explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:2302: 2020 Google Trends

2023-09-26T08:02:19Z

Lamty101:

The graph for US searches for those terms for the past year from Google Trends can be seen here: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2019-05-05%202020-05-04&geo=US&q=sewing%20machine,webcam,andrew%20cuomo,flour,pangolin
: OK, now I want to see a Google Trends graph ''for the above exact search''! [[User:John.Adriaan|John.Adriaan]] ([[User talk:John.Adriaan|talk]]) 01:00, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
: Here is the searches but done by topic instead of exact search (its generally recommended to do it this way) https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2019-05-05%202020-05-04&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0llzx,%2Fm%2F0mynm,%2Fm%2F02pjpd,%2Fm%2F0fkw3,%2Fm%2F0dh5j
Anyone have any idea about the September spike and December bump in webcam searches? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.93|162.158.74.93]] 22:49, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

The September spike seems to be due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian. This can be traced down by google trends when narrowing down the date range and looking at the top search phrases that hint at the Bahamas. 22:52, 4 May 2020 (UTC)
--- The hurricane theory seems to agree with a similar spike in mid 2018, days before hurricane Florence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Florence as seen in https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-08-01%202018-10-01&geo=US&q=webcam. I'd hope webcams would last more than a year...

I agree. There's a spike for webcams every September since 2017, along with a small spike aligning with Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and a spike in October 2018 with Hurricane Michael. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.104|162.158.78.104]] 00:03, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Why is the webcam search profile so different for worldwide vs. US? [[Special:Contributions/172.68.132.229|172.68.132.229]] 23:36, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Is there a possibility that some of the September Spike in webcams is a (later in years than I'd expect, and surely quashed a bit by smartphones) sudden demand for Family Time with newly departed higher-education students? A modern equivalent remnant of the old September Madness that was at first boosted and then rendered moot by The Eternal September..? (But if it ''is'' hurricane season that drives it, and I'm not sure it would be, the fact that (for example) "In Hertford, Hereford, and ''(not-New)'' Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen" might explain why it isn't a worldwide driver.) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.107.164|141.101.107.164]] 01:47, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

:I would say it is exactly that. A Freshman off to college for the first time, and they and the parents want to make sure they can stay connected. [[User:N0lqu|-boB]] ([[User talk:N0lqu|talk]]) 20:50, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

RE: All the webcam speculation: There is a spike not due to people buying a webcam, but watching a webcam of the storm surge hitting. Keep in mind that "BEST WEBCAM TO TALK WITH GRANDCHILDREN" and "HURRICANE XYZ WEATHER WEBCAM" both contain the indicated search terms. I'm interpreting the comments above as the first scenario here, instead of the latter. [[User:OhFFS|OhFFS]] ([[User talk:OhFFS|talk]]) 15:04, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

GOOMHR! (damn, haven't wrote/read that in quite a while) - I was just checking random Google Trends few days ago and wondered what would people from the past think of it. Some examples (both positive and negative trends here): [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=tickets,how%20to%20cook,disneyland,delivery,paper] (I especially like the "how to cook" one with its predictive spikes for the past few years). Those are better viewed one by one, instead on a single graph, though. [[User:BytEfLUSh|BytEfLUSh]] ([[User talk:BytEfLUSh|talk]]) 01:55, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

:Also: Why not a paper pangolin, or at least a paper chef's hat? [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=paper] =) [[User:BytEfLUSh|BytEfLUSh]] ([[User talk:BytEfLUSh|talk]]) 03:44, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

:Sorry for spamming, but this is too much fun: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=tickets,zoom,china,delivery,paper] [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=hotel,new%20york,online,crossing,toilet] [[User:BytEfLUSh|BytEfLUSh]] ([[User talk:BytEfLUSh|talk]]) 04:29, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
::Indeed it is! The pandemic shows up in the google trends for soooo many widely different categories. I had some fun creating several different plots that would be as confusing as possible without the appropriate context: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-08-01%202023-08-01&q=yeast,china,netflix,football,cinema&hl=en-US Yeast, China, Netflix, football, cinema]; [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-08-01%202023-08-01&q=delivery,test,hotel,how%20to,meeting&hl=en-US delivery, test, hotel, how to, meeting]; [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-08-01%202023-08-01&q=tour,bike,flight,alcohol,workout&hl=en-US tour, bike, flight, alcohol, workout] (note how bike and tour are usually correlated but diverge during the lockdowns); [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-08-01%202023-08-01&q=office%20chair,hockey,laptop,furlough,pasta&hl=en-US office chair, hockey, laptop, furlough, pasta]; [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-08-01%202023-08-01&q=candle,adopt,barbecue,trip,clapping&hl=en-US candle, adopt, barbecue, trip, clapping]; [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-08-01%202023-08-01&q=restaurant,paris,italy,toilet%20paper,coffee&hl=en-US restaurant, paris, italy, toilet paper, coffee] [[User:Rebekka|Rebekka]] ([[User talk:Rebekka|talk]]) 06:39, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Technically there are a few people every year that are indeed from past years: Those that woke up from a long coma. [[User:Fabian42|Fabian42]] ([[User talk:Fabian42|talk]]) 09:27, 5 May 2020 (UTC)
:A non-coma version can be read in https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52332899 (not from a 2019 perspective; saw the start early this year, but did not realise it hadn't petered out into the expected obscurity). Didn't the Germany/similar version of Big Brother also have to deliberately break the news to the participants? Forgot to look that up, too. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.159.82|162.158.159.82]] 13:37, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

Should the explanation include some reason/event why the peaks begin when they do? Like "Sewing Machine" begins pretty late and I think that corresponds to the CDC changing from telling people "If you're not a healthcare worker, don't bother with masks just keep your distance from people" to "if you have to go out, wear a mask to minimize your chance of spreading the virus". The early rise of flour could be the combined effect of people who are stuck at home doing more baking, and the panic buying clearing out the grocery store shelves. Pangolin rose early and slowly, but dropped off before the end of march; speculation on exactly how the virus started in Wuhan would be more interesting before the virus is in your country, so as it spread the search interest changed over to topics that impact a person directly more than speculation.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.187.187|162.158.187.187]] 12:53, 5 May 2020 (UTC)

IIII is a clock error.[[Special:Contributions/172.69.63.173|172.69.63.173]] 23:12, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

People from China may have guessed it based on pangolin, as it was hit hard by SARS-CoV-1 virus in 2003, and there were already speculations that pangolin or other wild animals sold in markets got the virus and passed it to humans. COVID-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus and pangolins become a suspect again. History rhymes really hard this time. [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 08:02, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

Talk:2682: Easy Or Hard

2022-10-11T02:10:41Z

Lamty101:

For other people not in US: active ingredient of Tylenol is {{w|Paracetamol}}. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 12:51, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

"Now paleontologists have pinpointed during what time of year that millions of years event happened, all thanks to new fossil evidence" (from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okOnVovooeM SciShow]) It is probably what's referenced in the "What time of year did the cretaceous impact happen?" [[User:Ppete pete|Pete Ratchatakul]] ([[User talk:Ppete pete|talk]]) 13:36, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Paper cited in the title text: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360674587_Derivation_of_a_governing_rule_in_triboelectric_charging_and_series_from_thermoelectricity
[[User:Victor|Victor]] ([[User talk:Victor|talk]]) 13:39, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
:AKA https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.023131 [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.49|172.70.210.49]] 14:17, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Papers related to the time of the year of the impact:

"... reveal that the impact occurred during boreal Spring/Summer, shortly after the spawning season for fish and most continental taxa." - [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-03232-9 Seasonal calibration of the end-cretaceous Chicxulub impact event]

"Here, by studying fishes that died on the day the Mesozoic era ended, we demonstrate that the impact that caused the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction took place during boreal spring." - [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04446-1 The Mesozoic terminated in boreal spring]

[[User:Ppete pete|Pete Ratchatakul]] ([[User talk:Ppete pete|talk]]) 13:46, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Isn't mechanisms of Tylenol well known?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4912877/
:No - that's still a fairly new theory and it isn't fully accepted yet, or confirmed that there isn't anything else going on. It's been an area of controversy for a long time - when I graduated it was still thought it was a cox-3 inhibitor and that wasn't that long ago. (I'm a pharmacist.) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.77|172.70.162.77]] 12:07, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

I can't vouch for the long-period accuracy of the software that I just used (nor have I cross-checked with any other list or interactive app), but my quick research shows that on 31st March 1889 (dignitaries were officially taken to the top of the Eiffel Tower), Mars was in Pisces, and that in-between then and 6th May (the public got to do the same) it had drifted through Aries (IIRC, forgot to note that explicitly!) and into Taurus, where it was still on 26th May (the lifts opened, and the journey didn't have to be by the stairs!). Although you would have been unlikely to get a good view of Mars as it was quite close to conjunction with the Sun, getting well past Mercury's furthest extent. (In mid-June, it was practically on top of (or over but behind, as it were) the Sun, out of sight for all practical purposes.) I'm sure someone can do a more thorough check than myself, before we set this down properly/succinctly, but it was the first thing I thought of checking for myself. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.245|172.70.90.245]] 15:56, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Top right reminds of [[2501: Average Familiarity]]: I guess that for many people relativity and quantum mechanics might fall in the middle right cell, not the top right. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.3.238|172.69.3.238]] 16:07, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
:I agree. It takes some familiarity with physics to realize that reconciling them is hard. Lay people may not understand these things at all, but they might assume that they're known well enough by scientists that this is at worst a hard problem. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 16:28, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Isn't there a category for these types of grids? There should be, he does lots of them. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 16:28, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

I got 2.125*10^-17 m/s^2, or 3.18*10^-18 N, for the gravitational force/acceleration from the Eiffel Tower on a baseball on Fenway Park. Someone might want to check my calculations, though.--[[User:Account|Account]] ([[User talk:Account|talk]]) 23:42, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
: It occurred to me that the Boston to Paris gravity question might not be quite as easy as it seems, since the relevant distance would be not “as the crow flies,” but more “as the mega-gopher digs.” (I think?) [[User:Miamiclay|Miamiclay]] ([[User talk:Miamiclay|talk]]) 21:11, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
:: I already edited it away from the (implied) suggestion of Great Circle distance (as a trivial understanding of 'distance between', and probably what most searches for a value would turn up). But using latitude, longitude and radius (local, +altitude if you're into the detail) from a sufficiently accurate geophysical model (at least an oblate spheroid) as spherical coordinates leads quickly to true-ish straight-line length. And probably doesn't need to be sigbificantly further adjusted by the small dimple in spacetime that the Earth puts there, or even the fringe distortions of other tide-inducing (and therefore variable) gravitational bodies.
:: You might even get away with a mere spherical model (and altitude is surely less significant a factor than the difference between that and the spheroid), for a given necessary accuracy level. But I thought that was too much to explain, so left it a bit vaguer. But if further edits are needed, feel free! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.49|172.70.85.49]] 08:27, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

I can attest to the anesthesia one... Near the beginning of Covid I had to get my foot amputated, something they obviously would knock you out for. However, it was felt that it would be risky in light of Covid so they wouldn't, instead numbing me with a needle to the spine (as I understand it, same idea as the epidural women might get while giving birth). So I was awake and feeling nothing while getting a body part cut off me (both times, I had to get cut twice due to the first cut getting infected). Just shows how delicate even an anesthesiologist's understanding is. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 04:03, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Is it actually a bigger medical mystery how Tylenol works than how general anesthesia works? I figure the latter has had more research dollars spent on it, at the very least. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.178.65|172.70.178.65]] 21:17, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Calculating how much does the Eiffel Tower's gravity deflect baseballs in Boston is easy, but direct observation is insanely hard. [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 02:09, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2682: Easy Or Hard

2022-10-11T02:09:41Z

Lamty101:

For other people not in US: active ingredient of Tylenol is {{w|Paracetamol}}. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 12:51, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

"Now paleontologists have pinpointed during what time of year that millions of years event happened, all thanks to new fossil evidence" (from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okOnVovooeM SciShow]) It is probably what's referenced in the "What time of year did the cretaceous impact happen?" [[User:Ppete pete|Pete Ratchatakul]] ([[User talk:Ppete pete|talk]]) 13:36, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Paper cited in the title text: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360674587_Derivation_of_a_governing_rule_in_triboelectric_charging_and_series_from_thermoelectricity
[[User:Victor|Victor]] ([[User talk:Victor|talk]]) 13:39, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
:AKA https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.023131 [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.49|172.70.210.49]] 14:17, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Papers related to the time of the year of the impact:

"... reveal that the impact occurred during boreal Spring/Summer, shortly after the spawning season for fish and most continental taxa." - [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-03232-9 Seasonal calibration of the end-cretaceous Chicxulub impact event]

"Here, by studying fishes that died on the day the Mesozoic era ended, we demonstrate that the impact that caused the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction took place during boreal spring." - [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04446-1 The Mesozoic terminated in boreal spring]

[[User:Ppete pete|Pete Ratchatakul]] ([[User talk:Ppete pete|talk]]) 13:46, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Isn't mechanisms of Tylenol well known?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4912877/
:No - that's still a fairly new theory and it isn't fully accepted yet, or confirmed that there isn't anything else going on. It's been an area of controversy for a long time - when I graduated it was still thought it was a cox-3 inhibitor and that wasn't that long ago. (I'm a pharmacist.) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.77|172.70.162.77]] 12:07, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

I can't vouch for the long-period accuracy of the software that I just used (nor have I cross-checked with any other list or interactive app), but my quick research shows that on 31st March 1889 (dignitaries were officially taken to the top of the Eiffel Tower), Mars was in Pisces, and that in-between then and 6th May (the public got to do the same) it had drifted through Aries (IIRC, forgot to note that explicitly!) and into Taurus, where it was still on 26th May (the lifts opened, and the journey didn't have to be by the stairs!). Although you would have been unlikely to get a good view of Mars as it was quite close to conjunction with the Sun, getting well past Mercury's furthest extent. (In mid-June, it was practically on top of (or over but behind, as it were) the Sun, out of sight for all practical purposes.) I'm sure someone can do a more thorough check than myself, before we set this down properly/succinctly, but it was the first thing I thought of checking for myself. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.245|172.70.90.245]] 15:56, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Top right reminds of [[2501: Average Familiarity]]: I guess that for many people relativity and quantum mechanics might fall in the middle right cell, not the top right. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.3.238|172.69.3.238]] 16:07, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
:I agree. It takes some familiarity with physics to realize that reconciling them is hard. Lay people may not understand these things at all, but they might assume that they're known well enough by scientists that this is at worst a hard problem. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 16:28, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Isn't there a category for these types of grids? There should be, he does lots of them. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 16:28, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

I got 2.125*10^-17 m/s^2, or 3.18*10^-18 N, for the gravitational force/acceleration from the Eiffel Tower on a baseball on Fenway Park. Someone might want to check my calculations, though.--[[User:Account|Account]] ([[User talk:Account|talk]]) 23:42, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
: It occurred to me that the Boston to Paris gravity question might not be quite as easy as it seems, since the relevant distance would be not “as the crow flies,” but more “as the mega-gopher digs.” (I think?) [[User:Miamiclay|Miamiclay]] ([[User talk:Miamiclay|talk]]) 21:11, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
:: I already edited it away from the (implied) suggestion of Great Circle distance (as a trivial understanding of 'distance between', and probably what most searches for a value would turn up). But using latitude, longitude and radius (local, +altitude if you're into the detail) from a sufficiently accurate geophysical model (at least an oblate spheroid) as spherical coordinates leads quickly to true-ish straight-line length. And probably doesn't need to be sigbificantly further adjusted by the small dimple in spacetime that the Earth puts there, or even the fringe distortions of other tide-inducing (and therefore variable) gravitational bodies.
:: You might even get away with a mere spherical model (and altitude is surely less significant a factor than the difference between that and the spheroid), for a given necessary accuracy level. But I thought that was too much to explain, so left it a bit vaguer. But if further edits are needed, feel free! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.49|172.70.85.49]] 08:27, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

I can attest to the anesthesia one... Near the beginning of Covid I had to get my foot amputated, something they obviously would knock you out for. However, it was felt that it would be risky in light of Covid so they wouldn't, instead numbing me with a needle to the spine (as I understand it, same idea as the epidural women might get while giving birth). So I was awake and feeling nothing while getting a body part cut off me (both times, I had to get cut twice due to the first cut getting infected). Just shows how delicate even an anesthesiologist's understanding is. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 04:03, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Is it actually a bigger medical mystery how Tylenol works than how general anesthesia works? I figure the latter has had more research dollars spent on it, at the very least. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.178.65|172.70.178.65]] 21:17, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Calculating how much does the Eiffel Tower's gravity deflect baseballs in Boston is easy, but direct observation is insanely hard.

