explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

226: Swingset

2022-06-01T18:18:50Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 226
| date = February 21, 2007
| title = Will Allen Builds a Swingset
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = Someone bring me a pocket fan so I can drift around the yard.
}}

==Explanation==
In the opening panel of this comic, [[Blondie]], possibly as [[Miss Lenhart]], sees [[Cueball]] sitting on a swing set. She tells him that during his swing, he becomes weightless. Cueball then imagines that at the peak of his swing he is able to become permanently weightless, floating above the ground without any support.

When on a swing or other [http://www.learner.org/interactives/parkphysics/pendulum.html pendulum ride], there is a moment between swinging forwards/backwards and swinging back down again when the forces of gravity, friction, air resistance, etc., bring the velocity of the swing to zero. At this moment, there is no acceleration toward the pivot of the swing (since the centripetal acceleration is proportional to the square of the speed). So the swinger experiences no centripetal force. Of course, gravity still acts on the person, but if the swing is horizontal at that point, then there is no reaction force, so for one moment, the swinger is in free-fall and experiences {{w|weightlessness}}. However, that weightlessness can only be maintained for a fraction of a second, so if Cueball tried this in real life, he would come crashing to the ground.

In the title text, Cueball asks for a pocket fan, believing he could fly around the yard using this small device perhaps as a propeller.

==Transcript==
:[Woman talking to Cueball on swing-set.]
:Woman: You know, at the peak of a big swing, you become weightless.
:[Thought bubble from Cueball.]
:[Cueball swings higher and higher. At the peak of a big swing, he shoves himself off the swing. Cueball remains hovering in the air.]
:Cueball: Hey guys. Come check this out.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Physics]]

2571: Hydraulic Analogy

2022-06-01T18:18:34Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 2571
| date = January 21, 2022
| title = Will Allen Makes A Hydraulic Analogy
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = Current (water) running through the water (wires) causes it to boil, increasing the pressure (voltage), but resisting (impeding) the flow of hydroelectricity (water currents). This is the basis for Ohm's law.
}}
*This was the sixth comic to come out after the [[Countdown in header text]] started.

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

Electric flow is [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvp_a_JkD2o commonly represented] by a "{{w|hydraulic analogy}}". In this analogy, the water pressure represents {{w|voltage}} and the flow of the water is the {{w|electric current|current}}. {{w|Electric resistance}} is represented by a constricted section of a pipe.

[[Miss Lenhart]] is teaching a class and starts to explain this analogy when [[Cueball]] suddenly has an idea and changes her diagrams - connecting the electrical diagram and the hydraulic diagram. In doing this, he has envisioned what comes to be called a "liquitricity device", combining liquid water and electric current flows together and given a suitably {{w|portmanteau}} title.

The last panel shows that Miss Lenhart and Cueball eventually receive the {{w|Nobel Prize}}, presumably the {{w|Nobel Prize in Physics}}, for the design ''and construction'' of the device - indicating that rather than being purely theoretical it has actually been practical to make this device.

The title text 'explains' how this device works and references {{w|Ohm's Law}}, one of the fundamental laws of electricity, but strangely seems as much an incomprehensible mix of the two as the diagram in explaining whatever form of {{w|Wave–particle duality|possible duality}} it actually employs.

One of the featured [[:Category:Footer comics|Footer comics]], [[730: Circuit Diagram]], displays a ''very complex'' circuit diagram. Although no pump or direct water flow can be found here, it all ends up in a beaker with holy water. And there is a symbol labeled 3 liters, at the bottom close to the beaker. This is the symbol for an orifice or flow restriction used on plumbing or hydraulic diagrams. So [[Randall]] already mixed water flow and circuit diagrams over 10 years ago.

==Transcript==
:[Miss Lenhart stands next to a white board with two diagrams while pointing to the first. While she is explaining Cueball interrupts her from off-panel as seen by his voice coming from the right side out of a starburst on the panels edge. The diagrams are a schematic circuit diagram and a water flow diagram. There is a battery (with labels on top and bottom) on the left and a resistor on the right of the circuit as well as labels on each of these and one at the top part of the wire. There is a pump to the left and a tighter section of the pipe to the right, as well as labels on these and on the top part of the pipe. At the bottom there is two arrow pointing in towards the pipe, this also has a label.]
:Miss Lenhart: Electric current is like water flowing in a pipe. The pressure represents-
:Cueball [off-panel]: Wait, hold on.
:Labels on circuit: + - V I R
:Labels on flow diagram: Pump F R D

:[The view changes so Miss Lenhart and the white board are seen from the side. She still stands next to the white board, arms now down, as Cueball approaches the board with a marker held in one hand. The diagrams can still be seen, but distorted from being viewed from the side, and no labels are readable.]
:Cueball: Do you mind if I just...

:[Zoom in on Cueball, who is drawing on the white board, which is the left edge of the panel, i.e. not visible in the panel. Noises from the marker drawing on the board comes up from the tip of the marker pen. The movement of the pen is indicated with small lines on either side.]
:''Scribble''
:''Scribble''
:''Scribble''

:[Miss Lenhart and Cueball, holding the marker pen down, stand on either side of the white board looking at Cueball's version with the merged diagram. He has connected the two, so instead of the wire going down after the resistor in the circuit diagram, it now is connected with water flowing to the right just below the resistor, and then up into the pump to the right of the resistor. At the bottom where the water pipe before bent up into the pump, the water now continues running to the left (the pipe was not drawn around it by Cueball), and it now flows where the bottom part of the wire, from the circuit, was before, turning up below the battery and connecting with it there. All the labels from before have been retained as follows.]
:Labels on diagram: + - V I R Pump F R D

:[Miss Lenhart and Cueball stand on a podium with a Cueball-like presenter. The presenter is holding two Nobel Prize medals up in his hands. He is holding them from the strings they are attached to, so the medals hang below his hands.]
:Presenter: And for the design and construction of the liquitricity device, the Nobel Prize goes to...

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Miss Lenhart]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Multiple Cueballs]]
[[Category:Physics]]
[[Category:Nobel Prize]]
[[Category:Portmanteau]]

455: Hats

2022-06-01T18:18:15Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 455
| date = July 28, 2008
| title = Will Allen Wears Hats
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = ...
}}

==Explanation==
[[Black Hat]] encounters a person who is wearing not one, but two black hats. Black Hat is not a person to be trifled with, but from his reaction, he apparently believes that Two Black Hats represents a considerable danger to him. Black Hat knows how dangerous he is to those with one fewer black hat than him, so he continues the logic and realises that one who has one ''more'' black hat must be proportionally dangerous to him.

If a black hat is assumed to be akin to a badge of rank, then Two Black Hats certainly is superior to him in the capacity and willingness to do evil. Alternatively, and even more worrying, Two Black Hats could be someone who has the desire and the ability to acquire black hats (possibly killing the previous owners in the process if having two black hats really means that the individual is more malevolent than Black Hat), which he then wears like a badge of honor. With all this in mind, Black Hat edges away, keeping Two Black Hats in sight at all times. This movement and the accompanying line could also be interpreted as Black Hat being physically pushed away, like two negative or two positive poles of a magnet, although this does not explain why it only starts after a beat panel.

This comic is also a metatextual joke about xkcd itself. Because of the comic's simplistic art style and characterization, Black Hat has only two defining physical traits: his hat and his hair, which we see when he takes off his hat, and one defining personality trait, his malevolence. Randall then implies that the two traits must be correlated, so that a black hat signifies malevolence, and accordingly two hats must signify even more malevolence -- an idea that wouldn't make any sense in real life, where a person with two hats would just be making an odd fashion choice.{{Citation needed}}

The title text is simply "..." This may represent the slow-motion pause during which Black Hat's nefarious life flashes before his eyes, as he considers his impending doom. It may also emphasize how the usually witty Black Hat is, for once, speechless. Or the title text is similar to that in [[412: Startled]], where Black Hat also becomes the little one (and with much focus on the black hat, as in this comic). As mentioned there, such a short title text could be due to the fact that it's a somewhat surreal comic, and any further commentary might have detrimentally brought it down to Earth. See also [[82: Frame]], with the same title text, but no relation to black hats.

Two Black Hats makes a reappearance in [[826: Guest Week: Zach Weiner (SMBC)]], down by the restrooms.

==Transcript==
:[Black Hat is walking.]

:[Black Hat stops in front of another man with two Black Hats, the uppermost hat tilted about 45 degrees back.]

:[After two panels, the original Black Hat steps backward, shuddering slightly.]

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Black Hat]]
[[Category:Characters with hats]]

1433: Lightsaber

2022-06-01T18:17:57Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 1433
| date = October 13, 2014
| title = Lightsiberia
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = A long time in the future, in a galaxy far, far, away, astronomers in the year 2008 sight an unusual gamma-ray burst originating from somewhere far across the universe.
}}

==Explanation==
This comic references a [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDnoczxzQyg scene] from the third theatrically-released ''{{w|Star Wars}}'' movie, ''[[wikia:c:starwars:Return of the Jedi|Return of the Jedi]]'', wherein [[wikia:c:starwars:Darth Vader|Darth Vader]] confronts his son, [[wikia:c:starwars:Luke skywalker|Luke Skywalker]], who had recently surrendered to [[wikia:c:starwars:Galactic Empire|Imperial]] soldiers. In the movie, Vader notes that Luke has constructed [[wikia:c:starwars:Luke Skywalker's lightsaber|a new lightsaber]] following the loss of his [[wikia:c:starwars:Luke skywalker#Lightsabers|original]] during their [[wikia:c:starwars:Duel on Cloud City|duel on Cloud City]] (Luke Skywalker's original lightsaber actually having been [[wikia:c:starwars:Anakin skywalker|Anakin Skywalker's]] second).

Lightsabers are often jokingly referred to as "laser swords" by fans (note that the official French-language translation of Star Wars actually calls them "laser sabers"), and this comic points out that a real laser would not have any way of stopping and would therefore continue forever, making this particular interpretation silly. (The ''Star Wars'' writers cleverly fail to state what exactly a lightsaber's blade is made out of, although this point makes it unlikely to be a laser.) Once Darth Vader turns on the light saber, it goes offscreen and presumably continues in that direction forever, causing much mayhem as it blazes through the stars. Hull breaches are a popular trope in science-fiction, despite curiously being almost entirely absent from the Star Wars films.

The title text refers to {{w|GRB 080319B}}, an unusual gamma ray burst in 2008, the afterglow of which was briefly visible to the human eye. It implies that the source of this burst was a light saber in the Star Wars story, which took place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" according to the {{w|Star Wars (film)|Star Wars}} {{w|Star Wars opening crawl|opening crawl}}.

Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader have had a similar conversation before in [[1397: Luke]]. In that version Luke wishes for Vader not to turn it on, as stated in the title text. He should probably have said this here in this comic!

==Trivia==
*In the comic, Vader's subordinates exclaim they are suffering a hull breach, implying they are on a spaceship (a Star Destroyer) or space station (the second Death Star). In the original movie, the conversation actually took place on the surface of Endor.

==Transcript==
:[Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are talking. Vader holds the handle of a powered-off lightsaber.]
:Vader: '''''I see you have constructed a new lightsaber.'''''
:[Vader turns it on. The beam of the lightsaber continues upward out of the frame.]
:Lightsaber: Snap-Hisss
:[Vader looks up toward where the beam is pointing.]
:[Vader looks back at Luke.]
:Vader: '''''Where does it end?'''''
:Luke: Doesn't.
:Intercom (out of view): ''Hull breach all along sector five!!''

