explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

3143: Question Mark

2025-10-03T19:47:03Z

DanShock: /* Transcript */ The non-standard spelling is in the actual comic.

{{comic
| number = 3143
| date = September 17, 2025
| title = Question Mark
| image = question_mark_2x.png
| imagesize = 380x463px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = Although now people will realize three-per-em space that all this time I've been using weird medium mathematical space whitespace characters in my hair space hair space hair space speech dot dot dot...
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|This page was created by a BOT TIRONIAN ET ⹒ MULTIPLE HUMANS PERIOD. Don apostrophe ' t remove this notice too soon period.}}

In colloquial English, the phrase "{{wiktionary|question_mark#Particle|question mark}}" is sometimes added to the end of a statement to give an exaggerated or emphasized impression of its uncertainty, as if the question mark in a written representation of the utterance should be spoken aloud instead of remaining implicit in the {{w|Intonation (linguistics)#English|rising intonation}}. This may be to reinforce true questions in dialects that exhibit a {{w|high rising terminal}} even for normal statements, to signal that a sentence is meant to be interrogative despite not following the typical structure of a question, or even just for effect. Here, the phrase “[it is] maybe even the greatest movie of all time” is structured like a standard declaration of fact, and so verbalizing the question mark helps clarify that the statement is made in order to request a (hoped for) confirmation, or at least acquiescence.

Saying "question mark" appears to be a relatively new phenomenon, at least in terms of gaining meaningful adoption, and such linguistic novelties can often cause irritation or discomfort among those outside of their usage groups. When [[Hairy]] does this, [[Cueball]] feels compelled to respond by doing the same with other punctuation marks, and even other matters of formatting, such as typographical emphasis, a paragraph break, and whitespace. Whether he does this to try to fit in, or as a form of 'revenge' for a perceived linguistic abuse, is unclear.

Generally, speaking punctuation and formatting out loud is considered strange, though there are some forms of it that are accepted, and it is possible that the same will become true of "question mark" over time. Sometimes the word "period" (US English) or "full-stop" (British, Irish and Commonwealth English) is spoken or written as a syntactic tail to the end of a sentence, just before the nominally unspoken punctuation of the same name (although often more in the context of an exclamation), to declare that there can be no dispute nor further discussion about what is being stated. An example might be, "That's the end of the matter. We're leaving Friday, period." Other examples would be "asterisk", indicating the statement is not absolute and has caveats, such as "You should buy a ticket and see that movie - asterisk [it's kind of expensive though]", while a feeling of incompleteness or foreboding is sometimes evoked by speaking the phrase "dot dot dot" at the end of a sentence, reflecting the use of an ellipsis to indicate an ominous unwritten continuation.

Cueball mentions the film ''{{w|Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle}},'' illustrating the common use of italics to indicate titles of films (as well as other works, including books, albums and series, depending on the stylebook used) and colons to separate subtitles from titles. From the context, Hairy and Cueball had strong but opposite opinions about the merits of this film.

The title text reads, "Although now people will realize three-per-em space that all this time I've been using weird medium mathematical space whitespace characters in my hair space hair space hair space speech dot dot dot...". Randall uses, and {{tvtropes|ReadingTheStageDirectionsOutLoud|vocalizes}}, three different whitespace characters in this statement. Specifically, the three-per-em space (U+2004), the medium mathematical space (U+205F), and the hair space (U+200A). Normally they'd be used for typesetting mathematical formulae and in {{w|microtypography}}, without any expected audible distinction or meaning beyond text-placement and alignment in printed media. The three spaces are all pretty close in width to ordinary inter-word white space, making it unlikely anyone would notice them without Randall explicitly naming them in the text.

Translated, it looks like:
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Characters in title text
| "Although now people will realize that all this time I’ve been using weird whitespace characters in my   speech..."
|-
! Ordinary whitespace
| "Although now people will realize that all this time I’ve been using weird whitespace characters in my speech..."
|}

Pronouncing punctuation used to be a staple of {{w|Dictation (exercise)|dictation}}, especially in the 20th century, when secretaries taking dictation to type letters were more commonplace. The expression "…, {{wiktionary|period#Interjection|period}}" or "…, {{wiktionary|full stop#Interjection|full stop}}", taken to mean "…and that's final", originates from this usage.{{acn}} Since Cueball is pronouncing all other punctuation marks as well, his final "period" denotes only the mark and not the common expression, especially since the latter would usually require mention of the comma before and then an ''additional'' spoken "period" after. Dictated punctuation is still used today in some software that supports {{w|speech recognition}} for text entry, such as [https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/spoken-punctuation Google Docs] and many smartphone keyboards' text-to-speech functions, so a person can send a text message with the precise punctuation intended.

The Kooblen, in Phil Foglio's Buck Godot setting, [https://web.archive.org/web/20150428205448/http://www.airshipentertainment.com/buckcomic.php?date=20070125 speak in this way] to express punctuation.

See (and hear) also Victor Borge's [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIf3IfHCoiE "Phonetic Punctuation"] sketch in its various forms, in which a variety of vocal sounds are used to make punctuation explicit.

==Transcript==

:[Hairy and Cueball are both walking to the right.]
:Hairy: That movie was so good. Maybe even the greatest movie of all time question mark?
:Cueball: Yeah comma, but you said that about italics ''Charlie's Angels Colon: Full Throttle'' period. Paragraph break.
:Cueball: I question your judgement period.
:[Caption below the panel:]
:When people say "question mark" out loud as a rhetorical device, it always makes me want to say my other punctuation and formatting too.

{{comic discussion}}<noinclude>
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Movies]]

Talk:2793: Garden Path Sentence

2023-06-26T15:15:13Z

DanShock:

The bot didn't upload the most recent comic so I tried to do it myself, but I think I screwed it up :([[User:Szeth Pancakes|Szeth Pancakes]] ([[User talk:Szeth Pancakes|talk]]) 18:31, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

I think the term "bird strikes" should be interpreted as a plural noun, given the two Xs on the map. Something like "After bird strikes, judge ... overturned but rights and lands safely" [[Special:Contributions/172.69.59.8|172.69.59.8]] 20:30, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
: Or it could be the bird strikes judge... You know, the one who was the judge in an important and well-known "bird strikes" case, possibly environmental, possibly an insurance scam case or something.[[User:Thisfox|Thisfox]] ([[User talk:Thisfox|talk]]) 21:46, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't think the current interpretation is wrong, but "olive garden" could be the lower-case-when-not-a-comics-headline descriptor for, you know, an actual garden of olive trees. That makes more sense when referring to green walkways. [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 20:33, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Can someone also parse the alt-text? I still can't figure it out. -[[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.176|162.158.154.176]] 20:39, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
:I think it's saying the arboretum owner (who is appealing the case) is himself appealing. I'm still having trouble with the grounds grounds portion though. :([[User:*anonymouse*|*anonymouse*]] ([[User talk:*anonymouse*|talk]]) 20:48, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
::He was ''appealing'' the lawsuit on the ''grounds'' that the ''grounds'' were ''appealing'' [[User:Ahecht|Ahecht]] ([[User talk:Ahecht|talk]]) 22:06, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Going by the picture I think the "bird" that struck the judge may be the plane.
:Disagree, "{{w|bird strike}}" is a term used for an incident where a bird strikes a vehicle, usually a plane. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.155|172.70.211.155]] 20:50, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
:But all these conflicting interpretations proves Randall's point that this is a garden path sentence :) [[User:Natg19|Natg19]] ([[User talk:Natg19|talk]]) 20:52, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

[[User:*anonymouse*|*anonymouse*]] please reconsider your edits; before them, I think I understood the meaning, but your supposed clarification messed it up :( the paragraph you removed seemed more plausible to me, and it also contained some useful wiki links to {{w|bird strike}} and {{w|vacated judgement}}. [[User:Torzsmokus|Torzsmokus]] ([[User talk:Torzsmokus|talk]]) 20:47, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

As I understood it, birds hit the plane piloted by the judge that gave the Olive Garden path sentence, overturning it (!!!), but he righted it and managed to land. [[User:J Petry|J Petry]] ([[User talk:J Petry|talk]]) 20:49, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

A [[wikipedia:bird strike]] is an aviation thing. Given the airplane in the photo and the path to what appears to be runways, I think that these are the bird strikes it's referring to. "Rights and lands safely" also would refer to the judge piloting an airplane. "Overturned" thus should also refer to the flight, but I would expect it to be something like "overturns", not "overturned", given "rights and lands". Thus: "After bird strikes, the judge who ordered the sentence overturned in the olive garden path case, his plane overturned, but rights the aircraft and lands it safely." [[User:SheeEttin|SheeEttin]] ([[User talk:SheeEttin|talk]]) 20:53, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

I see what you're saying, and I think you're right. After (multiple) bird strikes the (plane being flown by the judge) overturned but was able to right itself. :([[User:*anonymouse*|*anonymouse*]] ([[User talk:*anonymouse*|talk]]) 20:57, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

I feel certain that "olive" refers to the shade of green, because otherwise why specify "green" walkways? This makes "Olive Garden" a red herring, which seems likely. -- [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.244|108.162.245.244]] 21:01, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

:I disagree. I read "olive garden" as a literal garden of olive trees. Randall is exploiting our familiarity with the Olive Garden restaurant to construct the sentence. The path would be a footpath or something through this garden. What makes the walkways green? No idea, maybe they're the kind that are actually solar panels. [[User:SheeEttin|SheeEttin]] ([[User talk:SheeEttin|talk]]) 22:10, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

:: I would interpret "green walkway" as meaning a picturesque walkway going through a forest, public gardens, or similar, which fits in with the olive trees. Searching for the term on Wikipedia suggests this expression is more commonly used in England than in the US. [[User:Hmj|Hmj]] ([[User talk:Hmj|talk]]) 05:29, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

