explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

2136: Election Commentary

2019-04-13T02:09:21Z

ItMarki:

{{comic
| number = 2136
| date = April 12, 2019
| title = Election Commentary
| image = election_commentary.png
| titletext = This really validates Jones's strategy of getting several thousand more votes than Smith. In retrospect, that was a smart move; those votes were crucial.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by XOF NEWSBOT 3000. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic is a joke about the way newscasters commentate elections, and how they make it far more complicated than it needs to be in an election in which the candidate with the most votes wins. It's not uncommon for these methods to be used to imply the election is neck-and-neck long past the point one candidate has an insurmountable lead.

Smith has 55384 votes, while Jones has 59102 votes. Instead of comparing the votes as one number, and admitting that Jones' four thousand vote lead is likely going to earn him the lead, Cueball compares each digit to see which is larger. Ultimately he implies that Smith has a chance to win, ''if only he could pull ahead in the thousands digit'' and secure a dramatic upset.

It should be noted that for U.S. Presidential elections, the candidate with more votes does not necessarily win, and instead the winner is determined by which candidate leads in which state, are actually more complicated than depicted, and require 52 separate comparisons (51 to determine who is leading in each of 50 states and the District of Columbia, and then one to compare the candidates' total electoral vote).

The title text is a similarly satirical twist on a common news comment during elections. Candidates often employ different strategies during the election season, with varying degrees of success. For example, if a strategy collected many votes (or important votes, see above paragraph), then it could be said that the area it affected was "crucial". Here, the area affected by Jones' ''strategy'' (an entire place value" is said to have been crucial- an obvious claim, seeing as greater place values always result in greater amounts indicated.

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

:[Cueball is presenting a graphic on his left that shows two names followed by five digits]
:Cueball: Smith is leading in 3 of the 5 digits, and is tied in another. But Jones has a solid lead the thousands place, if Smith can't catch up there, it's over.

:Smith  5 5 3 8 4
:::tie X ✓ ✓ ✓
:::tie ✓ X X X
:Jones  5 9 1 0 2

:[Caption below the panel:]
:A lot of election commentary just consists of unnecessarily convoluted ways to add up who has more votes.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]

2113: Physics Suppression

2019-02-18T13:55:41Z

ItMarki: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 2113
| date = February 18, 2019
| title = Physics Suppression
| image = physics_suppression.png
| titletext = If physics had a mafia, I'm pretty sure the BICEP2 mess would have ended in bloodshed.
}}

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

Dark energy is an unknown form of energy which is hypothesized to permeate all of space, tending to accelerate the expansion of the universe. Even though "dark energy" is a direct consequence of Einstein's "cosmological constant" in the field equations of general relativity, it's actual discovery was still seen as a surprise within the physics community. Even Einstein had great trouble accepting it, calling it his "greatest blunder". In the comic, Megan says that if scientists were able to suppress inconvenient ideas, dark energy would likely have been such an case.

BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) was part of a series of instruments used to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In 17 March 2014, it was announced to much fanfare that BICEP2 had detected B-modes from gravitational waves in the early universe (called primordial gravitational waves). A few years later this announcement had to be backtracked, as it was found that most if not all the reported signal was actually due to interstellar dust within the Milky Way.

==Transcript==
[White Hat, furious with his hands in the air, is talking to Megan]

White Hat: You physicists are suppressing my theory because it's inconvenient for your models!

Megan: Wait, we have a mafia that can suppress annoying results?

Megan: ''Why didn't they do something about the dark energy people?!''

Megan: We gave them a Nobel prize but I'm still mad at them!

{{comic discussion}}

2113: Physics Suppression

2019-02-18T13:55:19Z

ItMarki: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 2113
| date = February 18, 2019
| title = Physics Suppression
| image = physics_suppression.png
| titletext = If physics had a mafia, I'm pretty sure the BICEP2 mess would have ended in bloodshed.
}}

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

Dark energy is an unknown form of energy which is hypothesized to permeate all of space, tending to accelerate the expansion of the universe. Even though "dark energy" is a direct consequence of Einstein's "cosmological constant" in the field equations of general relativity, it's actual discovery was still seen as a surprise within the physics community. Even Einstein had great trouble accepting it, calling it his "greatest blunder". In the comic, Megan says that if scientists were able to suppress inconvenient ideas, dark energy would likely have been such an case.

BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) was part of a series of instruments used to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In 17 March 2014, it was announced to much fanfare that BICEP2 had detected B-modes from gravitational waves in the early universe (called primordial gravitational waves). A few years later this announcement had to be backtracked, as it was found that most if not all the reported signal was actually due to interstellar dust within the Milky Way.

==Transcript==
[White Hat, furious with his hands in the air, is talking to Megan]

White Hat: You physicists are suppressing my theory because it's inconvenient for your models!

Megan: Wait we have a mafia that can suppress annoying results?

Megan: ''Why didn't they do something about the dark energy people?!''

Megan: We gave them a Nobel prize but I'm still mad at them!

{{comic discussion}}

2109: Invisible Formatting

2019-02-09T05:57:35Z

ItMarki: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 2109
| date = February 8, 2019
| title = Invisible Formatting
| image = invisible_formatting.png
| titletext = To avoid errors like this, we render all text and pipe it through OCR before processing, fixing a handful of irregular bugs by burying them beneath a smooth, uniform layer of bugs.
}}

==Explanation==

A''' '''fast''' '''way''' '''to''' '''select''' '''a''' '''word''' '''in''' '''many''' '''systems''' '''is''' '''to''' '''double-click''' '''it,''' '''which''' '''also''' '''selects''' '''the''' '''following''' '''space.''' '''After''' '''applying''' '''formatting,''' '''one''' '''may''' '''select''' '''only''' '''the''' '''word''' '''to''' '''remove''' '''this''' '''formatting,''' '''by''' '''clicking''' '''and''' '''dragging''' '''with''' '''the''' '''mouse,''' '''which''' '''leaves''' '''the''' '''space''' '''formatted.''' '''Since''' '''in''' '''most''' '''fonts''' '''the''' '''word''' '''space''' '''looks''' '''identical''' '''between''' '''the''' '''bold''' '''and''' '''the''' '''regular,''' '''this''' '''has''' '''no''' '''effect''' '''on''' '''how''' '''the''' '''end''' '''user''' '''will''' '''read''' '''the''' '''document,''' '''but''' '''could''' '''theoretically''' '''cause''' '''a''' '''problem''' '''on''' '''later''' '''occasions.''' '''[[Randall]]''' '''worries''' '''about''' '''this.

In the pictured case, he does not appear to have selected the word by double-clicking, since the cursor is depicted past the end of the word instead of on top of it. It appears instead that he has clicked and dragged the mouse cursor to select it, a method which also makes it easy to accidentally select a trailing space. The word space is a relatively thin character, which makes it hard to avoid and to notice, and most people don’t worry about whether they selected it. Therefore, selecting a trailing space is a common behavior, regardless of the method used.

If later the same word is highlighted to have the bold removed, but this time without including the space, the space would retain its bold formatting. Since it is an invisible character, there is no easy way to tell it is still bold—even if it is slightly longer in the bold font, this may be hard to notice. This is the situation the comic is highlighting—[[559: No Pun Intended|no pun intended]].

Occasions where a hidden bold space may be a problem include:
*Exporting to plain text files. If for example a {{w|markdown}} style is used, there will be characters in the output that do not make sense.
*Scraping, data mining, and linguistics processing by computer algorithms. Often (although not always) these algorithms are written based on samples of training or testing text that may not have spurious formatting present, and may misprocess something when encountering the spurious formatting.
*Wikis. In the first paragraph of this article, every space is a hidden bold space. From the editing view, all the spaces look <code><nowiki>like''' '''this</nowiki></code>. This will annoy all future editors of this article, due to the hidden apostrophes which are formatting the spaces. They may also accidentally introduce bold words.
**By default, MediaWiki attempts to prevent this by not including the trailing spaces in the bold formatting when you click the “bold” button, so someone has to manually type the formatting apostrophes to do this.
*Editing that adds some text at the location of the space will make this text bold.
*A situation where formatted text is not allowed, and is rejected, but the user failed to strip formatting from the spaces, and this is noticed.
*If a font has the word space look different between the bold and the regular, perhaps to make it so bold words are spaced closer to each other, the spacing will look inconsistent if there is a hidden bold space.
*Unnecessary extra formatting will usually unnecessarily increase file size, which may put the document above some maximum file size threshold.
*It can be later revealed that Randall considered to format parts of the text in bold. As the title text tells it is really important to Randall to control all information he publishes. Real-world examples are governments changing the impact of reports for political reasons. Attempted tampering of this kind can be revealed by bold spaces. Another example would be a casual and short one-sentence reply e.g. to a romantic interest, which one takes one hour to formulate to sound as natural as possible.