The calculation also need assumptions like the tower exert gravitational fields in same way as all other known matter over several thousand kms (presumably true) [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 02:09, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2682: Easy Or Hard

2022-10-11T02:09:07Z

Lamty101:

For other people not in US: active ingredient of Tylenol is {{w|Paracetamol}}. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 12:51, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

"Now paleontologists have pinpointed during what time of year that millions of years event happened, all thanks to new fossil evidence" (from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okOnVovooeM SciShow]) It is probably what's referenced in the "What time of year did the cretaceous impact happen?" [[User:Ppete pete|Pete Ratchatakul]] ([[User talk:Ppete pete|talk]]) 13:36, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Paper cited in the title text: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360674587_Derivation_of_a_governing_rule_in_triboelectric_charging_and_series_from_thermoelectricity
[[User:Victor|Victor]] ([[User talk:Victor|talk]]) 13:39, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
:AKA https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.023131 [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.49|172.70.210.49]] 14:17, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Papers related to the time of the year of the impact:

"... reveal that the impact occurred during boreal Spring/Summer, shortly after the spawning season for fish and most continental taxa." - [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-03232-9 Seasonal calibration of the end-cretaceous Chicxulub impact event]

"Here, by studying fishes that died on the day the Mesozoic era ended, we demonstrate that the impact that caused the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction took place during boreal spring." - [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04446-1 The Mesozoic terminated in boreal spring]

[[User:Ppete pete|Pete Ratchatakul]] ([[User talk:Ppete pete|talk]]) 13:46, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Isn't mechanisms of Tylenol well known?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4912877/
:No - that's still a fairly new theory and it isn't fully accepted yet, or confirmed that there isn't anything else going on. It's been an area of controversy for a long time - when I graduated it was still thought it was a cox-3 inhibitor and that wasn't that long ago. (I'm a pharmacist.) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.77|172.70.162.77]] 12:07, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

I can't vouch for the long-period accuracy of the software that I just used (nor have I cross-checked with any other list or interactive app), but my quick research shows that on 31st March 1889 (dignitaries were officially taken to the top of the Eiffel Tower), Mars was in Pisces, and that in-between then and 6th May (the public got to do the same) it had drifted through Aries (IIRC, forgot to note that explicitly!) and into Taurus, where it was still on 26th May (the lifts opened, and the journey didn't have to be by the stairs!). Although you would have been unlikely to get a good view of Mars as it was quite close to conjunction with the Sun, getting well past Mercury's furthest extent. (In mid-June, it was practically on top of (or over but behind, as it were) the Sun, out of sight for all practical purposes.) I'm sure someone can do a more thorough check than myself, before we set this down properly/succinctly, but it was the first thing I thought of checking for myself. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.245|172.70.90.245]] 15:56, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Top right reminds of [[2501: Average Familiarity]]: I guess that for many people relativity and quantum mechanics might fall in the middle right cell, not the top right. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.3.238|172.69.3.238]] 16:07, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
:I agree. It takes some familiarity with physics to realize that reconciling them is hard. Lay people may not understand these things at all, but they might assume that they're known well enough by scientists that this is at worst a hard problem. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 16:28, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Isn't there a category for these types of grids? There should be, he does lots of them. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 16:28, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

I got 2.125*10^-17 m/s^2, or 3.18*10^-18 N, for the gravitational force/acceleration from the Eiffel Tower on a baseball on Fenway Park. Someone might want to check my calculations, though.--[[User:Account|Account]] ([[User talk:Account|talk]]) 23:42, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
: It occurred to me that the Boston to Paris gravity question might not be quite as easy as it seems, since the relevant distance would be not “as the crow flies,” but more “as the mega-gopher digs.” (I think?) [[User:Miamiclay|Miamiclay]] ([[User talk:Miamiclay|talk]]) 21:11, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
:: I already edited it away from the (implied) suggestion of Great Circle distance (as a trivial understanding of 'distance between', and probably what most searches for a value would turn up). But using latitude, longitude and radius (local, +altitude if you're into the detail) from a sufficiently accurate geophysical model (at least an oblate spheroid) as spherical coordinates leads quickly to true-ish straight-line length. And probably doesn't need to be sigbificantly further adjusted by the small dimple in spacetime that the Earth puts there, or even the fringe distortions of other tide-inducing (and therefore variable) gravitational bodies.
:: You might even get away with a mere spherical model (and altitude is surely less significant a factor than the difference between that and the spheroid), for a given necessary accuracy level. But I thought that was too much to explain, so left it a bit vaguer. But if further edits are needed, feel free! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.49|172.70.85.49]] 08:27, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

I can attest to the anesthesia one... Near the beginning of Covid I had to get my foot amputated, something they obviously would knock you out for. However, it was felt that it would be risky in light of Covid so they wouldn't, instead numbing me with a needle to the spine (as I understand it, same idea as the epidural women might get while giving birth). So I was awake and feeling nothing while getting a body part cut off me (both times, I had to get cut twice due to the first cut getting infected). Just shows how delicate even an anesthesiologist's understanding is. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 04:03, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Is it actually a bigger medical mystery how Tylenol works than how general anesthesia works? I figure the latter has had more research dollars spent on it, at the very least. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.178.65|172.70.178.65]] 21:17, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Calculating how much does the Eiffel Tower's gravity deflect baseballs in Boston is easy, but direct observation is insanely hard.
The calculation also need assumptions like the tower exert gravitational fields in same way as all other known matter over several thousand kms (presumably true) [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 02:09, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2659: Unreliable Connection

2022-08-17T04:50:34Z

Lamty101:

I don’t think this has anything to do with teleconferencing. Am I missing something? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.214.81|172.70.214.81]] 22:46, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
:Yes. The impliction is that people are expecting you to be available for online communications, and you can use the unreliable Internet connection as an excuse to get out of it. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 22:51, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
::I think it's more about communication in general. He doesn't want anybody calling him or sending him emails, so by saying he has an "unreliable" connection people might assume it will be hard to get in touch with him.
:::Back in the day, email was usually configured so that it could easily overcome such unreliability, and it's still doable,[https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/running-from-home/6459/7] but today email for most people is a web or local client-server app, as opposed to a local mail store in a peer-to-peer app. Even people in urban areas can suffer unreliable internet, when squirrels or backhoes gnaw through data cables, copper theives strike, or 5G mind control base stations are congested. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.143|172.70.210.143]] 23:45, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
:::This could equally cover other instant communication methods where your availability is advertised (e.g. Whatsapp). It could also be about alleviating the social pressure the subject feels to continuously check and immediately respond to messages (including emails), because the immediacy is already hindered by the spotty connection (cf the standard "I will have limited access to email" out of office line, which gives the account owner psychological permission to check it infrequently). [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.5|172.70.85.5]] 09:02, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

According to a PhET simulator (https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/plinko-probability/latest/plinko-probability_en.html) for this situation, the ideal standard deviation is 1.732 and ideal mean is 6. I don’t feel like doing the calculations :P [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.134|172.70.211.134]] 23:34, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
:If we assume 50-50 for each bounce, the probability that internet is off will be about (11 choose 3)/(2^11), or 8%.--[[User:Account|Account]] ([[User talk:Account|talk]]) 23:51, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
::My first thought was, why so complicated? ''If'' each of the twelve switches is equally (and solely) likely to be struck by each ball, it's (100/12)% of the time, or 8⅓%.
::Although the equal-chance is wrong, so you're definitely doing "end up with exactly 7 bounce rights and 3 bounce lefts, but in any combination" or similar are you? I'd have summed it differently, though. And not sure where the choose ''3'' comes in... Just one bounce left off any row-end pin 11 sends to 11 if all others bounce right. Three bounces left hits switch 9, not eight. If I'm counting correctly. Or am I doing telegraph-poles/wires miscounting?
::Too early in the morning for me to untangle. The only thing I'm sure about is your division by 2^11 (how many total paths there are to get down). [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.78|172.70.91.78]] 05:00, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
:::Me again. I hadn't checked that the transcript (which said it was switch #8) was correct. Have now, and found it to be wrong. Have hence also just corrected the Transcript. So I'm gonna assume your 11-choose-3 is entirely correct after all. ;) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.78|172.70.91.78]] 05:08, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

To whomever did [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2659:_Unreliable_Connection&diff=292862&oldid=292861], doesn't [https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2018/8817/pdf/LIPIcs-FUN-2018-26.pdf] prove that symmetrical configurations nearly identical to those shown can produce uniform distributions? They seem to show it's just a matter of horizontal pin spacing. However, I for one can not verify the proof, which uses unusual (novel?) non-Unicode math notation, and a fairly opaque method of proof. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.134|172.70.211.134]] 00:07, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
:Not sure, but [https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%87%98%E8%AA%BF%E6%95%B4 this Japanese Wikipedia article] is fascinating. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 01:51, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
:Please see section 3.5 on pp. 16-18 of the currently first reference [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.05706.pdf]. I am particularly intrigued by, "Open Problem 2: Is every uniform distribution of output probabilities of the form 1/2k constructible by a 50-50 Pachinko?" on p. 18. However I haven't dived in enough to even know where the parentheses are supposed to be in that expression, yet. [[User:Liv2splain|Liv2splain]] ([[User talk:Liv2splain|talk]]) 17:27, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
: Good question! https://ibb.co/sRwGwB9 don't look triangular, but it seems the proof might suggest much more triangular solutions. Worth thinking about! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.115|172.69.33.115]] 21:24, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

What is the chance that the ball will bounce off the first pin, go down the outside of the pins and miss all the switches?
:Probably quite high if it's a bouncy ball. With idealized physics though it'd just hit the leftmost/rightmost switch. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.254.127|172.70.254.127]] 00:45, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

I would describe the device as a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton_board. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.230.109|172.70.230.109]] 00:30, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

I was watching the photo and hover-over text and the image disappeared and "Unreliable Connection" showed up in its place. I don't know how often this happens.
: Very neat if not a fluke! Can anyone replicate this experience on https://xkcd.com ? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.134|172.70.211.134]] 14:21, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

"An added source of humour is that Randall could likely achieve the same effect by looking through the router's settings - which most modern ones have a feature to turn on and off at scheduled times - or via purchasing a smart power strip." But by using these other methods, the connection would still be reliable. If it goes out at regular or pre-scheduled intervals then you know when it will be available or not, hence reliable. I think the joke here is that the contraption does in fact make the connection unreliable. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.77|172.70.114.77]] 14:18, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
: Addressed at [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2659:_Unreliable_Connection&diff=292926&oldid=292924]. [[User:Liv2splain|Liv2splain]] ([[User talk:Liv2splain|talk]]) 14:44, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
:(Edit conflicted by at least the above, but my answer to the same question...) From a user POV, unless they happen to know that at 11:53 each day (and 12:14, 15:02, 15:07, 16:31, etc...) the scheduler disables tracfic for one (or two, or three) minutes, it is still unreliable, if ultimately predictable ''once you know'' the schedule, having seen it go round a few times and taken note. Similarly a timered power-strip could be used (or even several, in serial, the two or three daily interventions by the first also stopping and delaying the subsequent strips' interventions, making their timings uneven, further down the chain) and until you got the pattern it might as well be 'random', not entirely deterministic. (I'm wondering about some OR-gate-like/etc implementation, so power can pass by at least one parallel timer-shut-off to maintain power at the lower levels while ''some'' mid-way timers get depowered and thus 'shuffled' in interesting ways, and the resulting single output is governed by an intricate multi-dependent set of routes, but I bet an electrician would be wary about wiring that up...)
:You could hack (or patch) the management firmware to be a bit more (pseudo)random about it, though it would still be pseudorandom LFSR/Xorshift with a (long) repetition cycle.
:Or make it dependant upon an external factor (if the modulo 12 of the cumulative sum of all observed packet-destination IPs is zero, shut off for the five times the prior modulo 12 test value, in seconds..?), but that's ''practically'' the pachinko solution but with software hacking rather than hardware-making/hacking as per the comic.
:More effort is needed to make it ultimately unpredictable, but it can still be considered unreliable if it goes out just when you 'want' it.... [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.5|172.70.85.5]] 15:02, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

For real though, isn't this kind of a good idea? [[User:Fephisto|Fephisto]] ([[User talk:Fephisto|talk]]) 14:34, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
:Talk to edtech people in the {{w|MOOC}} space and they will tell you asynchronous is worth it, but talk to people who study educational quality factors like time to receive answers to unanticipated questions, and they will have different ideas. [[User:Liv2splain|Liv2splain]] ([[User talk:Liv2splain|talk]]) 14:44, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Does anyone have an openWRT (or other) implementation of this feature yet?
:You can induce it on stock firmware without reflashing, but you need to know the parameters like how often balls come out of the hopper, and what exactly the on/off switches do. As pseudocode:
::<tt>#!/bin/sh</tt>
::<tt>while true ; do</tt>
:::<tt>sleep </tt>''seconds''
:::<tt>if [ `rand100` -le 8 ] ; then</tt>
::::<tt>wifictrl off</tt>
:::<tt>else</tt>
::::<tt>wifictrl on</tt>
:::<tt>fi</tt>
::<tt>done</tt>
:[[Special:Contributions/172.70.214.81|172.70.214.81]] 00:38, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

There are spaces between the button that the balls can fall into, and this could complicate the stuff a bit. However if the ratio between probability of hitting ON and probability of hitting OFF remain the same (1883:165), the average OFF time will still be the same (165/2048 of the time). The behavior that the network is switching between ON and OFF will probably be changed though. [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 04:44, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2659: Unreliable Connection

2022-08-17T04:44:43Z

Lamty101:

I don’t think this has anything to do with teleconferencing. Am I missing something? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.214.81|172.70.214.81]] 22:46, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
:Yes. The impliction is that people are expecting you to be available for online communications, and you can use the unreliable Internet connection as an excuse to get out of it. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 22:51, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
::I think it's more about communication in general. He doesn't want anybody calling him or sending him emails, so by saying he has an "unreliable" connection people might assume it will be hard to get in touch with him.
:::Back in the day, email was usually configured so that it could easily overcome such unreliability, and it's still doable,[https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/running-from-home/6459/7] but today email for most people is a web or local client-server app, as opposed to a local mail store in a peer-to-peer app. Even people in urban areas can suffer unreliable internet, when squirrels or backhoes gnaw through data cables, copper theives strike, or 5G mind control base stations are congested. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.143|172.70.210.143]] 23:45, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
:::This could equally cover other instant communication methods where your availability is advertised (e.g. Whatsapp). It could also be about alleviating the social pressure the subject feels to continuously check and immediately respond to messages (including emails), because the immediacy is already hindered by the spotty connection (cf the standard "I will have limited access to email" out of office line, which gives the account owner psychological permission to check it infrequently). [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.5|172.70.85.5]] 09:02, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

