches? I didn't notice it earlier [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.148|162.158.255.148]] 18:17, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:Nope, you were able to scroll before, too. At least about 2 hours ago. [[User:Fabian42|Fabian42]] ([[User talk:Fabian42|talk]]) 18:20, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

While some of the recaps of past battles are generic (taco vs sandwich: "One for the history books"), many seem to be specifically written for the battle (light bulb vs candle: "Some would argue that this one was settled in the 1800s"). I wonder if/how much this will continue into round 2.

Round two has just begun, and the timeout has been bumped to 60 seconds. --[[User:Anarcat|Anarcat]] ([[User talk:Anarcat|talk]]) 18:41, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:If that trend continues, the full competition will take pretty close to 24 hours. [[User:Fabian42|Fabian42]] ([[User talk:Fabian42|talk]]) 18:45, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:It looks like it's 1:14/round, which is double what the time was in round one. Will round three be 2:28? 1:51?
::It's just over 1:15/round from the history JSON (plus some hundredths of a second, but it appears 1:15 is the intent)
:::Hadn't looked there. Round one concluded at 18:39:20-ish, 9560 seconds from 16:00:00. At 256 battles, that's 37.34 seconds/battle. However, it looks like the first battle ended at 15:59:57, which would add about 40 seconds, 9600 seconds/256=37.5 seconds exactly. Doubling for round 2 gives 75 seconds.
::2 minutes 30 seconds per battle now. Looks like each round will be 2 hours 40 minutes long.
:: Well it is after 5:00 PST and round 4 just started - and this thing is at exactly 5 minutes a round - which means another 160 minutes for the round. Will see in 2 hours and 40 minutes if the times go up to minutes. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.65|172.69.33.65]] 00:25, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

And while the match-ups winners are typically colored, and underlined, the losers are endgame grey.

Has anyone determined if multiple-voting is actually counted? For me at least the vote button fades back to gray after I click it, which implies you can/should click it again, but that may not actually be processed. We might add a clarification about that to the explanation. [[User:Jerodast|- jerodast]] ([[User talk:Jerodast|talk]]) 19:01, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: A reddit user on the r/xkcd thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/b84at1/xkcd_2131_emojidome_script_src2131comicjs/) claims to have attempted "vote stuffing via the console" with no noticeable change in vote totals. So it looks like it may be sending it client-side, but only counting the vote once server-side --l

::Just few minutes ago there was message in "fun facts" that you can click multiple times, although it's not counted if you click too many times (or something like that). I guess that vote stuffing was too much. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 22:34, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

It would appear that we are supposed to believe the commentary is live, and unscripted:
" {"This one is a true test of the audience today.",
"Just to stress this again. Live commentary, folks. Completely unscripted and coming in hot.} "--[[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.173|162.158.79.173]] 19:20, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
:It's clearly live because the result of a previous round is affecting the next round's commentary - and the combinatorial explosion would prohibit that from being remotely plausible. We're watching live comedy here! [[User:SteveBaker|SteveBaker]] ([[User talk:SteveBaker|talk]]) 19:30, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: On the dog vs. wolf, he said "Again, we are getting a lot of questions on this today. This is live commentary, folks." Proof I guess. HI RANDALL! [[Special:Contributions/172.68.189.241|172.68.189.241]] 19:31, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