::: As an American, I assumed exactly the same meaning for "green walkway". I see no reason to interpret "olive" as a color in this comic. The primary meaning of "olive garden path" is definitely a path within a garden where olives are grown. The idea of "olive" referring to the color green could be mentioned as a possible alternative explanation but should not be the primary one. [[User:CarLuva|CarLuva]] ([[User talk:CarLuva|talk]]) 13:43, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

I still don't like "overturned but rights and lands" - why would the first verb be in the past tense and the others present tense, if they are describing events that happened within a very short time of each other? Wouldn't a headline be entirely in the present tense? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.102|162.158.159.102]] 05:10, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
: Because it had to overturn first (in the past) before it could right and land. It's a valid use of tense, using the past tense helps establish the sequence of events. Simpler sentences only use 3 tenses: past, present, and future, so in such a sentence, since none of the three events are in the future, two must share a tense. It could also have been "overturned, righted, and lands safely.", with two being past tense and the last being present. Getting less simple would be "had overturned, then righted so it lands safely", to give each term its own tense. Alternatively, because they're separate parts of the sentence: "Overturned" is that a court case sentence was overturned, which was further in the past, before this flight, but the most current event - that the judge rights the plane and lands the plane - is being listed in present tense, as the most current thing to happen. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 07:13, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

: This bothers me as well, but I don't see a way around it. It's possible that the case was "the case of the green walkways vacated," but then we need a valid parsing of "After bird strikes judge who ordered sentence overturned but rights and lands safely." Failing that, I'm prepared to conclude that the mixed case is either an error or a deliberate fudging of the norm for the sake of making it more confusing. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.147.140|172.71.147.140]] 18:52, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

: I am convinced that "overturned" is referring to the case, and "vacated" is referring to the walkways. That keeps the verb tense for the pilot/judge consistent: "rights" and "lands". The judge ordered the "olive garden path" sentence be overturned in the "case of green walkways vacated". In other words, the walkways were vacated, which led to an "olive garden path sentence", and that sentence was overturned, and the judge/pilot "rights and lands" the plane safely. Verb tense is one of the few hints on how to parse something so convoluted, and there's no better argument I can see for the current interpretation above that applies "overturned" to the plane itself. So, the plane was not overturned, but did need to be righted. [[User:DanShock|DanShock]] ([[User talk:DanShock|talk]]) 15:15, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

This also suggests the plane was overturned by some external factor, rather than just overturning by itself.

I had understood that an actual flying animal - a bird - bounced off the judge's head - in present tense, the bird strikes the judge - which made it flip over, but it managed to right itself and properly land, as if that's important. I honestly feel like this interpretation of "bird" makes more sense than an airplane being involved. Also that it adds humour, since how is the bird important enough to care that it recovered, and care ENOUGH that it should be mentioned in the headline. :) (I hadn't gotten around to trying to figure out the rest, felt too difficult until I read the concept of a garden path sentence) [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 07:03, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
: Check that, JUST noticed the PICTURE of a judge standing in front of a plane, LOL! [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 15:29, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

I can't help but feel a better (worse?) sentence would be "After bird strikes judge who ordered olive garden path sentence in case of emergency exits vacated overturned but rights and lands safely", playing off familiarity with the phrase "in case of emergency" and the fact that "exit" is both a verb and a noun. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.223|172.71.242.223]] 13:39, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm usually the one seeking explanation here. All the discussion above is actually the funny part because Garden Path sentences can't be properly parsed!

I think a useful addition to all the "the whole sentence could be" ideas, which could subsume all the "this bit could be rea as...", would be to do a table or header-list of how each sequential chain of words might be interpreted. Such as:
:... '''bird''': a dinosaur; '''bird strikes''': multiple {{w|Bird strike|aviation icidents}}; '''strikes''': something or someone impacting a target; '''strikes''': where an idea suddenly occured to a person; '''strikes judge''': a justice of the peace who a) adjudicated, or b) took part in, {{w|industrial action}}; '''Judge Who''': a person's name/honorific; '''who ordered olive garden path''': a possible question; '''ordered Olive''': commanded someone called Olive to do something; '''olive garden''': an area for growing {{w|Olive|Olea Europaea}} shrubs; '''garden path''': a trail or access through an aesthetically-designed space of cultivation; '''garden path sentence''': <ibid>; '''sentence in case''': a ruling made following a legal hearing; '''in case of''': indicates a conditional statement''; ...
Here squashed together (and many omissions made, even within that sub-chain), just to get the idea together. Perhaps, in table form, indexed by "(OPTIONAL)FOO <one or more adjacent words> (OPTIONAL)BAR" with something like "the FOO <undergoes an action of> some BAR", and add a reference to each (<placing of start-word>.<number of words>(<optional alpabetic index to distinguish exact overlaps of different distinctions>?), then a valid complete sentence (or composite partial section) can be described like "1.1 2.1 3.2b 5.2 7.1 8.1 9.3c 12...", or any another variation that a reader might want to then summarise/expand with a "plain English"/unambiguous 'translation'. And all existing work/exposition can be folded into this in a more structured and less randomly-conversational manner. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.47|162.158.74.47]] 19:50, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Newspaper headlines like that are fun. Best one so far: "Police stops speeding car with unsecured baby" [[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.161|172.68.50.161]] 07:29, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

Talk:2761: 1-to-1 Scale

2023-04-14T20:24:59Z

DanShock: correct MB unit conversion error

Really want an explanation for this one. [[User:JobbieJimmies|Melomaniac]] ([[User talk:JobbieJimmies|talk]]) 03:23, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

My comment got deleted by a bot!!! [[User:Unreliable Connection|2659: Unreliable Connection]] ([[User talk:Unreliable Connection|talk]]) 03:23, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:RIP... [[User:JobbieJimmies|Melomaniac]] ([[User talk:JobbieJimmies|talk]]) 03:25, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:No, UC, it just got overwritten by the 'bot, when it did its job and (re)created the whole initial state of the various pages to depict the new comic coming out. (Noting that you'd not set them all up fully/correctly.)
:That you had spotted it already and had ''just'' gotten in ahead of the 'bot clearly isn't something it was prepared to handle. But as someone spotting it can usually wait a short while for the 'bot to catch up, I don't think it's a problem. In fact, you could have just copied your old contributions into the now receptive page(s), with nary any comment. Too late now. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.101|172.70.90.101]] 03:44, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

:: This may have broken the next link on the previous page. --[[Special:Contributions/172.71.160.36|172.71.160.36]] 06:41, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

The lines represent the surfaces of the planets I think, so it's basically all the planets overlaid on top of each other. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.142.35|172.71.142.35]] 03:28, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

:Yup, I think it's what he meant - but I find it unlikely that the gas giants would have this clear cutoff of a "surface". [[Special:Contributions/162.158.189.241|162.158.189.241]] 03:34, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::If there is a gas - liquid phase transition (and I think at least the gas giants have them): Why not? OK, you could see "rain" as blurring a clear cutoff, but wouldn't that also apply to Earth, then?[[User:Tier666|Tier666]] ([[User talk:Tier666|talk]]) 08:04, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:::Gas giants' diameters are frequently defined at the average radius at which the atmosphere has a pressure of 1 bar (approximately equal to the pressure at sea level on Earth). There's not a physical edge there, like the boundary between the ground and the atmosphere on a rocky planet, but it is a reasonably well-defined (or, at least, define-able) measurement. FWIW, the pressure gradient is pretty high, and Jupiter's atmospheric pressure increases from 1 bar to 10 bar over about 100 km, which is about 0.1% of the radius, so it's fairly insensitive to the pressure you choose.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.139|162.158.158.139]] 16:20, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

I’d think the same citation as stands for ridiculously large would also cover larger than currently exists on earth, and his that citation is not in fact needed? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.174.186|162.158.174.186]] 06:53, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

:It seems like the gas-covered worlds are explicitly those with clearly cutoff "surfaces," so maybe in those cases the cutoff is some specific gas density -- which occurs at a consistent radius throughout the planet, thus creating a flat surface. While for rocky worlds (except Venus, which is treated like a gas planet here), a density cutoff can lead to bumpiness due to terrain. [[User:Trimeta|Trimeta]] ([[User talk:Trimeta|talk]]) 03:57, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::Correct re: gas giants. Typically 1 bar, which is approximately Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.139|162.158.158.139]] 16:20, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
:: just to be very clear (this being a explanation site!) that Venus is "treated like a gas giant" because of it's thick atmosphere. It would be just as correct to say "All the gas giants are treated like Venus" After all, ordinary telescopes couldn't take a picture that sees through any atmospheres, except Earth, where you'd see clouds but often surface where clouds don't appear. Sorry if that's an overexplanation [[User:Cuvtixo|Cuvtixo]] ([[User talk:Cuvtixo|talk]]) 19:10, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

On Twitter there seems to be concern that all planets are depicted flat. This may make this a contribution/mockery of the ongoing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth Flat Earth] discussions in some corners of the internet. --[[Special:Contributions/198.41.242.132|198.41.242.132]] 06:49, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:You can't see the curvature of the Earth when standing on it; doesn't mean it's flat. Since we're looking at the planets at a 1:1 scale, we're literally only seeing a couple of inches of each of their edges (notwithstanding the whole gas-giants-don't-have-a-sharp-edge issue). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.20|162.158.239.20]] 12:06, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:actually you can see it, standing on the shore of any large lake on a calm day looking at a shore that's ~6.5 miles (10.5km) away. You'll lose ~8ft (2.5m) below the horizon - [[Special:Contributions/162.158.186.213|162.158.186.213]] 13:55, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