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Star Wars]]
[[Category:Physics]]

2471: Hippo Attacks

2022-06-01T18:17:39Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

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

==Explanation==

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

The viral post appears to be [https://www.facebook.com/clickhole/photos/a.1461385317435063/2945077732399140/?type=3 this Facebook post.] The relevant source is unknown (and may very well be made up, since the source is ClickHole, a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClickHole satirical website formerly owned by The Onion]). There are a number of listicles Cueball may be referring to, but they all appear to be citing [https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Most-Lethal-Animal-Mosquito-Week the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation], however, even they do not seem to provide source for the number of fatalities caused by hippopotamus.

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

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

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

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

With different replies to these questions, wildly different answers could be reached. But, counting every body of water on the planet, 850 trillion waves works out as around 2.354 (unique) waves per square meter.

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

{{comic discussion}}

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

2057: Internal Monologues

2022-06-01T18:17:07Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 2057
| date = October 10, 2018
| title = Internal Monologues of Will Allen
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = Haha, just kidding, everyone's already been hacked. I wonder if today's the day we find out about it.
}}

==Explanation==

This comic explores some seemingly strange perspectives that academics or professionals might have due to their deeper knowledge and understanding of the fields that they study.

Many seemingly mundane phenomena can actually be quite weird or counterintuitive if you understand how they really work. The five people featured in this comic, all from different disciplines, are all aware of certain facts about reality that seem so strange even they have trouble believing they are true; yet, undeniably, they are.

* [[Megan]], a {{w|botanist}}, is struck by the fact that trees are made in large part from air, as in the carbon dioxide they consume.
* [[Cueball]], a {{w|physicist}}, finds it weird that he can feel the gravity between an object in his hand (his phone) and the Earth.
* [[Blondie]], a computer security researcher, knows of the inherent insecurity of computer systems and wonders if today is the day everyone will get hacked, collapsing our society.
* [[Hairy]], a {{w|graphic designer}}, wonders what sequence of events drove a store's decision to use a particular recognizable font for their signage.
* [[Ponytail]], studying medicine, wonders how humans manage to seem so normal on the outside, given that most of their bodies are made up of things usually unmentionable.

Four of the five people are pondering things that they happen to find very interesting but that aren't too concerning to an everyday person, whereas what Blondie is pondering could have widespread or even global effects on our way of life. In the title text, Blondie amends her thought, since she actually knows an even more concerning truth: we've ''already'' all been hacked, and we just don't know it yet.

Below, the people's thoughts are explained in detail.

;Botany
Much of the mass of trees is extracted from the air. An Australian ABC program explains that "[http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/greatmomentsinscience/trees-are-made-from-air/9675642#transcript Trees are made from air]". More precisely: The bulk of the mass of a tree is composed of {{w|cellulose}} and water.

Cellulose is a polysaccharide, a large molecule consisting of many glucose molecules (C6H12O6) bonded together. Plants make those glucose molecules through photosynthesis: they make them by combining water (H2O) and carbon dioxide molecules (CO2) using the energy from sunlight, releasing oxygen in the process (O2). Plants get the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and arguably the water also as it usually comes from rain which is condensed water vapor.

The main photosynthesis balance is given by the formula :
:6 CO2 + 6 H2O -> C6H12O6 + 6 O2

;Physics
{{w|Gravity}} is the weakest of the four {{w|Fundamental interaction|fundamental forces}} in physics but also to humans the most preeminent one. In everyday experience, most people tend to think of gravity merely as a pervasive downward force, but as a physicist, Cueball is more aware that in fact, all gravitational forces are mutual; any pair of objects will exert a gravitational force on each other, regardless of how big they are. Therefore, he is correct in saying that his phone and the Earth are being "pulled together", and finds it remarkable that he is able to sense this interaction between two objects of such an disparate size even when the gravitational pull of the phone is hard to detect.

;Computer Security
Anyone well versed in computer security understands just how insecure the systems that we depend on actually are.

In the title text it is noted that possibly all our systems are already hacked, and we just haven't found out yet. Since malicious hackers do their work covertly, a successful hack often isn't discovered until days, weeks, or even years later if at all. By that time they may have successfully hacked many other systems using the same techniques and/or exploiting the same widely unknown or un-patched security flaws. Some high profile hacks recently discovered at the time of this posting include a [https://securitytoday.com/articles/2018/10/02/facebook-hacked-50-million-users-data-exposed.aspx 50-million user hack of Facebook] and Google+ announcing they are [https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/project-strobe/ shutting down the consumer side of Google+], in part due to a security flaw that was discovered and patched months ago.

;Graphic Design
{{w|Graphic designer}}s recognize fonts and design elements, and see how they come together. In this comic, the graphic designer wonders how the ''{{w|Law & Order}}'' font was chosen for a particular storefront's sign. ''Law & Order'' is a police procedural TV series created by Dick Wolf in 1990, which has had various spinoffs. The font used for the title sequence of ''Law & Order'' is called {{w|Friz Quadrata}}, and is also the font used for the signage of the New York Police Department headquarters.

;Medicine
Doctors are well versed in {{w|human anatomy}}, and are likely to think about what is inside of people more than the average person would. And most people would actually like not to think about all the blood and bones we are all carrying around with us. Not to mention the poop or the contents of our stomach that could be considered vomit or the pee etc.

Most people do not think about that the person next to them is actually a skeleton packed in meat and animated by electricity... But Ponytail does, because she is being exposed to this fact all the time through her study of medicine.

==Transcript==

:[Beneath a two line caption are five characters shown, with their thoughts inside thought bubbles. Below them are labels giving their respective fields of science.]
:<big>Internal Monologues</big>
:from various fields

:Botany
:Megan: I can't get over the fact that trees are made of air.

:Physics
:Cueball [looking at a phone in his hand]: It's so weird that I can feel the Earth and my phone being pulled together.

:Computer security
:Blondie: I wonder if today will be the day everyone gets hacked and it all finally collapses.

:Graphic design
:Hairy: I wonder how that store ended up with the Law & Order font for their sign.

:Medicine
:Ponytail: We're all acting normal even though we're full of blood and bones and poop.

==Trivia==
*[[913: Core]] shows what a geologist might have thought about had they been in this comic.
*A similar expression of a mundane phenomenon that's really weird when you think about it can be seen in [[203: Hallucinations]].
*This comic has a similar setup to some other kinds of thoughts between such scientific fields presented in [[435: Purity]].
*On computer security, Randall gave a similar message about voting software security in [[2030: Voting Software]].
*On medicine, Doctor Ponytail offers similar thoughts in this comic and in [[1839: Doctor Visit]].

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Blondie]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Science]]
[[Category:Physics]]
[[Category:Computer security]]
[[Category:Biology]]
[[Category:Medicine]]

45: Schrodinger

2022-06-01T18:16:53Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 45
| date = January 4, 2006
| title = Schrodingus
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = There was no alt-text until you moused over
}}

==Explanation==
This comic is a joke creating a humorously false synthesis, combining the principles of quantum superposition and the effects of reading a comic one panel at a time.

{{w|Schrödinger's cat}} is a thought experiment that illuminates the notion that a particle only resolves itself to its state upon observation, and until such observation is made, it is in all of its possible states simultaneously. In the thought experiment, a cat is both dead and alive until observation; likewise, in this comic, [[Black Hat]] and [[Cueball]] are likening the last panel to the box with the cat: until you read it, it is in a mixed state (a superposition) of both funny and unfunny.

Finally, in the last panel, both of them say "Shit." The joke is that after reading the last panel, the comic is both funny (as it is unexpected) and not funny (as the last line was a non sequitur and therefore there is no climax) at the same time, thus proving Black Hat and Cueball wrong, hence them expressing discontent with the word "shit."

The [[title text]], which Randall here calls the alt-text, suggests that the alt text did not exist until the mouse over action occurred. This is another reference to Schrödinger's cat. You do not know if there is a title text until you mouse over, so before you mouse over, the title text could be missing or existent.

===Schrödinger's cat===
Schrödinger's cat is a famous thought experiment proposed by {{w|Erwin Schrödinger}} to question the {{w|Copenhagen interpretation}} of quantum mechanics.

Under the {{w|Copenhagen interpretation}}, any particle is described by a {{w|wave function}} that allows one to calculate the probability that it is any given state. A radioactive nucleus with a half-life of one hour, for instance, would have a wave-function that would split, showing two distinct states (decayed, undecayed) that change over time until some "observation" forced the wave-function into one state or another (called "collapsing the wave-function"). Before the wave-function is collapsed, it is incorrect to say that the atom has decayed or has not decayed; it is in a "superposition" of states, effectively both decayed and undecayed.

Schrödinger thought that the Copenhagen interpretation was absurd, and devised the below thought experiment to show this. The experiment goes as follows: Put a cat in a box, he said, with a device triggered by the decay of an atom with a half-life of one hour that would release a poisonous gas if triggered. Then, after waiting an hour, the Copenhagen interpretation would say that the atom is in a superposition of decayed and undecayed states, and thus, by extension, the cat would be in a superposition of alive and dead states. Only when the box is opened would the wave-function for the cat collapse into either alive or dead states. This thought experiment is not meant to be taken literally, as every interaction of a particle with another constitutes an observation, and many particles must interact for a cat to die, but still his argument was that since it is absurd for a cat to be both alive and dead, it is absurd for an atom to be both decayed and undecayed.

If this experiment were to be performed, the cat would not be both dead and alive.

== Transcript ==
:[Black Hat and Cueball are standing next to each other. Above them the text is written in a box with shades around it.]
:Schrödinger's Comic

:[Black Hat and Cueball are still standing next to each other, but Cueball has lifted his arms above his head. The text is again written in a box with shades around it.]
:The last panel of this comic is both funny and not funny at the same time.

:[Black Hat and Cueball are still standing next to each other, Cueball arms are down again. The text is again written in a box with shades around it.]
:Until you read it, there's no way to tell which it will end up being.

:[Black Hat and Cueball are still standing next to each other. Cueball has become smaller and smaller through the three frames after the first. Quite clearly here in the last panel. The text is again written in a box with shades around it.]
:Shit.

==Trivia==
*This was the 42nd comic originally posted to [[LiveJournal]].
**The previous was [[39: Bowl]].
**The next was [[46: Secrets]].
*There had been a break of almost a month between this and the previous comic.
**This time was probably used to prepare the launch of the new [[xkcd]] site.
*Original title: "Drawing: Schrodinger"
**For the first time in eight comics and only the second time since after the first day on LiveJournal, the weekday was not part of the title on LiveJournal.
**But the extra word "Drawing" was still added to the title for this and the four comics after the next, in spite of the simultaneous release on xkcd.
*There were no original [[Randall]] quote for this comic.
*This was the first comic to be posted simultaneous (i.e. on the same day) on both LiveJournal and the new xkcd site.
*Thus this comic was one of the last 11 comics posted on LiveJournal.
**These 11 comics were [[:Category:Posted on LiveJournal after xkcd|posted both on LiveJournal and xkcd]] after the xkcd site opened on the 1st of January 2006.
**They were not all posted on the same day though.
*Black Hat's hat is beginning to shorten from its top-hat look, although its height varies between panels. (As does Cueballs height compared to Black Hat.)

{{Comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics posted on livejournal| 42]]
[[Category:Posted on LiveJournal after xkcd]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Black Hat]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Physics]]
[[Category:Comics with lowercase text]]

578: The Race: Part 2

2022-06-01T18:16:39Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 578
| date = May 5, 2009
| title = Will Allen: Part 2
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = The Hammer + Captain Tightpants == Captain Hammerpants?
}}

==Explanation==
''{{w|Firefly (TV series)|Firefly}}'' was a television series aired by {{w|Fox Broadcasting Company|Fox}} in 2002. The star of the show was {{w|Malcolm Reynolds|Captain Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds}}, played by {{w|Nathan Fillion}}.