According to a PhET simulator (https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/plinko-probability/latest/plinko-probability_en.html) for this situation, the ideal standard deviation is 1.732 and ideal mean is 6. I don’t feel like doing the calculations :P [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.134|172.70.211.134]] 23:34, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
:If we assume 50-50 for each bounce, the probability that internet is off will be about (11 choose 3)/(2^11), or 8%.--[[User:Account|Account]] ([[User talk:Account|talk]]) 23:51, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
::My first thought was, why so complicated? ''If'' each of the twelve switches is equally (and solely) likely to be struck by each ball, it's (100/12)% of the time, or 8⅓%.
::Although the equal-chance is wrong, so you're definitely doing "end up with exactly 7 bounce rights and 3 bounce lefts, but in any combination" or similar are you? I'd have summed it differently, though. And not sure where the choose ''3'' comes in... Just one bounce left off any row-end pin 11 sends to 11 if all others bounce right. Three bounces left hits switch 9, not eight. If I'm counting correctly. Or am I doing telegraph-poles/wires miscounting?
::Too early in the morning for me to untangle. The only thing I'm sure about is your division by 2^11 (how many total paths there are to get down). [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.78|172.70.91.78]] 05:00, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
:::Me again. I hadn't checked that the transcript (which said it was switch #8) was correct. Have now, and found it to be wrong. Have hence also just corrected the Transcript. So I'm gonna assume your 11-choose-3 is entirely correct after all. ;) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.78|172.70.91.78]] 05:08, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

To whomever did [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2659:_Unreliable_Connection&diff=292862&oldid=292861], doesn't [https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2018/8817/pdf/LIPIcs-FUN-2018-26.pdf] prove that symmetrical configurations nearly identical to those shown can produce uniform distributions? They seem to show it's just a matter of horizontal pin spacing. However, I for one can not verify the proof, which uses unusual (novel?) non-Unicode math notation, and a fairly opaque method of proof. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.134|172.70.211.134]] 00:07, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
:Not sure, but [https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%87%98%E8%AA%BF%E6%95%B4 this Japanese Wikipedia article] is fascinating. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 01:51, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
:Please see section 3.5 on pp. 16-18 of the currently first reference [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.05706.pdf]. I am particularly intrigued by, "Open Problem 2: Is every uniform distribution of output probabilities of the form 1/2k constructible by a 50-50 Pachinko?" on p. 18. However I haven't dived in enough to even know where the parentheses are supposed to be in that expression, yet. [[User:Liv2splain|Liv2splain]] ([[User talk:Liv2splain|talk]]) 17:27, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
: Good question! https://ibb.co/sRwGwB9 don't look triangular, but it seems the proof might suggest much more triangular solutions. Worth thinking about! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.115|172.69.33.115]] 21:24, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

What is the chance that the ball will bounce off the first pin, go down the outside of the pins and miss all the switches?
:Probably quite high if it's a bouncy ball. With idealized physics though it'd just hit the leftmost/rightmost switch. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.254.127|172.70.254.127]] 00:45, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

I would describe the device as a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton_board. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.230.109|172.70.230.109]] 00:30, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

I was watching the photo and hover-over text and the image disappeared and "Unreliable Connection" showed up in its place. I don't know how often this happens.
: Very neat if not a fluke! Can anyone replicate this experience on https://xkcd.com ? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.134|172.70.211.134]] 14:21, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

"An added source of humour is that Randall could likely achieve the same effect by looking through the router's settings - which most modern ones have a feature to turn on and off at scheduled times - or via purchasing a smart power strip." But by using these other methods, the connection would still be reliable. If it goes out at regular or pre-scheduled intervals then you know when it will be available or not, hence reliable. I think the joke here is that the contraption does in fact make the connection unreliable. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.77|172.70.114.77]] 14:18, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
: Addressed at [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2659:_Unreliable_Connection&diff=292926&oldid=292924]. [[User:Liv2splain|Liv2splain]] ([[User talk:Liv2splain|talk]]) 14:44, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
:(Edit conflicted by at least the above, but my answer to the same question...) From a user POV, unless they happen to know that at 11:53 each day (and 12:14, 15:02, 15:07, 16:31, etc...) the scheduler disables tracfic for one (or two, or three) minutes, it is still unreliable, if ultimately predictable ''once you know'' the schedule, having seen it go round a few times and taken note. Similarly a timered power-strip could be used (or even several, in serial, the two or three daily interventions by the first also stopping and delaying the subsequent strips' interventions, making their timings uneven, further down the chain) and until you got the pattern it might as well be 'random', not entirely deterministic. (I'm wondering about some OR-gate-like/etc implementation, so power can pass by at least one parallel timer-shut-off to maintain power at the lower levels while ''some'' mid-way timers get depowered and thus 'shuffled' in interesting ways, and the resulting single output is governed by an intricate multi-dependent set of routes, but I bet an electrician would be wary about wiring that up...)
:You could hack (or patch) the management firmware to be a bit more (pseudo)random about it, though it would still be pseudorandom LFSR/Xorshift with a (long) repetition cycle.
:Or make it dependant upon an external factor (if the modulo 12 of the cumulative sum of all observed packet-destination IPs is zero, shut off for the five times the prior modulo 12 test value, in seconds..?), but that's ''practically'' the pachinko solution but with software hacking rather than hardware-making/hacking as per the comic.
:More effort is needed to make it ultimately unpredictable, but it can still be considered unreliable if it goes out just when you 'want' it.... [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.5|172.70.85.5]] 15:02, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

For real though, isn't this kind of a good idea? [[User:Fephisto|Fephisto]] ([[User talk:Fephisto|talk]]) 14:34, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
:Talk to edtech people in the {{w|MOOC}} space and they will tell you asynchronous is worth it, but talk to people who study educational quality factors like time to receive answers to unanticipated questions, and they will have different ideas. [[User:Liv2splain|Liv2splain]] ([[User talk:Liv2splain|talk]]) 14:44, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Does anyone have an openWRT (or other) implementation of this feature yet?
:You can induce it on stock firmware without reflashing, but you need to know the parameters like how often balls come out of the hopper, and what exactly the on/off switches do. As pseudocode:
::<tt>#!/bin/sh</tt>
::<tt>while true ; do</tt>
:::<tt>sleep </tt>''seconds''
:::<tt>if [ `rand100` -le 8 ] ; then</tt>
::::<tt>wifictrl off</tt>
:::<tt>else</tt>
::::<tt>wifictrl on</tt>
:::<tt>fi</tt>
::<tt>done</tt>
:[[Special:Contributions/172.70.214.81|172.70.214.81]] 00:38, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

There are spaces between the button that the balls can fall into, and this could complicate the stuff a bit. However if the ratio between probability of hitting ON and probability of hitting OFF remain the same (1883:165), the average OFF time will still be the same. [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 04:44, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2639: Periodic Table Changes

2022-07-01T15:01:04Z

Lamty101:

The format of this comic appears most similar to https://xkcd.com/1902/. Is it worth noting that, in some representations of the periodic table (see https://ptable.com/#Electrons), Helium is indeed placed in the second column next to Hydrogen? [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 21:54, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Nice. I'm doing the old "what elements have been obscured/overwritten" thing, after far too long since actually memorising the Periodic Table that was on my school's lab wall... But, hey! Where has Hahnium got to? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.77|172.70.162.77]] 22:25, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

I wonder why he kept the Latinate abbreviations for Antimony and Mercury. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 23:17, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

The changes by Asdf seem like they mostly belong in the Transcript, not Explanation.
:I moved some of my lengthy descriptions from Explanation to Transcript, hopefully this helps. Sorry if I caused inconvenience. -[[User:Asdf|Asdf]] ([[User talk:Asdf|talk]]) 00:00, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

Laaaaame! Not revolutionary enough! Why not simply get rid of all these historical accidents and indicate any element by its nuclear charge? [[Special:Contributions/172.71.102.117|172.71.102.117]] 07:05, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

Anyone else find it ironic that the new kinds of carbon are indexed with Roman numerals on the same comic where it says "this isn't Ancient Rome"? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.38.27|162.158.38.27]] 07:18, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

For the language nerds among us, "I" for iron wouldn't work at all well in Dutch. Although the element is typewritten "ijzer", the first two characters are treated as a single letter and are capitalised together (IJzer). It's pronounced EI and is listed in the Dutch alphabet alongside (or sometimes even instead of) Y.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.233.55|162.158.233.55]] 08:37, 30 June 2022 (UTC)
:Clearly there isn't much consideration given to any other language than English. The "annoying W" is for Wolfram or something close in many languages, "Na" is Natrium, "K" is Kalium - frankly, Mr. Munroe just uses the wrong language. Then again, "Fe" really is annoying, of course it should be "Ei" for Eisen ... [[User:627235|627235]] ([[User talk:627235|talk]]) 11:32, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

This feels more like a parallel to corporate reorganisations that are based on idealised concepts of how an organisation 'should' work than on the practicalities of what people actually do, than it does to economic plans. Particularly with the reference to training elements to adapt to their new positions. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.173|172.70.90.173]] 10:47, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

For the language bit he somehow missed Mercury (Hg: Hydrargyrum). [[User:Thaledison|Erin Anne]] ([[User talk:Thaledison|talk]]) 15:21, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

He also missed Cu. Since copper is more familiar than cobalt, except for certain classes of scientist, it gets Co and cobalt gets Cb. Which will never get confused with niobium, will it? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.175.30|172.70.175.30]] 21:28, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

The title may also mean "Periodic" tables changes, i.e. the table changes every few months. That's what I understood at first glance. [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 15:01, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

=== Table galore ===
Can we please get back to a less table-ceneterd style? Tables are a neat tool to order various data. "Text" and "Explanation" are not in that category. That's what (section)headlines are for. Or do you write your articles/homework/thesis/whatever in Excel (or equivalent)? I know people who LOVE to use excel for text work, so that's not that unheared of, but there's a general rule: Use the right tool for the right job. Tables are not the right tool for "Text" and "Explanation". /edit: And such wide tables are generally bad to view/handle in mobile [[User:Elektrizikekswerk|Elektrizikekswerk]] ([[User talk:Elektrizikekswerk|talk]]) 08:22, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

As long as we can all agree on the spellings. I propose that we all use the spelling "aluminum" but as a compromise adopt "platinium" [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.75|108.162.237.75]] 14:34, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

2608: Family Reunion

2022-04-20T13:49:23Z

Lamty101: added dinosaur extinction year

{{comic
| number = 2608
| date = April 18, 2022
| title = Family Reunion
| image = family_reunion.png
| titletext = Grandma says that because of differences in primate and feline lifespans, the cat is actually my 17,000,000th cousin 14,000,000 times removed.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by THE GIRL YOU DIDN'T KNOW WAS YOUR RELATIVE (WHOOPS) - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

Because all humans are descended from a {{w|Mitochondrial Eve|common ancestor}}, every human is, at some point, related to every other human, albeit distantly. Similarly, all life forms on Earth are presumed (with good reasons) to be descended from a single {{w|Most recent common ancestor|even more distant relative}} whose ultimate lineage {{w|Last universal common ancestor|became more relevant}} than any from its own 'cousins' at the time, and thus ''all'' life forms are distantly related. This makes every interaction with another life-form, technically, a family reunion, if not in the traditional sense.

The general English definition of a {{w|cousin}}, which is a person sharing an ancestor who is not a direct parent of either party, can be qualified by two numbers. There is the ''n''th-ness of the relationship (the fewest generations you need to go beyond one's parentage, "a first cousin" implies that a grandparent is the key link) - for example, [[Cueball|this Cueball's]] relation to [[White Hat]] is via a great-grandparent, whilst that with [[Hairbun]] is through a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent. A "removed" number is any difference in this number between the two individuals, such that a child of a direct cousin invokes a "once removed" relationship between the two (without individually qualifying who is the 'senior' generation, from whom the 'nth' count is determined). You would normally only qualify "first cousin" if this fact is considered important, and "zero times removed" would also be considered implicit.

As pointed out in the title text, cat lifespans (or, more importantly, inter-generational breeding cycles) are somewhat different from those of humans. Although they would have still been very similar immediately after the divergence from the appropriate MRCA, the differences will have built up to a generational-count displacement of a similarly extreme nature. i.e. that while the shared ancestor is Cueball's 17-million-or-so-Great Grandparent, the cat is in turn the 31-million-or-so-Great Grandchild. Exactly how accurate, or even precise, Randall considers these numbers is unknown, but it is the kind of fact that we know he likes to research and use expert opinion for.

According to [https://www.quora.com/How-many-generations-of-human-beings-recognizably-the-same-as-us-have-there-been this Quora page], there have been about 13,000 generations of modern humans, so the people at this party would be quite closely related, all things considered.

[https://www.evogeneao.com/en/learn/tree-of-life The Evogeneao Tree of Life diagram] indicates that humans and cats diverged around 90 million years ago and humans and plants diverged around 1.8 billion years ago.

If we presume that generations of humans (including proto-humans, pre-humans, etc) since the divergence from cathood (including proto-cats, pre-cats, and the rest, back to the common ancestral form) have averaged around 5 years, then a 17 millionth cousin may be about right. Many of our (and cats') early ancestors will have necessarily been small burrowing mammals — to have been amongst the ones who survived the asteroid around 66 million years ago that killed off most of the dinosaurs — with contemporary equivalents having breeding cycles in terms of a year at the most. But we currently have a large feasible range of generational cycle (15-50 years, ''very'' roughly, with or without technical/social help or hinderances), that may have started to drag our long-term average upwards since at least the age of the early homonids, if not the age of our primate forebears or earlier.

To get a 50 billionth cousin from the potted plant, then the generations of (eventually) humans since we were of the same form as that time's ancestrial plants (or vice-versa) would need to average two weeks. This is possible, but difficult to be precise about due to the lack of much of the required evidence in the known fossilised remains.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon. Like seriously, don't}}

:[Megan, White Hat, Cueball, Hairy, Danish, a cat, Hairbun, a chair, and a potted plant on a cabinet are "standing" in a line. White Hat is holding a cup and Hairy has his hands to the side. There are arrows pointing to each of the living creatures.]