The display for an uncropped version of the image would not only be larger than any display on earth. It would be larger than earth. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.86.243|162.158.86.243]] 06:59, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:By necessity, at least as large as Jupiter. Maybe slightly above two Jupiters (max dimension squared compared to display height*width of any common aspect ratio) if you wanted to not overlay any of the others at all. And make the lower limit a packing-problem, then add a buffer so there isn't the actual need for any to touch. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.253|172.70.90.253]] 10:02, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::I'm going to add that. Someone was confused enough to put {{cite needed}} there, which may be a joke onto itself?, I can't tell. I've removed the cite needed, but I guess it needs to be more clear why it's totally nonsensical and doesn't need a citation? [[User:Cuvtixo|Cuvtixo]] ([[User talk:Cuvtixo|talk]]) 19:16, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:::The four inner planets are small enough to fit the upper left corner of any display big enough for Jupiter. As Uranus and Neptune are smaller than the latter one, they cannot extend past its top, bottom or right edge in the constellation shown, so they will not need additonal screen space either. Only Saturn is shifted so far to the left that he will require more width than Jupiter itself, but will still fit within the same height. Knowing Randall, the shown angles are not random, but were calculated to match a commercial available display ratio with Saturn placed touching the left edge and Jupiter touching the top, bottom and right edges. 16:9 or 16:10 at 142 km hight would be a fair guess, so I would not rule out 4:3 resulting in total width significantly smaller than two Jupiters. Of course Randall might also be playing hardcore nerd: The outer diameter of Saturns F ring, which is almost always included in representations, has almost exactly a ratio of 32:9 to Jupiters polar diameter, making a picture showing the former in front of the latter a perfect match for those new fancy double wide monitors. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.111.77|162.158.111.77]] 00:22, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

:What can we use as a citation for the graphics card? I couldn't find a single unified source for that concept, but stitched together some information to cover this:
:The world's largest digital display is the Fremont Street Experience, at 457m by 27m, which is about 12,000 sq meters. It has 16.4 megapixels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_video_screens
:The mean radius of Jupiter is about 70x10^6 m, so its area is roughly 1.5x10^16 sq meters.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter
:That means the world's largest digital display would only provide a 7.8x10^-13 fraction of the area of Jupiter.
:Going with NVIDIA's Titan V, which has Total Video Memory of 12288 MB, that would mean it could handle about 98x10^9 black-and-white (1 bit) pixels.
:Using the pixel density of the world's largest digital display (16.4 megapixels), scaling it up by its 12000 sq meters to the area of Jupiter (1.5x10^6 sq meters), that comes out to 2.1x10^19 1-bit pixels. So, we would somehow need about 2.1x10^8 of those graphics cards working together to handle our Jupiter-sized display.
:That display wouldn't even be at HD resolution, let alone 4K. Then again, if we use Apple's "Retina" designation that is dependent on reasonable viewing distance, that might be acceptable. [[User:DanShock|DanShock]] ([[User talk:DanShock|talk]]) 20:22, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

1-to-1 scale means 'assume all planets are the same size,' right? I see Earth's grass is shown to be as large as Martian rocks, because Earth is a third again as large. (At the scale where grass is visible, Earth looks flat.) At first I thought the point was that altitude variation in cloud-tops varied so little that a gas giant shrunk down to Earth size would be featureless and have a distinct edge, but that's wrong. Ground isn't cloud-tops. Do gas giants have any solid ground? We've seen Jupiter eat comets, and it makes sense they would've collected at least some minerals and metals. According to [[https://www.teachastronomy.com/textbook/The-Giant-Planets-and-Their-Moons/Internal-Structure-of-the-Gas-Giant-Planets/|Teach Astronomy]], gas giants have Earth-sized solid cores. I'm guessing gas giants' immense gravity compresses their cores into featureless spheres, which, if scaled to Earth-size and viewed at the scale where one could see grass, would look flat. Yes?
[[User:EllenNB|EllenNB]] ([[User talk:EllenNB|talk]]) 10:14, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:Gravity itself won't compress (and 'flatten') the cores. "Shell theory" shows that gravitational force only counts from the proportion of the body that is within the radius of the bit you're concerned with. But there'll also be the external pressure (from being at the bottom of a thick atmosphere that ultimately ''is'' above far more of the planetary mass) and possibly a degree of compression density to make any Earth-sized core slightly heavier than if it was just a bare core of the same size but shorn of outer layers.
:As to flatness, I can take you to very flat stretches of Earth and very lumpy bits (depends which direction I go, from where I am now), all within 30 minutes' drive. We can'teven know how representative a sample of planetary cross-sections we are seeing (once we get over the issues of gas/space boundaries for gas-giants), but I bet there are bits that resemble the diagram... If you ''really'' want it to be so real. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.87|172.71.242.87]] 11:05, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:No, 1-to-1 means that they are actual size, not the same size. [[User:SDSpivey|SDSpivey]] ([[User talk:SDSpivey|talk]]) 13:37, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

There are several pieces of information here that are featured but don't make sense to me. What's the function of the dark polygon in the center? Why are the lines showing each surface going in random directions? Why is the surface of each planet so flat at a full scale rendition? When I look out my window at full sized Earth, it's not flat. It's quite bumpy, actually. But perhaps he doesn't mean these are full size, he might be saying that they're all shrunk, but the same amount, so 1:1:1:1:1... but even then, I'm totally lost.

"What's the function of the dark polygon in the center?"
I think it is a view of the dark sky, "above" the surface of the Earth, Mars, etc. [[User:Rps|Rps]] ([[User talk:Rps|talk]]) 11:43, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:I think the "polygon" is a grassy Earth itself, with the white above it sky. Earth is the rearmost planet pictured. Then in front of Earth, on all sides except the top, are the overlays of the various planets, what little of each one as can fit. But then maybe the polygon is night starry sky, and Earth is the white area above it. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 14:35, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::No, the polygon is the sky. Zoom in and you see the Milky Way and stars and other space stuff. And the ant on the Earth has its legs pointing upwards (in the reference frame of the image). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.26|162.158.239.26]] 03:09, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
:::Agreed. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 13:43, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Is this an ant on earth, over the letters "EA" ? On my monitor, set for my less-than-perfect vision, it is 15mm long, which (at a 1:1 scale) makes it a cow ant, or a large african ant. I guess people with normal vision get fire and carpenter ants instead? And those on smartphones get pavement ants?[[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.73|172.68.50.73]] 11:00, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:I do believe it is! It's 6 mm on my desktop monitor and 3 mm on my phone. We also don't know what side of the Earth we're looking at, so I suppose it could really be any ant, including the one in your local area. I like to think it's a black garden ant (''Lasius niger''), since I'm most familiar with those :) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.25|162.158.239.25]] 12:16, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

It took me a good while to figure out this one; I don't normally need to come here, but this one stumped me at first. (The comments as of right now weren't too illuminating either.) I think the lack of color was an issue; I first thought the black polygon in the center was the earth, and then interpreted the various lines as a really weird diagram type I'd never seen before, like a phase diagram or something; I also considered one-dimensional planets. [https://imgur.com/a/yJOYvk1 I colored in the planets to aid me.] The way I now interpret this one is thus: imagine an observer sitting a tremendous distance away from the solar system, and they have a camera with an extremely supremely highly zooming telephoto lens. Then a lining-up of all eight planets happens – I believe this is impossible IRL (because of resonances or something), but just go with it. The observer manages to snap this incredible image of a teeny tiny spot of the sky, which simultaneously manages to include the very very edges of all the planets as well as some of the sky behind them all. The sky is the black polygon: it has nebulae and stars. Neptune is in front of Uranus, and that as well as Mercury are in front of Saturn, which is in front of both Jupiter and Mars; Venus is between Mercury, Mars and the Earth, and the Earth is also behind Jupiter. The reason why these are all so smooth is because it's such a small area: we're literally only seeing a couple of square inches of the surface of each of the rocky planets. (See, you can see an individual ant on the Earth. Go to the most rugged mountain range you can find and observe a couple of square inches; it'll be locally flat.) The lack of atmospheres on the rocky planets as well as the hard edges of the gas giants are artistic license. This one is a member of the genre of "true yet unhelpful diagrams"; I'm surprised that isn't a category on this wiki. – [[Special:Contributions/162.158.238.4|162.158.238.4]] 12:58, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

((Written whilst 162.158.238.4 was editing, above, and I got an edit conflict on that. The editor concerned touches on this ordering business, but I'm pasting my original in unaltered, not rejigged as a more focused reply.)) I was wondering abut the "overlap order" for a while, until I twigged it. May not be worth officially documenting, but my analysis, showing that (perhaps depending upon specific orbital positions, during a given range of times, which can of course be checked) it's ''probably'' based upon distance away from Earth.
*Earth is bottom-most. Could be 1st/2nd, shared with Mars, as their overlap isn't shown.
*Mars is our nearest neighbour. (As above, could be 1st ''or'' 2nd on stack.)
*Venus next. Although it could be 7th (only obscured by Mercury) or anywhere else down to 3rd.
*Jupiter as 4th from bottom. (''Could'' be 3rd..5th, though.)
*Saturn takes 5th-up position. (4th..6th)
*Mercury as 6th. (Or all the way to topmost, but I made an assumption about its relationship to the last two.)
*Uranus as 7th. (6th/7th a possibility, depends on Mercury)
*Neptune as 8th. (7th/8th possible, Mercury again.)
...or at least that's what my mental notes tell me. Not helped by starting off counting from near to far and possibly messing up my numbers when I realised it made sense to flip them. It could also be "delta-V needed to reach the planet concerned" (either without or ''including'' flyby slingshot momentum borrowing/burning), but that's something I'd also need to check. I doubt it really needs tying down/Explaining, and when I edited the Transcript I decided not to record every nuance of the "variously orientated surfaces", as I think it adds nothing so long as the description gives the general idea. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.121|141.101.98.121]] 13:06, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