Randall’s background in {{w|computer programming}} could be what makes him more attentive to these types of technical problems, and therefore the reason for his worries.

Popular modern word processing programs have features which may make it easier to notice improperly formatted invisible characters. In the tutorials linked here, one may learn how to view invisible characters in [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/show-or-hide-formatting-marks-c2d8a607-5646-4165-8b08-bd68f9d172a0 Microsoft Word], [https://support.apple.com/kb/PH23650?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US Pages] and [https://help.libreoffice.org/Writer/Nonprinting_Characters LibreOffice Writer], however even with this on it would be difficult to spot a bolded space (which looks like a bolded dot – now visible but so small it's still hard to tell if it's bold or not). In the older word processor {{w|WordPerfect}}, one could do this with the “Reveal Codes” feature, which showed you character codes, separate from the characters themselves, around the characters. For example, a bolded space would look something like "[BOLD≻&ensp;≺BOLD]".

In the title text, Randall says that he “fixes” this by running the text through {{w|Optical character recognition|OCR}}, which turns physical copies or images into text. This would usually ruin even more formatting, and add inaccuracies to the text. This way, no one can tell which bugs were introduced by him and which ones by the OCR, which he thinks is better somehow.

==Transcript==

:[A text editor, with some options. They are superscript in one section, bold, italic and underscore in another section and alignments in the third section. The word "not ", including the following space, is highlighted in blue. There is a cursor below it.]
:Text: ...ere, but would not have to mo...
:Action: Select

:[The cursor is on the "bold" option and the selected word is bolded.]
:Text: ...ere, but would '''not '''have to mo...
:Action: Click

:[The cursor is next to the "to". No text is highlighted.]
:Text: ...ere, but would '''not '''have to mo...
:Thought bubble: ...Nah, the bold is too much.

:[The word "not" is now highlighted in blue again, but the following space is not.]
:Text: ...ere, but would '''not '''have to mo...
:Action: Select

:[The cursor is on the "bold" option and the selected word is not bolded.]
:Text: ...ere, but would not''' '''have to mo...
:Action: Click

:[The cursor and the blue highlighting are gone. The space after "not" has a dashed box around it, and an arrow points to it.]
:Text: ...ere, but would not''' '''have to mo...
:Arrow: Hidden bold space

:[Caption below the panels:]
:When editing text, in the back of my mind I always worry that I'm adding invisible formatting that will somehow cause a problem in the distant future.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]

2109: Invisible Formatting

2019-02-08T14:39:32Z

ItMarki: /* Transcript */

2100: Models of the Atom

2019-01-18T10:09:19Z

ItMarki: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 2100
| date = January 18, 2019
| title = Models of the Atom
| image = models_of_the_atom.png
| titletext = J.J. Thompson won a Nobel Prize for his work in electricity in gases, but was unfairly passed over for his "An atom is plum pudding, and plum pudding is MADE of atoms! Duuuuude." theory.
}}

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

This comic humorously describes the changing view of how {{w|atom}}s work.