:14th cousin [Megan]
:2nd cousin [White Hat]
:Me [Cueball]
:12th cousin [Hairy]
:35th cousin [Danish]
:17,000,000th cousin [cat]
:9th cousin [Hairbun]
:50,000,000,000th cousin [potted plant]

:[Caption below the panel:]
:Really, ''every'' gathering is a family reunion.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]

[[Category:Comics featuring Hairbun]]
[[Category:Cats]]
[[Category:Biology]]

Talk:2559: December 25th Launch

2022-01-14T08:51:50Z

Lamty101:

Santa delivers his presents on Christmas Eve. The launch is scheduled for 9:20am French Guiana time, so Santa should be long gone during the final countdown. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 06:05, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

I feel like the way it's written and also the "update" in the title text is a reference to the NORAD Santa Tracker (or maybe the Google one). I'd do it myself but it's 2AM, so can someone fact check me and possibly add it to the article assuming I'm not misremembering. Thanks, [[User:Zman350x|Zman350x]] ([[User talk:Zman350x|talk]]) 07:20, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Launches have been stopped many times at less than 8 seconds, and Randall would be familiar with this fact. The "unavoidable" bit of the explanation can safely (and preferably) be dropped. Given Randall's demonstrated frustration with Webb delays, the joke about the RSO shooting down Santa is almost certainly attributable to intolerance of another delay. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.213|172.70.130.213]] 07:45, 25 December 2021 (UTC)
:Thanks for the heads up; edited my addition. It still feels like an italicized "oh no" is too big of a reaction to a delay that's <strike>short, unique, and measurable</strike>. Maybe forcing a launch to abort at -7 seconds causes some kind of fuel combustion(??)/consumption issue that damages some of the spacecraft and requires a much longer delay? Then this could be added to the explanation. (Obviously I'm not an expert here.) Alternatively, say it takes 7 seconds to say the words in the second and third panels, so the spacecraft has already launched. [[User:Zowayix|Zowayix]] ([[User talk:Zowayix|talk]]) 08:16, 25 December 2021 (UTC)
:Edit: Found a real example of an abort delay and added to the explanation.
::I mean, it kinda feels like a “straw that broke the camel’s back” type of situation here. It’s not the incident itself, it’s everything leading up to that moment and how it probably left Cueball on edge. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.215.195|108.162.215.195]] 08:30, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

I think there's a barb here about NASA ruining xmas for a lot of people, by slipping the launch date to 25 December. [[User:Arithex|Arithex]] ([[User talk:Arithex|talk]]) 08:58, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

As far as I know, Range Safety Officers don't have ground-to-air weapons, and are therefore incapable of shooting down Santa. when RSO's need to kill something, they use remote detonation commands. How any RSO managed to pre-place a self-destruct package aboard Santa's Sleigh remains an open question: normally they only have those placed aboard the actual rocket stages. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.57|172.70.130.57]] 11:15, 25 December 2021 (UTC)
:That's easy: Write Santa a letter that you want a remotely controllable self-destruct package for Christmas. It will be conveniently placed on the sleigh on December 25. This must be one of the gazillion steps on the JWST pre-launch checklist. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.91.164|162.158.91.164]] 13:14, 25 December 2021 (UTC)
:All will be revealed in the new {{w|How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000 film)|Grinch}} sequel, '''How the Grinch Killed Christmas''' which details how he finds work as a Range Safety Officer. [[User:Kev|Kev]] ([[User talk:Kev|talk]]) 19:12, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

While I like the current note about Santa being aware about this launch due to astronomy geeks asking for it as a present, I would note that Santa must already have extremely good collision avoidance system considering the speed his sleight is moving (at least 650 miles per second) to manage all deliveries over single night. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 03:33, 26 December 2021 (UTC)
:That's assuming Santa moves with finite speed and well-defined position. Personally I'm a big fan of the time stop/time loop explanation.[[Special:Contributions/172.69.42.121|172.69.42.121]] 03:56, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Real launch aborts have occurred after T=0. For Ariane 5 launches T=0 is ignition of the main engines. Liftoff occurs when the solid boosters are ignited at T+6seconds. (This is different from NASA and other American launchers where T=0 is liftoff)[[Special:Contributions/172.70.34.91|172.70.34.91]] 15:46, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

Arguably observing Santa Claus should be prioitized over launching JWST ASAP, if Santa ''really'' appear on a flying sleigh. It could lead to completely new science if it ever happens :p [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 08:51, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2492: Commonly Mispronounced Equations

2021-07-24T08:45:05Z

Lamty101:

This comic is obviously a take on the generation Z style of writing words without vowels so that they fit on T-Shirts, text messages or to avoid censorship, like "BRLN", "O RLY", "PIX PLZ". Some of the people from that generation are now established scientist, leading their respective fields forward. Obviously this is how they refer to common equations. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.92.29|162.158.92.29]] 13:10, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I think the wave equation is wrong based on units, but it's been a while. The wave speed ought to be squared. Of course, ''c'' could be a squared speed, but it's usually not. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.34.164|172.70.34.164]] 01:22, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

:I agree, normally it's written as C squared... The equations in order are 1: Gravitational Attraction, 2: Einstein's Mass / Energy Conversion, 3: Pythagorean Theorem (triangle side relations), 4: Area of a Circle, 5: Entropy equation, 6: Ideal Gas Law, 7: Euler's Identity, 8: Newtons Second law, 9: Wave equation, 10: The derivative of a function f, and, 11: The Quadratic Equation... I don't understand the linguistic rules being applied to the names, but they seem to be visual as much as anything [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.66|108.162.237.66]] 02:04, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
::You should turn that into a table in the explanation. We can have a column where we try to come up with the pronunciation rule. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 04:10, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

The equation for the thing I have as what it was made by is
L
=
i
ψ
¯
γ
μ
∂
μ
ψ
−
e
ψ
¯
γ
μ
(
A
μ
+
B
μ
)
ψ
−
m
ψ
¯
ψ
1
4
F
μ
ν
F
μ
ν
.
{\displaystyle {\mathcal {L}}=i{\bar {\psi }}\gamma ^{\mu }\partial _{\mu }\psi -e{\bar {\psi }}\gamma ^{\mu }(A_{\mu }+B_{\mu })\psi -m{\bar {\psi }}\psi -{\frac {1}{4}}F_{\mu \nu }F^{\mu \nu }.}

when copy-pasted from Wikipedia. {{w|Quantum electrodynamics#Equations_of_motion|here is the link:}} [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics#Equations_of_motion These are both the links.]
For archival, this is the thing: LAGRONJ EYSIBARYMOODMOOSIOYLERSIBRYMOOAMOOBAMOOSIMASIBRSIQORTFAHMOOVYFAHMOOVY.
[[User:4D4850|4D4850]] ([[User talk:4D4850|talk]]) 02:22, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

My friends and I actually pretty often say "PəV-nert" for the ideal gas law. First syllable is kind of vowel-less, sort of a schwa if anything. But also stressed? Didn't know you could stress a schwa but, guess I did.
[[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.160|172.70.130.160]] 02:36, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:My teachers always pronounced it PIV-nert. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.62.20|172.69.62.20]] 18:38, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I think this is the XKCD that has made me laugh the most, out of all 2492.
:I'd say it might be the one that made me laugh the most, out of all {{LATESTCOMIC}}. I won't, because it didn't, but I could. --[[User:4D4850|4D4850]] ([[User talk:4D4850|talk]]) 03:23, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:"Doot-ca-doox" is so funny. I'm imagining Pingu saying that. !!!!

I tried to transcribe these pronunciations into IPA, because reading them like this is kind of ambiguous. I probably got a bunch of stuff wrong though.
fəˈdʒæmɚ |
ˈɛmkɑˌtu |
ætˈbutkut |
ˈæpɚˌtu |
həˈsplɒgpi |
ˈpævnɚt |
ˈaɪpɪn |
ˈfimɑ |
dut kəˈduks |
ˈfækslɪmˌoʊ ˈfæksəˌfɒx |
zəˈbɔbə fækˈtoʊɑ |
ˌɛpsɪˈhutəˌmu ˈdupsɪˌkwɔrps

Why is it a soft G in the gravity equation? [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 04:10, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:I believe it's a reference to the "gif" pronunciation debate. "Fuh-gam-er" is the obvious pronunciation, Randal is facetiously asserting "Fuh-jam-er" is correct.--[[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.130|108.162.250.130]] 05:00, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:I think it might be because the English letter "G" is pronounced "Gee" (i.e. "Jee"), which made its way into the pronunciation here.[[User:BenjaminTheBenevolent|BenjaminTheBenevolent]] ([[User talk:BenjaminTheBenevolent|talk]]) 10:27, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ok_GMxThuo How would you pronounce the word 'give'?] !!!!

The most similar time when equations are actually 'pronounced' a bit like this is the "soh cah toa" mnemonic for the trigonometric identities - should this be in the explanation? (the comic made at least me think that might be the original inspiration) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.204|141.101.99.204]] 06:42, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

:How is "soh cah toa" a mnemonic?? It's just a bunch of random letters. Normally you memorize random letters by coming up with words that fit together, not vice versa. I think this is much harder to remember than the thing it is supposedly a mnemonic for. If anyone actually finds it useful, can you explain how it works for you? I've seen this before so I suppose it's a real thing, but I find it baffling. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.220|108.162.221.220]] 04:15, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
::You ask how it's a mnemonic, yet you say you've seen it before. Think about that for a sec.
[[User:Klo876|Klo876]] ([[User talk:Klo876|talk]]) 01:58, 24 July 2021 (UTC)
::Not sure it's a mnemonic, no, but I was taught SOHCAHTOA by a very good (but strict) maths teacher as in "... (like?) that volcanic eruption". Given we were 10, 11 years old, I don't think we even ''knew'' about {{w|Krakatoa}} at that point (despite having also a very good Geography teacher who readily identified lumps of 'Gneissian schist' that I may have brought back from holiday - he also had a much better sense of humour...) so whether I (or the teacher?) was mistaken in understanding "Sohcahtoa" to be purported to be a (now ironically memorable) volcano rather than it was a "it rhymes with..." mnemonic, I don't now know. But since then I have always used SOHCAHTOA to confirm in my mind which trigonometric identity I should use. And, later, I learnt and never forgot that {{w|Krakatoa,_East_of_Java|Krakatoa is/was ''west'' of Java}}! [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.230|141.101.98.230]] 08:20, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
::(PS - If I ever have to use the "Many Very Elderly Men Just..." mnemonic (or whatever it is, I was sure it had had Earthenware Vases, but maybe only in a reversed version!), I tend to have to ''backform'' it from my unclear recollection of the mnemonic(s) I've been told plus just ''knowing'' that it's "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, **, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune*, Pluto-if-we're-counting-it*" (* - except between 1979 and 1999 when it was "...Pluto-definity-counted-at-this-time, Neptune") (** - and then there's possibly an A, B or C here for Asteroid, Belt or Ceres; nobody I know has ever added Kuiper and/or Oort into the string of words to need remembering, though) using very non-mnemonical direct or indirect knowledge about the solar-system, like Clarke's written version of 2001 aiming at Saturn but Kubrik's film 'only' going as far as Jupiter. So I "(Sometimes?) Might Very Earnestly Make And Join Something Unprecedented Never Known Originally" on the spur of the moment.)
:The circle area might be meant to read out like "upper two", referencing the square. I can't see the same for any of the others though. / [[Special:Contributions/162.158.183.157|162.158.183.157]] 06:52, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

:Mneumonics are supposed to make it easier to remember the equations; this collection would actually make it more challenging to remember these. Mind you, as a math tutor, my first thought was that these were attempts at mnemonics that missed the mark, '''badly'''. [[User:Nutster|Nutster]] ([[User talk:Nutster|talk]]) 15:04, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I see nobody has attempted the Transcript yet. (Also I'm wondering how to 'properly' pronounce P-One V-One Over T-One Equals P-Two V-Two Over T-Two.) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.155.157|162.158.155.157]] 10:41, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:I started a transcript. --[[User:4D4850|4D4850]] ([[User talk:4D4850|talk]]) 16:54, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Sorry to come in as an amateur, but I think the equation pronounced Ha-SPLOG-pee is actually the equation for Shannon diversity. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.126.134|162.158.126.134]] 11:58, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
: In my opinion, most of the contributions here are from people pretending to know more than they do. Edit away. Be bold. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.172|172.70.114.172]] 21:04, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

The Pythagorean Theorem one made me think of the AT-AT debate for Star Wars
:The wave equation reminded me of Jimmy Durante's Ink A Dinka Doo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWqi9eWwXvk I think I'm dating myself (no one else will). [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 16:55, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't think it's clear if the provided pronunciations are the ''Correct'' ones or the common ''mispronunciations''

It's worth noting that the majority of these equations are especially likely to be elided, and that the way they're routinely elided is generally incorrect - and more than that, the stressed syllable in particular is likely wrong. Especially notably "Fu-Jam-Er" should be "Fu-Gam-Er" and "Pav-Nert" should be "Piv-Nert". The joke works on the level of equation pronunciation being pretty intrinsically funny if you're not familiar with the specific equation, but also on the level of the specific equations having a standard pronunciation that pointedly isn't the one in the comic.

It would be interesting to try and reverse-engineer the original equations behind, for example, "Fus ro dah", or "Avada Kedavra". [[User:Cavaler|Cavaler]] ([[User talk:Cavaler|talk]]) 12:53, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

What is the pronounciation notation this comic is using?? I can't even find them in Oxford/Cambridge/Merriam-Webster/Collins dictionary, though I think I occasionally see them somewhere else. --[[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 08:43, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Talk:2492: Commonly Mispronounced Equations

2021-07-24T08:44:43Z

Lamty101:

This comic is obviously a take on the generation Z style of writing words without vowels so that they fit on T-Shirts, text messages or to avoid censorship, like "BRLN", "O RLY", "PIX PLZ". Some of the people from that generation are now established scientist, leading their respective fields forward. Obviously this is how they refer to common equations. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.92.29|162.158.92.29]] 13:10, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I think the wave equation is wrong based on units, but it's been a while. The wave speed ought to be squared. Of course, ''c'' could be a squared speed, but it's usually not. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.34.164|172.70.34.164]] 01:22, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

:I agree, normally it's written as C squared... The equations in order are 1: Gravitational Attraction, 2: Einstein's Mass / Energy Conversion, 3: Pythagorean Theorem (triangle side relations), 4: Area of a Circle, 5: Entropy equation, 6: Ideal Gas Law, 7: Euler's Identity, 8: Newtons Second law, 9: Wave equation, 10: The derivative of a function f, and, 11: The Quadratic Equation... I don't understand the linguistic rules being applied to the names, but they seem to be visual as much as anything [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.66|108.162.237.66]] 02:04, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
::You should turn that into a table in the explanation. We can have a column where we try to come up with the pronunciation rule. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 04:10, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

The equation for the thing I have as what it was made by is
L
=
i
ψ
¯
γ
μ
∂
μ
ψ
−
e
ψ
¯
γ
μ
(
A
μ
+
B
μ
)
ψ
−
m
ψ
¯
ψ
1
4
F
μ
ν
F
μ
ν
.
{\displaystyle {\mathcal {L}}=i{\bar {\psi }}\gamma ^{\mu }\partial _{\mu }\psi -e{\bar {\psi }}\gamma ^{\mu }(A_{\mu }+B_{\mu })\psi -m{\bar {\psi }}\psi -{\frac {1}{4}}F_{\mu \nu }F^{\mu \nu }.}

when copy-pasted from Wikipedia. {{w|Quantum electrodynamics#Equations_of_motion|here is the link:}} [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics#Equations_of_motion These are both the links.]
For archival, this is the thing: LAGRONJ EYSIBARYMOODMOOSIOYLERSIBRYMOOAMOOBAMOOSIMASIBRSIQORTFAHMOOVYFAHMOOVY.
[[User:4D4850|4D4850]] ([[User talk:4D4850|talk]]) 02:22, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

My friends and I actually pretty often say "PəV-nert" for the ideal gas law. First syllable is kind of vowel-less, sort of a schwa if anything. But also stressed? Didn't know you could stress a schwa but, guess I did.
[[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.160|172.70.130.160]] 02:36, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:My teachers always pronounced it PIV-nert. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.62.20|172.69.62.20]] 18:38, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I think this is the XKCD that has made me laugh the most, out of all 2492.
:I'd say it might be the one that made me laugh the most, out of all {{LATESTCOMIC}}. I won't, because it didn't, but I could. --[[User:4D4850|4D4850]] ([[User talk:4D4850|talk]]) 03:23, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:"Doot-ca-doox" is so funny. I'm imagining Pingu saying that. !!!!

I tried to transcribe these pronunciations into IPA, because reading them like this is kind of ambiguous. I probably got a bunch of stuff wrong though.
fəˈdʒæmɚ |
ˈɛmkɑˌtu |
ætˈbutkut |
ˈæpɚˌtu |
həˈsplɒgpi |
ˈpævnɚt |
ˈaɪpɪn |
ˈfimɑ |
dut kəˈduks |
ˈfækslɪmˌoʊ ˈfæksəˌfɒx |
zəˈbɔbə fækˈtoʊɑ |
ˌɛpsɪˈhutəˌmu ˈdupsɪˌkwɔrps

Why is it a soft G in the gravity equation? [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 04:10, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:I believe it's a reference to the "gif" pronunciation debate. "Fuh-gam-er" is the obvious pronunciation, Randal is facetiously asserting "Fuh-jam-er" is correct.--[[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.130|108.162.250.130]] 05:00, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:I think it might be because the English letter "G" is pronounced "Gee" (i.e. "Jee"), which made its way into the pronunciation here.[[User:BenjaminTheBenevolent|BenjaminTheBenevolent]] ([[User talk:BenjaminTheBenevolent|talk]]) 10:27, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ok_GMxThuo How would you pronounce the word 'give'?] !!!!

