2471: Hippo Attacks

2021-06-03T22:49:53Z

Ivan Awfulitch:

{{comic
| number = 2471
| date = June 2, 2021
| title = Hippo Attacks
| image = hippo_attacks.png
| titletext = It's cool how, when there's a number lots of people are curious about, but which isn't easy to measure, some random guess will get cited everywhere and become the universally quoted value. Unrelatedly, did you know there are 850 trillion waves in the ocean?
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a HIPAA-VIOLATING HIPPO. I think we have managed to capture the broad strokes of the comic, but it could use some copy-editing (especially my words), and I am not confident I am not missing some finer details. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

The first part of this comic deals with unreliable sources on the internet. Neither "viral posts" nor "random listicles" are usually very reliable sources of information. They rarely cite their sources, and they are often published without much fact-checking, as published volume and impressive-sounding numbers are far more important for ad-revenue than actual facts.

The viral post appears to be [https://www.facebook.com/clickhole/photos/a.1461385317435063/2945077732399140/?type=3 this Facebook post.] The relevant source is unknown (and may very well be made up, since the source is "ClickHole," a "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClickHolesatirical website formerly owned by The Onion]"). There are a number of listicles Cueball may be referring to, but they all appear to be citing [https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Most-Lethal-Animal-Mosquito-Week the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.]

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ({{w|HIPAA}}, pronounced ''HIP-uh'') is an American healthcare law enacted in 1996. One of the most commonly cited provisions from HIPAA is the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which regulates the use and disclosure of protected health information.

In this comic, Cueball and Megan are discussing the number of {{w|hippopotamus}} attacks, which is unverified. Megan proposes an alternative explanation as to why this particular number is hard to come by: it would be violating the patients' privacy to create statistics of a very specific and unusual cause of death. The punchline comes with the pun on "hippo violation" ("HIPAA violation").

The title text amplifies the criticism of listicles. They sometimes provide factoids with regards to ill-defined, hard-to-measure numbers, and these factoids might end up in common circulation between such articles. One extreme example would be the number of waves in the ocean. Some problems with this definition would be:

* In which ocean/oceans?
* What is the smallest ripple that counts as a wave?
* When does one count two interacting waves as separate, and when does one count them as one?
* Are counted waves limited to water waves, or can EM waves be considered?
* Should sub-surface waves be evaluated, too?

With different replies to these questions, wildly different answers could be reached. But, counting every body of water on the planet, this obviously works out as around 2.354 (unique) waves per square meter. Another possibility is that Cueball is trying to tell you how many hippo deaths there are without violating HIPAA/hippo code. (Note: There are less than 8 billion people on the earth, so this doesn't work.)

==Transcript==
:[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at his desk. He has lifted both arms with palm up towards the screen of his laptop in front of him. Megan stands behind him to the right, looking over his shoulder at the screen.]
:Cueball: I hate unsourced statistics.
:Cueball: ''This'' viral post says hippos kill 2,900 people a year, but ''this'' random listicle says 500.
:Megan: Makes sense.
:Megan: Publishing the real number would be a HIPPO violation.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Animals]]
[[Category:Statistics]]
[[Category:Puns]]

2470: Next Slide Please

2021-06-02T14:18:42Z

Ivan Awfulitch: Added Armstrong quotation caveat

{{comic
| number = 2470
| date = June 1, 2021
| title = Next Slide Please
| image = next_slide_please.png
| titletext = "I have nothing to offer but blood--next slide, please--toil--next slide, please--tears, and--next slide, please--sweat."
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by -- Next slide, please -- a BOT. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic presumes that many famous quotes are actually excerpts from {{w|Slide show|slideshow presentations}}, and the text they were reading was split across multiple slides. Splitting sentences across multiple slides can often be a useful tool if there are images accompanying it, which could explain the specific placement of many of "next slide, please" comments. For example, in the quote "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," one can imagine the speaker starting with a slide that showed the prosperity of some people then, in the middle of the sentence, switching to a slide of many people's destitution. When using images this way, it is often better for timing purposes to have control of your own slides. However, Randall claims that, in these speeches, the person making the speech wasn't controlling their slide presentation, so they had to ask the operator to go to the next slide. A common way to ask this is to say "next slide, please", but these requests have been edited out of the historical transcripts. The comic imagines the places where the slide breaks might have been, and inserts that request.

