https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=31.111.87.233&feedformat=atomexplain xkcd - User contributions [en]2024-03-29T04:59:12ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.30.0https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:514:_Simultaneous&diff=38725Talk:514: Simultaneous2013-05-28T13:36:08Z<p>31.111.87.233: Created page with "When reading "one of whom is moving at close to the speed of light compared to the other" in the explanation I'm reminded of the (non-)joke "What's the difference between a du..."</p>
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<div>When reading "one of whom is moving at close to the speed of light compared to the other" in the explanation I'm reminded of the (non-)joke "What's the difference between a duck? One of its legs is not the same." Because of frames of reference ''both'' of them are moving at close to the speed of light compared with the respective other. Which doesn't affect the disagreement about the simultaneity of observed events, of course. That still potentially/inevitably happens. [[Special:Contributions/31.111.87.233|31.111.87.233]] 13:36, 28 May 2013 (UTC)</div>31.111.87.233https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:517:_Marshmallow_Gun&diff=38724Talk:517: Marshmallow Gun2013-05-28T13:25:48Z<p>31.111.87.233: Created page with "Not wanting to be picky, but there's loads of logic problems (loads more than suspended by standard disbelief, that is) with crossing marshmallow beams and getting... whoever/..."</p>
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<div>Not wanting to be picky, but there's loads of logic problems (loads more than suspended by standard disbelief, that is) with crossing marshmallow beams and getting... whoever/whatever it is in giant form. Proton beams (possibly, the original film is vague and inconsistent in its technobabble), when crossed, ''destroyed'' the marshmallow man. So marshmallow beams should perhaps be applicable in somehow despelling ''Giant Protons'' Man, or something similar. Just saying. [[Special:Contributions/31.111.87.233|31.111.87.233]] 13:25, 28 May 2013 (UTC)</div>31.111.87.233https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=521:_2008_Christmas_Special&diff=38719521: 2008 Christmas Special2013-05-28T12:42:19Z<p>31.111.87.233: /* Explanation */ Moved the rotation reference to where it makes more sense (orientation (and reflection) is irrelevent in CGoL, but /would/ count in a standard meme's appearance).</p>
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<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 521<br />
| date = December 24, 2008<br />
| title = 2008 Christmas Special<br />
| image = 2008_christmas_special.png<br />
| titletext = 'How could you possibly think typing 'import skynet' was a good idea?'<br />
}}<br />
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==Explanation==<br />
This comic is the xkcd Christmas Special from the year 2008. The prologue states that due to the {{w|2008 financial crisis}}, only very few images of the strip could be produced. It is therefore left to the reader to reconstruct the whole story based on the given images. While it is claimed that the reconstruction should be rather easy, the complicated and abstruse plot-line makes it nearly impossible to fill the gaps. Any attempt at inferring the missing images would therefore be largely guesswork. The comic features the well-known xkcd characters getting involved in a strange fight with cyborgs and raptors on Christmas eve.<br />
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The line "We apologise for the inconvenience." is possibly a reference to the famous book series {{w|The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy}} by {{w|Douglas Adams}}. It appears there as God's Final Message to His Creation, written in letters of fire on the side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains.<br />
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'''Panel 2:''' [[Megan]] strives to outdo some christmas lights she has seen on YouTube.<br />
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'''Panel 3:''' Dissatisfied with her work, Megan is thinking about alternative ways improve her light arrangement. The idea of firing {{w|Sodium}} pellets into snow is probably a bad one, as Sodium reacts exothermically with water and may, in large amounts, induce explosions.<br />
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'''Panel 5:''' Probably still obsessed with the idea of creating a large and impressive light display, Megan has constructed an electronic device with an {{w|Arduino}} processor, perhaps to make the light chain show patterns. However, the amount of energy she used was apparently too high, causing one of the control boards to vaporise.<br />
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'''Panel 7:''' Megan's device has developed {{w|artificial intelligence}}, allowing it to feel. This common trope in science-fiction works usually leads to the system's attempting to eradicate its creator. [[Cueball]] attributes the emergence of a personality to flaws in the programming language {{w|Python (programming language|Python}}.<br />
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'''Panel 11:''' Out of context, this panel introduces the idea of {{w|Santa Claus}} being a {{w|muslim}}. This is a reference to the persistent Internet rumors that Barrack Obama is a Muslim, though he declares himself to be a Christian. However, the theory probably relates to the fact the Santa Claus is usually displayed with a large beard, which is sometimes also sported by conservative Muslims.<br />