The most similar time when equations are actually 'pronounced' a bit like this is the "soh cah toa" mnemonic for the trigonometric identities - should this be in the explanation? (the comic made at least me think that might be the original inspiration) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.204|141.101.99.204]] 06:42, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

:How is "soh cah toa" a mnemonic?? It's just a bunch of random letters. Normally you memorize random letters by coming up with words that fit together, not vice versa. I think this is much harder to remember than the thing it is supposedly a mnemonic for. If anyone actually finds it useful, can you explain how it works for you? I've seen this before so I suppose it's a real thing, but I find it baffling. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.220|108.162.221.220]] 04:15, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
::You ask how it's a mnemonic, yet you say you've seen it before. Think about that for a sec.
[[User:Klo876|Klo876]] ([[User talk:Klo876|talk]]) 01:58, 24 July 2021 (UTC)
::Not sure it's a mnemonic, no, but I was taught SOHCAHTOA by a very good (but strict) maths teacher as in "... (like?) that volcanic eruption". Given we were 10, 11 years old, I don't think we even ''knew'' about {{w|Krakatoa}} at that point (despite having also a very good Geography teacher who readily identified lumps of 'Gneissian schist' that I may have brought back from holiday - he also had a much better sense of humour...) so whether I (or the teacher?) was mistaken in understanding "Sohcahtoa" to be purported to be a (now ironically memorable) volcano rather than it was a "it rhymes with..." mnemonic, I don't now know. But since then I have always used SOHCAHTOA to confirm in my mind which trigonometric identity I should use. And, later, I learnt and never forgot that {{w|Krakatoa,_East_of_Java|Krakatoa is/was ''west'' of Java}}! [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.230|141.101.98.230]] 08:20, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
::(PS - If I ever have to use the "Many Very Elderly Men Just..." mnemonic (or whatever it is, I was sure it had had Earthenware Vases, but maybe only in a reversed version!), I tend to have to ''backform'' it from my unclear recollection of the mnemonic(s) I've been told plus just ''knowing'' that it's "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, **, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune*, Pluto-if-we're-counting-it*" (* - except between 1979 and 1999 when it was "...Pluto-definity-counted-at-this-time, Neptune") (** - and then there's possibly an A, B or C here for Asteroid, Belt or Ceres; nobody I know has ever added Kuiper and/or Oort into the string of words to need remembering, though) using very non-mnemonical direct or indirect knowledge about the solar-system, like Clarke's written version of 2001 aiming at Saturn but Kubrik's film 'only' going as far as Jupiter. So I "(Sometimes?) Might Very Earnestly Make And Join Something Unprecedented Never Known Originally" on the spur of the moment.)
:The circle area might be meant to read out like "upper two", referencing the square. I can't see the same for any of the others though. / [[Special:Contributions/162.158.183.157|162.158.183.157]] 06:52, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

:Mneumonics are supposed to make it easier to remember the equations; this collection would actually make it more challenging to remember these. Mind you, as a math tutor, my first thought was that these were attempts at mnemonics that missed the mark, '''badly'''. [[User:Nutster|Nutster]] ([[User talk:Nutster|talk]]) 15:04, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I see nobody has attempted the Transcript yet. (Also I'm wondering how to 'properly' pronounce P-One V-One Over T-One Equals P-Two V-Two Over T-Two.) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.155.157|162.158.155.157]] 10:41, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
:I started a transcript. --[[User:4D4850|4D4850]] ([[User talk:4D4850|talk]]) 16:54, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Sorry to come in as an amateur, but I think the equation pronounced Ha-SPLOG-pee is actually the equation for Shannon diversity. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.126.134|162.158.126.134]] 11:58, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
: In my opinion, most of the contributions here are from people pretending to know more than they do. Edit away. Be bold. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.114.172|172.70.114.172]] 21:04, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

The Pythagorean Theorem one made me think of the AT-AT debate for Star Wars
:The wave equation reminded me of Jimmy Durante's Ink A Dinka Doo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWqi9eWwXvk I think I'm dating myself (no one else will). [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 16:55, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't think it's clear if the provided pronunciations are the ''Correct'' ones or the common ''mispronunciations''

It's worth noting that the majority of these equations are especially likely to be elided, and that the way they're routinely elided is generally incorrect - and more than that, the stressed syllable in particular is likely wrong. Especially notably "Fu-Jam-Er" should be "Fu-Gam-Er" and "Pav-Nert" should be "Piv-Nert". The joke works on the level of equation pronunciation being pretty intrinsically funny if you're not familiar with the specific equation, but also on the level of the specific equations having a standard pronunciation that pointedly isn't the one in the comic.

It would be interesting to try and reverse-engineer the original equations behind, for example, "Fus ro dah", or "Avada Kedavra". [[User:Cavaler|Cavaler]] ([[User talk:Cavaler|talk]]) 12:53, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

What is the pronounciation notation this comic is using?? I can't even find them in Oxford/Cambridge/Merriam-Webster/Collins dictionary, though I do occasionally see them somewhere else. --[[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 08:43, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Talk:2492: Commonly Mispronounced Equations

2021-07-24T08:43:30Z

Lamty101:

Talk:2118: Normal Distribution

2020-08-21T08:23:10Z

Lamty101:

Is there a statistician in the house? [[User:Hawthorn|Hawthorn]] ([[User talk:Hawthorn|talk]]) 15:32, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
I think they all got annoyed at the graph and left. [[User:Margath|Margath]] ([[User talk:Margath|talk]]) 15:46, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
Of course there is! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.214.22|162.158.214.22]] 15:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

As an example: When measuring the height of people in the same age bracket, then you'll expect the number of people at each height to look like this graph. There will be a lot of people around the average height, fewer a foot shorter/taller, some (but very few) exceptionally tall people, and some (but very few) exceptionally short people. The x-value represents the height, the y-value essentially represents the amount of population that share that height. When we measure the middle 50% of the population using vertical bars, then people at a certain height are either inside '''OR''' outside the middle. Randall uses horizontal bars here, which means some people at a certain height will be counted in the middle 50%, but other people with the same height won't be. In fact, some people with the exact average height of the whole population would fall outside the middle. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.214|108.162.241.214]] 16:01, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Feel free to rip me apart for referring to it as the "number of people at each height", since y-axis is more complicated than a simple count. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.214|108.162.241.214]] 16:03, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Just to say, Randall's horizontal slice isn't entirely meaningless. It's a calculation I've had to do, where I have a series of binned samples of a population (say I knew how many fell in -10..10, how many fell in -5..5, how many fell in -2..2) and wanted to combine them with an appropriate weighting to approximate a Gaussian. I was using it for filtering, but it's logically similar. [[User:Fluppeteer|Fluppeteer]] ([[User talk:Fluppeteer|talk]]) 16:19, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::Also, the slice sampler for MCMC is a trick for sampling from a distribution by "turning it on its side". But I don't think the 50% figure would be meaningful in that context. (Though the 52.7% number on this graph would be.) [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.136|172.68.54.136]] 21:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Pedant: etymologically, there *is* actually a connection between a normal (to a surface or line) and the normal distribution; the former comes from the Latin for a set square (giving you perpendicular), and it later came to mean "standard". The "tangential distribution" certainly fits the etymology of "odd/unusual" though. [[User:Fluppeteer|Fluppeteer]] ([[User talk:Fluppeteer|talk]]) 16:26, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

This reminds me of the difference between Riemann(-Stieltjes) and Lebesgue integration. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.160|172.68.54.160]] 20:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

As the axis are not labeled (see comic 833) we could consider this a multivariate distribution where one parameter is uniform and the other is normal. That was my first thought when I saw this. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.34.88|172.68.34.88]] 18:43, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Is there any meaning to midpoint: 52.7%? Maybe that is the arbitrary center he formed the horizontal bounds around? Maybe it relates to data? Is this a reference to something? It's certainly reminiscent of how normal distributions produce statistically meaningful numbers that have weird decimals in them (like the % represented by being within so many standard deviations). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.178|162.158.78.178]] 19:45, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::Maybe it's because the meaning of "50% of the chart lies between these lines" specifically becomes roughly useless for discerning error if the lines are not centered around the origin. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.178|162.158.78.178]] 19:52, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::I might get it!!! The area between the lines is 52.7% of the total area: which means that 50% is technically included in what lies between them. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.220|162.158.78.220]] 23:07, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

The correct way to do this is to have the topmost vertical line equal to or above the top of the normal plot. Then the bottom-most line would represent the same values as vertical lines would. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.220|162.158.78.220]] 23:32, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Say I want to build a diverse team or a representative council. And it is more important that the selection is representative of several subpopulations (who should not be voted down by the majority) than that it gives an equal fair chance to anybody. I would cut away the absolute outliers and reduce the weight of the most abundant group - this gives just the area between the two lines. Sebastian --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.70|172.68.110.70]] 23:40, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
:That's actually... not a horrible idea. Problem is, it's not robust to transformations of the X axis, because of the Jacobian multiplier that comes with such transformations. Which in practice would look like people loudly insisting they have nothing in common with each other ("we wear baseball hats with the brim to the RIGHT while those other completely unrelated people wear them with the brim to the LEFT")[[Special:Contributions/162.158.63.244|162.158.63.244]] 16:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Has somebody measured or calculated (by assuming normal distribution) the areas? It seems that the upper area is way smaller than the lower one, but both having the same 'height' in the middle. Is the 52.7% graphically correct? I tried half of the height at 0: .398942 and integrated, then I get 52,6% for the white area and 47,4% for the gray area. On the y-axis it seems that the three visible ticks are .1, .2, .3, then the gray area would be a bit broader than .2 and centered at .1. Sebastian --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.70|172.68.110.70]] 23:40, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Got [[356:_Nerd_Sniping|Nerd Sniped]] by the number "52.7%", but failed on an analytic solution and settled for a quick and dirty numerical integration instead, which suggested that the exact number might be somewhere between .5268 and .5269, so I think I'm not far from the truth. As I see it, the shaded area is vertically centered around the vertical midpoint, with a relative vertical width chosen such that the shaded area is exactly 50% of the total area under the curve. Just as usual, only with vertical instead of horizontal binning, which of course is the twist that makes this graph puzzling, funny, and completely useless for meaningful interpretation.
The label "52.7%" is not an addition to the Midpoint label but instead gives the width of the vertical bin, as a percentage of the vertical height of the curve. I read the tics on the vertical axis to indicate just quarters of the curve maximum, which is consistent with my understanding of "Midpoint".
Oh, and you are certainly right in that the marginal distributions at the top and the bottom are asymmetric, as is the gaussian when viewed sideways.
[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.64|172.68.110.64]] 23:56, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
: Feh. You merely have to integrate something like Sqrt[Log[x]] which I'm too lazy for and use Mathematica instead which gives...<covers eyes>...what was #2117 about again? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.94.2|162.158.94.2]] 11:57, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:: There's a way to (attempt to) symbolically integrate functions involving things like e^(-x^2) like you have with the normal distribution (Cherry's extension of the Risch algorithm, see his thesis or his 1985 paper), but I have no idea how to apply it here. It's definitely a very complex procedure. As I understand even Mathematica has not implemented it in full. - [[User:CRGreathouse|CRGreathouse]] ([[User talk:CRGreathouse|talk]]) 03:59, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
::: I found this calculation of the number 52.7% from wolfram community. https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1623478 I found the area subtraction diagram near the middle most useful for understanding the basic idea of it. Also, a related question in quora. https://www.quora.com/In-the-xkcd-comic-Normal-Distribution-how-was-the-number-52-7-calculated [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 08:21, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

How to annoy a Democratic Liberal Statician- Point out that every identity group that they're trying to make "normal" falls to the far left or the far right of the normal distribution curve.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 14:50, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:As somebody who happens to be all 3 of those things, I can confirm that your comment annoyed me. But only for bringing politics into a discussion that isn't political, and for misusing "normal" in a way like Randall's alt-text. The actual "edgy" political content of your post I find wrong but not particularly annoying. YMMV. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.63.244|162.158.63.244]] 16:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
::All statistics are ultimately political, in that they are used to politically argue for predetermined conclusions. Statistics aren't very useful at actually discovering anything not previously determined to be true. And it isn't me has misused the word normal, it's those ~2% of the population identity groups that are now using the courts to claim to be normal, when mathematically, they'll never be normal.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 15:14, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

'''"Completely meaningless?"''' 
The explanation currently says, "Randall finds the area between two horizontal lines instead, which is mathematically completely meaningless." This doesn't seem right. Each of the two horizontal lines intersect the curve at points and those points have meaningful values on the x axis. I'm not sure if they represent anything interesting (or rather, what their significance might be), but the result is the horizontal lines are not meaningless. I'm a little reluctant to edit it because I'm not sure how meaning to ascribe (and I also haven't measured the or calculated what those points are), but the explanation as-written seems improper. Do I have it wrong? [[User:JohnHawkinson|JohnHawkinson]] ([[User talk:JohnHawkinson|talk]]) 15:02, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:Nothing is ever completely meaningless. I think the change to "completely meaningless" may have been added by an annoyed statistician. I wrote the previous phrasing of it rarely being used for anything meaningful, so it seems impolite for me to edit it back. It's notable that implying there is meaning to the horizontal lines could be misleading to those new to statistics. It's also notable that the area between them represents a calculable portion of the samplesets, and that the points of intersection are just as meaningful as with vertical lines, two uses mentioned in comments above. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.245|162.158.79.245]] 15:13, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

The horizontal division is vaguely reminiscent of Lebesgue integration. I wonder if that was intentional. [[User:Dfeuer|Dfeuer]] ([[User talk:Dfeuer|talk]]) 06:37, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

There is now a statistician in the house. I have added two paragraphs that discuss some of the fine points. This is wrong (which, of course, Randall knows) in so many ways! I tried to keep what I said simple, but it may need some expansion. I also don't think we need the graphic in the explanation because, as I say in the text I added, that is the ''wrong way'' to describe a nonsymmetric distribution like the "tangent distribution". [[User:Cjgeyer|Cjgeyer]] ([[User talk:Cjgeyer|talk]]) 22:56, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

'''Sloppy explanation''' 
What I don't like, are phrases like: "To turn that bar chart into a distribution, you'd get an infinite number of people, put them into age bins that are infinitely narrow, [...]". Infinitely narrow is actually zero or 0. No other interpretation exists.