The first model shown, in 1810, is said to be a "small hard ball model." Around this time, {{w|John Dalton}} came up with the most famous maxim of chemistry: "All stuff is made of atoms." Dalton used the idea to explain what is today known as {{w|stoichiometry}}. Thus humans thought up the idea of atoms – but in lieu of any ideas of how they work, the scientific community likely thought of them as "hard round balls"; thus the name described here.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the study of these "atom" things faced a crisis: where would the newly discovered "{{w|electron}}s" go? In 1904, physicist {{w|J. J. Thomson}}, who discovered electrons, had an idea: maybe the electrons were small point charges moving around in a big mass of positive charge. This was the "{{w|plum pudding model}}", the second model on the comic, called this because people imagined the positively charged mass as a "{{w|Christmas pudding|plum pudding}}". (The title text references Thomson as well, along with the humorous observation that plum puddings themselves are made of atoms.)

This was one of many competing ideas in the formative years of what-are-atoms-made-of-ology, where [[Randall]] claims a 1907 "tiny bird model" (the third model shown) would fit in well. But ultimately, the tentative winner in the battle was the model of Thomson's student {{w|Ernest Rutherford}}, who discovered that the positive charge seemed to be in the center of the atom, and put down his {{w|Rutherford model}}, or "planetary model", in 1911, where electrons orbit a positive charge. This is the fourth model put down.

But there were a few problems; {{w|Maxwell's equations}} complained, for instance, saying that the electrons would quickly orbit into the nucleus, emitting light in the process. {{w|Niels Bohr}} patched the model up with the newfangled idea of quantum mechanics, creating his "{{w|Bohr model}}", the fifth model shown here, in 1913.

If this sounds like today's model, you didn't pay enough attention; note that at this time, nobody thought of splitting up the nucleus into {{w|proton}}s and {{w|neutron}}s. But pretty soon people noticed that protons and neutrons existed; Randall facetiously suggests a "{{w|Nunchaku|nunchuck}} model", the sixth model shown, of a packet of protons swinging a packet of electrons around. But more seriously, {{w|James Chadwick}}, who discovered the neutron, figured that the atom had a nucleus of neutrons and protons, along with a bunch of electrons orbiting around it in a Bohrish manner. This is what the layman today often thinks of as an atom, and is the the seventh model shown here.

The eighth model shown is a "538 model" in 2008. {{w|FiveThirtyEight|538}} is a statistical analysis website that gained fame in 2008 for predicting every race but 2 correctly in the {{w|2008 United States presidential election|US presidential election}}. It has since been known for making mathematical models for everything; the model jokingly suggests that 538 has modeled and presumably made predictions about the atom. The {{w|pie chart}} shows the composition of neutrons, protons and electrons, 38%, 31%, and 31% respectively. This could represent gallium-69, the most abundant {{w|Isotopes of gallium|isotope of gallium}}, with 31 protons, 31 electrons and 38 neutrons.

But is the Chadwick model what scientists endorse today? No! Today physicists subscribe to a quantum model, which is the ninth model shown here. Instead of electrons, there are quantum clouds, or more simply, the parts of the atom aren't in any particular point, but rather a probability field of possible locations. This is very abstract, and in the last model, the model is postulated to get so abstract that it is just a "small hard ball surrounded by math" model, the last model shown. This then is remarkably similar to the model we started out from, the "small hard ball model" (without the math).

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
[One large panel with a caption centered on top and ten small drawings in two rows. Each drawing has a description below it.]

Models of the atom over time

[A somewhat imperfectly drawn circle.]

1810 Small hard ball model

[A rounded-corners trapezoid inside which there are four small plus signs and four small circles with minus signs inside them.]

1904 Plum pudding model

[A bigger circle, with four birds on the surface and music notes above.]

1907 Tiny bird model

[A small circle with dots circling around it, drawn with paths.]

1911 Rutherford model

[A circle with a plus sign with three circles around it, each with a dot.]

1913 Bohr model

[A nunchuck swinging, with the left stick filled with circles with plus signs and the right stick filled with circles with minus signs.]

1928 Nunchuck model

[A nucleus with three circles around it, each with a dot.]

1932 Chadwick model

[A pie chart, where a part of it has a circle, a part of it has a circle with a minus sign and a part of it has a circle with a plus sign.]

2008 538 model

[A circle, with (...)]

Today Quantum model

[A circle with numbers above.]

Numbers: 18, 0.1, π, 173, √2, 4i

Future "Small hard ball surrounded by math" model

{{comic discussion}}