Is there really anything we can put for the transcript? [[Special:Contributions/172.68.189.241|172.68.189.241]] 19:25, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: We can go into the socket data and pull out the commentary for each matchup. -- [[User:Bobson|Bobson]] ([[User talk:Bobson|talk]]) 04:05, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Any ideas on how the commentary is done? It seems to sort of match the emojis.
[[User:Svízel přítula|Svízel přítula]] ([[User talk:Svízel přítula|talk]]) 19:31, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: It seems that Randall is commentating this live, as he periodically says it's live in the robot commentator text. See above. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.189.241|172.68.189.241]] 19:36, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
::Perhaps not "live" as each round 2 matchup was known 160 minutes before it was voted on. He could comment on the battle itself, and/or provide a comment if one or the other combatant won. I think he's a couple hours ahead of us.
::: I dunno. Whenever a new battle starts, there is a default message, that is soon replaced by a more pertinent message. That seems to suggest that he's doing it on the fly. [[User:9yz|9yz]] ([[User talk:9yz|talk]]) 20:03, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
::::If that's live, Randall, and if you see this, give us a shout-out as proof. -Brent
::::: Just because it ''says'' it's live, doesn't mean that it really is. It's also possible that the actual clicks are being ignored and the reported numbers are all pre-generated. Much less likely than that it's actually counting and Randall is inserting commentary live (with default messages when he doesn't), but possible. -- [[User:Bobson|Bobson]] ([[User talk:Bobson|talk]]) 12:50, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

This is a quick piece of python to see the json results (and commentary):
<nowiki>import json, urllib.request
d = json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen("https://emojidome.xkcd.com/2131/socket ").read().decode('utf-8'))
for g in d['bracket']['played'][0]:
c1, c2 = g['game']
print(f"{c1['score']} {c1['competitor']}-{c2['competitor']} {c2['score']}")</nowiki>
[[User:Tammo80|Tammo80]] ([[User talk:Tammo80|talk]]) 19:42, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: or if you want to see the vote count live in browser: https://emojidome.playcode.io/ -Andy 22:01, April 2019
:: Awesome, thank you [[User:9yz|9yz]] ([[User talk:9yz|talk]]) 20:23, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

There must be some kind of manipulation going on with the votes. There is NO WAY the poop emoji would lose to the skull emoji in round two. It was my guess for the winner >:( [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.138|162.158.106.138]] 20:50, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
: And the 100 emoji just lost to the shiny heart. :(

Well, there's the comment "How do you know for sure that your votes are doing anything?". For my side because every single one I voted for lost so far. Well, I'm not a lucky charm, apparently... [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.11|141.101.104.11]] 10:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

The second round bracket was released, but is hidden behind the bottom nav buttons: https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_256.png --[[User:Thefallen138|Thefallen138]] ([[User talk:Thefallen138|talk]]) 20:56, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

And now the third round has begun. Strangely, the bracket is not visible yet: https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_128.png. The delay has been bump to something above two minutes as well. --[[User:Anarcat|Anarcat]] ([[User talk:Anarcat|talk]]) 21:21, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

: It's here https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_round_3.png [[Special:Contributions/162.158.107.79|162.158.107.79]] 21:41, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

:: It seems to be he overwrote round_3.png with round_4.png (at least its the same picture)

Both the Emojidome and counter were brought together in iframes https://ducakedhare.co.uk/emojidome.html [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.17|141.101.99.17]] 23:39, 1 April 2019 (UTC)taikedz

Anyone have an IRC room for Emojidome discussion? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.146.10|162.158.146.10]]

So disappointed he left out the egg plant... :D --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Despite Spaaaaaaaaace winning the battle 🌌 (36285) vs 🚝 (17405), the current bracket chart https://xkcd.com/2131/emojidome_bracket_round_3.png shows 🚝 as having won. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.242.13|108.162.242.13]] 13:23, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

What if the April Fools joke of the whole bracket is that the "Vote" buttons were actually switched and all the losers are actually the winners??? [[Special:Contributions/172.68.59.84|172.68.59.84]] 15:24, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== "Emoji" or "emojis" as the plural? ==

Due to the nature of the Japanese language, "emoji" is technically both the plural and the singular - however, the improper form "emojis" is used more as a plural frequently nowadays among English speakers. Which form should this explanation use? --[[User:Youforgotthisthing|Youforgotthisthing]] ([[User talk:Youforgotthisthing|talk]]) 22:27, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

The "friends in Australia" comment was made during the last round's wink vs upside down smile battle. This is probably a pun on how Australia is on the other side of the world from America; I don't think Randall was seriously saying he witnessed an influx of Australians inbound. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.82|108.162.219.82]] 00:47, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== Draws ==

What would happen if any of the fights resulted in a draw? (same number of votes for both)

Given the # of matchups, it's not actually that unlikely.