'''Pictures''' 
Hey @Zom-b, you changed the picture I set and gave the comment "I don't know what that other curve is, but it's not normal. (no) pun intended." The two pictures appear to have exactly the same curve in them. I was wondering what you meant by your comment? This is the first picture I've ever set in a wiki, and I worry I could have made an error. Here are the two pictures: [[File:Empirical_Rule.PNG|64px]] [[File:Standard_deviation_diagram.svg|64px]]. I like the first one, mine, because the lines extend beyond the graph as Randall's do. I like the second one, yours, because it includes percentages over the graph as Randall's has. But the curves both appear normal, in both senses, to me? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.113|162.158.79.113]] 13:05, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

:Regarding "infinitely narrow", I disagree that this is sloppy wording; it is concisely describing something that tends to zero at the limit of infinity, which is useful information. [[User:Hawthorn|Hawthorn]] ([[User talk:Hawthorn|talk]]) 10:26, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Talk:2118: Normal Distribution

2020-08-21T08:17:56Z

Lamty101:

Is there a statistician in the house? [[User:Hawthorn|Hawthorn]] ([[User talk:Hawthorn|talk]]) 15:32, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
I think they all got annoyed at the graph and left. [[User:Margath|Margath]] ([[User talk:Margath|talk]]) 15:46, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
Of course there is! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.214.22|162.158.214.22]] 15:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

As an example: When measuring the height of people in the same age bracket, then you'll expect the number of people at each height to look like this graph. There will be a lot of people around the average height, fewer a foot shorter/taller, some (but very few) exceptionally tall people, and some (but very few) exceptionally short people. The x-value represents the height, the y-value essentially represents the amount of population that share that height. When we measure the middle 50% of the population using vertical bars, then people at a certain height are either inside '''OR''' outside the middle. Randall uses horizontal bars here, which means some people at a certain height will be counted in the middle 50%, but other people with the same height won't be. In fact, some people with the exact average height of the whole population would fall outside the middle. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.214|108.162.241.214]] 16:01, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Feel free to rip me apart for referring to it as the "number of people at each height", since y-axis is more complicated than a simple count. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.214|108.162.241.214]] 16:03, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Just to say, Randall's horizontal slice isn't entirely meaningless. It's a calculation I've had to do, where I have a series of binned samples of a population (say I knew how many fell in -10..10, how many fell in -5..5, how many fell in -2..2) and wanted to combine them with an appropriate weighting to approximate a Gaussian. I was using it for filtering, but it's logically similar. [[User:Fluppeteer|Fluppeteer]] ([[User talk:Fluppeteer|talk]]) 16:19, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::Also, the slice sampler for MCMC is a trick for sampling from a distribution by "turning it on its side". But I don't think the 50% figure would be meaningful in that context. (Though the 52.7% number on this graph would be.) [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.136|172.68.54.136]] 21:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Pedant: etymologically, there *is* actually a connection between a normal (to a surface or line) and the normal distribution; the former comes from the Latin for a set square (giving you perpendicular), and it later came to mean "standard". The "tangential distribution" certainly fits the etymology of "odd/unusual" though. [[User:Fluppeteer|Fluppeteer]] ([[User talk:Fluppeteer|talk]]) 16:26, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

This reminds me of the difference between Riemann(-Stieltjes) and Lebesgue integration. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.160|172.68.54.160]] 20:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

As the axis are not labeled (see comic 833) we could consider this a multivariate distribution where one parameter is uniform and the other is normal. That was my first thought when I saw this. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.34.88|172.68.34.88]] 18:43, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Is there any meaning to midpoint: 52.7%? Maybe that is the arbitrary center he formed the horizontal bounds around? Maybe it relates to data? Is this a reference to something? It's certainly reminiscent of how normal distributions produce statistically meaningful numbers that have weird decimals in them (like the % represented by being within so many standard deviations). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.178|162.158.78.178]] 19:45, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::Maybe it's because the meaning of "50% of the chart lies between these lines" specifically becomes roughly useless for discerning error if the lines are not centered around the origin. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.178|162.158.78.178]] 19:52, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::I might get it!!! The area between the lines is 52.7% of the total area: which means that 50% is technically included in what lies between them. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.220|162.158.78.220]] 23:07, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

The correct way to do this is to have the topmost vertical line equal to or above the top of the normal plot. Then the bottom-most line would represent the same values as vertical lines would. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.220|162.158.78.220]] 23:32, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Say I want to build a diverse team or a representative council. And it is more important that the selection is representative of several subpopulations (who should not be voted down by the majority) than that it gives an equal fair chance to anybody. I would cut away the absolute outliers and reduce the weight of the most abundant group - this gives just the area between the two lines. Sebastian --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.70|172.68.110.70]] 23:40, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
:That's actually... not a horrible idea. Problem is, it's not robust to transformations of the X axis, because of the Jacobian multiplier that comes with such transformations. Which in practice would look like people loudly insisting they have nothing in common with each other ("we wear baseball hats with the brim to the RIGHT while those other completely unrelated people wear them with the brim to the LEFT")[[Special:Contributions/162.158.63.244|162.158.63.244]] 16:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Has somebody measured or calculated (by assuming normal distribution) the areas? It seems that the upper area is way smaller than the lower one, but both having the same 'height' in the middle. Is the 52.7% graphically correct? I tried half of the height at 0: .398942 and integrated, then I get 52,6% for the white area and 47,4% for the gray area. On the y-axis it seems that the three visible ticks are .1, .2, .3, then the gray area would be a bit broader than .2 and centered at .1. Sebastian --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.70|172.68.110.70]] 23:40, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Got [[356:_Nerd_Sniping|Nerd Sniped]] by the number "52.7%", but failed on an analytic solution and settled for a quick and dirty numerical integration instead, which suggested that the exact number might be somewhere between .5268 and .5269, so I think I'm not far from the truth. As I see it, the shaded area is vertically centered around the vertical midpoint, with a relative vertical width chosen such that the shaded area is exactly 50% of the total area under the curve. Just as usual, only with vertical instead of horizontal binning, which of course is the twist that makes this graph puzzling, funny, and completely useless for meaningful interpretation.
The label "52.7%" is not an addition to the Midpoint label but instead gives the width of the vertical bin, as a percentage of the vertical height of the curve. I read the tics on the vertical axis to indicate just quarters of the curve maximum, which is consistent with my understanding of "Midpoint".
Oh, and you are certainly right in that the marginal distributions at the top and the bottom are asymmetric, as is the gaussian when viewed sideways.
[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.64|172.68.110.64]] 23:56, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
: Feh. You merely have to integrate something like Sqrt[Log[x]] which I'm too lazy for and use Mathematica instead which gives...<covers eyes>...what was #2117 about again? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.94.2|162.158.94.2]] 11:57, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:: There's a way to (attempt to) symbolically integrate functions involving things like e^(-x^2) like you have with the normal distribution (Cherry's extension of the Risch algorithm, see his thesis or his 1985 paper), but I have no idea how to apply it here. It's definitely a very complex procedure. As I understand even Mathematica has not implemented it in full. - [[User:CRGreathouse|CRGreathouse]] ([[User talk:CRGreathouse|talk]]) 03:59, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
::: I found this calculation of the number 52.7% from wolfram community https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1623478. I found the area subtraction diagram near the middle most useful for understanding the basic idea of it. [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 08:12, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

How to annoy a Democratic Liberal Statician- Point out that every identity group that they're trying to make "normal" falls to the far left or the far right of the normal distribution curve.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 14:50, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:As somebody who happens to be all 3 of those things, I can confirm that your comment annoyed me. But only for bringing politics into a discussion that isn't political, and for misusing "normal" in a way like Randall's alt-text. The actual "edgy" political content of your post I find wrong but not particularly annoying. YMMV. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.63.244|162.158.63.244]] 16:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
::All statistics are ultimately political, in that they are used to politically argue for predetermined conclusions. Statistics aren't very useful at actually discovering anything not previously determined to be true. And it isn't me has misused the word normal, it's those ~2% of the population identity groups that are now using the courts to claim to be normal, when mathematically, they'll never be normal.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 15:14, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

'''"Completely meaningless?"''' 
The explanation currently says, "Randall finds the area between two horizontal lines instead, which is mathematically completely meaningless." This doesn't seem right. Each of the two horizontal lines intersect the curve at points and those points have meaningful values on the x axis. I'm not sure if they represent anything interesting (or rather, what their significance might be), but the result is the horizontal lines are not meaningless. I'm a little reluctant to edit it because I'm not sure how meaning to ascribe (and I also haven't measured the or calculated what those points are), but the explanation as-written seems improper. Do I have it wrong? [[User:JohnHawkinson|JohnHawkinson]] ([[User talk:JohnHawkinson|talk]]) 15:02, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:Nothing is ever completely meaningless. I think the change to "completely meaningless" may have been added by an annoyed statistician. I wrote the previous phrasing of it rarely being used for anything meaningful, so it seems impolite for me to edit it back. It's notable that implying there is meaning to the horizontal lines could be misleading to those new to statistics. It's also notable that the area between them represents a calculable portion of the samplesets, and that the points of intersection are just as meaningful as with vertical lines, two uses mentioned in comments above. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.245|162.158.79.245]] 15:13, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

The horizontal division is vaguely reminiscent of Lebesgue integration. I wonder if that was intentional. [[User:Dfeuer|Dfeuer]] ([[User talk:Dfeuer|talk]]) 06:37, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

There is now a statistician in the house. I have added two paragraphs that discuss some of the fine points. This is wrong (which, of course, Randall knows) in so many ways! I tried to keep what I said simple, but it may need some expansion. I also don't think we need the graphic in the explanation because, as I say in the text I added, that is the ''wrong way'' to describe a nonsymmetric distribution like the "tangent distribution". [[User:Cjgeyer|Cjgeyer]] ([[User talk:Cjgeyer|talk]]) 22:56, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

'''Sloppy explanation''' 
What I don't like, are phrases like: "To turn that bar chart into a distribution, you'd get an infinite number of people, put them into age bins that are infinitely narrow, [...]". Infinitely narrow is actually zero or 0. No other interpretation exists.

'''Pictures''' 
Hey @Zom-b, you changed the picture I set and gave the comment "I don't know what that other curve is, but it's not normal. (no) pun intended." The two pictures appear to have exactly the same curve in them. I was wondering what you meant by your comment? This is the first picture I've ever set in a wiki, and I worry I could have made an error. Here are the two pictures: [[File:Empirical_Rule.PNG|64px]] [[File:Standard_deviation_diagram.svg|64px]]. I like the first one, mine, because the lines extend beyond the graph as Randall's do. I like the second one, yours, because it includes percentages over the graph as Randall's has. But the curves both appear normal, in both senses, to me? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.113|162.158.79.113]] 13:05, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

:Regarding "infinitely narrow", I disagree that this is sloppy wording; it is concisely describing something that tends to zero at the limit of infinity, which is useful information. [[User:Hawthorn|Hawthorn]] ([[User talk:Hawthorn|talk]]) 10:26, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Talk:2118: Normal Distribution

2020-08-21T08:13:34Z

Lamty101:

Is there a statistician in the house? [[User:Hawthorn|Hawthorn]] ([[User talk:Hawthorn|talk]]) 15:32, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
I think they all got annoyed at the graph and left. [[User:Margath|Margath]] ([[User talk:Margath|talk]]) 15:46, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
Of course there is! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.214.22|162.158.214.22]] 15:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

As an example: When measuring the height of people in the same age bracket, then you'll expect the number of people at each height to look like this graph. There will be a lot of people around the average height, fewer a foot shorter/taller, some (but very few) exceptionally tall people, and some (but very few) exceptionally short people. The x-value represents the height, the y-value essentially represents the amount of population that share that height. When we measure the middle 50% of the population using vertical bars, then people at a certain height are either inside '''OR''' outside the middle. Randall uses horizontal bars here, which means some people at a certain height will be counted in the middle 50%, but other people with the same height won't be. In fact, some people with the exact average height of the whole population would fall outside the middle. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.214|108.162.241.214]] 16:01, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Feel free to rip me apart for referring to it as the "number of people at each height", since y-axis is more complicated than a simple count. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.214|108.162.241.214]] 16:03, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Just to say, Randall's horizontal slice isn't entirely meaningless. It's a calculation I've had to do, where I have a series of binned samples of a population (say I knew how many fell in -10..10, how many fell in -5..5, how many fell in -2..2) and wanted to combine them with an appropriate weighting to approximate a Gaussian. I was using it for filtering, but it's logically similar. [[User:Fluppeteer|Fluppeteer]] ([[User talk:Fluppeteer|talk]]) 16:19, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::Also, the slice sampler for MCMC is a trick for sampling from a distribution by "turning it on its side". But I don't think the 50% figure would be meaningful in that context. (Though the 52.7% number on this graph would be.) [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.136|172.68.54.136]] 21:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Pedant: etymologically, there *is* actually a connection between a normal (to a surface or line) and the normal distribution; the former comes from the Latin for a set square (giving you perpendicular), and it later came to mean "standard". The "tangential distribution" certainly fits the etymology of "odd/unusual" though. [[User:Fluppeteer|Fluppeteer]] ([[User talk:Fluppeteer|talk]]) 16:26, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

This reminds me of the difference between Riemann(-Stieltjes) and Lebesgue integration. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.160|172.68.54.160]] 20:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

As the axis are not labeled (see comic 833) we could consider this a multivariate distribution where one parameter is uniform and the other is normal. That was my first thought when I saw this. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.34.88|172.68.34.88]] 18:43, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Is there any meaning to midpoint: 52.7%? Maybe that is the arbitrary center he formed the horizontal bounds around? Maybe it relates to data? Is this a reference to something? It's certainly reminiscent of how normal distributions produce statistically meaningful numbers that have weird decimals in them (like the % represented by being within so many standard deviations). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.178|162.158.78.178]] 19:45, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::Maybe it's because the meaning of "50% of the chart lies between these lines" specifically becomes roughly useless for discerning error if the lines are not centered around the origin. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.178|162.158.78.178]] 19:52, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::I might get it!!! The area between the lines is 52.7% of the total area: which means that 50% is technically included in what lies between them. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.220|162.158.78.220]] 23:07, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

The correct way to do this is to have the topmost vertical line equal to or above the top of the normal plot. Then the bottom-most line would represent the same values as vertical lines would. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.220|162.158.78.220]] 23:32, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Say I want to build a diverse team or a representative council. And it is more important that the selection is representative of several subpopulations (who should not be voted down by the majority) than that it gives an equal fair chance to anybody. I would cut away the absolute outliers and reduce the weight of the most abundant group - this gives just the area between the two lines. Sebastian --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.70|172.68.110.70]] 23:40, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
:That's actually... not a horrible idea. Problem is, it's not robust to transformations of the X axis, because of the Jacobian multiplier that comes with such transformations. Which in practice would look like people loudly insisting they have nothing in common with each other ("we wear baseball hats with the brim to the RIGHT while those other completely unrelated people wear them with the brim to the LEFT")[[Special:Contributions/162.158.63.244|162.158.63.244]] 16:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Has somebody measured or calculated (by assuming normal distribution) the areas? It seems that the upper area is way smaller than the lower one, but both having the same 'height' in the middle. Is the 52.7% graphically correct? I tried half of the height at 0: .398942 and integrated, then I get 52,6% for the white area and 47,4% for the gray area. On the y-axis it seems that the three visible ticks are .1, .2, .3, then the gray area would be a bit broader than .2 and centered at .1. Sebastian --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.70|172.68.110.70]] 23:40, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Got [[356:_Nerd_Sniping|Nerd Sniped]] by the number "52.7%", but failed on an analytic solution and settled for a quick and dirty numerical integration instead, which suggested that the exact number might be somewhere between .5268 and .5269, so I think I'm not far from the truth. As I see it, the shaded area is vertically centered around the vertical midpoint, with a relative vertical width chosen such that the shaded area is exactly 50% of the total area under the curve. Just as usual, only with vertical instead of horizontal binning, which of course is the twist that makes this graph puzzling, funny, and completely useless for meaningful interpretation.
The label "52.7%" is not an addition to the Midpoint label but instead gives the width of the vertical bin, as a percentage of the vertical height of the curve. I read the tics on the vertical axis to indicate just quarters of the curve maximum, which is consistent with my understanding of "Midpoint".
Oh, and you are certainly right in that the marginal distributions at the top and the bottom are asymmetric, as is the gaussian when viewed sideways.
[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.64|172.68.110.64]] 23:56, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
: Feh. You merely have to integrate something like Sqrt[Log[x]] which I'm too lazy for and use Mathematica instead which gives...<covers eyes>...what was #2117 about again? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.94.2|162.158.94.2]] 11:57, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:: There's a way to (attempt to) symbolically integrate functions involving things like e^(-x^2) like you have with the normal distribution (Cherry's extension of the Risch algorithm, see his thesis or his 1985 paper), but I have no idea how to apply it here. It's definitely a very complex procedure. As I understand even Mathematica has not implemented it in full. - [[User:CRGreathouse|CRGreathouse]] ([[User talk:CRGreathouse|talk]]) 03:59, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