Most of these quotes are drawn from speeches, which could conceivably have been accompanied by slides or other stage directions ("pause for laughter"), but the list is quite ridiculous as it includes works of literature, where the reader is the one who turns pages as necessary, and speeches from periods of history, such as the {{w|American Revolution}} and {{w|Julius Caesar|Caesars}} {{w|Veni, vidi, vici}} speech, which predated slide projectors{{Citation needed}}. See details in the [[#Table of quotes|table]] below, including the quote in the title text.

The phrase "Next slide, please" is perhaps in a sweet-spot of utility and performance. A rehearsed presentation, with speaker and 'slide handler' working with a tight script, could probably do without off-stage prompting at all, or the better lecturers with an oft-repeated talk could set it all on timings knowing they can keep the changes synchronised with their speech, or vice-versa. But when a cue is necessary, an unambiguous signal should be used, and an audible 'clicker' (or a small and briefly flashed light) has been used historically, especially with pre-electronic slide-shows where the slide-operator at the back of an auditorium needed to clearly discern the intent of the person at the lectern.

===Table of quotes===
{| class="wikitable"
!Quote
!Attribution
!Context
|-
| "Give me liberty or give me—Next slide, please—death!"
| {{w|Patrick Henry}}, at the {{w|Second Virginia Convention}} on March 23, 1775, as part of the American Colonies' War of Independence from {{w|Kingdom of Great Britain|Great Britain}}.
| A {{w|Give me liberty, or give me death!|quotation}} from his speech to convince the convention to provide troops for the {{w|American Revolutionary War}}.
|-
| "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down—Next slide, please—this wall."
| {{w|Ronald Reagan}}, {{w|Berlin Wall Speech}} (1987).
| A speech calling for the opening of the Berlin Wall. This speech was later well known after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, resulting in the collapse of the Soviet Union. <br>In the comic Ronald Regan is shown next to his slide with a picture of the wall.
|-
| "It was the best of times—Next slide, please—It was the worst of times."
| {{w|A Tale of Two Cities}}, novel by {{w|Charles Dickens}}.
| At the current pace, the intro would have 13 "Next slide, please" instances.
|-
| "We have nothing to fear but—Next slide, please—fear itself."
| Inauguration of {{w|Franklin D. Roosevelt}} in 1933.
| {{w|First inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt|A speech}} outlining Roosevelt's plan to recover from the Great Depression. The correct phrasing of this speech is: "the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself".
|-
| "To be or—Next slide, please—not to be, that is the question."
| From the play ''{{w|Hamlet}}'' by {{w|William Shakespeare}}, Act III, Scene i.
| This speech is considered a soliloquy, even though Ophelia was in the room reading a book.
|-
| "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art—Next slide, please—more lovely and—Next slide, please—more temperate."
| Shakespeare's {{w|Sonnet 18}}.
| A sonnet is a type of poem and it requires specific rhyming and pacing. The inclusion of "Next slide, please" breaks the poetic flow and unbalanced the length of lines, making it unpredictable when a rhyme is supposed to occur.
|-
| "We shall fight—Next slide, please—on the beaches, we shall fight on—Next slide, please—the landing grounds..."
| {{w|Winston Churchill}}, ''{{w|We shall fight on the beaches}}'' speech.
| On 4 June 1940, after the disastrous first weeks of the {{w|battle of France}}, Churchill had to acknowledge a military disaster but to convene confidence in victory and will to fight. <br/>In the comic Winston Churchill is shown next to his slide of a beach. The beach image shown, shows [[Ponytail]] sitting under a parasol [[Cueball]] sitting on the sand with a drink and a kid playing with a beach-ball, as opposed to {{w|British_anti-invasion_preparations_of_the_Second_World_War#Coastal_crust|the rapidly fortified}} sea-fronts [http://ww2.brightonmuseums.org/defence-measures/ of wartime Britain].
|-
| "Read my lips—Next slide, please—no new taxes."
| {{w|George H. W. Bush}}, spoken at 1988 Republican National Convention
| A significant part of Bush's political platform was the opposition of new taxes. However, after winning the election, he was unable to keep this promise and ultimately did raise taxes in 1990.
|-
| "That's one small step for man—Next slide, please—one giant leap for mankind."
| {{w|Neil Armstrong}}, when he stepped off the {{w|Apollo 11}} lunar module and onto the surface of the Moon.
| Normally would be proof of a fake moon landing, although Neil Armstrong strongly insisted that the speech be made on location.{{fact}} The positioning of the "next slide, please" was placed at the intended comma, although there was also a small gap within "one giant" which could also be a potential placement in the audio clip.
Armstrong, it should be noted, claims to have said "That's one small step for '''a''' man, one giant leap for mankind" and that the '''a''' should be included in the quotation, [https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/armstrongs-famous-small-step-quote-explained-64311878 at least in parenthesis].
|-
| "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears! Next slide, please. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him."
| Spoken by the character Mark Antony in the play ''{{w|Julius Caesar (play)|Julius Caesar}}'' by Shakespeare, Act III, Scene ii.
| Takes place after Julius Caesar suffered a few stab wounds in Act III, scene ii. If it were a presentation, the pictures would need to be created between scenes, although the play implies there would barely be enough time in response to a recent event.
|-
| "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of—Next slide, please—a good fortune, must be in want of—Next slide, please—a wife."
| Intro to ''{{w|Pride and Prejudice}}'', written by {{w|Jane Austen}}.
|
|-
| "Veni, vidi—Velim, pictura proxima—vici."
| {{w|Julius Caesar}}, wrote his famous sentence {{w|Veni, vidi, vici}} in a letter after defeating Pharnaces II (47 BC). The sentence literally means, "I came, I saw, I conquered."
| Caesar used this phrase to refer to a swift, conclusive victory at the Battle of Zela.
|-
| "I have nothing to offer but blood--next slide, please--toil--next slide, please--tears, and--next slide, please--sweat." (title text)
| Winston Churchill, ''{{w|Blood, toil, tears and sweat}}'' speech.
| From 1940, shortly after he was appointed the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, when asking for a vote of confidence in the new all-party (unity) cabinet.
It would have to respond to the continuing challenges of the {{w|United_Kingdom_home_front_during_World_War_II|war-footing}} and active conflicts of WW2. The country had already been at war for eight months and was yet to experience Dunkirk, prompting yet another of Churchill's defiant speeches (mentioned above).
|}