Megan tries to play the rational card, and insist that the characters of major TV shows must get tired of fans' never-ending need to see them playing that character, and never being themselves. Nathan Fillion, however, appears to miss the days of ''Firefly'' so much that he spends his time reenacting his role as Malcolm at home.

In the fourth panel Cueball suggests they race for charities, which would mean the winner gets to donate the prize money to their charity of choice. In the fifth panel Fillion, takes the phrase and twists it to mean that the winner gets the charity. This is why Cueball says the confused line "Come again?"

The title text refers both to Mal being referred to by Kaylee as "Captain Tightpants" in the episode {{w|Shindig (Firefly)|"Shindig"}}, and to Captain Hammer, a superhero played by Nathan Fillion in ''{{w|Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog}}'', another series created by {{w|Joss Whedon}}. "Hammerpants" may also be a reference to the odd, puffy parachute pants worn by 1990s rapper MC Hammer.

All comics in "[[The Race]]" series:
*[[577: The Race: Part 1]]
*[[578: The Race: Part 2]]
*[[579: The Race: Part 3]]
*[[580: The Race: Part 4]]
*[[581: The Race: Part 5]]

This series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday) and not over the usual Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule.

Electric skateboards have been the subject of several other comics like [[139: I Have Owned Two Electric Skateboards]], [[409: Electric Skateboard (Double Comic)]] and a panel in [[442: xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel]].

==Transcript==
:[Cueball with skateboard and gear and Megan are talking.]
:Cueball: "Why race him?" He's ''Captain Reynolds!''
:Megan: Mr. Fillion is an actor. Firefly was years ago.

:[They go over to a computer; Cueball is using a phone and presumably looking up a phone number.]
:Megan: He has his own life to live, and I'm sure the last thing he wants to do is indulge a fan by playing Mal for him.

:Meanwhile...
:[Nathan Fillion is standing in front of a mirror in a trenchcoat.]
:Nathan: (into the mirror) Name's Captain Reynolds, ma'am. *ahem* Name's Captain Reynolds, ma'am.
:Someone offpanel: Nathan? Telephone!
:Nathan: That's ''Captain!''
:Someone offpanel: Fine, Captain Nathan.
:Nathan: No, use my '''space''' name!
:Someone offpanel: *sigh*

:[Nathan and Cueball talk on the phone.]
:Cueball: So, how about we race for charities?

:Nathan: Sure. Always did want a charity of my own.

:Cueball (between panels): Come again?

:Nathan: You know, boxes in supermarkets collecting food. 'Course, ought to tack up a list sayin' which wines I like best...

:Cueball: Uh, that's not quite—
:Nathan (over the phone): Listen, I'm the captain here.
:Cueball: ...I just got goosebumps when you said that.

:Nathan: Yeah, happens to me too whenever I get captainy. I cut such a strapping figure.
:Nathan: Buckle! Swash!
:Nathan: All right, let's do this race.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:The Race]]
[[Category:Comics sharing name|The Race]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Nathan Fillion]]
[[Category:Firefly]]
[[Category:Electric skateboard]]

2219: Earthquake Early Warnings

2022-06-01T18:16:22Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 2219
| date = October 23, 2019
| title = Will Allen Gives Earthquake Early Warnings
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = I was fired by the National Weather Service five minutes after they hired me for going into their code base and renaming all the tornado warnings to "tornado spoiler alerts."
}}

==Explanation==
A week before this comic, on October 17th, California introduced an {{w|earthquake warning system}} in the form of an [https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-16/california-to-launch-statewide-earthquake-early-warning-system app for smartphones called MyShake].
The system works through a network of sensors across the state that can detect {{w|P-waves}} from an {{w|earthquake}}, {{w|P-wave#As_an_earthquake_warning|which move faster}} than the {{w|S-waves}}, which cause most of the damage. In addition, the sensors send the warning electronically - at a significant fraction of the speed of light - much faster than either P-waves or S-waves. Because of these differences in speed, the network can send warnings through the app about 5-20 seconds before major shaking occurs, enough time for people to take cover under tables, run outside, etc. The farther you are away from the epicenter, the more warning time you have.

In the comic [[Megan]] talks about the app, suggesting how cool it is, but [[Cueball]] is upset. He seems to think that prediction of the earthquake coming is like a spoiler that ruins the experience of how an earthquake should be experienced. Apparently he prefers to simply be taken by surprise like most people are when an earthquake large enough to feel hits.

He also personifies the {{w|tectonic plates}} (whose shifting positions causes the quake), saying that we should all feel the shaking the way the tectonic plate intended. The statement is usually one regarding to arts, such as a music lover might prefer to listen to older music from vinyl (including cracking sounds, etc.) instead of a remastered digital version, as it is, as the artist intended.

In the title text Cueball mentions that he was fired from the {{w|National Weather Service}} five minutes after they hired him because the first thing he did was to rename {{w|tornado warnings}} as {{w|tornado}} spoiler alerts. A {{w|Spoiler (media)|spoiler alert}} is something used, for instance, when talking about a plot twist of a new movie, so that people who haven't seen the movie can avoid learning important details that would spoil the experience of seeing the movie. Cueball seems to genuinely wish to be surprised by these potentially lethal phenomena for which just minutes of warning may make the difference between life and death.

Earthquake warnings, on a smartphone but not as an app, were the topic of [[723: Seismic Waves]], and shortly before that a [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/protip protip] for an alternative seismograph was mentioned in [[711: Seismograph]]. An app for warning about tornadoes was the topic of [[937: TornadoGuard]]. Warnings in general by the NWS were the subject in [[2179: NWS Warnings]], which mentioned tornadoes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and many other hazards. Tsunamis are often caused by earthquakes, though earthquakes were not specifically mentioned.

==Transcript==
:[Megan is looking at her phone while standing next to Cueball]
:Megan: Ooh, California has a new earthquake early warning app.
:Cueball: Yeah, I'm so mad about it.

:[Megan puts her phone down and looks at Cueball who throws his arms up in the air.]
:Megan: What, why?
:Cueball: It ruins the experience of trying to recognize the p-waves before the obvious main waves hit.

:[Megan still looks at Cueball who has taken his arms down.]
:Megan: So you're mad about earthquake ''spoilers?''
:Cueball: I just want to experience the shaking the way the tectonic plate ''intended!''

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Tornadoes]]
[[Category:Smartphones]]
[[Category:Geology]]

236: Collecting Double-Takes

2022-06-01T18:16:06Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number =236
| date =March 16, 2007
| title =Collecting Double Takes With Will Allen
| image =Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext =Fun Game: find a combination of two items that most freaks out the cashier. Winner: pregnancy test and single coat hanger.
}}

==Explanation==
There's a fairly well-founded meme that singles looking for other singles (''mostly'' that being men for women, and vice-versa, but not exclusively) can make connections with others in the fresh produce sections of a supermarket. From a single lady's point of view, men who are buying such goods are more likely to be unattached, due to the traditionally skewed gender politics of who shops for what in a couple, and at the same time, the man is exhibiting good habits in not merely stocking up on ready-meals or subsisting on takeaways while living the bachelor life.

By standing in a produce aisle with a tube of {{w|K-Y Jelly}} (which is most commonly used as a sexual lubricant) in his hand and considering what produce to buy (between bananas, apples, oranges, zucchinis, and doubtless many more off-screen), [[Cueball]] is allowing other people to believe that he either has plans to have sex with any connection he might manage to take home with him, or also he plans to use the chosen produce item to pleasure himself, probably sexually.

Cueball is probably not actually planning on doing either{{Citation needed}}, but he loves to see the look on people's faces; hence, he's collecting double-takes.

In the title text, he says he likes to play a game of "freak out the cashier using two items." Wire coat hangers have been used to perform {{w|Unsafe abortion | do-it-yourself abortions}}, many times with disastrous effects, such as internal hemorrhaging and the death of the woman.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball is standing in the middle of the produce aisle in a supermarket, holding a tube of K-Y Jelly in one hand, the other on his chin. The signs read "Bananas" "Apples" "Oranges" and "Zucchini" from left to right.]
:MY HOBBY: Standing in the supermarket's produce section holding a tube of K-Y Jelly, looking contemplative.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:My Hobby]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Sex]]

1453: fMRI

2022-06-01T18:15:51Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 1453
| date = November 28, 2014
| title = fwill
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = They also showed activation in the parts of the brain associated with exposure to dubious study methodology, concern about unremoved piercings, and exasperation with fMRI techs who won't stop talking about Warped Tour.
}}

==Explanation==
{{w|Functional magnetic resonance imaging}} (fMRI), as the name suggests, is an offshoot of the MRI. It shows brain activity, typically while the subject is performing tasks or responding to stimuli. During the test, the subject is laid in a relatively small cylinder inside a big, very loud, machine which produces extremely strong magnetic fields. To prevent damage or injury, the subject must remove all metal objects from their body, including piercings, jewelry, watches, etc.

In the tests shown, the brain activity detected is a direct result of the testing environment itself, and has nothing to do with the simple tasks being performed by the subject. During fMRI participants hear loud noises, are confined in a small space (thus the claustrophobia) and have removed their jewelry. The researcher has mistaken these associated brain activities as effects as being caused by ''performing simple memory tasks'' which the participants have been asked to do and not a direct result of the settings of the test. Thus, the brain areas described by Megan are those associated with taking a functional MRI scan, rather than those associated with the "test" supposedly being carried out. The results being shown are known as {{w|Artifact_(error)|artifacts}}, which are shown later in [[1781: Artifacts]].

In real experiments, reported activity patterns are always a result of subtracting average brain activity from many samples gathered during task from so called ''resting-state'' activity - which is obtained while subjects are not engaged in any task, thus eliminating the effect the setting has on brain activity. Apparently, the researcher in the comic has failed to account for that in the analysis of the data.

The title text raises the more difficult and controversial issues of methodology, saying that the subjects ''also showed activation in the parts of the brain associated with exposure to dubious study methodology''. Here [[Randall]] makes fun of the overly confident, sweeping statements made by some fMRI researchers, often in the press. Of course, fMRI technique requires that the researcher account for several possible sources of errors by, among others, performing proper statistical analyses, multiple comparisons and using proper control groups. These are usually the reasons for {{w|Functional magnetic resonance imaging#Criticism|fMRI criticism}}. See the link for further information, including a famous ironic study of a dead salmon which was shown various pictures of people while fMRI scans were made. The scans could be interpreted as showing meaningful brain activity, unless the {{w|multiple comparisons problem}} was properly addressed. Randall has previously made fun of geographic profiles falling to this trap in comic [[1138: Heatmap|1138]].

The title text then continues with the jewelry issue, now especially the ''concern about unremoved piercings''. In the worst case these could be ripped off by the strong magnetic field. So it could be of some concern - especially when you take into consideration some of the places people may have piercings that are not obvious to the MRI personnel! The final remark about activation regards ''exasperation with fMRI techs who won't stop talking about Warped Tour''. "{{w|Warped Tour}}" refers to a traveling music festival that has been going since 1995, originally as a punk rock festival, but now with a more diverse set of music. Due to the nature of {{w|Moshing|Mosh Pits}}, the loud, cacophonous music, the facial jewelry of concert-goers and the tight quarters of the pit make it similar in description to an MRI.

==Transcript==
:[Megan talking to an unseen audience in front of an fMRI brain scan.]
:Megan: Our fMRI study found that subjects performing simple memory tasks showed activity in the parts of the brain associated with loud noises, claustrophobia, and the removal of jewelry.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Psychology]]
[[Category:Science]]

1685: Patch

2022-06-01T18:15:14Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 1685
| date = May 25, 2016
| title = Will Allen Writes a Patch
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = My optimizer uses content-aware inpainting to fill in all the wasted whitespace in the code, repeating the process until it compiles.
}}

==Explanation==
{{w|Adobe Photoshop}} is a commonly used application for image manipulation. One of its features is the Patch tool, which allows the user to overwrite parts of the image, replacing them with a copy of another area of the same image. It is often used for “patching up” photographs by overwriting scratches or other visible damage to the photo. Another of Photoshop’s features is “content-aware fill”, which could also be described as “content-aware inpainting”. It works similarly to the Patch tool, but automatically generates a replacement texture from the area surrounding the deleted part instead of copying a user-specified area exactly.