How to annoy a Democratic Liberal Statician- Point out that every identity group that they're trying to make "normal" falls to the far left or the far right of the normal distribution curve.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 14:50, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:As somebody who happens to be all 3 of those things, I can confirm that your comment annoyed me. But only for bringing politics into a discussion that isn't political, and for misusing "normal" in a way like Randall's alt-text. The actual "edgy" political content of your post I find wrong but not particularly annoying. YMMV. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.63.244|162.158.63.244]] 16:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
::All statistics are ultimately political, in that they are used to politically argue for predetermined conclusions. Statistics aren't very useful at actually discovering anything not previously determined to be true. And it isn't me has misused the word normal, it's those ~2% of the population identity groups that are now using the courts to claim to be normal, when mathematically, they'll never be normal.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 15:14, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

I found this calculation on the number 52.7% from wolfram community https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1623478. I think the area subtraction diagram near the middle is the most useful for understanding the basic idea of it. [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 08:12, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

'''"Completely meaningless?"''' 
The explanation currently says, "Randall finds the area between two horizontal lines instead, which is mathematically completely meaningless." This doesn't seem right. Each of the two horizontal lines intersect the curve at points and those points have meaningful values on the x axis. I'm not sure if they represent anything interesting (or rather, what their significance might be), but the result is the horizontal lines are not meaningless. I'm a little reluctant to edit it because I'm not sure how meaning to ascribe (and I also haven't measured the or calculated what those points are), but the explanation as-written seems improper. Do I have it wrong? [[User:JohnHawkinson|JohnHawkinson]] ([[User talk:JohnHawkinson|talk]]) 15:02, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:Nothing is ever completely meaningless. I think the change to "completely meaningless" may have been added by an annoyed statistician. I wrote the previous phrasing of it rarely being used for anything meaningful, so it seems impolite for me to edit it back. It's notable that implying there is meaning to the horizontal lines could be misleading to those new to statistics. It's also notable that the area between them represents a calculable portion of the samplesets, and that the points of intersection are just as meaningful as with vertical lines, two uses mentioned in comments above. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.245|162.158.79.245]] 15:13, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

The horizontal division is vaguely reminiscent of Lebesgue integration. I wonder if that was intentional. [[User:Dfeuer|Dfeuer]] ([[User talk:Dfeuer|talk]]) 06:37, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

There is now a statistician in the house. I have added two paragraphs that discuss some of the fine points. This is wrong (which, of course, Randall knows) in so many ways! I tried to keep what I said simple, but it may need some expansion. I also don't think we need the graphic in the explanation because, as I say in the text I added, that is the ''wrong way'' to describe a nonsymmetric distribution like the "tangent distribution". [[User:Cjgeyer|Cjgeyer]] ([[User talk:Cjgeyer|talk]]) 22:56, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

'''Sloppy explanation''' 
What I don't like, are phrases like: "To turn that bar chart into a distribution, you'd get an infinite number of people, put them into age bins that are infinitely narrow, [...]". Infinitely narrow is actually zero or 0. No other interpretation exists.

'''Pictures''' 
Hey @Zom-b, you changed the picture I set and gave the comment "I don't know what that other curve is, but it's not normal. (no) pun intended." The two pictures appear to have exactly the same curve in them. I was wondering what you meant by your comment? This is the first picture I've ever set in a wiki, and I worry I could have made an error. Here are the two pictures: [[File:Empirical_Rule.PNG|64px]] [[File:Standard_deviation_diagram.svg|64px]]. I like the first one, mine, because the lines extend beyond the graph as Randall's do. I like the second one, yours, because it includes percentages over the graph as Randall's has. But the curves both appear normal, in both senses, to me? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.113|162.158.79.113]] 13:05, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

:Regarding "infinitely narrow", I disagree that this is sloppy wording; it is concisely describing something that tends to zero at the limit of infinity, which is useful information. [[User:Hawthorn|Hawthorn]] ([[User talk:Hawthorn|talk]]) 10:26, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Talk:2118: Normal Distribution

2020-08-21T08:12:11Z

Lamty101:

Is there a statistician in the house? [[User:Hawthorn|Hawthorn]] ([[User talk:Hawthorn|talk]]) 15:32, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
I think they all got annoyed at the graph and left. [[User:Margath|Margath]] ([[User talk:Margath|talk]]) 15:46, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
Of course there is! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.214.22|162.158.214.22]] 15:44, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

As an example: When measuring the height of people in the same age bracket, then you'll expect the number of people at each height to look like this graph. There will be a lot of people around the average height, fewer a foot shorter/taller, some (but very few) exceptionally tall people, and some (but very few) exceptionally short people. The x-value represents the height, the y-value essentially represents the amount of population that share that height. When we measure the middle 50% of the population using vertical bars, then people at a certain height are either inside '''OR''' outside the middle. Randall uses horizontal bars here, which means some people at a certain height will be counted in the middle 50%, but other people with the same height won't be. In fact, some people with the exact average height of the whole population would fall outside the middle. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.214|108.162.241.214]] 16:01, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Feel free to rip me apart for referring to it as the "number of people at each height", since y-axis is more complicated than a simple count. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.214|108.162.241.214]] 16:03, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Just to say, Randall's horizontal slice isn't entirely meaningless. It's a calculation I've had to do, where I have a series of binned samples of a population (say I knew how many fell in -10..10, how many fell in -5..5, how many fell in -2..2) and wanted to combine them with an appropriate weighting to approximate a Gaussian. I was using it for filtering, but it's logically similar. [[User:Fluppeteer|Fluppeteer]] ([[User talk:Fluppeteer|talk]]) 16:19, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::Also, the slice sampler for MCMC is a trick for sampling from a distribution by "turning it on its side". But I don't think the 50% figure would be meaningful in that context. (Though the 52.7% number on this graph would be.) [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.136|172.68.54.136]] 21:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Pedant: etymologically, there *is* actually a connection between a normal (to a surface or line) and the normal distribution; the former comes from the Latin for a set square (giving you perpendicular), and it later came to mean "standard". The "tangential distribution" certainly fits the etymology of "odd/unusual" though. [[User:Fluppeteer|Fluppeteer]] ([[User talk:Fluppeteer|talk]]) 16:26, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

This reminds me of the difference between Riemann(-Stieltjes) and Lebesgue integration. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.160|172.68.54.160]] 20:16, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

As the axis are not labeled (see comic 833) we could consider this a multivariate distribution where one parameter is uniform and the other is normal. That was my first thought when I saw this. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.34.88|172.68.34.88]] 18:43, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Is there any meaning to midpoint: 52.7%? Maybe that is the arbitrary center he formed the horizontal bounds around? Maybe it relates to data? Is this a reference to something? It's certainly reminiscent of how normal distributions produce statistically meaningful numbers that have weird decimals in them (like the % represented by being within so many standard deviations). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.178|162.158.78.178]] 19:45, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::Maybe it's because the meaning of "50% of the chart lies between these lines" specifically becomes roughly useless for discerning error if the lines are not centered around the origin. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.178|162.158.78.178]] 19:52, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
::I might get it!!! The area between the lines is 52.7% of the total area: which means that 50% is technically included in what lies between them. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.220|162.158.78.220]] 23:07, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

The correct way to do this is to have the topmost vertical line equal to or above the top of the normal plot. Then the bottom-most line would represent the same values as vertical lines would. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.220|162.158.78.220]] 23:32, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Say I want to build a diverse team or a representative council. And it is more important that the selection is representative of several subpopulations (who should not be voted down by the majority) than that it gives an equal fair chance to anybody. I would cut away the absolute outliers and reduce the weight of the most abundant group - this gives just the area between the two lines. Sebastian --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.70|172.68.110.70]] 23:40, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
:That's actually... not a horrible idea. Problem is, it's not robust to transformations of the X axis, because of the Jacobian multiplier that comes with such transformations. Which in practice would look like people loudly insisting they have nothing in common with each other ("we wear baseball hats with the brim to the RIGHT while those other completely unrelated people wear them with the brim to the LEFT")[[Special:Contributions/162.158.63.244|162.158.63.244]] 16:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Has somebody measured or calculated (by assuming normal distribution) the areas? It seems that the upper area is way smaller than the lower one, but both having the same 'height' in the middle. Is the 52.7% graphically correct? I tried half of the height at 0: .398942 and integrated, then I get 52,6% for the white area and 47,4% for the gray area. On the y-axis it seems that the three visible ticks are .1, .2, .3, then the gray area would be a bit broader than .2 and centered at .1. Sebastian --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.70|172.68.110.70]] 23:40, 1 March 2019 (UTC)

Got [[356:_Nerd_Sniping|Nerd Sniped]] by the number "52.7%", but failed on an analytic solution and settled for a quick and dirty numerical integration instead, which suggested that the exact number might be somewhere between .5268 and .5269, so I think I'm not far from the truth. As I see it, the shaded area is vertically centered around the vertical midpoint, with a relative vertical width chosen such that the shaded area is exactly 50% of the total area under the curve. Just as usual, only with vertical instead of horizontal binning, which of course is the twist that makes this graph puzzling, funny, and completely useless for meaningful interpretation.
The label "52.7%" is not an addition to the Midpoint label but instead gives the width of the vertical bin, as a percentage of the vertical height of the curve. I read the tics on the vertical axis to indicate just quarters of the curve maximum, which is consistent with my understanding of "Midpoint".
Oh, and you are certainly right in that the marginal distributions at the top and the bottom are asymmetric, as is the gaussian when viewed sideways.
[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.64|172.68.110.64]] 23:56, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
: Feh. You merely have to integrate something like Sqrt[Log[x]] which I'm too lazy for and use Mathematica instead which gives...<covers eyes>...what was #2117 about again? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.94.2|162.158.94.2]] 11:57, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:: There's a way to (attempt to) symbolically integrate functions involving things like e^(-x^2) like you have with the normal distribution (Cherry's extension of the Risch algorithm, see his thesis or his 1985 paper), but I have no idea how to apply it here. It's definitely a very complex procedure. As I understand even Mathematica has not implemented it in full. - [[User:CRGreathouse|CRGreathouse]] ([[User talk:CRGreathouse|talk]]) 03:59, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

How to annoy a Democratic Liberal Statician- Point out that every identity group that they're trying to make "normal" falls to the far left or the far right of the normal distribution curve.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 14:50, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:As somebody who happens to be all 3 of those things, I can confirm that your comment annoyed me. But only for bringing politics into a discussion that isn't political, and for misusing "normal" in a way like Randall's alt-text. The actual "edgy" political content of your post I find wrong but not particularly annoying. YMMV. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.63.244|162.158.63.244]] 16:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
::All statistics are ultimately political, in that they are used to politically argue for predetermined conclusions. Statistics aren't very useful at actually discovering anything not previously determined to be true. And it isn't me has misused the word normal, it's those ~2% of the population identity groups that are now using the courts to claim to be normal, when mathematically, they'll never be normal.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 15:14, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

I found this calculation on the number 52.7% from wolfram community https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1623478. I think the area subtraction diagram near the middle is the most useful for understanding the idea of it without too much math symbols. [[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 08:12, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

'''"Completely meaningless?"''' 
The explanation currently says, "Randall finds the area between two horizontal lines instead, which is mathematically completely meaningless." This doesn't seem right. Each of the two horizontal lines intersect the curve at points and those points have meaningful values on the x axis. I'm not sure if they represent anything interesting (or rather, what their significance might be), but the result is the horizontal lines are not meaningless. I'm a little reluctant to edit it because I'm not sure how meaning to ascribe (and I also haven't measured the or calculated what those points are), but the explanation as-written seems improper. Do I have it wrong? [[User:JohnHawkinson|JohnHawkinson]] ([[User talk:JohnHawkinson|talk]]) 15:02, 2 March 2019 (UTC)
:Nothing is ever completely meaningless. I think the change to "completely meaningless" may have been added by an annoyed statistician. I wrote the previous phrasing of it rarely being used for anything meaningful, so it seems impolite for me to edit it back. It's notable that implying there is meaning to the horizontal lines could be misleading to those new to statistics. It's also notable that the area between them represents a calculable portion of the samplesets, and that the points of intersection are just as meaningful as with vertical lines, two uses mentioned in comments above. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.245|162.158.79.245]] 15:13, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

The horizontal division is vaguely reminiscent of Lebesgue integration. I wonder if that was intentional. [[User:Dfeuer|Dfeuer]] ([[User talk:Dfeuer|talk]]) 06:37, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

There is now a statistician in the house. I have added two paragraphs that discuss some of the fine points. This is wrong (which, of course, Randall knows) in so many ways! I tried to keep what I said simple, but it may need some expansion. I also don't think we need the graphic in the explanation because, as I say in the text I added, that is the ''wrong way'' to describe a nonsymmetric distribution like the "tangent distribution". [[User:Cjgeyer|Cjgeyer]] ([[User talk:Cjgeyer|talk]]) 22:56, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

'''Sloppy explanation''' 
What I don't like, are phrases like: "To turn that bar chart into a distribution, you'd get an infinite number of people, put them into age bins that are infinitely narrow, [...]". Infinitely narrow is actually zero or 0. No other interpretation exists.

'''Pictures''' 
Hey @Zom-b, you changed the picture I set and gave the comment "I don't know what that other curve is, but it's not normal. (no) pun intended." The two pictures appear to have exactly the same curve in them. I was wondering what you meant by your comment? This is the first picture I've ever set in a wiki, and I worry I could have made an error. Here are the two pictures: [[File:Empirical_Rule.PNG|64px]] [[File:Standard_deviation_diagram.svg|64px]]. I like the first one, mine, because the lines extend beyond the graph as Randall's do. I like the second one, yours, because it includes percentages over the graph as Randall's has. But the curves both appear normal, in both senses, to me? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.113|162.158.79.113]] 13:05, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

:Regarding "infinitely narrow", I disagree that this is sloppy wording; it is concisely describing something that tends to zero at the limit of infinity, which is useful information. [[User:Hawthorn|Hawthorn]] ([[User talk:Hawthorn|talk]]) 10:26, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Talk:730: Circuit Diagram

2020-07-02T14:13:08Z

Lamty101: WIMP meaning?

So, is the arena a new kind of comparator or something? '''[[User:Davidy22|Davidy22]]'''[[User talk:Davidy22|<tt>[talk]</tt>]] 13:28, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

11:13, 10 April 2013 (UTC)11:13, 10 April 2013 (UTC)[[User:Jh6p|Jh6p]] ([[User talk:Jh6p|talk]])
The 3 liter capacitor could also be a ball approximately 6 inches in diameter if the seams on the ball were similar to the seams on a basketball. Perhaps a volleyball?