We should try to test this. Gotta keep Randall on his feet!

Pretty sure one early on resulted in a tie.

: The very first round was 0-0. I guess no one refreshed at exactly the right minute to see it. --[[User:Bobson|Bobson]] ([[User talk:Bobson|talk]]) 04:05, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

: Actually, Birthday Cake vs Cupcake was a tie at 3658:3658. Birthday Cake advanced. I wonder why? (from the socket: [{"score":3658,"competitor":"ðŸŽ‚"},{"score":3658,"competitor":"ðŸ§"}]) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.138|162.158.106.138]] 04:54, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== Emoji Fonts ==
Having an emoji font is required to see emoji displayed on sites such as http://srv-01.valo.media/ . If anybody else is looking for a way to display these, there's a good free emoji font available here:
https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-font
It includes a script to replace the default Windows emoji fonts to get them to display properly on windows. Unfortunately it's only black-and-white in chrome. If anybody knows any better options, please let me know!

: For Ubuntu Linux users: sudo apt install fonts-noto-color-emoji -- then restart Chrome/Firefox.
: [[User:SteveBaker|SteveBaker]] ([[User talk:SteveBaker|talk]]) 11:29, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== Commentary Transcript ==

I've written a script that pulls the commentary history and transforms it into a wiki table. It's up to date as of right now, and I'll run it again in the morning and one last time after the final round. If you have formatting suggestions, just put them here and I'll incorporate it when I regenerate the table. -- [[User:Bobson|Bobson]] ([[User talk:Bobson|talk]]) 04:58, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

: Wonderful, thank you! Could you perhaps make the winner bold (or underlined like in the comic)? -Andy

== Successful Ballot-stuffing? ==

As I type this, I'm watching owl blast past 180000 votes in the owl-octopus bout. That means that in about 10 minutes, owl has earned more votes than all the votes earned in the entirety of any other individual bout. I could be totally off-base, but that seems vaguely suspicious to me. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.214.82|162.158.214.82]] 05:28, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I concur: that is highly suspicious. Fortunately, nothing of importance is at stake here, even if you were really pulling for the octopus. At this moment, we're ±10 minutes into bee vs pineapple and nothing comparable has happened. It may be an isolated incident. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.144|162.158.106.144]] 05:50, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

I've seen enough hentai to...what? The *owl* has won? O RLY? I demand a recount! [[Special:Contributions/141.101.105.6|141.101.105.6]] 08:10, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

YOLO. You Obviously Like Owls. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.11|141.101.104.11]] 10:11, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

For the violin vs the curling stone ('classical vs house'), the stone was ahead, but in the last four minutes I spammed my discord server to vote and we just got it over the line. - fudgeforlife
: Rrrr. :angry face: I love curling, and of course I wanted the stone to win. With curling no-one complains if I fall asleep watching. But with classical music everyone complains... [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.89|141.101.104.89]] 12:49, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
: A similar thing happened for the "scared cat vs devil" bout - those two were consistently nearly tied until about T-10 minutes, whereupon the devil voting rate spiked and devil finished ~12000 votes ahead. The "cat vs hedgehog" bout was also similar - hedgehog had a consistent lead of ~1000 votes until about T-10 minutes, when the hedgehog voting rates spiked and hedgehog ended up finishing ~10000 votes ahead.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.214.28|162.158.214.28]] 14:39, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

What? It's possible the owl cheated? IT'S POSSIBLE OCTOPUS TOTALLY SHOULD HAVE WON IF THE MATCH WAS LEGITIMATE? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.75.226|162.158.75.226]] 12:02, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== Avocado quote citation ==