{{w|GNU}} {{w|Patch (Unix)|patch}} is a program that replaces only parts of code with an updated version, without requiring the user to download the entire source code. Here, it appears the author was told to “patch” the code but used Photoshop to do this instead of GNU patch, with devastating results. Although the title text suggests that if you did this enough times the code would eventually compile, this would never happen. In fact, Photoshop could only edit an image of the text and not the text itself. However, it could work if optical character recognition (OCR) were integrated into the workflow as well.

The comic blurs the difference between {{w|text_file|text}} (in which letters and symbols represent discrete values, such as 65 being the number for the letter A in the ASCII encoding standard, and it's relatively easy for a program compiler to interpret combinations of these values as keywords and other programming constructs) and {{w|Raster_graphics|graphics}} (where the letters and symbols in the comic are actually represented by a pattern of colored dots), playing with the idea that the ''patch'' metaphor can be used on both (although with different meanings). There are common and straightforward processes for converting text information to images, such as printing, which can convert text to a graphics format very faithfully. The reverse, however, requires the use of {{w|optical character recognition}} (OCR), which attempts to figure out which letter or symbol certain patterns of dots "look like". OCR could be effective in converting some of the image in the comic back to usable text; however, it would fail on some of those patterns that have been mangled and don't look like any existing characters or symbols. A compiler can only operate on text data, so converting the graphic back into text would be a requirement to even begin to attempt to compile it, a step omitted in the title text.

The code appears to be written in {{w|Python_(programming_language)|Python}}, a programming language often referred to in xkcd, such as in [[353: Python]]. A few of the function names that can be recognized are "isPrime" and "quicksort", both elementary programming algorithms. It was also apparently originally edited using a Python-aware programming text editor, which is able to use different colors for different programming elements. For example, it appears to use red for keywords, blue for variables, and black for other elements; however, because of the mangling from the use of the wrong patching program, that doesn't appear to be consistent. Since the patching replaced graphical elements rather than whole characters, there are examples of symbols that are combinations of two different characters, and when the original two characters were rendered in different colors the resulting non-character could be in two colors, or the resulting "word" might be rendered in multiple colors.

The comic brings to attention the high rate of Adobe Photoshop piracy. GNU Patch is available for free, even [http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/patch.htm for Windows], and Mac OS X. So the comic implies that Adobe Photoshop, a subscription to which costs $20/month, is more available than GNU patch. According to [http://blog.epicedits.com/2008/03/28/60-of-photoshop-users-are-pirates/ this poll], 58% of Photoshop copies were pirated.

The title text also explains that the patch used the content-aware inpainting to fill in all the wasted whitespace in the code. In most programming languages, whitespace is necessary to separate words, so this would combine words that shouldn’t be combined and create invalid code. Since the code in the image is Python, the code will be messed up even more, because Python uses whitespace as a part of its programming syntax. For example, statements are separated by newlines instead of by semicolons (;), and indentation is used instead of brackets to determine the scope of each section of code.

The original code was likely as follows:

import re
def isPrime(n):
if n<=1:
return False
for i in range(2, int(n**0.5)+1):
if n%i==0:
return False
return True
def isPrimeRegex(n):
if re.match(r'^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$', '1'*n):
return False
return True
def quicksort(a):
if len(a) < 2:
return a
pivot=a[0]
l=[i for i in a if i<pivot]
r=[i for i in a if i>pivot]
mid=[pivot]*(len(a)-(len(l)+len(r)))
return quicksort(l)+mid+quicksort(r)

isPrime and quicksort are standard python implementations of simple algorithms (although you would not generally write a sorting algorithm in python as there are built-in algorithms available). isPrimeRegex uses the [https://docs.python.org/library/re.html re module] to detect if a number is prime by seeing if a string containing that many 1s can be matched to 2 or more copies of some string containing at least 2 1s.

The comic two comics back [[1683: Digital Data]], also related to turning digital data into bad copies. Less than a month before quicksort was mentioned in [[1667: Algorithms]], and a month before that another "easy" solution to a programming problem was released in [[1654: Universal Install Script]].

Using a Photoshop tool for a task it is not intended for was also used in [[1784: Bad Map Projection: Liquid Resize]], where [https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/content-aware-scaling.html Photoshop's content-aware resizing tool] was a very questionable choice to use for a Map Projection.

==Transcript==
:[The panel displays part of a code, in five different colors (red, purple, light blue, blue, and green) as well as normal black text, which due to image editing is difficult to read. The first and last lines are partly obscured by the frame of the panel. Here below is an attempt to transcribe the code, using the sign "¤" for anything not easily transcribed. Feel free to add other signs instead of these that look more like the one in the image (and also improve the attempted transcription if possible).]
impoɞtme
dooPisPŞ¤me(n):
r(¤n<n,1:
retern F(ise
for i irararre(2, nint *n**n+5)+5):
if n i==0
ret¤¤nrselsel:
re¤ irn True
defesisPrimcieg ¤x(cx
if ge¤inatcx(ᵣ'^(1?| ?.1+?)\+)$'*n )1'*n):
rerjrn Fa( e
LetylnrTrl
dql qlsorsorn(a :
if ¤n(a < 2:
eteturn a
pi= =r fa[0]
l=pi=for j ın a i< i<pi<(t]()
r=[ı=for f in a) r i>viviv](vo)
mid=[pi[*t]*(l*t,(a)-(lenpienlen(c)))
r¤lrurrriklcksckt(l) + r ¤ ¤quickrort(r)

:[Caption below the panel:]
:Protip: If you don't have access to the GNU ''patch'' tool, you can use the Photoshop one.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Protip]]
[[Category:Programming]]

1811: Best-Tasting Colors

2022-06-01T18:14:58Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 1811
| date = March 15, 2017
| title = Best-Tasting Colors with Will Allen
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = I recognize that chocolate is its own thing on which reasonable people may differ. Everything else here is objective fact.
}}

==Explanation==
In this comic, [[Randall]] rates colors based on tastiness of various flavors, which makes it very similar to [[388: Fuck Grapefruit]]. The colors are sorted in descending order (from most tasty to least tasty) by the midpoint of their overall taste range.

Within each color, several individual items are placed at points marked by dots along a tastiness scale, with nine ticks ranging from bad (1) to good (9). For example, within the pink color band at the very top, watermelon is only rated 6/9 — much less tasty than cotton candy, which is almost at 9/9, making it the very best tasting flavor in the chart. Interestingly, watermelon is mentioned twice, as it is also listed under green. Usually people do not eat the green part of a watermelon, so it is strange that Randall has rated both types at almost the same level of tastiness. It could be that he sees the green watermelon as green, but also sees the pink fruit inside, so it is actually the pink fruit that is rated for both colors, or the chart is a rating of candy (such as jellybean or popsicle) flavors, as it is not uncommon for both green and pink to represent watermelon in those situations.

For pink, blue and white there are one, two and three regions, respectively labeled with "???". It is not clear what the purpose of these is. Perhaps they indicate regions in which Randall is unable to think of any examples, and is inviting the reader to speculate. For instance, are there any pink-colored foods more tasty than watermelon (6/9) but less tasty than cotton candy (8.5/9)? It could also be that he thinks there must be other interesting foods with this color, which could seem to be the case for white and blue, where there are a group of question marks above the most tasty labeled flavor blue raspberries and vanilla for white. The latter is yet a joke, as vanilla is black, but is often used in white food such as vanilla ice, which he may have been thinking off, or just again messes with his readers.

The question marks thus imply an arbitrary tastiness assigned to a color that is not derived from an actual data point, however. For instance, the only blue datapoint is "blue raspberry", assigned a ranking of 5.5. But the range assigned to blue as a whole is 4 to 8. The regions on either side of the blue raspberry dot are labeled with ???.

There are a few exceptions with chocolate the most obvious as Randall makes a wide range for chocolate for brown, ranging from 2.5-9.5 out of 9. And the arrows here ends in single question marks indicating that the range could be even longer. In the title text he acknowledges the fact chocolate is its own thing and that regarding its taste reasonable people may differ in opinion.

The region for chocolate could not go further down because below the section for chocolate for brown food, there is another range with some other brown food items that Randall really does not like, caramel and especially coffee at 1.5/9. It may seem that Randall has never grown up to drink the drinks that society often dictates that you should drink. Not drinking Coffee (or hating it when you do) can be a problem with all the coffee breaks and meetings held over coffee etc. And as Randall has shown in [[1534: Beer]] he also doesn't like beer...

Although it is not so clear as with chocolate pistachio is also split up with three lines indicating a range on the green from about 5 to 7 without any assigned point to their taste. And finally popcorn at 1.5/9 simply falls below the otherwise already low and slim rating range for yellow foods (2.5-3.5) with only lemon at 3/9 included. Many people love popcorn, but not especially for the corns actual taste, which is non existing if not for the adding of salt or sugar or other additives.

The worst taste by far to Randall, though, is licorice, and black food has a very small range from almost below 1 to less than 1.5. In USA it seems few people like licorice (although as most of the other mentioned food items, it may come in a wide variety of flavors and strengths). But in for instance northern Europe (Scandinavia) many people love it. See more explanations for all the mentioned flavors in the [[#Table|table]] below. It also seems that [[388:_Fuck_Grapefruit#Change_of_taste|Randall's taste has changed]] over the nine years since the grapefruit comic.

In the title text, Randall asserts that his rankings of colors and flavors are indisputable (with the exception of chocolate). This together with rather obscure flavors included ("blue raspberry", "creamsicle") rather than more obvious choices, such as banana for yellow and carrot for orange could be a jab at the reception of his first food ranking comic, [[388: Fuck Grapefruit]] which ranked fruits based on their tastiness and ease of consumption. Randall claims that it is the [[388:_Fuck_Grapefruit#Controversy|most controversial piece]] he has ever published. So all this is maybe just a way to generate even more controversy about this comic, and based on the [[#Discussion|discussion]] below he may have succeeded.

In [[882: Significant]] researchers were studying the effect of eating 20 differently colored types of jelly beans (and all colors here are included except white).