: "A squirrel. What it does as a circuit element is unsure."
Perhaps an allusion to a {{w|Squirrel-cage rotor|squirrel cage}}?
[[User:Wwoods|Wwoods]] ([[User talk:Wwoods|talk]]) 18:51, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

: The shape of the squirrel's tail reminds me of a {{w|hysteresis}} curve, although this is admittedly a bit of a stretch. —[[User:Scs|Scs]] ([[User talk:Scs|talk]]) 16:02, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

The 'to scale' motor would be about half a mile wide. Powering the rabbit on Gaia's vibrator (also included)? --[[User:StarChaser Tyger|StarChaser Tyger]] ([[User talk:StarChaser Tyger|talk]]) 08:40, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

I beg to differ on the flux capacitor thing, as cool as it sounds. Since it is right above the I-90 notation, it is more likely a fork in the road (notice the road stripes indicating that you can pass at any point in the fork). [[Special:Contributions/97.87.12.114|97.87.12.114]] 02:15, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
: Oh, I'm pretty sure it's a flux capacitor. Compare some of [http://www.google.com/search?q=flux+capacitor&tbm=isch these images]. Yes, there are several road references in this comic, but an electronic reference (especially to a ''fictional'' electronic component!) makes more sense. Also I've never seen a Y-shaped highway intersection that looked quite like that (and especially not on an interstate). —[[User:Scs|Scs]] ([[User talk:Scs|talk]]) 14:52, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

I have wasted 4 hours on the puzzle, and after wasting 9 pages of A5 paper, the resistance of that terrible resistor mess worked out to be exactly 25265/33783 ohm, or about 0.74786135 ohm. --KopaLeo [[Special:Contributions/199.48.226.89|199.48.226.89]] 15:16, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

I think that the "fishing float" might actually be a picture of an ordinary push switch (similar to foot switches used on standard lamps). [[Special:Contributions/87.194.171.29|87.194.171.29]] 16:12, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Isn't the "YES" resistor a reference to the anecdote of how John Lennon and Yoko Ono met? That's what I thought when I saw it, but then, I kinda like The Beatles a bit. [[Special:Contributions/200.70.22.74|200.70.22.74]] 12:27, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

I think the attempt to explain every single piece of the comic is rather silly. The humor largely draws from the absurdity of the diagram, and that can probably be summarized without going into detail about the possible references of each individual component. [[Special:Contributions/199.27.130.180|199.27.130.180]] 03:22, 26 November 2013 (UTC)
: I disagree. The joke works on multiple levels, both the absurdity of the circuit, and the smaller parts of which it is comprised. [[User:Hydroksyde|Hydroksyde]] ([[User talk:Hydroksyde|talk]]) 02:40, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

I concur with KopaLeo - I got the same answer for the resistance of the grid of resistors - about 0.748 when rounded. What a problem!
--techdude
[[Special:Contributions/108.162.215.65|108.162.215.65]] 20:45, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

I feel like I should point out that putting a ground connection in holy water probably creates {{w|Holy Ground}} [[Special:Contributions/108.162.212.197|108.162.212.197]] 11:36, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

To center of Sun could possibly be another map reference. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.202|108.162.250.202]] 01:08, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

The 'moral rectifier' seems like it's built of diodes which prevent current flow to the left, which might mean it's making the current 'more right'? with right being a synonym for moral?
[[Special:Contributions/108.162.212.18|108.162.212.18]] 00:15, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

;3L capacitor

The capacitor reminded me of a time I asked my dad why desktop PCs (the kind we could afford at the time were 200-500 W) couldn't have capacitors to protect them from 1-second or shorter power interruptions without the cost of a UPS. He said such a capacitor would have to be as wide and tall as a 2L pop bottle. (He didn't say how much it would weigh.) [[User:Promethean|Promethean]] ([[User talk:Promethean|talk]]) 04:38, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Where did the claim that the EKG is atrial fibrillation come from? At best it it hard to tell without a time scale what the ventricular rate is, but there is no evidence of extra P waves between QRS complexes that I see. If the diagnosis is made based on the absence of P & T waves, keep in mind that some recording conditions make those (especially T) hard to see. In an {{w|Einthoven's triangle}} arrangement, they might not show up at all above the noise. If we had a time scale that let us calculate ventricular rate, we might be able to conclude {{w|supraventricular tachycardia}}, but I'm hesitant to make a strong claim that this is abnormal at all given that it's hand drawn and we have no scale.[[User:Djbrasier|Djbrasier]] ([[User talk:Djbrasier|talk]]) 21:07, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Does this really belong in Category:Charts? I'm moving it to Category:Maps instead. [[User:gijobarts|gijobarts]] ([[User Talk:gijobarts|talk]]) 21:38, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Are we really explaining "vibrator" as "a motor with an off-center weight attached to it"? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.91.97|141.101.91.97]] 06:51, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

I just spent 3 hours trying to work out the resistor nest. I was unsuccessful. [[User:Mikemk|Mikemk]] ([[User talk:Mikemk|talk]]) 05:32, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

I did an LTSpice simulation or the resistor mess. It looks like the 25265/33783 ohm answer above is correct. It drew 1.3371463 amps from a one volt source. {{unsigned ip|108.162.215.133}}

Based on Randall's promotion of international standards (such as ISO 8601), it seems odd that he's using the US zigzag symbol for a resistor, rather than the IEC rectangular one. [[User:Walale12|Walale12]] ([[User talk:Walale12|talk]]) 21:37, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Looking at the label "Tear Collector" I think it refers to the heartbeat below it, not the symbol above, suggesting that a heart (or heart break) is a likely source of tears. {{unsigned ip|108.162.216.44}}

I'm not sure why the rat's nest of resistors is considered such a difficult problem. I would like to respectfully point out that by far the easiest way to solve it is by assuming a constant current through the network. You can then assign a name to each of the nodes, set one of the end nodes to 0V, and solve by KCL. Granted, there are 13 unknowns and 14 equations, but it still took less than 30 minutes to complete since they are all 1st order! archerator [[User:Archerator|Archerator]] ([[User talk:Archerator|talk]]) 04:57, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

120×72 @ 537,847: the coil symbol next to "Take off shirt while wiring this part. Ooh, yeah, I like that." is similar in appearance to chest hair in stylized comic strips. [[User:Thaledison|Thaledison]] ([[User talk:Thaledison|talk]]) 17:19, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

144×177 @ 31,753 - Could the rats next of 1 Ohm resister be a reference the the sign that Blackhat holds up in: https://xkcd.com/356/ as you can't show an infinite numbers of 1 ohm resistors in the diagram?{{unsigned ip|141.101.98.108}}

To me, the arena calls to mind the one in the Labyrinth in the Percy Jackson book series. One of the figures resembles a centaur, which was a gladiator that was defeated in said arena in the scene it is introduced. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.46|108.162.245.46]] 22:16, 30 October 2016 (UTC)

And here I was thinking that the fishing float was a Pokeball... [[User:Whoop whoop pull up|Whoop whoop pull up]] ([[User talk:Whoop whoop pull up|talk]]) 19:03, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

I think that "take off shirt while wiring this" could be sexual reference- there is "ooh, i like that"

:I always thought that the 555 timer was called so because of the three 5k ohm resistors...apparently it is a myth! Does anybody know the real reason?

Regarding the resistor part - I read http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ResistanceDistance.html and implemented it in Mathematica. <nowiki>g = Graph[{1 <-> 2, 1 <-> 3, 1 <-> 4, 1 <-> 5, 2 <-> 3, 2 <-> 6, 3 <-> 6, 3 <-> 7, 3 <-> 8, 4 <-> 7, 4 <-> 5, 5 <-> 9, 5 <-> 10, 6 <-> 12, 6 <-> 11, 7 <-> 12, 7 <-> 11, 7 <-> 13, 7 <-> 14, 7 <-> 9, 8 <-> 15, 8 <-> 10, 9 <-> 14, 10 <-> 15, 11 <-> 12, 11 <-> 13, 13 <-> 14, 14 <-> 15}]; m = KirchhoffMatrix[g] + 1/15; inverse = Inverse[Table[m[[i, j]], {i, 1, 15}, {j, 1, 15}]]; omega[i_, j_] := inverse[[i, i]] + inverse[[j, j]] - 2*inverse[[i, j]]; omega[1, 13]</nowiki>. The result was 167294/195327 = 0.856482...

I feel that it needs to be electronic eel more than an electric one.

Ok, who the hell did the explanation for Magic Smoke? I even had to make a <nowiki>[</nowiki>[[285|REAL Citation needed]]<nowiki>]</nowiki> sign to indicate that the needed citation wasn't a joke.[[Special:Contributions/108.162.242.21|108.162.242.21]] 15:02, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

Isn't it 616 not 666 citation[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_Beast]--[[User:Galactic ascencion|Galactic ascencion]] ([[User talk:Galactic ascencion|talk]]) 07:32, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:Well the image clearly shows a 666. Also the wikipedia article you use as a citation here, states also both numbers. The number should be most famous (at least to people who do not follow the bible/quran word by word and to specific translation) due to its use by iron maiden in the song "the number of the beast" which also states it as 666, and other pop culture references. --[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 10:10, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Could wimp also stands for {{w|weakly interacting massive particles}}, a candidate of {{w|dark matter}}? Then it will reasonably omit the electromagnetic interactions running in this circuit diagram.--[[User:Lamty101|Lamty101]] ([[User talk:Lamty101|talk]]) 14:13, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

2242: Ground vs Air

2019-12-23T12:05:31Z

Lamty101: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2242
| date = December 16, 2019
| title = Ground vs Air
| image = ground vs air.png
| titletext = Water is thinner than both, and fire is *definitely* thicker.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a THICK FIRE. More on the general thickness of the "ground", especially on the oceans and at the thickest parts. Needs more about the actual data portrayed.}}
This comic depicts a map of the world using the {{w|Winkel tripel projection}}, comparing the thickness of the ground, which refers to the {{w|lithosphere}}, to the "thickness" (or height) of the air above it, which refers to the {{w|atmosphere}}.

In an inserted figure, [[Randall]] defines the thickness using three boundaries. At the top is {{w|space}}, defined by the {{w|Kármán line}} at an altitude of 100 km (≈ 62 mi). (See the [[#Trivia|Trivia]] section below for a discussion of this definition of the beginning of space). Below that is the atmosphere which goes down to the ground, where [[Cueball]] is standing, or the water. Beneath the surface is the lithosphere, comprised of the Earth's crust along with the rigid upper part of the mantle, and beneath this is the {{w|asthenosphere}}, the partially melted, highly viscous region of the {{w|upper mantle}} just below the lithosphere. The lithosphere is variable in thickness, averaging about 100 km, but the oceanic lithosphere is much thinner than the continental lithosphere (oceanic crust is thinner and denser than continental crust). The diagram also shows oceanic cross-section to the left-hand side and, though the diagram does not make it explicit, presumably the two measurements used are of the atmosphere down from 'space' to the surface (solid ground or sea-level, whichever is locally highest) and of rock descending from the solid interface down to the asthenosphere, as the sliver of liquid that can intervene between the two spans is refered to as a seperate measurement elsewhere.

The map shades in the parts where the thickness of the ground is thicker than the thickness of the air. This almost only occurs over continents, and certainly only where the continental plates are located (which can stretch into the shallow parts of the oceans). But there are several sections, such as in the Caribbean, northernmost Canada, and the Sea of Japan, where the ground is thicker even being below sea level.

Randall has mainly used a work by Conrad and Lithgow-Bertelloni from 2006 to estimate the thickness of the "ground", and he gives the reference to the paper [https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2005GL025621 DOI.1029/2005GL025621]. Basically, Randall has taken their map and shaded the green and blue areas. It is the second comic in a row with a citation, after the footnote in [[2241: Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect]].

The title text refers to the ancient four {{w|classical element}}s: earth, water, air, fire. The lithosphere, or ground, is earth, the oceans is water, the atmosphere is air, and fire would thus be the hot, plastic rock of the Earth's mantle, see [[913: Core]]. The mantle is not "on fire", but it is hot enough that it would ignite almost anything on the surface. The water layer on Earth is never more than 11 km deep, even at the deepest part of the ocean, the {{w|Mariana Trench}}, and thus cannot compare to the thickness of the atmosphere or the lithosphere. An expansive definition of "fire" to include the rest of the Earth below the lithosphere puts the fire layer at 6,000 km thick, the radius of the Earth, much thicker than the other layers, hence the ''and fire is *definitely* thicker'' comment at the end of the title text. Space or vacuum would in the classical element terminology have been called the {{w|Aether (classical element)|Aether}}.

In [[977: Map Projections]] the [[977:_Map_Projections#Winkel-Tripel|Winkel-Tripel projection]] is the fifth projection which is linked to the {{w|Hipster (contemporary subculture)|hipster}} subculture.

==Transcript==
:[Caption above the drawing]:
:Which is thicker—the ground or the air?

:[The drawing shows a Winkel tripel projection of the Earth. The features of the main map is unlabeled, with only the outlines of the landmasses present. Various parts of the map are labeled with "Air" (four times) or "Ground" (5 times). Areas marked as "Ground" are differentiated with gray shading. These are always over large landmasses or close to them. They cover most of North America (labeled), the northern part of South America (labeled), Northern Europe and most of Asia (labeled), Japan, most of Australia and part of the Indonesia, Western Africa, sub-equatorial Africa (labeled), and finally the central parts of Antarctica (labeled). Air is written on the West Coast of the United States, in the Atlantic Ocean, over the central part of Africa and in the Pacific Ocean, near the Philippines.]
:[Over West Coast of the United States]: Air
:[Over North America]: Ground
:[Over Atlantic Ocean]: Air
:[Over South America]: Ground
:[Over the central part of Africa]: Air
:[Over the southern part of Africa]: Ground
:[Over Asia]: Ground
:[Over Pacific Ocean]: Air
:[Over Antarctica ]: Ground

:[A small diagram is present in the Pacific Ocean left of South America. The diagram depicts several labeled layers of Earth and its atmosphere, listed below. Cueball, a body of water, and several mountains are shown on the flat surface part of the diagram, with the ocean floor lower than where Cueball stands. Above is a line representing the border to space. The line beneath the surface is much more curved going both up and down. Two double arrows representing the thickness of the atmosphere and the lithosphere are drawn between the surface and the layers above and below. Another curved double arrow is pointing to each of these distances and it is marked with a question mark in the middle of the line.]
:Space
:Atmosphere
:Lithosphere
:Asthenosphere
:?

:[In the bottom right corner of the comic with gray text is a reference:]
:Based mostly on Conrad and Lithgow-Bertelloni (2006) DOI.1029/2005GL025621

==Trivia==
*[[Randall]] always uses the {{w|Kármán line}} as the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space.
**He has previously mocked the alternative definition of the atmosphere boundary (at 80 km ≈ 50 mi) used by {{w|US Air Force}} and {{w|NASA}} in the title text of [[1375: Astronaut Vandalism]].
***That definition would, of course, have resulted in a significantly different picture where the ''air'' is thicker than the ''ground'' only inside small areas around mid-ocean ridges.
**Although most authorities use the FAI definition of the Kármán line since it is the international organization of record for aeronautics, there are good scientific reasons for the U.S. Air Force definition.
**The Kármán line is named for {{W|Theodore von Kármán}}, who originally calculated the height at which a vehicle would have to travel faster than orbital velocity to generate lift from wings (therefore making the vehicle a spacecraft in orbit rather an "air"craft using aerodynamics for flight).
**Von Kármán originally calculated this height as 51.9 miles (83.6 km) - closer to the Air Force definition.
**Additionally, the boundary between the {{W|Mesosphere}} and the {{W|Thermosphere}} is traditionally taken to be 52.7 miles (85 km), also close to the Air Force definition.
**On the other hand, some newer research suggests the mesopause (the line between the mesosphere and thermosphere) may have peaks between 53 and 62 miles (85-100 km).
**Also the {{w|turbopause}} - the line where gas molecules cease mixing atmospherically and begin stratifying by molecular weight as if they are in orbit - is generally taken to be about 100 kilometers (62 miles), and as such, closer to the FAI definition.
**Regardless of which definition is used, the reality is that the transition from atmosphere to space takes place gradually over tens of kilometers.
***But the idea behind this comic is only funny if an atmosphere of 100 km thickness is used.

{{comic discussion}}


[[Category: Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Maps]]
[[Category:Geology]]
[[Category:Space]]