So no one is going to mention that for the clarity depicted you'd need to literally place the planets inside of each other, or have some sort of focal length from zero to infinity? I'm not sure if that bothers me more or less than the missed trick of making the length of ground shown relate to some comparative parameter (albedo might have been a fun one) - [[Special:Contributions/162.158.186.213|162.158.186.213]] 13:55, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:To be fair, you're also going to have to choose a "flat" few inches of surface that stands proud of the local geography (such that anything higher is below the curvature of the Earth for its proximity), and deal with an impossible resolution of an impossibly zoomed telephoto shot from a viewpoint unimaginably distant (''whilst'' a near-enough non-Solar conjunction/asterism is happening, or at least was, when the light passed each body), without significant atmospheric distortion (which is a relatively minor issue, compared with the scarcity of photons that reach the camera ''anyway'').
:Can we perhaps instead assume that these are just individual 1:1-scale cross-sectional diagrams (or even carefully curated local photos) drawn together into a hybrid image to accurately retain the scaling verisimilitude, and individual contexts, but happily faking the relative positions? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.56|172.70.85.56]] 15:00, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

It would take some work to check, but I'm wondering if the angle of the horizons of the various planets are perpendicular to the line made between the earth and the planet in question [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.141|162.158.154.141]] 15:36, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

This is how I interpret this image: [https://imgur.com/a/WwdbXkN I didn't want to make the black dot as small as in the picture so dimensions are insanely larger] [[Special:Contributions/172.69.194.80|172.69.194.80]] 20:35, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
: that is a very clarifying picture, thank you! Shall we include it on the explanation page? It belongs there IMO [[User:Flekkie|Flekkie]] ([[User talk:Flekkie|talk]]) 22:19, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:: You may by me. The original picture is from NASA https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/686/solar-system-sizes/ and they have no restrictive copyright either. I view this picture as 2D planets stacked and not real planets viewed in space since this is clearly impossible orientation and you couldn't see half the planets, let alone ant on Earth's surface, from behind Neptunes orbit [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.26|162.158.239.26]] 10:43, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
: Is this right though? Based off the image Mercury is in front of Saturn. For this to happen, Mercury has to be closer distance wise, so Saturn has to be on the opposite side of the sun. But that can't be true if Saturn is in front of Jupiter and behind Uranus/Neptune?

I don't like the current explanation, since the planets never line up like this. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.203.40|162.158.203.40]] 07:11, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

This is truly one of the comics of all time. AzureArmageddon 08:48, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

We have a 1::1 bird book, where each page has a photo of the bird (or a portion of the bird, in case of flamingos) at 1::1 scale. This comic is a play on those books. -- Bob Jenkins [[Special:Contributions/172.71.150.174|172.71.150.174]] 15:25, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
:Regarding the flamingo, and anything else bigger than the book, what a waste of an opportunity for a fold-out section..! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.152|172.70.91.152]] 18:58, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

This image is only going to be 1:1 scale on a really large display too; The grass on Earth is around a centimeter in length when the image is full-screen on my 27" (68.58 cm) monitor, while it's clear from the way it is depicted that it is supposed to be long grass, at least 50 centimeters in length. That means that the display which would make this truly 1:1 is about 50 times larger than mine, or in other words has a diagonal of about 34 m. This is bigger than a typical cinema screen, but I suppose not that much bigger and there ought to be cinemas in which one can display this image such that it is truly 1:1. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.87.66|162.158.87.66]] 06:27, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
:The ant is 'about right' for a possible ant even on my display (8"/20cm). If that would be 0.5m long grass, the ant would be truly huge, nothing like the typical ones around here. Which I think are actually smaller (certainly more svelte) than the image, if I wandered down the garden path to find an actual ant or three in the 'wild'.
:So I don't think that's long grass of the kind you're assuming. But it does resemble the kind of 'pre-grass' (one step up from mosses) or microscrub (effectively bonzaied grass due to local growing conditions) to be found on a bit of semi-fresh dusty hardcore/well-worn footpath, as also shown by the loose stoney debris also present. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.151|172.70.91.151]] 09:50, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Talk:2761: 1-to-1 Scale

2023-04-14T20:23:18Z

DanShock: clarified what kind of source I could not find

Really want an explanation for this one. [[User:JobbieJimmies|Melomaniac]] ([[User talk:JobbieJimmies|talk]]) 03:23, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

My comment got deleted by a bot!!! [[User:Unreliable Connection|2659: Unreliable Connection]] ([[User talk:Unreliable Connection|talk]]) 03:23, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:RIP... [[User:JobbieJimmies|Melomaniac]] ([[User talk:JobbieJimmies|talk]]) 03:25, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:No, UC, it just got overwritten by the 'bot, when it did its job and (re)created the whole initial state of the various pages to depict the new comic coming out. (Noting that you'd not set them all up fully/correctly.)
:That you had spotted it already and had ''just'' gotten in ahead of the 'bot clearly isn't something it was prepared to handle. But as someone spotting it can usually wait a short while for the 'bot to catch up, I don't think it's a problem. In fact, you could have just copied your old contributions into the now receptive page(s), with nary any comment. Too late now. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.101|172.70.90.101]] 03:44, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

:: This may have broken the next link on the previous page. --[[Special:Contributions/172.71.160.36|172.71.160.36]] 06:41, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

The lines represent the surfaces of the planets I think, so it's basically all the planets overlaid on top of each other. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.142.35|172.71.142.35]] 03:28, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

:Yup, I think it's what he meant - but I find it unlikely that the gas giants would have this clear cutoff of a "surface". [[Special:Contributions/162.158.189.241|162.158.189.241]] 03:34, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::If there is a gas - liquid phase transition (and I think at least the gas giants have them): Why not? OK, you could see "rain" as blurring a clear cutoff, but wouldn't that also apply to Earth, then?[[User:Tier666|Tier666]] ([[User talk:Tier666|talk]]) 08:04, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:::Gas giants' diameters are frequently defined at the average radius at which the atmosphere has a pressure of 1 bar (approximately equal to the pressure at sea level on Earth). There's not a physical edge there, like the boundary between the ground and the atmosphere on a rocky planet, but it is a reasonably well-defined (or, at least, define-able) measurement. FWIW, the pressure gradient is pretty high, and Jupiter's atmospheric pressure increases from 1 bar to 10 bar over about 100 km, which is about 0.1% of the radius, so it's fairly insensitive to the pressure you choose.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.139|162.158.158.139]] 16:20, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

I’d think the same citation as stands for ridiculously large would also cover larger than currently exists on earth, and his that citation is not in fact needed? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.174.186|162.158.174.186]] 06:53, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

:It seems like the gas-covered worlds are explicitly those with clearly cutoff "surfaces," so maybe in those cases the cutoff is some specific gas density -- which occurs at a consistent radius throughout the planet, thus creating a flat surface. While for rocky worlds (except Venus, which is treated like a gas planet here), a density cutoff can lead to bumpiness due to terrain. [[User:Trimeta|Trimeta]] ([[User talk:Trimeta|talk]]) 03:57, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::Correct re: gas giants. Typically 1 bar, which is approximately Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.139|162.158.158.139]] 16:20, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
:: just to be very clear (this being a explanation site!) that Venus is "treated like a gas giant" because of it's thick atmosphere. It would be just as correct to say "All the gas giants are treated like Venus" After all, ordinary telescopes couldn't take a picture that sees through any atmospheres, except Earth, where you'd see clouds but often surface where clouds don't appear. Sorry if that's an overexplanation [[User:Cuvtixo|Cuvtixo]] ([[User talk:Cuvtixo|talk]]) 19:10, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

On Twitter there seems to be concern that all planets are depicted flat. This may make this a contribution/mockery of the ongoing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth Flat Earth] discussions in some corners of the internet. --[[Special:Contributions/198.41.242.132|198.41.242.132]] 06:49, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:You can't see the curvature of the Earth when standing on it; doesn't mean it's flat. Since we're looking at the planets at a 1:1 scale, we're literally only seeing a couple of inches of each of their edges (notwithstanding the whole gas-giants-don't-have-a-sharp-edge issue). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.20|162.158.239.20]] 12:06, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:actually you can see it, standing on the shore of any large lake on a calm day looking at a shore that's ~6.5 miles (10.5km) away. You'll lose ~8ft (2.5m) below the horizon - [[Special:Contributions/162.158.186.213|162.158.186.213]] 13:55, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

The display for an uncropped version of the image would not only be larger than any display on earth. It would be larger than earth. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.86.243|162.158.86.243]] 06:59, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:By necessity, at least as large as Jupiter. Maybe slightly above two Jupiters (max dimension squared compared to display height*width of any common aspect ratio) if you wanted to not overlay any of the others at all. And make the lower limit a packing-problem, then add a buffer so there isn't the actual need for any to touch. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.253|172.70.90.253]] 10:02, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::I'm going to add that. Someone was confused enough to put {{cite needed}} there, which may be a joke onto itself?, I can't tell. I've removed the cite needed, but I guess it needs to be more clear why it's totally nonsensical and doesn't need a citation? [[User:Cuvtixo|Cuvtixo]] ([[User talk:Cuvtixo|talk]]) 19:16, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:::The four inner planets are small enough to fit the upper left corner of any display big enough for Jupiter. As Uranus and Neptune are smaller than the latter one, they cannot extend past its top, bottom or right edge in the constellation shown, so they will not need additonal screen space either. Only Saturn is shifted so far to the left that he will require more width than Jupiter itself, but will still fit within the same height. Knowing Randall, the shown angles are not random, but were calculated to match a commercial available display ratio with Saturn placed touching the left edge and Jupiter touching the top, bottom and right edges. 16:9 or 16:10 at 142 km hight would be a fair guess, so I would not rule out 4:3 resulting in total width significantly smaller than two Jupiters. Of course Randall might also be playing hardcore nerd: The outer diameter of Saturns F ring, which is almost always included in representations, has almost exactly a ratio of 32:9 to Jupiters polar diameter, making a picture showing the former in front of the latter a perfect match for those new fancy double wide monitors. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.111.77|162.158.111.77]] 00:22, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