===Table===

{| class="wikitable sortable"
! scope="col"| Color
! scope="col"| Item
! scope="col"| Explanation
! scope="col"| Rating (Approx.)
|-
|Pink
|{{w|Cotton Candy}}
|Randall seems to like cotton candy. This treat is sold in many places, most notably carnivals.
|95%
|-
|Pink
|{{w|Watermelon}}
|Watermelon is a fruit that is used as a processed candy flavoring, especially in hard candies, and is usually very sweet and pink in color. The actual fruit is made of 95 percent water.
|63%
|-
|Red
|{{w|Strawberry}}
|Strawberries are a seeded fruit which are usually sweet and red. They are of relatively small size.
|93%
|-
|Red
|{{w|Cherry}}
|Cherries are red fruits that are normally very tart in taste.
|86%
|-
|Red
|{{w|Raspberry}}
|Raspberries are reddish-pink fruits (though Randall lists them under red) that are in the more tart category of fruits.
|55%
|-
|Blue
|{{w|Blue raspberry flavor |Blue Raspberry}}
|Blue-colored raspberries are not found in nature. While some {{w|Bramble fruit|bramble fruit}} species and cultivars are sometimes referred to as "blue raspberry" - notably {{w|Rubus leucodermis}} - the actual color of such fruit varies between purple and black as it matures, closer to that of {{w|Blackberry|blackberries}} than for example {{w|Blueberry|blueberries}}.
While not a real fruit color, "blue raspberry" is nevertheless a {{w|Blue raspberry flavor|common artificial flavor}}, ostensibly based on Rubus leucodermis. Products featuring this flavor are often artificially colored bright blue (nowhere near the hue of Rubus leucodermis fruit), contributing to the perceived association between the color and the flavor among general population.
|57%
|-
|Green
|{{w|Apple|Green Apple}}
|Green apples are usually more sweet than red apples, which are not listed, and are Randall's favorite apple. He mentioned a dislike for red apples in his what if? Blog
|84%
|-
|Green
|{{w|Watermelon}} (Rind?)
|While the red part of a watermelon and the pink watermelon flavoring used in candy are widely eaten and sweet, the green rind is hard and not normally eaten.
|60%
|-
|Green
|{{w|Mentha|Mint}}
|Mint is a herb that can be considered as spicy by some people, which makes it unappealing to them.
|38%
|-
|Green
|{{w|Lime (fruit)|Lime}}
|Limes are a green, sour fruit sharing many traits with lemons. These are rarely eaten as fruit, but can be served with water or beer.
|31%
|-
|Green
|{{w|Pistachio}}
|Pistachios are green nuts. Randall seems unsure of where to place these on the chart.
|47% to 70%
|-
|White
|{{w|Vanilla}}
|Randall is likely playing with expectations here. Vanilla and vanilla bean are both dark brown, not white. But vanilla ice cream is white thanks to the cream, milk, and sugar used in its creation. The brown is nearly invisible in the ice cream, either as vanilla extract mixed in or as minute flakes of vanilla bean in exceptional vanilla ice creams.
|65%
|-
|White
|{{w|White Chocolate}}
|White chocolate is disliked by many people who assert that it is "not real chocolate" because it contains no cocoa solids and is mainly cocoa butter and sugar.
|19%
|-
|Brown
|{{w|Chocolate}}
|Chocolate is given a very wide range. While widely recognized as a classic candy, containing the chemical {{w|phenylethylamine}} which literally makes the human brain happier, there are also very staunch and not rare people who clearly and adamantly don't like it. There are also many varieties of chocolate with varying degrees of sweetness -- and, not coincidentally, colors to help differentiate them. Randall deems the whole situation too complex to assign to only one data point.
|38% to 86%. (range of text area)
|-
|Brown
|{{w|Caramel}}
|Caramel is a liquid-like substance usually drizzled on desserts. "Caramel" can also refer to the coloring. Randall seems to enjoy caramel less than many people.
|19%
|-
|Brown
|{{w|Coffee}}
|While widely enjoyed by many people, coffee is a bitter beverage (or bean). Many people add sugar and/or cream to their coffee (or cover the beans in chocolate) to make it palatable. Clearly Randall does not like black coffee (coffee with no sweeteners or additives)
|5%
|-
|Orange
|{{w|Popsicle_(brand)#Related_snacks|Creamsicle}}
|Orange creamsicle is an ice pop sold by {{w|Popsicle_(brand)|Popsicle}}. It is known as a favorite among the Popsicle lineup.
|47%
|-
|Orange
|{{w|Orange (fruit)|Orange}}
|Oranges are round fruits similar in size to an apple. Randall appears to dislike oranges, maybe because of their slightly sour flavoring or the difficulty of opening one up.
Interestingly, in this comic Randall rates oranges as tasting worse than lemons, while in [[388: Fuck Grapefruit]], it was lemons he charted as tasting significantly worse.
|25%
|-
|Yellow
|{{w|Popcorn}}?!
|Popcorn is a very popular food item, but not for its flavor. By itself it has nearly no flavor, and the usual toppings of salt and butter are some of the most basic cravings the human tongue asks for.
|5%
|-
|Yellow
|{{w|Lemon}}
|Lemons by themselves have a very strong sour flavor. Many people, apparently including Randall, do not like this taste raw or on its own, though some do. To make lemons appealing to those who don't like very sour things, they are instead added as ingredients in a much larger dish, often with sugar added to balance the sourness.
|27%
|-
|Purple
|{{w|Grape}}
|Randall apparently does not like {{w|Concord grape}}s, a small, oval-like purple fruit. He did not list green grapes, though. But given his previous comic [[388: Fuck Grapefruit]] it seems likely that he like the green grapes very much as they were listed as some of the most tasty fruits
|15%
|-
|Black
|{{w|Licorice}}
|Licorice has a strong bitter and spicy flavour. It is made from the root of the plant Glycyrrhiza glabra. Most Americans tend to find it a very unpleasant flavor. It would appear that Randall resides within that majority.
|0.1%
|}

==Transcript==
:[Caption above the chart:]
:<big>Best-Tasting Colors</big>

:[Below the caption there is a scale with two large ticks (with labels written above) at either end and seven smaller ticks in between for nine ticks in total. The labels:]
:Bad
:Good

:[Below the scale to the left is a numbered list of ten colors. Black double arrows goes under the scale. On the arrows there are labeled points, but there is also questions marks and other exceptions where text is not pointing to a point. Labels appear both above and below the arrows, but here the text is listed as it appears on the scale from left (bad) to right (good):]
:1. Pink - Watermelon, ???, Cotton candy
:2. Red - Raspberry, Cherry, Strawberry
:3. Blue - ???, Blue raspberry, ???
:4. Green - Lime, Mint, Pistachio??, Watermelon, Green apple
:5. White - ???, White chocolate, ???, Vanilla, ???
:6. Brown - Coffee, Caramel ? [However you feel about chocolate] ?
:7. Orange - Orange, Creamsicle
:8. Yellow - Popcorn?!, Lemon
:9. Purple - Grape
:10. Black - Licorice

*'''Click''' to expand for a more detailed description:
<div class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed leftAlign" style="width:100%">
 
:[There is no more text from the comic below here:]

:[Below the scale to the left is a numbered list of ten colors, the name of the color written in said color (white written on a gray background). From the color goes a thin gray line out under the scale. At different points and lengths along the scale there appear black double arrows pointing to two lines. The gray line never extends beyond the black arrows to the right. On the line of these arrows there are one to four points, that have all been labeled with gray text (both above and below the arrow to which the labels belong).]
:[Five places on three arrows there are groups of three questions marks which relates to a region on the arrow rather than a point, either with three lines pointing to the arrow (once for pink and trice for white) or just standing close beneath the arrow (twice for blue). There are only three other exceptions.]
:[First there is pistachio which has no point but has three lines going from the text to the arrow for green.]
:[Second there is chocolate, which has its own double arrow where the ends do not end in lines but in questions marks. The arrow is broken by a square bracket with normal black text written on two lines within it. This arrow thus does not connect with the other "normal" arrow for brown to the left of the chocolate arrow.]
:[Third there is a point that is outside the black arrow for yellow on the gray line for popcorn. That is the only place where the gray line exceeds any black markings as it is only broken by the dot and then continues further to the arrow.]
</div>
 

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Charts]]
[[Category:Rankings]]
[[Category:Food]]

1402: Harpoons

2022-06-01T18:14:33Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 1402
| date = August 1, 2014
| title = Harpoons and Will Allen
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = To motivate it to fire its harpoons hard enough, Rosetta's Philae lander has been programmed to believe it is trying to kill the comet.
}}

==Explanation==
This comic is a graph of the number of {{w|harpoon}}s in space over time. One would not expect that harpoons, which are associated with old technology, would be used in space, which is associated with high technology. Any occurrences are unexpected, and therefore interesting or funny.

The first peak states that a harpoon was in space during the {{w|Apollo 12}} mission and various possible explanations have been put forward (See discussion section below). One of more widely accepted theories proposes that [http://www.harpoon-rum.eu/1.html Harpoon] brand of {{w|Rum#Regional variations|Jamaican rum}} made it aboard the Apollo 12 rocket. Despite a fair amount of research into the basis of the harpoon incident, there have been no credible or official sources to confirm the presence of any type of harpoon on board Apollo 12. As the presence of a harpoon on board would run counter to any official story, perhaps that's exactly why it would be considered an "incident".

The latter peak on this graph refers to the {{w|Rosetta (spacecraft)|Rosetta}} unmanned spacecraft. As part of its mission, it carried a lander called {{w|Philae (spacecraft)|Philae}}, which has two harpoon tethers to anchor itself to the comet {{w|67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko}}. Rosetta was launched in March 2004 (as shown in the graph) and was scheduled to encounter the comet in August 2014, making this a timely comic. Rosetta maneuvered to enter orbit on September 10, and ultimately the Philae lander touched down on the comet on 12 November 2014, although the harpoon system failed to deploy. Randall produced a live comic of the landing, updating [[1446: Landing]] every 5 minutes with the latest progress. The Rosetta spacecraft also carries a disk micro-etched with 13,000 pages of text in 1200 languages donated by the Long Now foundation, mentioned in previous comics.

The title text compares the Philae lander's method of deploying its tethers to {{w|whaling}}, in which sailors would throw harpoons at a whale with the intent of killing the whale. It was important to throw hard so the harpoon would stick in the whale so it could not get away and would tow the whaling boat until it got tired and could be killed. Thus the title text implies that the spacecraft is sentient and needs a motivation to fire the harpoons hard enough to stay anchored to the comet; to this end it has been programmed to believe that its mission is to kill the comet. Evidently this motivation was not enough, as Philae ultimately failed to deploy its harpoons - it still managed to land, though.

==Transcript==
:'''Number of harpoons in space'''
:by year
:[A chart with a red graph is drawn below.]
:[The y-axis.]
:0 1 2 3
:[The x-axis.]
:1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
:[The graph is at zero until a sharp peak to 1 in 1970. The peak is labeled.]
:Apollo 12 rum incident
:[The graph then stays at 0 until 2004. Then it rises to 2 and stays there until today, continuing as a dotted line after 2014. The rise is labeled.]
:Rosetta comet mission launched carrying lander with harpoon tethers

==Trivia==
In 2018, shortly after the line gets dotted, the number actually increased again., thanks to the {{w|RemoveDEBRIS}} satelite.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Line graphs]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]

145: Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics

2022-06-01T18:14:17Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 145
| date = August 18, 2006
| title = Parody Week: Will Allen
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = Guys: while I was writing this, I accidentally swallowed a table-size slab of drywall. I know! Wacky.
}}

==Explanation==
This comic is a part of the [[:Category:Parody Week|Parody Week]], just joking about other {{w|webcomics}}. This series was released on five consecutive days (Monday-Friday), not over the usual Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule, and it comprises the following five {{w|parodies}}:
*[[141: Parody Week: Achewood]]
*[[142: Parody Week: Megatokyo]]
*[[143: Parody Week: TFD and Natalie Dee]]
*[[144: Parody Week: A Softer World]]
*[[145: Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics]]

{{w|Dinosaur Comics}} is a webcomic by {{w|Ryan North}}. The artwork never changes, save a few rare exceptions, and only the dialogue is different. [[Randall]] traced the comic's usual artwork, though the drawing of the house about to be squashed in panel 3 is a more rudimentary rendition, and the person about to be squashed in panel 4 has been changed into [[Cueball]] rather than a woman in bright yellow and pink clothes.

For those who haven't read it, this is a [http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1387 typical strip], and [http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2079 here's] a strip dealing with the same subject as this comic (but posted five years after it). See also [http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2420 this particular example], where the title text actually refer to Randall and xkcd.