I'm not sure where to put this. The "I like avocados because they taste pretty good and also they come with a cool wood ball you get to keep" quote is from here: https://twitter.com/jitka/status/236240801926086656 . [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.41|172.69.33.41]] 07:15, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== How sure are we the voting is real ==
I'm no expert at all, but it there any way that the websites that shows the number of votes live etc. can test whether these votes are real, or something Randall has pre-programmed? Not that I would not believe he was willing to stay up for the duration of this day, but it is an April Fools' Day comic, so he is completely "allowed" to have decided him self who should win all matched and have made up the commentaries in advance. Yes it would take along time, but not longer than doing it on the fly. It could just be that joke on us, that our votes does nothing and we just see how Randall has decided the dome should end. Can anyone go in to this, and explain why it is as it is either way (for sure made up, for sure real or uncertain if real or fake)? (PS I dislike these sections in the commentaries, but there are already 6...) --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

It should be noted that Milky Way won over Maglev by a long shot, but the bracket shows otherwise. - Brent [[Special:Contributions/172.69.50.58|172.69.50.58]] 13:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== Which picture should we use for the comic ==
The current picture shown is not relevant. That is only shown to web crawlers that pick new images up. Does anyone have a picture of the very first match? Not sure that is relevant either. Anything in between could be used. like this:
[[File:2131_Emojidome_example.png]]
--[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 12:43, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
:I’m assuming there’ll be a picture at the end. Show that when it finishes. [[User:Netherin5|“That Guy from the Netherlands”]] ([[User talk:Netherin5|talk]]) 13:53, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
::I added the current picture originally as a temporary solution since the bot didn't upload one. No one commented on the image so I kept it though I considered using something like this: [[File:emojidome_blank.png]]
::[[User:Asdf|Asdf]] ([[User talk:Asdf|talk]]) 14:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== References and jokes in the commentary ==
Should we start explaining some of the robot announcer's commentary lines? Some of them are clear references to things. For example, the "Kickpuncher vs. Punchkicker" line is a reference to Community (Kickpuncher is a character in an in-universe film series, and Punchkicker is one of the characters' OC based on it.)
:Maybe make extra pages like has been done for several of the previous years huge comics, especially April Fools' comics. And yes it would be interesting to explain them... But that is a huge job. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 13:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

== Errors ==
There’s a mistake in the bracket, the genome won but is grayed out [[User:Netherin5|“That Guy from the Netherlands”]] ([[User talk:Netherin5|talk]]) 13:14, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
:Same with stars vs flying saucer --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 13:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
::The genome has been corrected, but not the stars. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 13:48, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
:::Yeah - stars is currently duelling volcano - but the bracket shows that stars was eliminated by monorail. This kinda suggests that the bracket is being manually generated! [[User:SteveBaker|SteveBaker]] ([[User talk:SteveBaker|talk]]) 13:59, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Speaking of errors, hearts no longer show up on mobile. [[User:Netherin5|“That Guy from the Netherlands”]] ([[User talk:Netherin5|talk]]) 14:31, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Disappointed no one thought to get the egg to at least the second round. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.142|162.158.255.142]] 15:27, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

: Many of the rounds were incredibly close - even the final was won by just a couple of percent. It was rare for there to be an overwhelming majority on either side. But it's incredible that 1,393,048 votes were cast in the final...given that all those people had to be there over just the 26 minute voting timeslot. I presume explainxkcd was taken down by overwhelming traffic? [[User:SteveBaker|SteveBaker]] ([[User talk:SteveBaker|talk]]) 16:44, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

2130: Industry Nicknames

2019-03-29T15:35:06Z

Arachrah: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2130
| date = March 29, 2019
| title = Industry Nicknames
| image = industry_nicknames.png
| titletext = As far as "being in the pocket of Big Egg" goes, I think the real threat is Chansey.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a Big Bird. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

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

{{comic discussion}}

2128: New Robot

2019-03-25T16:16:15Z

Arachrah:

{{comic
| number = 2128
| date = March 25, 2019
| title = New Robot
| image = new_robot.png
| titletext = "Some worry that we'll soon have a surplus of search and rescue robots, compared to the number of actual people in situations requiring search and rescue. That's where our other robot project comes in..."
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a "Search and Rescue" Robot. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

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

{{comic discussion}}

Talk:2108: Carbonated Beverage Language Map

2019-02-07T13:20:16Z

Arachrah:

I'm wondering what the joke behind the weird shapes of "softie" and "punch" are about. [[User:Cgrimes85|Cgrimes85]] ([[User talk:Cgrimes85|talk]]) 17:22, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
:The shapes could easily be random. But at first glance the "softie" shape vaguely represents areas where Mormons represent more than 50% of the population. [[User:Syberiyxx|Syberiyxx]] ([[User talk:Syberiyxx|talk]]) 19:07, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
::I fixed the explanation with the correct interpretation of the two shapes. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 21:27, 6 February 2019 (UTC)
::My additions had disappeared, but it looks to have been by accident, and Shamino put them back. Thanks! In case it disappears again for whatever reason, on the map Punch is literally punching Softie. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 22:10, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

"Bubbler" is definitely a reference to people in Rhode Island calling drinking fountains "bubblers".[[User:Cgrimes85|Cgrimes85]] ([[User talk:Cgrimes85|talk]]) 17:23, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

:::[https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/51af5dc7ecad04c04600000c-750-533.png Bubbler reference, Joshua Katz], and [https://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_103.html its data]

:The “bubbler” term is used in some areas of Wisconsin, too; I wonder how that happened. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.59.108|172.68.59.108]] 17:31, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

::Interesting. I didn't know that. In this case though, the map is pointing directly at RI. [[User:Cgrimes85|Cgrimes85]] ([[User talk:Cgrimes85|talk]]) 17:40, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

:::I was devastated to see that 'bubbler' had not been given to eastern WI. I demand a recount!--[[Special:Contributions/162.158.214.10|162.158.214.10]] 18:47, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

:I was surprised to see 'bubbler' avoided Boston. Living in the suburbs of Boston, which are in the 'bubbler' area, we always called them 'water fountains', but we talked about how people in downtown Boston would say 'bubblah' instead, which somebody from the city verified once. Later I moved to the Harvard/Cambridge area (is that Randall's area?) and people seemed to say 'water fountain' to me, although I might not have noticed, or maybe they were all college kid types, dunno. Maybe the point is that in the highlighted area, people weirdly _don't_ refer to water fountains as bubblers, and the reason for this is that it is how soda/pop is referred to. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.62.10|172.69.62.10]] 23:50, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

:Growing up in the New York metropolitan area in the 70's, my family sometimes used the term "bubbler", but only to refer to those drinking fountains where the water is projected straight up. We never used it for the more common kind where the water is projected at an angle. [[User:Shamino|Shamino]] ([[User talk:Shamino|talk]]) 21:37, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Clearly a parody of this map: http://www.popvssoda.com/countystats/total-county.html
The isolated regions surrounding Atlanta and the Twin Cities are probably a reference to the similar pattern around St. Louis in the real map. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.78.40|172.68.78.40]] 17:17, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Oh man, this one is gonna have to be a table. Bring in the guy who knows how to make tables. I think it was the user Dgbrt. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.65.168|172.68.65.168]] 18:28, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

I've heard Americans have 50 different words for "soda" [[Special:Contributions/172.68.58.251|172.68.58.251]] 20:26, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Re: Medicine - People in Detroit and Buffalo often use Ginger Ale, especially Vernor's, medicinally. Whenever I had an upset stomach growing up, it was the preferred beverage. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.75.136|162.158.75.136]] 20:54, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure "crypto" is a joke on cryptocurrency craze, not cryptography or any other crypto-thing. [[Special:Contributions/198.41.242.46|198.41.242.46]] 21:21, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

"True water" could be a reference to the [https://sf.eater.com/2018/1/4/16850592/what-is-raw-water-live-water-san-francisco-rainbow-grocery "raw water"] (aka untreated water) thing that went through the SF Bay Area in 2018.[[Special:Contributions/172.69.218.10|172.69.218.10]] 21:51, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Re: Medicine - Sodas started out as medicines made by pharmacists. ([https://www.medicalbag.com/grey-matter/the-origins-of-soda/article/472378/| first reference I found]) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.146.10|162.158.146.10]] 22:41, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

On "fluid": the term "fluid" can refer to liquids and gasses both, so perhaps it's a deliberate reference to the fact that carbonated beverages contain both liquid and (rapidly decompressing) gas?