:What can we use as a citation for the graphics card? I couldn't find a single unified source for that concept, but stitched together some information to cover this:
:The world's largest digital display is the Fremont Street Experience, at 457m by 27m, which is about 12,000 sq meters. It has 16.4 megapixels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_video_screens
:The mean radius of Jupiter is about 70x10^6 m, so its area is roughly 1.5x10^16 sq meters.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter
:That means the world's largest digital display would only provide a 7.8x10^-13 fraction of the area of Jupiter.
:Going with NVIDIA's Titan V, which has Total Video Memory of 12288 MB, that would mean it could handle about 98,000 black-and-white (1 bit) pixels.
:Using the pixel density of the world's largest digital display (16.4 megapixels), scaling it up by its 12000 sq meters to the area of Jupiter (1.5x10^6 sq meters), that comes out to 2.1x10^19 1-bit pixels. So, we would somehow need about 2.1x10^14 of those graphics cards working together to handle our Jupiter-sized display.
:That display wouldn't even be at HD resolution, let alone 4K. Then again, if we use Apple's "Retina" designation that is dependent on reasonable viewing distance, that might be acceptable. [[User:DanShock|DanShock]] ([[User talk:DanShock|talk]]) 20:22, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

1-to-1 scale means 'assume all planets are the same size,' right? I see Earth's grass is shown to be as large as Martian rocks, because Earth is a third again as large. (At the scale where grass is visible, Earth looks flat.) At first I thought the point was that altitude variation in cloud-tops varied so little that a gas giant shrunk down to Earth size would be featureless and have a distinct edge, but that's wrong. Ground isn't cloud-tops. Do gas giants have any solid ground? We've seen Jupiter eat comets, and it makes sense they would've collected at least some minerals and metals. According to [[https://www.teachastronomy.com/textbook/The-Giant-Planets-and-Their-Moons/Internal-Structure-of-the-Gas-Giant-Planets/|Teach Astronomy]], gas giants have Earth-sized solid cores. I'm guessing gas giants' immense gravity compresses their cores into featureless spheres, which, if scaled to Earth-size and viewed at the scale where one could see grass, would look flat. Yes?
[[User:EllenNB|EllenNB]] ([[User talk:EllenNB|talk]]) 10:14, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:Gravity itself won't compress (and 'flatten') the cores. "Shell theory" shows that gravitational force only counts from the proportion of the body that is within the radius of the bit you're concerned with. But there'll also be the external pressure (from being at the bottom of a thick atmosphere that ultimately ''is'' above far more of the planetary mass) and possibly a degree of compression density to make any Earth-sized core slightly heavier than if it was just a bare core of the same size but shorn of outer layers.
:As to flatness, I can take you to very flat stretches of Earth and very lumpy bits (depends which direction I go, from where I am now), all within 30 minutes' drive. We can'teven know how representative a sample of planetary cross-sections we are seeing (once we get over the issues of gas/space boundaries for gas-giants), but I bet there are bits that resemble the diagram... If you ''really'' want it to be so real. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.87|172.71.242.87]] 11:05, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:No, 1-to-1 means that they are actual size, not the same size. [[User:SDSpivey|SDSpivey]] ([[User talk:SDSpivey|talk]]) 13:37, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

There are several pieces of information here that are featured but don't make sense to me. What's the function of the dark polygon in the center? Why are the lines showing each surface going in random directions? Why is the surface of each planet so flat at a full scale rendition? When I look out my window at full sized Earth, it's not flat. It's quite bumpy, actually. But perhaps he doesn't mean these are full size, he might be saying that they're all shrunk, but the same amount, so 1:1:1:1:1... but even then, I'm totally lost.

"What's the function of the dark polygon in the center?"
I think it is a view of the dark sky, "above" the surface of the Earth, Mars, etc. [[User:Rps|Rps]] ([[User talk:Rps|talk]]) 11:43, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:I think the "polygon" is a grassy Earth itself, with the white above it sky. Earth is the rearmost planet pictured. Then in front of Earth, on all sides except the top, are the overlays of the various planets, what little of each one as can fit. But then maybe the polygon is night starry sky, and Earth is the white area above it. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 14:35, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::No, the polygon is the sky. Zoom in and you see the Milky Way and stars and other space stuff. And the ant on the Earth has its legs pointing upwards (in the reference frame of the image). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.26|162.158.239.26]] 03:09, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
:::Agreed. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 13:43, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Is this an ant on earth, over the letters "EA" ? On my monitor, set for my less-than-perfect vision, it is 15mm long, which (at a 1:1 scale) makes it a cow ant, or a large african ant. I guess people with normal vision get fire and carpenter ants instead? And those on smartphones get pavement ants?[[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.73|172.68.50.73]] 11:00, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:I do believe it is! It's 6 mm on my desktop monitor and 3 mm on my phone. We also don't know what side of the Earth we're looking at, so I suppose it could really be any ant, including the one in your local area. I like to think it's a black garden ant (''Lasius niger''), since I'm most familiar with those :) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.25|162.158.239.25]] 12:16, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

It took me a good while to figure out this one; I don't normally need to come here, but this one stumped me at first. (The comments as of right now weren't too illuminating either.) I think the lack of color was an issue; I first thought the black polygon in the center was the earth, and then interpreted the various lines as a really weird diagram type I'd never seen before, like a phase diagram or something; I also considered one-dimensional planets. [https://imgur.com/a/yJOYvk1 I colored in the planets to aid me.] The way I now interpret this one is thus: imagine an observer sitting a tremendous distance away from the solar system, and they have a camera with an extremely supremely highly zooming telephoto lens. Then a lining-up of all eight planets happens – I believe this is impossible IRL (because of resonances or something), but just go with it. The observer manages to snap this incredible image of a teeny tiny spot of the sky, which simultaneously manages to include the very very edges of all the planets as well as some of the sky behind them all. The sky is the black polygon: it has nebulae and stars. Neptune is in front of Uranus, and that as well as Mercury are in front of Saturn, which is in front of both Jupiter and Mars; Venus is between Mercury, Mars and the Earth, and the Earth is also behind Jupiter. The reason why these are all so smooth is because it's such a small area: we're literally only seeing a couple of square inches of the surface of each of the rocky planets. (See, you can see an individual ant on the Earth. Go to the most rugged mountain range you can find and observe a couple of square inches; it'll be locally flat.) The lack of atmospheres on the rocky planets as well as the hard edges of the gas giants are artistic license. This one is a member of the genre of "true yet unhelpful diagrams"; I'm surprised that isn't a category on this wiki. – [[Special:Contributions/162.158.238.4|162.158.238.4]] 12:58, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

((Written whilst 162.158.238.4 was editing, above, and I got an edit conflict on that. The editor concerned touches on this ordering business, but I'm pasting my original in unaltered, not rejigged as a more focused reply.)) I was wondering abut the "overlap order" for a while, until I twigged it. May not be worth officially documenting, but my analysis, showing that (perhaps depending upon specific orbital positions, during a given range of times, which can of course be checked) it's ''probably'' based upon distance away from Earth.
*Earth is bottom-most. Could be 1st/2nd, shared with Mars, as their overlap isn't shown.
*Mars is our nearest neighbour. (As above, could be 1st ''or'' 2nd on stack.)
*Venus next. Although it could be 7th (only obscured by Mercury) or anywhere else down to 3rd.
*Jupiter as 4th from bottom. (''Could'' be 3rd..5th, though.)
*Saturn takes 5th-up position. (4th..6th)
*Mercury as 6th. (Or all the way to topmost, but I made an assumption about its relationship to the last two.)
*Uranus as 7th. (6th/7th a possibility, depends on Mercury)
*Neptune as 8th. (7th/8th possible, Mercury again.)
...or at least that's what my mental notes tell me. Not helped by starting off counting from near to far and possibly messing up my numbers when I realised it made sense to flip them. It could also be "delta-V needed to reach the planet concerned" (either without or ''including'' flyby slingshot momentum borrowing/burning), but that's something I'd also need to check. I doubt it really needs tying down/Explaining, and when I edited the Transcript I decided not to record every nuance of the "variously orientated surfaces", as I think it adds nothing so long as the description gives the general idea. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.121|141.101.98.121]] 13:06, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

So no one is going to mention that for the clarity depicted you'd need to literally place the planets inside of each other, or have some sort of focal length from zero to infinity? I'm not sure if that bothers me more or less than the missed trick of making the length of ground shown relate to some comparative parameter (albedo might have been a fun one) - [[Special:Contributions/162.158.186.213|162.158.186.213]] 13:55, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:To be fair, you're also going to have to choose a "flat" few inches of surface that stands proud of the local geography (such that anything higher is below the curvature of the Earth for its proximity), and deal with an impossible resolution of an impossibly zoomed telephoto shot from a viewpoint unimaginably distant (''whilst'' a near-enough non-Solar conjunction/asterism is happening, or at least was, when the light passed each body), without significant atmospheric distortion (which is a relatively minor issue, compared with the scarcity of photons that reach the camera ''anyway'').
:Can we perhaps instead assume that these are just individual 1:1-scale cross-sectional diagrams (or even carefully curated local photos) drawn together into a hybrid image to accurately retain the scaling verisimilitude, and individual contexts, but happily faking the relative positions? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.56|172.70.85.56]] 15:00, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

It would take some work to check, but I'm wondering if the angle of the horizons of the various planets are perpendicular to the line made between the earth and the planet in question [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.141|162.158.154.141]] 15:36, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

This is how I interpret this image: [https://imgur.com/a/WwdbXkN I didn't want to make the black dot as small as in the picture so dimensions are insanely larger] [[Special:Contributions/172.69.194.80|172.69.194.80]] 20:35, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
: that is a very clarifying picture, thank you! Shall we include it on the explanation page? It belongs there IMO [[User:Flekkie|Flekkie]] ([[User talk:Flekkie|talk]]) 22:19, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:: You may by me. The original picture is from NASA https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/686/solar-system-sizes/ and they have no restrictive copyright either. I view this picture as 2D planets stacked and not real planets viewed in space since this is clearly impossible orientation and you couldn't see half the planets, let alone ant on Earth's surface, from behind Neptunes orbit [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.26|162.158.239.26]] 10:43, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
: Is this right though? Based off the image Mercury is in front of Saturn. For this to happen, Mercury has to be closer distance wise, so Saturn has to be on the opposite side of the sun. But that can't be true if Saturn is in front of Jupiter and behind Uranus/Neptune?