Randall makes several shots at recurring themes in Dinosaur Comics. T-Rex, the green {{w|Tyrannosaurus}}, is bold and enthusiastic, discussing various topics, a favorite of which appears to be linguistics (North got his degree in computational linguistics). This time, he is talking about "{{w|Singular_they|they}}" being used as a {{w|Grammatical_person|third person}} {{w|Grammatical number|singular}} {{w|Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns|gender-free pronoun}} and how it should be more widely used, even though its acceptance varies. {{w|Dromiceiomimus}}, the white dinosaur in the third panel, usually responds calmly to T-Rex's discussions. T-Rex then elaborates on how singular "they" has been used for centuries (specifically since the fourteenth century), with the change in convention being relatively recent (having fallen out of "fashion" in the nineteenth century). Technically, the English language lacks {{w|Personal pronoun|personal pronouns}} that are {{w|Epicenity|gender-neutral}} in the singular third-person — that is, there are only gender-specific personal pronouns such as "{{w|He (pronoun)|he}}" and "{{w|She (pronoun)|she}}" — so when a gender-neutral pronoun is needed, {{w|Plural|plural}} pronouns such as "{{w|They|they}}" (which ''are'' gender-neutral) are often used instead. There is some debate about whether this is a grammatical error, which may result in the use of grammatically correct, but cumbersome, gender-neutral phrases such as "he or she", "him or her", "his or hers" and so on. To compensate for these shortcomings, other gender-neutral personal pronouns for the singular third-person have also been introduced, such as "he/she", "s/he" and "xe" instead of "he or she", or "hirs" instead of "his or hers." T-Rex considers these constructs to be "ridiculous" and points out that they can be avoided by simply using the singular "they" instead.

While "he/she" and "s/he" are commonly used as a gender-neutral pronoun when gender is unknown, "xe" and "hirs" are often used for {{w|genderqueer}} individuals. Genderqueer persons do not subscribe to a "binary" definition of gender, where the only genders are male and female, and may identify as having, just to name a few examples, a gender between male and female, a combination of both male and female genders, no gender (terms for this include "genderless", "agender," and "neutrois"), a {{w|Third Gender|separate gender}} from male and female, an unnameable gender, or a "fluid" gender identity that shifts between multiple genders ("genderfluidity").

{{w|Utahraptor}}, the orange dinosaur, typically contradicts T-Rex, but Randall subverts this pattern and has him agree. The comic suggests that the perpetual disagreement stems from a 'rift' in the author's mind, which would be healed if only he lived in a world where there were a {{w|Beringia|land bridge between Asia and North America}}.

In the last panel, the narrator starts with "In a world…" a phrase made famous by {{w|Don LaFontaine}} in movie trailers. "In a world…" is also likely a reference to the recurring gag of Dinosaur Comics suddenly jumping to alternate worlds or time periods that have whatever conditions T-Rex and his friends have been discussing, to humorous effect.

The last sentence suggests that in this other world, everyone is {{w|bi-curious}}. This is a phenomenon in which people of a {{w|heterosexual}} or {{w|homosexual}} identity who, while showing some curiosity for a relationship or sexual activity with a person of the sex they do not favor, distinguish themselves from the {{w|bisexual}} label. Bi-curious has been used as the word of the day two days in a row on [http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=311 May 11th] and [http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=312 May 12th] 2004, so it's no wonder Randall put the word in this comic. The suggestion that "everyone is bi-curious" could be a reference to {{w|Arthur C. Clarke|Arthur C. Clarke's}} book ''{{w|Imperial Earth}}'', where bisexuality is the norm. Deliberately trite and awkward explorations of this subject matter are also a recurring theme in Dinosaur Comics.

Like [[xkcd]], Dinosaur Comics has [[title text]]s. Ryan's title texts are often bizarre non-sequiturs; the title text for the [http://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2593 2593rd comic], eleven years after the appearance of the first comic, read "the sixth panel and the second panel are just zoomed versions of each other. IT'S TRUE. I'M SORRY. I COULDN'T BEAR CARRYING THIS TERRIBLE SECRET ANY LONGER." The title text in this parody fits this pattern.

T-Rex from ''Dinosaur Comics'' later appeared in [[1350: Lorenz]] (see this [http://xkcd.com/1350/#p:f2b12f1e-bbae-11e3-801c-002590d77bdd example story line] and also the Dinosaur section under [[1350: Lorenz#Themes|Lorenz themes]]), where the actual images from the first three panels of Ryan's comic are used, rather than like here where Randall copied them himself and in [[1452: Jurassic World]], where it was the last image from the actual comic that was used.

==Transcript==
:[T-Rex, a large green Tyrannosaurus, holds out his small arms to each side and the tail pointing up while speaking with a wide open pink mouth showing all his teeth. All the text is written like on a typewriter with both caps and lowercase letters, which is not normal in xkcd.]
:T-Rex: THINGS I AM UPPITY ABOUT: "They" as a third-person singular gender-free pronoun.

:[Zoom in on T-Rex head holding his hands up under his mouth, and mouth even wider open so also the red tongue can be seen.]
:T-Rex: I'm all for it!

:[Zoom out to show T-Rex to the left, mouth almost closed, arms in normal position, the tail pointing up, and lifting his left leg ready to smash his foot down through the roof of a brown log cabin with chimney and porch with a blue car holding in front of the house to the right. Further right is a smaller white/yellow dinosaur, Dromiceiomimus, standing away from T-Rex, but turning its long neck toward him.]
:Dromiceiomimus: But isn't that terrible grammar?
:T-Rex: Only by recent convention! It's been in use that way for centuries, and its use is widely accepted! ALSO: This lets us avoid ridiculous constructs like "he/she", "s/he", "xe" or "hirs"!

:[T-Rex is moving left, so part of his head and his lifted right foot are outside the panels frame, pink mouth again partly open so tongue can be seen, but no teeth are drawn. Arms are still in normal position and the tail is pointing up. Beneath the part of his right foot visible, there is Cueball about to be squashed. Behind him an orange dinosaur, Utahraptor, has appeared. It looks like a smaller version of T-Rex, but with longer arms and very large claws on its rear legs. It has its pink mouth wide open to show its red tongue and teeth, also holding arm in front of it and the tail pointing up. It is moving forward standing only on one leg, the other lifted high up.]
:Utahraptor: T-Rex, I . . . agree.
:T-Rex: What?
:Utahraptor: That sounds good to me!

:[T-Rex stand with both legs down, but wide spread out. The tails is almost down to the ground, only the tip pointing up. The arms are still in front of it towards the left, but it has turned its head, mouth almost closed, toward right looking at Utahraptor, which now stands on both legs, but like it is leaning forward on its toes, stretching up with arms held high, mouth less open, but tongue and teeth visible.]
:Utahraptor: Normally I'd jump in with an objection, but I think your point makes sense.
:T-Rex: Could it be that the rift in our author's mind has finally healed? Is he no longer locked in perpetual war with the self-doubt that lurks in his subc-

:[The final part of the final words from T-Rex is interrupted in the previous panel and first finishes here after a narrator "speaks" before T-Rex with bold capital letters to the top right, and after to the bottom left. T-Rex is seen in full figure standing with wide open mouth, teeth and tongue visible, arms and tail up.]
:Narrator: '''IN A WORLD WHERE THERE IS STILL A LAND BRIDGE BETWEEN ASIA AND NORTH AMERICA FOR SOME REASON:'''
:T-Rex: -onscious?
:Narrator: '''ALSO HOW ABOUT IN THIS WORLD EVERYONE IS BICURIOUS'''

==Trivia==
*This was the [http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=830 Dinosaur Comics strip] released the day before this comic
**Dinosaur Comics released MTWT, so there was no release on the Friday of this comics release.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Parody Week]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]] 
[[Category:Dinosaurs]]
[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Sex]]

27: Meat Cereals

2022-06-01T18:14:03Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 27
| date = November 4, 2005
| title = Will Allen likes Meat Cereals
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = Disgusting
}}

==Explanation==
[[Randall Munroe|Randall]] parodies several real-world breakfast cereals (which typically consist solely of grains and sweet flavorings) by creating versions that contain meat (animal products). The cereals that appear to be parodied (clockwise from top-left) include Froot Loops, Rice Krispies, Honey Bunches of Oats, Apple Jacks, Frosted Flakes, and Cheerios. There does not appear to be a deeper meaning to this comic than that.

The Scrapple Jacks parody (the only slightly obscure reference) appears to be made with {{w|scrapple}}, which, according to Wikipedia, is a mush of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and wheat flour, often buckwheat flour, and spices. Real Apple Jacks ran an ad campaign in the 1980s and 1990s in which an adult or authority figure tasted the cereal and declared "these don't taste like apples!", thus missing the point of why kids liked the cereal. The slogan is parodied on the Scrapple Jacks box. Randall referenced this same slogan again in "[[38: Apple Jacks]]".

The title text, reading, "Disgusting.", apparently reflects Randall's opinion of his own creation.

==Transcript==
:[A collection of fictional meat based cereals in bright colors with nice pictures on them.]
:Pork Loops
:Mice Krispies
:Hammios
:Frosted Bacon Flakes
:Scrapple Jacks
::Hey, these don't taste like Scrapple!
:Honey Bunches of Goats

==Trivia==
*This was the 28th comic originally posted to [[LiveJournal]].
**The previous was [[26: Fourier]].
**The next was [[30: Donner]].
*Original title: "Friday's Drawing - Meat Cereals"
*There was no original [[Randall]] quote for this comic.
*This comic was posted on [[xkcd]] when the web site opened on Sunday the 1st of January 2006.
**It was posted along [[:Category:First day on xkcd|with all 41 comics]] posted before that on LiveJournal as well as a few others.
**The latter explaining why the numbers of these 41 LiveJournal comics ranges from 1-44.
*One of the original drawings drawn on [[:Category:Checkered paper|checkered paper]].

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics posted on livejournal| 28]]
[[Category:First day on xkcd]]
[[Category:Checkered paper]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Food]]
[[Category:Comics with lowercase text]]

2453: Excel Lambda

2022-06-01T18:13:32Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 2453
| date = April 21, 2021
| title = Will Allen teaches Microsoft Excel
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = Extremely rude how Turing's later formulations of the halting problem called me out by name specifically.
}}

==Explanation==
[[Cueball]] is computing and [[Ponytail]] criticizes him in a way that is reminiscent of the [[:Category:Code Quality|Code Quality series]], although not as harsh. Cueball has lots of strange [[:Category:Cueball Computer Problems|computer problems]], and this will most likely result in another one.

The comic begins with Ponytail finding out that {{w|Microsoft Excel}} is adding a {{w|Anonymous_function|lambda function}} to their function library. This was [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing-lambda-turn-excel-formulas-into-custom-functions/ba-p/1925546 announced by Microsoft] for Beta users in December of 2020. A lambda function is a fundamental mathematical structure that can be used to define all possible computations, in what is known as {{w|lambda calculus}}. They are commonly found in programming languages such as {{w|Lisp}}, {{w|Python}}, and many others. A lambda function is also called an {{w|anonymous function}} because in most languages it can be passed to other functions (including another lambda function) without needing to be given any formal name.

Finding that Excel is adding a lambda function pleases Ponytail. Cueball claims that the lambda function is unnecessary, as when he needs arbitrary computation he just adds a block of columns to the side of his sheet and has a {{w|Turing machine}} process it. This would technically work as lambda calculus is formally equivalent to Turing machines. People have created [https://www.felienne.com/archives/2974 Turing machines in Excel], although not for practical purposes.

Ponytail finds his solution absurd and is convinced Cueball is "doing computing wrong". But he claims that all computing is equally wrong, citing the {{w|Church-Turing thesis}}, a hypothesis which says that a function can be computed by executing a series of instructions if and only if that function is computable by a Turing machine. A classical Turing machine uses an infinitely long strip of tape as its memory; for Cueball, the large Excel column acts as the "tape". All ways of computing are "equally wrong" since, according to this thesis, they can all be translated to or from a Turing machine.