==Transcript==
:[A list of 12 quotes is given. Above is a large header with a question, and then a description, before the quotes follows. The text above the quotes is centered:]
:<big>'''''Did you know?'''''</big>
:''Transcripts of famous quotes often''
:''leave out the slideshow instructions.''
:''Here’s how these lines actually sounded:''

:[The first six quotations, are written so they fit around an image of Ronald Reagan standing next to his slide showing six segments of the Berlin Wall. A large arrow points down on to the middle segment of the wall. There is something on the ground in front of the wall, could be puddles or debris. The image is to the right, and the two first and last quote goes above and below the image, while the other three stops to the left of the image:]
:"Give me liberty or give me—Next slide, please—death!"
:"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down—Next slide, please—this wall."
:"It was the best of times—Next slide, please—It was the worst of times."
:"We have nothing to fear but—Next slide, please—fear itself."
:"To be or—Next slide, please—not to be, that is the question."
:"Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art—Next slide, please—more lovely and—Next slide, please—more temperate."

:[Below those five quotations is three more quotes to the right of an image showing Winston Churchill standing next to his slide showing a beach. The sun and three small clouds are over the ocean which has white waves on the black water. Ponytail is sitting under a parasol to the left, Cueball is sitting on the sand to the right with a drink in his hands, and behind him is a kid running after a large beach-ball.]
:"We shall fight—Next slide, please—on the beaches, we shall fight on—Next slide, please—the landing grounds..."
:"Read my lips—Next slide, please—no new taxes."
:"That's one small step for man—Next slide, please—one giant leap for mankind."

:[Below this picture is the last three quotations, without any pictures:]
:"Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears! Next slide, please. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him."
:"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of—Next slide, please—a good fortune, must be in want of—Next slide, please—a wife."
:"Veni, vidi—Velim, pictura proxima—vici."

==Trivia==
* The Blood, toil, tears and sweat speech was already the topic of [[1148: Nothing to Offer]]

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Ronald Reagan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Winston Churchill]]
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]] 
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]

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2471: Hippo Attacks

2470: Next Slide Please