I don't like the current explanation, since the planets never line up like this. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.203.40|162.158.203.40]] 07:11, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

This is truly one of the comics of all time. AzureArmageddon 08:48, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

We have a 1::1 bird book, where each page has a photo of the bird (or a portion of the bird, in case of flamingos) at 1::1 scale. This comic is a play on those books. -- Bob Jenkins [[Special:Contributions/172.71.150.174|172.71.150.174]] 15:25, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
:Regarding the flamingo, and anything else bigger than the book, what a waste of an opportunity for a fold-out section..! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.152|172.70.91.152]] 18:58, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

This image is only going to be 1:1 scale on a really large display too; The grass on Earth is around a centimeter in length when the image is full-screen on my 27" (68.58 cm) monitor, while it's clear from the way it is depicted that it is supposed to be long grass, at least 50 centimeters in length. That means that the display which would make this truly 1:1 is about 50 times larger than mine, or in other words has a diagonal of about 34 m. This is bigger than a typical cinema screen, but I suppose not that much bigger and there ought to be cinemas in which one can display this image such that it is truly 1:1. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.87.66|162.158.87.66]] 06:27, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
:The ant is 'about right' for a possible ant even on my display (8"/20cm). If that would be 0.5m long grass, the ant would be truly huge, nothing like the typical ones around here. Which I think are actually smaller (certainly more svelte) than the image, if I wandered down the garden path to find an actual ant or three in the 'wild'.
:So I don't think that's long grass of the kind you're assuming. But it does resemble the kind of 'pre-grass' (one step up from mosses) or microscrub (effectively bonzaied grass due to local growing conditions) to be found on a bit of semi-fresh dusty hardcore/well-worn footpath, as also shown by the loose stoney debris also present. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.151|172.70.91.151]] 09:50, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Talk:2761: 1-to-1 Scale

2023-04-14T20:22:12Z

DanShock: Added math for scaling up graphics card to Jupiter-sized display

Really want an explanation for this one. [[User:JobbieJimmies|Melomaniac]] ([[User talk:JobbieJimmies|talk]]) 03:23, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

My comment got deleted by a bot!!! [[User:Unreliable Connection|2659: Unreliable Connection]] ([[User talk:Unreliable Connection|talk]]) 03:23, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:RIP... [[User:JobbieJimmies|Melomaniac]] ([[User talk:JobbieJimmies|talk]]) 03:25, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:No, UC, it just got overwritten by the 'bot, when it did its job and (re)created the whole initial state of the various pages to depict the new comic coming out. (Noting that you'd not set them all up fully/correctly.)
:That you had spotted it already and had ''just'' gotten in ahead of the 'bot clearly isn't something it was prepared to handle. But as someone spotting it can usually wait a short while for the 'bot to catch up, I don't think it's a problem. In fact, you could have just copied your old contributions into the now receptive page(s), with nary any comment. Too late now. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.101|172.70.90.101]] 03:44, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

:: This may have broken the next link on the previous page. --[[Special:Contributions/172.71.160.36|172.71.160.36]] 06:41, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

The lines represent the surfaces of the planets I think, so it's basically all the planets overlaid on top of each other. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.142.35|172.71.142.35]] 03:28, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

:Yup, I think it's what he meant - but I find it unlikely that the gas giants would have this clear cutoff of a "surface". [[Special:Contributions/162.158.189.241|162.158.189.241]] 03:34, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::If there is a gas - liquid phase transition (and I think at least the gas giants have them): Why not? OK, you could see "rain" as blurring a clear cutoff, but wouldn't that also apply to Earth, then?[[User:Tier666|Tier666]] ([[User talk:Tier666|talk]]) 08:04, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:::Gas giants' diameters are frequently defined at the average radius at which the atmosphere has a pressure of 1 bar (approximately equal to the pressure at sea level on Earth). There's not a physical edge there, like the boundary between the ground and the atmosphere on a rocky planet, but it is a reasonably well-defined (or, at least, define-able) measurement. FWIW, the pressure gradient is pretty high, and Jupiter's atmospheric pressure increases from 1 bar to 10 bar over about 100 km, which is about 0.1% of the radius, so it's fairly insensitive to the pressure you choose.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.139|162.158.158.139]] 16:20, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

I’d think the same citation as stands for ridiculously large would also cover larger than currently exists on earth, and his that citation is not in fact needed? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.174.186|162.158.174.186]] 06:53, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

:It seems like the gas-covered worlds are explicitly those with clearly cutoff "surfaces," so maybe in those cases the cutoff is some specific gas density -- which occurs at a consistent radius throughout the planet, thus creating a flat surface. While for rocky worlds (except Venus, which is treated like a gas planet here), a density cutoff can lead to bumpiness due to terrain. [[User:Trimeta|Trimeta]] ([[User talk:Trimeta|talk]]) 03:57, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::Correct re: gas giants. Typically 1 bar, which is approximately Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.139|162.158.158.139]] 16:20, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
:: just to be very clear (this being a explanation site!) that Venus is "treated like a gas giant" because of it's thick atmosphere. It would be just as correct to say "All the gas giants are treated like Venus" After all, ordinary telescopes couldn't take a picture that sees through any atmospheres, except Earth, where you'd see clouds but often surface where clouds don't appear. Sorry if that's an overexplanation [[User:Cuvtixo|Cuvtixo]] ([[User talk:Cuvtixo|talk]]) 19:10, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

On Twitter there seems to be concern that all planets are depicted flat. This may make this a contribution/mockery of the ongoing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth Flat Earth] discussions in some corners of the internet. --[[Special:Contributions/198.41.242.132|198.41.242.132]] 06:49, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:You can't see the curvature of the Earth when standing on it; doesn't mean it's flat. Since we're looking at the planets at a 1:1 scale, we're literally only seeing a couple of inches of each of their edges (notwithstanding the whole gas-giants-don't-have-a-sharp-edge issue). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.20|162.158.239.20]] 12:06, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:actually you can see it, standing on the shore of any large lake on a calm day looking at a shore that's ~6.5 miles (10.5km) away. You'll lose ~8ft (2.5m) below the horizon - [[Special:Contributions/162.158.186.213|162.158.186.213]] 13:55, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

The display for an uncropped version of the image would not only be larger than any display on earth. It would be larger than earth. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.86.243|162.158.86.243]] 06:59, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:By necessity, at least as large as Jupiter. Maybe slightly above two Jupiters (max dimension squared compared to display height*width of any common aspect ratio) if you wanted to not overlay any of the others at all. And make the lower limit a packing-problem, then add a buffer so there isn't the actual need for any to touch. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.253|172.70.90.253]] 10:02, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::I'm going to add that. Someone was confused enough to put {{cite needed}} there, which may be a joke onto itself?, I can't tell. I've removed the cite needed, but I guess it needs to be more clear why it's totally nonsensical and doesn't need a citation? [[User:Cuvtixo|Cuvtixo]] ([[User talk:Cuvtixo|talk]]) 19:16, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:::The four inner planets are small enough to fit the upper left corner of any display big enough for Jupiter. As Uranus and Neptune are smaller than the latter one, they cannot extend past its top, bottom or right edge in the constellation shown, so they will not need additonal screen space either. Only Saturn is shifted so far to the left that he will require more width than Jupiter itself, but will still fit within the same height. Knowing Randall, the shown angles are not random, but were calculated to match a commercial available display ratio with Saturn placed touching the left edge and Jupiter touching the top, bottom and right edges. 16:9 or 16:10 at 142 km hight would be a fair guess, so I would not rule out 4:3 resulting in total width significantly smaller than two Jupiters. Of course Randall might also be playing hardcore nerd: The outer diameter of Saturns F ring, which is almost always included in representations, has almost exactly a ratio of 32:9 to Jupiters polar diameter, making a picture showing the former in front of the latter a perfect match for those new fancy double wide monitors. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.111.77|162.158.111.77]] 00:22, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

:What can we use as a citation for the graphics card? I couldn't find a source for that concept, but stitched together some information to cover this:
:The world's largest digital display is the Fremont Street Experience, at 457m by 27m, which is about 12,000 sq meters. It has 16.4 megapixels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_video_screens
:The mean radius of Jupiter is about 70x10^6 m, so its area is roughly 1.5x10^16 sq meters.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter
:That means the world's largest digital display would only provide a 7.8x10^-13 fraction of the area of Jupiter.
:Going with NVIDIA's Titan V, which has Total Video Memory of 12288 MB, that would mean it could handle about 98,000 black-and-white (1 bit) pixels.
:Using the pixel density of the world's largest digital display (16.4 megapixels), scaling it up by its 12000 sq meters to the area of Jupiter (1.5x10^6 sq meters), that comes out to 2.1x10^19 1-bit pixels. So, we would somehow need about 2.1x10^14 of those graphics cards working together to handle our Jupiter-sized display.
:That display wouldn't even be at HD resolution, let alone 4K. Then again, if we use Apple's "Retina" designation that is dependent on reasonable viewing distance, that might be acceptable. [[User:DanShock|DanShock]] ([[User talk:DanShock|talk]]) 20:22, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