Ponytail and Cueball appear to have different ideas of 'computing'. Ponytail, like most programmers, probably includes efficiency and readability as important characteristics of 'doing computing right'. Cueball appears interested only in {{w|computability}}, a more theoretical point of view than Ponytail's.

Ponytail then says that Turing would change his mind if he saw Cueball's spreadsheet, presumably because of the extreme complexity of Cueball's code in the spreadsheet. Cueball's final statement is that Turing could ask him to stop, but would not be able to prove if he actually will stop.

Cueball's final statement is a reference to the {{w|halting problem}} mentioned in the title text. It is the problem of determining whether a given Turing machine will halt. The problem has been shown to be undecidable, i.e., it is impossible to build an algorithm that computes whether any arbitrary Turing machine will halt or not. Because of the way Cueball has behaved, he has been specifically mentioned in Turing's later formulations of the halting problem. Cueball finds this very rude. This is of course a joke, since Turing has been dead since 1954, presumably long before Cueball was born. But it would be crazy indeed if a scientist became so mad at a person that they would mention this person by name in their formulation of a serious problem.

Over-complicated spreadsheets were also mentioned in [[2180: Spreadsheets]].

==Transcript==
:[In a narrow panel, Ponytail is walking in from the left, looking down at her phone]
:Ponytail: Oh cool, Excel is adding a lambda function, so you can recursively define functions.

:[Ponytail, holding her phone to her side stands behind Cueball, who is sitting in an office chair with a hand on a laptop standing on his desk. He has turned around to face her, leaning with the other arm on the back of the chair.]
:Cueball: Seems unnecessary.
:Cueball: When I need to do arbitrary computation, I just add a giant block of columns to the side of my sheet and have a Turing machine traverse down it.

:[In a frame-less panel Ponytail is standing in he same position behind Cueball, who has resumed working on his laptop with both hands on the keyboard.]
:Ponytail: I think you're doing computing wrong.
:Cueball: The Church-Turing thesis says that all ways of computing are '''''equally''''' wrong.

:[Ponytail is still behind Cueball, who has a finger raised in the air, and the other hand is on the desk. Cueball's head has a visible sketch layer which has not been erased.]
:Ponytail: I think if Turing saw '''''your''''' spreadsheets, he'd change his mind.
:Cueball: He can ask me to stop making them, but not prove whether I will!

==Trivia==
*In the [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/3/3b/excel_lambda.png original version] of the comic, in the final panel, there was a gray pencil outline, slightly different to Cueball's head that had not been removed.
**This was later fixed in a re-upload.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Spreadsheets]]
[[Category:Programming]]

1880: Eclipse Review

2022-06-01T18:13:10Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 1880
| date = August 23, 2017
| title = Eclipse Review with Will Allen
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = I watched from a beautiful nature reserve in central Missouri, and it was--without exaggeration--the coolest thing I've ever seen.
}}

==Explanation==
This comic is the last of five consecutive comics published in the week before and during the {{w|solar eclipse}} occurring on Monday, {{w|Solar eclipse of August 21, 2017|August 21, 2017}} which was visible as a total solar eclipse within a band across the {{w|contiguous United States}} from west to east and visible as a partial eclipse across the entire contiguous United States and beyond. The other comics are [[1876: Eclipse Searches]], [[1877: Eclipse Science]], [[1878: Earth Orbital Diagram]], and [[1879: Eclipse Birds]].

The comic is another comparison graph, like [[1775: Things You Learn]] or [[1701: Speed and Danger]]. It contrasts how cool something ''sounds'' and how cool it actually ''is''. It has five points on it, planetary conjunction, supermoon, lunar eclipse, partial solar eclipse, and total solar eclipse.

While the four other things than total solar eclipse are relatively close to each other on the "how cool to see" scale, the graph is not even high enough to plot the total solar eclipse point as indicated by the dotted arrow showing that this point should be way higher up. This is as opposed to leaving the point out, as Randall did with the coconut in [[388: Fuck Grapefruit]], where it is only mentioned in the title text. This could be an indication that if the scale had been high enough to fit the total solar eclipse point, then the rest of the points would be on the x-axis without any indication of which would be cooler.

A total solar eclipse correctly sounds like it is the coolest of the five, but it is vastly cooler to see it in person by a wide margin. It seems like Randall is trying to convince those who missed the eclipse this time to go watch in seven years when another total solar eclipse is visible in the USA.

;Planetary Conjunction
In a {{w|Conjunction (astronomy)|planetary conjunction}} two or more planets are visible close together in the night sky. This happens relatively {{w|List_of_conjunctions_(astronomy)|often}} because all planets lie in roughly the same plane around the sun (the <s>Sagittal</s> {{w|ecliptic}}). This looks like two big stars close to each other, and isn't particularly exciting.

;Supermoon
A {{w|Supermoon|supermoon}} is a full moon or a new moon that approximately coincides with the Moon's closest approach in its elliptic orbit around the Earth. This results in a larger-than-usual apparent size of the lunar disk, but a typical human doesn't recognize the difference. Nevertheless, in recent years the press has often announced supermoons as important astronomical events. The opposite of a supermoon is called a micromoon. A "supermoon" sounds very cool, but like a planetary conjunction it's almost indistinguishable in the average night sky (see [[1394: Superm*n]], and this [[:Category:Supermoon|list]]) of other comics that have referred to the term).

;Lunar Eclipse
A {{w|Lunar eclipse|lunar eclipse}} occurs during the full moon and, like at a solar eclipse, happens only when the Moon is in the region where the orbital planes of the Moon and the Earth intersect. The Earth's shadow falls on the Moon, causing it to appear dark red. The moon doesn't generally darken completely due to some light still reaching the Moon through the outer layers of the Earth's atmosphere. As with solar eclipses, lunar eclipses occur on average once every six months, but they can be viewed by anyone who is on the night-time side of Earth during the eclipse, as opposed to only being visible from a small strip of the Earth's surface. A lunar eclipse looks noticeably different from a usual full moon, making it fairly cool.

;Partial Solar Eclipse
There are three types of {{w|Solar_eclipse#Types|non-total solar eclipses}}. A ''partial eclipse'' occurs when the Sun and Moon are not exactly in line with an observer on Earth, and thus the Moon doesn't fully obscure the Sun. An ''annular eclipse'' occurs when the Sun and Moon do line up with an observer on Earth, but the Moon is too far away from earth to block the entire Sun. The Sun appears as a very bright ring, which is also called an annulus. A ''hybrid eclipse'' is an eclipse which is total when viewed from some parts of the earth, but is annular when viewed from others. These ''mixed'' eclipses are comparatively rare, even when compared with total eclipses. A large percentage of the continental United States experienced a partial eclipse along with the total solar eclipse on August 21st. A partial solar eclipse is quite cool, but nowhere near as dramatic as a sky-darkening total solar eclipse.

;Total Solar Eclipse
The {{w|Solar_eclipse#Types|total solar eclipse}} is the topic of this and the four preceding comics. It occurs during the new moon, and happens only when the Sun and Moon are exactly in line with an observer on Earth and when the Moon appears large enough to fully obscure the Sun. Unlike a lunar eclipse, only a small portion of the Earth lies within the Moon's shadow at any given time, roughly a disc with a diameter of approx. 100 km. The disc moves very fast over the Earth's surface, meaning that at any given location eclipses can't last longer than a few minutes. At locations outside of this ''shadow-disc'', in a region over a few thousand kilometers, the eclipse is partial.

In the title text Randall reveals that he had traveled to a location in Missouri (possibly the {{w|Shaw Nature Reserve}}) because at his home in Massachusetts the eclipse was only partial. And, without a doubt, the total solar eclipse was the coolest thing he ever has seen in his life.

==Transcript==
:[A scatter plot with five labeled dots is drawn. The x-axis reads "How cool it sounds like it would be" and the y-axis is labeled with "How cool it is to see in person".]
:[Bottom left] Planetary conjunction
:[Bottom middle] Supermoon
:[Low left-center] Lunar eclipse
:[Low-center middle] Partial solar eclipse
:[Upper right, with a dotted arrow above it pointing up] Total solar eclipse

==Trivia==
*While the ''WOW-effect'' happened mostly to people standing on Earth gazing at the sun, there were more astonishing pictures taken from this event: An ISS-transit in front of the [https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/iss-transit-during-2017-solar-eclipse partial eclipsed] sun, the shadow on Earth seen from [https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-eclipse-2017-umbra-viewed-from-space-1 space], the astronauts also could see a [https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-eclipse-2017-from-space partial eclipse] because the orbit was [https://twitter.com/Astromaterials/status/899475632912052224/photo/1 above America] by that time, the eclipse seen from a distance of 380,000 km in an orbit around the [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/LRO-captures-eclipse-from-the-moon Moon], and an [https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2017/nasas-epic-view-of-2017-eclipse-across-america animation] taken from a distance of 1,6 Mio. km by the {{w|Deep Space Climate Observatory|Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR)}} located in a line exacly between Earth and Sun.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Scatter plots]]
[[Category:Rankings]]
[[Category:Total Solar Eclipse 2017]]
[[Category:Supermoon]]
[[Category:Astronomy]]

92: Sunrise

2022-06-01T18:12:53Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 92
| date = April 21, 2006
| title = Will Allen likes the Sunrise
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = Sometimes, I sit on top of parking decks and watch the sun rise. I feel like I should have a guitar or something.
}}

==Explanation==
This comic is about the desire for an intimate connection with another, and the compromises we make to not be alone.

[[Hairy]] finds a certain beauty in the way the world looks without billions of humans crawling around on it. He thinks of this as a secret place that thrills him. He is excited about the remote chance of finding someone like him who appreciates its beauty. But he realizes that it's the very thing that makes this time beautiful to him that makes his imagined chance encounter exceedingly unlikely. Reconciled to the fact that he will not find a kindred spirit outside this morning, he heads back home.

At the house, he gets ready and drives to a club to meet people. The club is drawn using an inverted color scheme (white people, black background) to emphasize that it is the opposite of the 4am outside world. The club is dark and full of people, who are the lightest things present, where outside, the natural beauty shines without interruption by human forms. Hairy is seen alone in the middle of the crowd.

The title text is a reference to a common music video scene (sometimes country music videos) where people play the guitar on parking garages as the sun rises.

==Transcript==
:[Hairy is on the street. Behind him is a house with a lawn.]
:Hairy (thinking): I love the time just before sunrise. It's quiet; no one is ever just walking about.
:Hairy (thinking): It's like a secret
:Hairy (thinking): I always hope that I'll find someone else quietly hiding from sleep, and we'll see each other and sit and talk.
:Hairy (thinking): I guess this is a bad place to meet people.
:Hairy (thinking): I wish it weren't.

:[Hairy goes into the house, brushes his teeth, shaves his head (?), and leaves the house again.]

:[Hairy is at a club, disco balls in the ceiling and a giant woofer. Many people are dancing around him.]

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Romance]]
[[Category:Comics with inverted brightness]]
[[Category:Multiple Cueballs]]
[[Category:Comics with lowercase text]]

326: Effect an Effect

2022-06-01T18:12:38Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 326
| date = October 8, 2007
| title = Effect an Effect with Will Allen
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = Time to paint another grammarian silhouette on the side of the desktop.
}}

==Explanation==
[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/affect "Affect"] and [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/effect?s=t "effect"] can each both be a noun and a verb, share the sense of ''influence'', and they are often confused with each other. (See the usage note under "Affect.")