I doubt that "True Water" is a reference to True Blood. Randall doesn't exactly seem like a vampire guy to me. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.189.241|172.68.189.241]] 00:50, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

When I saw "Glug" I immediately thought it could be a reference to the Squidbillies although it is an alcoholic drink and that section is in Florida instead of Georgia. [[User:Ansarya|Ansarya]] ([[User talk:Ansarya|talk]]) 01:08, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

The Söde section is just south of Seattle and so is probably a reference to the SoDo section of Seattle (which was also parodied on South Park's 19th season as SodoSopa) Should I add these to the explanation? [[User:Ansarya|Ansarya]] ([[User talk:Ansarya|talk]]) 02:13, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

I'm wondering if the term "Hydro" in Upstate NY bordering Canada is a play on the common Canadian use of "Hydro" to mean electricity [[User:B0xertw1n|B0xertw1n]] ([[User talk:B0xertw1n|talk]]) 03:15, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

I know meltwater is used as a term for water from melted glaciers, icebergs or just ice and snow in general. I have heard Melt used to refer to glacier water in specific twice in Canada. I also know people ride boats up to icebergs just to grab some ice for a drink. Considering the region, I wouldn't be surprised if both Melt and Boat Drink refer to that. [[User:D|D]] ([[User talk:D|talk]]) 05:22, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

I wonder why he used five colors for the map, given the four color theorem I would never be able to resist using four only for maps like this.

There were five ingredients in punch but that is tenuous.

2103: Midcontinent Rift System

2019-01-25T14:53:04Z

Arachrah:

{{comic
| number = 2103
| date = January 25, 2019
| title = Midcontinent Rift System
| image = midcontinent_rift_system.png
| titletext = The best wedge issue is an actual wedge.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a Midcontinental Rift. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

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

{{comic discussion}}

Talk:2087: Rocket Launch

2018-12-19T16:44:28Z

Arachrah:

I had to fight the urge to type Care Bare [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]])

2087: Rocket Launch

2018-12-19T16:43:52Z

Arachrah:

{{comic
| number = 2087
| date = December 19, 2018
| title = Rocket Launch
| image = rocket_launch.png
| titletext = NASA tries to coordinate launch timing with the Care Bears' cloud castle, but unfortunately sometimes collisions with stray Care Bears are unavoidable, so they just try to make the fairings sturdy and hope for a glancing impact.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a CARE BEAR. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

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

{{comic discussion}}

2084: FDR

2018-12-12T15:08:16Z

Arachrah: /* Explanation */ removed peacock words - I am aware of the speach but cannot quote more than one line.

{{comic
| number = 2084
| date = December 12, 2018
| title = FDR
| image = fdr.png
| titletext = June 21st, 365, the date of the big Mediterranean earthquake and tsunami, lived in infamy for a few centuries before fading. Maybe the trick is a catchy rhyme; the '5th of November' thing is still going strong over 400 years later.
}}

==Explanation==

The United States Naval base at Pearl Harbor was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor attacked in 1941], and is credited with starting the United States' involvement in World War II. The then US president, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt Franklin D. Roosevelt], issued a speech to the American people which begins with the line "December 7th, 1941. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infamy_Speech A date which will live in infamy...]". Whenever Randall writes "December" he feels compelled to complete the line, a mistake which is visible in this comic.

The title text refers to the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/365_Crete_earthquake 365 Crete earthquake], a historical earthquake with a magnitude of at least 8.0 which caused widespread destruction across the Eastern Mediterranean; and to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_Night Guy Fawkes Night], the anniversary of the famous failed attempt to bomb Parliment on the night of November 5th, 1605. The later event is immortalized in the rhyme "remember remember, the fifth of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot", the former event less so.
The Mediterranean earthquake and tsunami destroyed the mycenan civilisation and possibly led to the myth of atlantis.

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

{{comic discussion}}