1-to-1 scale means 'assume all planets are the same size,' right? I see Earth's grass is shown to be as large as Martian rocks, because Earth is a third again as large. (At the scale where grass is visible, Earth looks flat.) At first I thought the point was that altitude variation in cloud-tops varied so little that a gas giant shrunk down to Earth size would be featureless and have a distinct edge, but that's wrong. Ground isn't cloud-tops. Do gas giants have any solid ground? We've seen Jupiter eat comets, and it makes sense they would've collected at least some minerals and metals. According to [[https://www.teachastronomy.com/textbook/The-Giant-Planets-and-Their-Moons/Internal-Structure-of-the-Gas-Giant-Planets/|Teach Astronomy]], gas giants have Earth-sized solid cores. I'm guessing gas giants' immense gravity compresses their cores into featureless spheres, which, if scaled to Earth-size and viewed at the scale where one could see grass, would look flat. Yes?
[[User:EllenNB|EllenNB]] ([[User talk:EllenNB|talk]]) 10:14, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:Gravity itself won't compress (and 'flatten') the cores. "Shell theory" shows that gravitational force only counts from the proportion of the body that is within the radius of the bit you're concerned with. But there'll also be the external pressure (from being at the bottom of a thick atmosphere that ultimately ''is'' above far more of the planetary mass) and possibly a degree of compression density to make any Earth-sized core slightly heavier than if it was just a bare core of the same size but shorn of outer layers.
:As to flatness, I can take you to very flat stretches of Earth and very lumpy bits (depends which direction I go, from where I am now), all within 30 minutes' drive. We can'teven know how representative a sample of planetary cross-sections we are seeing (once we get over the issues of gas/space boundaries for gas-giants), but I bet there are bits that resemble the diagram... If you ''really'' want it to be so real. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.87|172.71.242.87]] 11:05, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:No, 1-to-1 means that they are actual size, not the same size. [[User:SDSpivey|SDSpivey]] ([[User talk:SDSpivey|talk]]) 13:37, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

There are several pieces of information here that are featured but don't make sense to me. What's the function of the dark polygon in the center? Why are the lines showing each surface going in random directions? Why is the surface of each planet so flat at a full scale rendition? When I look out my window at full sized Earth, it's not flat. It's quite bumpy, actually. But perhaps he doesn't mean these are full size, he might be saying that they're all shrunk, but the same amount, so 1:1:1:1:1... but even then, I'm totally lost.

"What's the function of the dark polygon in the center?"
I think it is a view of the dark sky, "above" the surface of the Earth, Mars, etc. [[User:Rps|Rps]] ([[User talk:Rps|talk]]) 11:43, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:I think the "polygon" is a grassy Earth itself, with the white above it sky. Earth is the rearmost planet pictured. Then in front of Earth, on all sides except the top, are the overlays of the various planets, what little of each one as can fit. But then maybe the polygon is night starry sky, and Earth is the white area above it. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 14:35, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
::No, the polygon is the sky. Zoom in and you see the Milky Way and stars and other space stuff. And the ant on the Earth has its legs pointing upwards (in the reference frame of the image). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.26|162.158.239.26]] 03:09, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
:::Agreed. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 13:43, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Is this an ant on earth, over the letters "EA" ? On my monitor, set for my less-than-perfect vision, it is 15mm long, which (at a 1:1 scale) makes it a cow ant, or a large african ant. I guess people with normal vision get fire and carpenter ants instead? And those on smartphones get pavement ants?[[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.73|172.68.50.73]] 11:00, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:I do believe it is! It's 6 mm on my desktop monitor and 3 mm on my phone. We also don't know what side of the Earth we're looking at, so I suppose it could really be any ant, including the one in your local area. I like to think it's a black garden ant (''Lasius niger''), since I'm most familiar with those :) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.25|162.158.239.25]] 12:16, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

It took me a good while to figure out this one; I don't normally need to come here, but this one stumped me at first. (The comments as of right now weren't too illuminating either.) I think the lack of color was an issue; I first thought the black polygon in the center was the earth, and then interpreted the various lines as a really weird diagram type I'd never seen before, like a phase diagram or something; I also considered one-dimensional planets. [https://imgur.com/a/yJOYvk1 I colored in the planets to aid me.] The way I now interpret this one is thus: imagine an observer sitting a tremendous distance away from the solar system, and they have a camera with an extremely supremely highly zooming telephoto lens. Then a lining-up of all eight planets happens – I believe this is impossible IRL (because of resonances or something), but just go with it. The observer manages to snap this incredible image of a teeny tiny spot of the sky, which simultaneously manages to include the very very edges of all the planets as well as some of the sky behind them all. The sky is the black polygon: it has nebulae and stars. Neptune is in front of Uranus, and that as well as Mercury are in front of Saturn, which is in front of both Jupiter and Mars; Venus is between Mercury, Mars and the Earth, and the Earth is also behind Jupiter. The reason why these are all so smooth is because it's such a small area: we're literally only seeing a couple of square inches of the surface of each of the rocky planets. (See, you can see an individual ant on the Earth. Go to the most rugged mountain range you can find and observe a couple of square inches; it'll be locally flat.) The lack of atmospheres on the rocky planets as well as the hard edges of the gas giants are artistic license. This one is a member of the genre of "true yet unhelpful diagrams"; I'm surprised that isn't a category on this wiki. – [[Special:Contributions/162.158.238.4|162.158.238.4]] 12:58, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

((Written whilst 162.158.238.4 was editing, above, and I got an edit conflict on that. The editor concerned touches on this ordering business, but I'm pasting my original in unaltered, not rejigged as a more focused reply.)) I was wondering abut the "overlap order" for a while, until I twigged it. May not be worth officially documenting, but my analysis, showing that (perhaps depending upon specific orbital positions, during a given range of times, which can of course be checked) it's ''probably'' based upon distance away from Earth.
*Earth is bottom-most. Could be 1st/2nd, shared with Mars, as their overlap isn't shown.
*Mars is our nearest neighbour. (As above, could be 1st ''or'' 2nd on stack.)
*Venus next. Although it could be 7th (only obscured by Mercury) or anywhere else down to 3rd.
*Jupiter as 4th from bottom. (''Could'' be 3rd..5th, though.)
*Saturn takes 5th-up position. (4th..6th)
*Mercury as 6th. (Or all the way to topmost, but I made an assumption about its relationship to the last two.)
*Uranus as 7th. (6th/7th a possibility, depends on Mercury)
*Neptune as 8th. (7th/8th possible, Mercury again.)
...or at least that's what my mental notes tell me. Not helped by starting off counting from near to far and possibly messing up my numbers when I realised it made sense to flip them. It could also be "delta-V needed to reach the planet concerned" (either without or ''including'' flyby slingshot momentum borrowing/burning), but that's something I'd also need to check. I doubt it really needs tying down/Explaining, and when I edited the Transcript I decided not to record every nuance of the "variously orientated surfaces", as I think it adds nothing so long as the description gives the general idea. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.121|141.101.98.121]] 13:06, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

So no one is going to mention that for the clarity depicted you'd need to literally place the planets inside of each other, or have some sort of focal length from zero to infinity? I'm not sure if that bothers me more or less than the missed trick of making the length of ground shown relate to some comparative parameter (albedo might have been a fun one) - [[Special:Contributions/162.158.186.213|162.158.186.213]] 13:55, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:To be fair, you're also going to have to choose a "flat" few inches of surface that stands proud of the local geography (such that anything higher is below the curvature of the Earth for its proximity), and deal with an impossible resolution of an impossibly zoomed telephoto shot from a viewpoint unimaginably distant (''whilst'' a near-enough non-Solar conjunction/asterism is happening, or at least was, when the light passed each body), without significant atmospheric distortion (which is a relatively minor issue, compared with the scarcity of photons that reach the camera ''anyway'').
:Can we perhaps instead assume that these are just individual 1:1-scale cross-sectional diagrams (or even carefully curated local photos) drawn together into a hybrid image to accurately retain the scaling verisimilitude, and individual contexts, but happily faking the relative positions? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.56|172.70.85.56]] 15:00, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

It would take some work to check, but I'm wondering if the angle of the horizons of the various planets are perpendicular to the line made between the earth and the planet in question [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.141|162.158.154.141]] 15:36, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

This is how I interpret this image: [https://imgur.com/a/WwdbXkN I didn't want to make the black dot as small as in the picture so dimensions are insanely larger] [[Special:Contributions/172.69.194.80|172.69.194.80]] 20:35, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
: that is a very clarifying picture, thank you! Shall we include it on the explanation page? It belongs there IMO [[User:Flekkie|Flekkie]] ([[User talk:Flekkie|talk]]) 22:19, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
:: You may by me. The original picture is from NASA https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/686/solar-system-sizes/ and they have no restrictive copyright either. I view this picture as 2D planets stacked and not real planets viewed in space since this is clearly impossible orientation and you couldn't see half the planets, let alone ant on Earth's surface, from behind Neptunes orbit [[Special:Contributions/162.158.239.26|162.158.239.26]] 10:43, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
: Is this right though? Based off the image Mercury is in front of Saturn. For this to happen, Mercury has to be closer distance wise, so Saturn has to be on the opposite side of the sun. But that can't be true if Saturn is in front of Jupiter and behind Uranus/Neptune?