In careful speech, both words (as verbs) are similar but not identical. "Affect" is /əˈfɛkt/ (or uh-'''fekt''') and "effect" is /ɪˈfɛkt/ (or ih-'''fekt'''). However, for some people, these words are {{w|homophones}} — it's also explained here: [http://www.writingforward.com/grammar/homophones/homophones-affect-vs-effect homophones affect vs effect].

"Effect" is usually a noun, meaning ''a result'', and "affect" usually a verb, meaning ''to act upon''. "Effect" as a verb has the slightly different meaning ''to bring about''. [[Cueball]] says that the foreign policy ''causes'' the situation, not, as the "grammar nazi" thinks, that it ''changes'' the situation.

The title of the comic translates to ''cause or bring about a result'', which is just what Cueball does! It can also be seen as a play on words, being similar to the phrase "cause and effect."

The title text refers to the {{w|Victory marking}} practice common among fighter pilots in a war zone. Fighter pilots who score a "kill" on an opposing aircraft will have a silhouette of the downed plane painted on the side of their plane as a way of keeping track of kills. In this sense, Cueball "shot down," figuratively speaking, an online (grammar) nazi, and would mark it by painting a silhouette on the side of his computer.

See also [[1429: Data]].

==Transcript==
:My Hobby:
:Using the more obscure meanings of "affect" and "effect" to try to trip up amateur grammar Nazis.
:Cueball: I think that our foreign policy effects the situation.
:Computer: You mean "affects."
:Cueball: tee hee hee

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:My Hobby]]
[[Category:Language]]

23: T-shirts

2022-06-01T18:12:21Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 23
| date = October 26, 2005
| title = Will Allen likes T-shirts
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = It's depressing how many of these are real shirts
}}

==Explanation==

This comic satirizes the plethora of "snarky" phrase T-shirts that exist today. In the top-left, the character wears a typical (and real) snark shirt, "I see dumb people" (suggesting that the wearer thinks everyone else is dumb, while being a parody of the phrase "I see dead people" from the movie ''{{w|The Sixth Sense}}''). Other shirts shown also suggest that the wearer is better than everyone else, and perhaps the shirts increasingly suggest that the wearer is anti-social moving from top to bottom. Near the bottom of the screen, the T-shirts no longer attempt to be witty and simply have straightforward phrases like "go away" and "die". These are exaggerations of the message that the other more-realistic shirts broadcast.

The final three shirts are also exaggerated shirts that suggest [[Randall]]'s view that people who wear snarky shirts are overcompensating for the fact that they are already alone or perhaps putting up a tough exterior to conceal their sadness that no one would talk to them anyway. Most notably "maybe if this T-shirt is witty enough, someone will finally love me" sums up what Randall thinks snarky shirts really say. There are shirts with this or a similar message, although it is unclear whether they were created before this comic or as a tribute to this comic.

In the title text, Randall says that it's depressing how many of the shirts in the comic actually exist in real life, further underlining the point that these shirts are overly arrogant, to the point where one might believe that Randall made them up. This highlights the inadequacy of substance within these T-shirts and the terror they invoke in Randall's mind.

==Transcript==
:[A collection of phrases on T-shirts. The first and the last on actual black T-shirts worn by the same person, whose facial expression is more sad on the last one.]
:I see dumb people
:As a matter of fact the world <big>does</big> revolve around me
:I can only please one person per day / today is not your day.
:You know what your problem is? You're stupid.
:Get a clue
:Do I look like a people person?
:Your village called / they want their idiot back
:Go away
:I hate you all
:Die.
:Help.
:Maybe if this T-shirt is witty enough, someone will finally love me.
:Oh God I'm so alone.

==Trivia==
*This was the 24th comic originally posted to [[LiveJournal]].
**The previous was [[22: Barrel - Part 3]].
**The next was [[37: Hyphen]].
*Original title: "Wednesday's Drawing"
*Original [[Randall]] quote: "I saw the 'problem' t-shirt (upper right) on campus a few days ago and suddenly felt so sad."
*This comic was posted on [[xkcd]] when the web site opened on Sunday the 1st of January 2006.
**It was posted along [[:Category:First day on xkcd|with all 41 comics]] posted before that on LiveJournal as well as a few others.
**The latter explaining why the numbers of these 41 LiveJournal comics ranges from 1-44.
*One of the original drawings drawn on [[:Category:Checkered paper|checkered paper]].
*This is one of the few, early comics that contains a non-[[stick figure]] character.
*The last phrase of the comic was made into an actual T-shirt called "[https://store.xkcd.com/products/witty Witty]" sold at the xkcd store (as "maybe if this shirt is witty enough, someone will finally love me").
*Real shirts are: 'I see dumb people', 'As a matter of fact, the world '''does''' revolve around me', 'You know what your problem is? You're stupid.', 'I can only please one person per day//This is not your day.', 'Do I LOOK like a people person?', 'Get a clue', 'Your village called//They want their idiot back', 'Go away', 'Die.', 'Help', and 'Maybe if this t-shirt was witty enough, someone will finally love me.'
*'I hate you all' doesn't exist, but 'Hate you all' and 'I hate you' does. 'Oh god//I'm so alone' also doesn't exist, but 'Oh god I'm gonna die alone' and 'Oh god I am so alone in my world' does.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics posted on livejournal| 24]]
[[Category:First day on xkcd]]
[[Category:Checkered paper]]
[[Category:Sarcasm]]
[[Category:Comics with xkcd store products]]

735: Floor

2022-06-01T18:12:05Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 735
| date = May 3, 2010
| title = Will Allen standing on the Floor
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = We once got grounded when we convinced the FAA to block flights through our county because of ash clouds.
}}

==Explanation==
{{w|Hot lava (game)|The floor is lava}} is a game many kids play where they pretend the floor is {{w|lava}}, meaning that they can't step on it or else they'll get 'burned'. In this comic, the three kids are taking this game too seriously, causing great damage to the house with what appears to be a garden hose and some dynamite.

Stopping a lava flow by diverting it into an artificial trench or cooling the flow with (sea)water are both tactics that have been used in the past [http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_12_06.html with varying success].

The title text refers to events like the 2010 eruptions at {{w|Eyjafjallajökull}}, the ash clouds of which caused the shutdown of most of Europe's {{w|IFR}} airspace. The first joke there is that grounding a child often means to consign him to his/her bedroom for a set period of hours (as a punishment), whereas grounding a plane means to disallow any use of that plane for an extended period of time. The most notable example of this is {{w|Concorde}}, which has been indefinitely grounded. The second joke is that causing panic and diverting a large number of flights would cause lots of financial damage, and would normally be subject to more punishment than simply giving the kids a time-out.

==Transcript==
:[Three Cueball-like kids are in a living room. Furniture and other things are knocked over, broken, or tilted. The first kid is holding a handle of a plunger with cables going offscreen.]
:First Kid: I've dynamited a trench through the kitchen to divert flow!
:'''BOOM'''

:[The second kid is aiming a hose at the floor.]
:Second Kid: More hoses! We need to cool and solidify the surface layer!
:''FWOOSH''

:[The third kid is standing on a chair, using a cell phone or radio.]
:Third Kid: Where are the damn helicopters?

:[Caption beneath the panel:]
:Like many kids, we sometimes pretended the floor was lava.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Volcanoes]]

2627: Types of Scopes

2022-06-01T18:11:48Z

Vandalbane, a big guy (for you):

{{comic
| number = 2627
| date = June 1, 2022
| title = Types of Will Allen
| image = Will Allen holding fish.jpg
| titletext = An x-ray gyroscope is used to determine exactly which toppings they included in the pita.
}}

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

''Electron microscopes'', ''electron telescopes'' and ''radio telescopes'' are special forms of microscopes and telescopes, respectively. This comic explores what you could do with a hypothetical "electron ___-scope" and "radio ___-scope" for other words also ending in -scope (namely: periscope, stethoscope, kaleidoscope, gyroscope and horoscope). The definition of the word itself ("regular ___-scope") is also given.

The third column often plays on different meanings of the word ''radio:'' 1) related to radiation and 2) a device for receiving radio communication or broadcasts.

{| class="wikitable"
|+ What the words could mean according to the comic
|-
! Word !! Regular ___-scope!! Electron ___-scope !! Radio ___-scope
|-
| Micro- || ''Really exists'' || ''Really exists'' || Simply a microscope for looking at your radio.
|-
| Tele- || ''Really exists'' || ''Really exists'' || ''Really exists''
|-
| Peri- || Periscopes allow submarine crews to watch what happens above the water surface, without exposing the submarine to enemy observers, or enemy radars. In practice, periscope use is minimized because periscopes are still observable, but to a lesser degree. || An electron microscope seemingly mounted on a periscope. Examining enemy boats like a periscope, with the detail of an electron microsope. This would not be useful in combat. || In principle, the German navy has invented radio periscopes during World War 2. The {{w|Metox radar detector}}'s early antenna had to be built up after surfacing, and dismantled before diving. Later, the fixed ''Bali'' antenna could act like a true periscope, in order to detect aircraft and ships that were using radar to hunt submarines.
|-
| Stethoscope
|| A medical device for listening to sounds made by a patient's body, for example the heart. Has a disc-shaped resonator that is placed against the patient's skin.
|| If the resonator is emitting electromagnetic radiation, it could burn the skin due to its close proximity.
|| Normally, the sounds are transmitted to an earpiece that the examiner wears. There are also recording stethoscopes. A radio stethoscope would transmit the sound either directly via radio waves, or send it to a radio station such as NPR where it could then be broadcasted.
|-
| Kaleidoscope || || Seemingly a pun of electron "collide"-oscope, as electron collisions generate {{w|Bremsstrahlung}}. ||
|-
| Gyroscope || Gyroscopes are used for {{w|inertial navigation}}, for example. || || In theory, radio waves could be sent around in a triangular pattern, thus replicating the existing {{w|ring laser gyroscope}}.
|-
| Horoscope
|| In common usage, predictions or advice given based on the position of stars and planets. Proven to be unscientific junk.
|| Predictions based on the position of a particle, such as an electron. In a funny twist, the exact location of an electron cannot be determined, due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
|| Predictions or advice given based on the radiation emitted by exploding stars or galaxies.
|}

The title text makes a pun on "gyroscope" and the Greek foods {{w|Gyros}} and {{w|Pita}}.

to live in the pod, to eat the bugs, to trust the science - these are the noble persuits

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
Content is a table, with column headings "Regular ''Blank'' Scope", "Electron ''Blank'' Scope", and "Radio ''Blank'' Scope". Row headings are "Micro", "Tele", "Peri", "Stetho", "Kaleido", "Gyro", and "Horo".

;Regular Microscope
:Look at small stuff
;Electron Microscope
:Look at ''really'' small stuff
;Radio Microscope
:Figure out why your radio broke
;Regular Telescope
:Look at stuff that's far away
;Electron Telescope
:Detect cosmic rays
;Radio Telescope
:Look at distant high-energy stuff
;Regular Periscope
:Look for enemy ships
;Electron Periscope
:Examine the hull of an enemy ship for structural flaws
;Radio Periscope
:Let the crew of your submarine listen to NPR
;Regular Stethoscope
:Listen to a patient's chest
;Electron Stethoscope
:Burn a patient's skin
;Radio Stethoscope
:Play the noises from a patient's chest on NPR
;Regular Kaleidoscope
:See cool shapes and colors
;Electron Kaleidoscope
:See cool Bremsstrahlung
;Radio Kaleidoscope
:Another word for the "Scan" button
;Regular Gyroscope
:Balance by spinning
;Electron Gyroscope
:Another word for electromagnet
;Radio Gyroscope
:Another word for turntable
;Regular Horoscope
:Get random life advice
;Electron Horoscope
:Predict a particle's quantum state
;Radio Horoscope
:Get random life advice from exploding galaxies
{{comic discussion}}