I don't like the current explanation, since the planets never line up like this. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.203.40|162.158.203.40]] 07:11, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

This is truly one of the comics of all time. AzureArmageddon 08:48, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

We have a 1::1 bird book, where each page has a photo of the bird (or a portion of the bird, in case of flamingos) at 1::1 scale. This comic is a play on those books. -- Bob Jenkins [[Special:Contributions/172.71.150.174|172.71.150.174]] 15:25, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
:Regarding the flamingo, and anything else bigger than the book, what a waste of an opportunity for a fold-out section..! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.152|172.70.91.152]] 18:58, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

This image is only going to be 1:1 scale on a really large display too; The grass on Earth is around a centimeter in length when the image is full-screen on my 27" (68.58 cm) monitor, while it's clear from the way it is depicted that it is supposed to be long grass, at least 50 centimeters in length. That means that the display which would make this truly 1:1 is about 50 times larger than mine, or in other words has a diagonal of about 34 m. This is bigger than a typical cinema screen, but I suppose not that much bigger and there ought to be cinemas in which one can display this image such that it is truly 1:1. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.87.66|162.158.87.66]] 06:27, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
:The ant is 'about right' for a possible ant even on my display (8"/20cm). If that would be 0.5m long grass, the ant would be truly huge, nothing like the typical ones around here. Which I think are actually smaller (certainly more svelte) than the image, if I wandered down the garden path to find an actual ant or three in the 'wild'.
:So I don't think that's long grass of the kind you're assuming. But it does resemble the kind of 'pre-grass' (one step up from mosses) or microscrub (effectively bonzaied grass due to local growing conditions) to be found on a bit of semi-fresh dusty hardcore/well-worn footpath, as also shown by the loose stoney debris also present. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.151|172.70.91.151]] 09:50, 13 April 2023 (UTC)

Talk:2035: Dark Matter Candidates

2018-08-23T19:05:10Z

DanShock: /* Monolith reference */ new section

"thin patina of grime covering the whole universe" is a reference to the "International prototype kilogram" and the necessity to keep it dust-free to preserve its reference status. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.229.100|108.162.229.100]] 11:14, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
:I think it's just referring to how your room or furniture can get super dirty and completely covered in dust, but you don't really notice it getting dirty because it happens so gradually. But once you actually get around to cleaning your room and you remove all the dust you realize how insanely filthy your room was, now that you can compare it to clean. Since there hasn't been a massive universe cleaning within human history, we wouldn't really be able to tell if the universe was coated in dirt because we wouldn't remember what it looks like clean. [[User:Yosho27|Yosho27]] ([[User talk:Yosho27|talk]]) 12:53, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
::I concur, my thought upon reading the "thin patina of grime" was when I helped a friend power wash his back deck and we realized it was far more dirty than we thought; as the newly washed sections stood out in stark contrast to the grimy parts.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.186.246|162.158.186.246]] 19:29, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
One can only hope that the solution for dealing with space cows involves space cowboys. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.75.136|162.158.75.136]] 20:40, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
;109 kg - 1033 kg black holes
Not sure if it's a mistake by Randall or he has something other in mind. But most of his black holes are far too lightweight:
*109 kg is a million tons, the Great Pyramid of Giza wights six times of that
*6x1024 kg Earth
*2x1030 kg Sun
*1031 kg smallest known stellar black hole
*1040 kg the real big black holes with a diameter in the size of our solar system
Everything except the Buzzkill is below a single solar mass. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 16:24, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
: The theoretical lower limit for black hole mass is the planck mass (22 µg), although such micro black holes would evaporate very quickly under standard models. However, larger black holes were excluded fairly early by gravitational lensing searches ('buzzkill' cases), so smaller black holes had to be considered separately as dark matter candidates. --[[User:Quantum7|Quantum7]] ([[User talk:Quantum7|talk]]) 20:40, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
::You misunderstand my point: Those not discovered smaller black holes would need an explanation how they did form but more important here how they could be ruled out as Randall states. A nano black hole at 1010 kg disproved by gamma rays? What's Randall's point? He was more accurate in the past. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:18, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
:::Um, his point is that we know that black holes that size (regardless of how they came into existence) would "evaporate" in a burst of gamma rays through the process that causes Hawking radiation. Which the explanation above, you know, explains. Similarly, other light black holes (which would be formed by any number of theoretical processes other than collapsing stars, usually involving conditions early in the Big Bang) would be ruled out by the other reasons given, also explained in the explanation. {{unsigned ip|172.69.70.125}}

; Axon pun?
My first thought upon reading 'axion' was that it was a pun on axon. Neurons have typical membrane potentials in the mV range, which lines up nicely with the meV energy of axions. Coincidence? --[[User:Quantum7|Quantum7]] ([[User talk:Quantum7|talk]]) 20:44, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
:An axion is a suggested subatomic particle. I'm not a biologist but if one meV is enough energy to trigger an axon our biology wouldn't work that smoothly. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:18, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
:: It's mV (electrical potential), not meV (energy/mass). It's a stretch, but Randall's included more distant puns before in XKCD. Source for action potential strength: [http://understandingcontext.com/2014/01/ei-electric-potential-curve/] --[[User:Quantum7|Quantum7]] ([[User talk:Quantum7|talk]]) 23:15, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

While this comic is about Dark Matter, does the explanation really need to include a justification on why Dark Matter really exists as a "substance" instead of being some error in our understanding of gravity? It seems a little excessive and unnecessary to me. [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 21:46, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
:I'm with you but this comic is about that "substance" like most astronomers are. This always reminds me to aether - also a famous "substance" in space more than hundred years ago which nobody could explain. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:32, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
::Thanks for the laugh - my thoughts exactly! In fact, part of me wonders if Randall is actually making fun of the whole idea that there's a dark matter particle at all, since there's such a wide range of possible sizes for such a particle. His humor can be so subtle at times that someone may not realize when they're actually the butt of his joke. [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 23:55, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
:::Actually, the observings that dark matter doesn't seem to be at same places as normal matter is countering the idea that it's because of error in out understanding of gravity. Like, not completely disproving it, but making it less likely. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 04:15, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
:Excessive? Maybe. But the first responses to you indicate that people who have presumably even read the explanation as to why dark matter really exists don't understand why we expect that dark matter really exists. (Sure, modified gravity theories were a reasonable alternative hypothesis fifteen years ago, but that was before we'd made multiple independent observations that the gravitational effects are decoupled from the presence of visible matter, and thus cannot simply be gravity working differently at galactic mass scales than General Relativity predicts.) {{unsigned ip|108.162.221.5}}
::I'm not interested in debating which viewpoint is correct. I'm not even picking a side, and yet others seem eager to argue their side with me. I'm only asking if that even needs to be included in the explanation, as it tends to distract from the points made in the comic. I think it might be more helpful to mention why it's called dark matter in the first place, which I don't see at all - maybe because of this distraction. Please remember that our primary purpose is to explain the comic, not to write a wikipedia article on the subject matter. Thanks for sharing though. [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 05:31, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Furthermore, while space cowboys were mentioned earlier in the discussion, I suspect Randall included space cows in the chart specifically as a reference to the movie Space Cowboys. Also, I think the point about Neutron Star Data ruling out black holes in that mass range is because you can't have both of them with the same mass, since the current theory is that they both form from a star collapse, but at different masses. You're always going to get one or the other from that size star, and since we find neutron stars in that range, we can't have black holes there too. [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 21:59, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
:The mass of neutron stars is well understood. A smaller star ends at a white dwarf and the big ones produce a black hole. Nonetheless our sun will end up into a white dwarf and the others require higher masses as in the buzzkill range at the graph. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:32, 20 August 2018 (UTC)
::My point exactly - we now know quite a bit about the mass needed and process required to form a neutron star, making it unlikely the same mass would be able to form a black hole. I think that's what Randall meant in that part of the chart, but that's not what the explanation states. (Unfortunately, I've reached the point where I no longer want to argue with other editors over correct explanations.) [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 23:55, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

; The Mysterious Eight Ball
How many of you remember the 8 Ball as a funny toy that you would ask questions and then turn over to receive an answer. Could that be the joke referred to in the 8 ball as a possible source of mysterious dark matter? --[[User:ProfKrueger|ProfKrueger]] ([[User talk:ProfKrueger|talk]]) 00:41, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're being physics-nerd-sniped! [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 00:09, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Sorry to be picky, but I'm having trouble with "a star which was nearly in line with the sun appeared closer to the sun than usual." Doesn't a distant star's apparent position move away from the sun compared to the direct path? The light ray we see has been bent toward us, so it appears further away than an unaffected ray would, no?[[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.105|162.158.74.105]] 03:31, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
:You're not picky - you are just right. It's fixed. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 14:06, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Can anyone explain how the paragraph associated with Buzzkill Astronomers has anything at all to do with a group of negative or skeptical astronomers? Am I misunderstanding the meaning of that phrase? If I'm just in the dark about some inside joke in astronomy, perhaps the explanation could enlighten me (and maybe others). As it reads right now, I don't see how anyone would find that explanation helpful. [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 03:31, 22 August 2018 (UTC)
:My interpretation: "Black holes above a certain size would be impossible to miss [by astronomers]". In other words, the observations of astronomers rule out any dark matter candidates in that mass range. What a buzzkill, those astronomers, making those observations... [[User:Ahiijny|Ahiijny]] ([[User talk:Ahiijny|talk]]) 19:47, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

== Monolith reference ==

(Spoiler alert for the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey") The monoliths in the movie were not just the three individual monoliths mentioned here. Near the end of the movie, a huge number of them appeared around, and apparently merged into, Jupiter. The added mass of the swarm of monoliths is what allowed Jupiter to initiate fusion, transforming it into the star Lucifer. So, the idea of "monoliths" being a source for dark matter is a joke on the final component of the plot of 2001, not just a vague reference. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_(Space_Odyssey) Wikipedia entry on Monolith (Space Odyssey)] [[User:DanShock|DanShock]] ([[User talk:DanShock|talk]]) 19:05, 23 August 2018 (UTC)