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'''Panel 13:''' At this point the self-conscious Christmas light control systems has apparently released {{w|cyborgs}} that tried to kill Megan and Cueball. In order to repel the cyborgs, they have cloned {{w|Velociraptors}}. Cueball expresses doubt whether that was really a good idea. Velociraptors appear frequently in xkcd, cf. comics [[87]], [[135]] and [[292]].<br />
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'''Panel 17:''' As predicted, the raptors have gone wild, but Megan, Cueball and the two smaller characters (perhaps their children) managed to cage the dinosaurs. They believe themselves safe unless the raptors learn how to build {{w|lightsabers}}.<br />
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'''Panel 19:''' The raptors have indeed succeeded with constructing lightsabers and must now be fought. The "Clever girl" is a reference to a line from Jurassic Park where the raptors outflank (and kill) one of the human characters.<br />
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'''Panel 23:''' IT billionaire {{w|Bill Gates}} has mistakenly killed Santa Claus, possibly in a sword fight. He claims to have taken him for {{w|Richard Stallman}}, a prominent {{w|free software}} activist. (Gates strongly opposes the idea of free software and is therefore considered a antagonist by many of its supporters.) The most striking resemblance between Stallman and Santa Claus is probably the long and untamed beard. Comic [[225]] is one of the most famous xkcd comics and features Stallman involved in a sword fight.<br />
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'''Panel 29:''' Megan asks [[Black Hat]] where he obtained the enormously large {{w|christmas tree}} that can be seen on the right side of the picture. It is implied that he logged {{w|Yggdrasil}}, a giant ash tree in Norse mythology. According to tradition, Yggdrasil is the world tree representing the whole creation and holding together the cosmological structure.<br />
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'''Panel 31:''' [[Randall]] wishes Merry Christmas to all xkcd readers.<br />
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The title text refers to panel 7. In Python, modules are imported using the "import ''module''" syntax. {{w|Skynet (Terminator)|Skynet}} is a self-conscious artificial intelligence system featured in the {{w|Terminator}} film series as the main antagonist. Importing the skynet module might therefore account for Megan's system's developing an evil personality.<br />
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Note that this comic was first published in another version that had panel 29 as panel 27 and the "Merry Christmas from xkcd" message at the bottom. As 27 is not a {{w|prime number}}, the current version was published in lieu of the erroneous one. The original version can be found [[:File:2008_christmas_special_original.png|here]] for the sake of completeness.<br />
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It has been observed that the top left nine panels form a {{w|Glider (Conway's life)|Glider}} in {{w|Conway's Game of Life}}. The glider is sometimes used as an emblem representing {{w|hacker subculture}}, although rotated by 90 degrees. It remains however unclear wether the occurrence in the comic is intentional or owed to the prime number pattern.<br />
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==Transcript==<br />
:The 2008 XKCD Christmas Special<br />
:Due to the slowing economy, we could only afford to produce the prime-numbered panels.<br />
:You should be able to infer the missing parts of the story easily enough.<br />
:We apologize for the inconvenience.<br />
:[The first panel is blank.]<br />
:[Megan carrying Christmas lights and Cueball watching.]<br />
:Megan: I'm going to one-up those Christmas light displays on YouTube.<br />
:[Megan thinking]<br />
:Megan: Hmm. Needs more flair. Do you know what happens when you fire sodium pellets into a snowbank?<br />
:Cueball: No.<br />
:Megan: Me neither.<br />
:[The next panel is blank.]<br />
:[Megan sitting in front of a console.]<br />
:Megan: Whoops, one of the Arduino control boards sublimated.<br />
:Megan: If only I could make it self-repairing...<br />
:[The next panel is blank.]<br />
:Megan: Shit. The system has become sentient.<br />
:Cueball: Friggin' Python.<br />
:System: GRAAARR!<br />
:[The next three panels are blank.]<br />
:[Megan showing laptop to Cueball.]<br />
:Megan: But according to this email forward, Santa is secretly a Muslim!<br />
:Cueball: It explains everything!<br />
:[The next panel is blank.]<br />
:Megan: Okay, the cloned raptors are hunting the last of the cyborgs. We're safe.<br />
:Cueball: Are you sure you thought this through?<br />
:[The next three panels are blank.]<br />
:[Two couples appear in this next panel.]<br />
:Cueball: Are the raptors contained?<br />
:Girl: Sure. Unless they figure out how to build lightsabers.<br />
:[The next panel is blank.]<br />
:[Guy with hat fighting with a raptor using lightsabers.]<br />
:Cueball: It's all right. I've got her.<br />
:[Lightsaber appears from behind.]<br />
:Snap-hiss!<br />
:Cueball: ...Clever girl.<br />
:[The next three panels are blank.]<br />
:[Bill Gates is holding a weapon over Santa's body. The two girls are watching.]<br />
:Megan: Great. Bill Gates kills Santa.<br />
:Bill Gates: I thought it was Stallman with a dyed beard.<br />
:[The next five panels are blank.]<br />
:[Megan and Black Hat are looking at a tree.]<br />
:Megan: Where did you get this Christmas tree?<br />
:Black Hat: Nowhere.<br />
:Megan: Did you cut down the Yggdrasil?<br />
:Black Hat: ...Maybe.<br />
:[The next panel is blank.]<br />
:[Megan and Cueball holding hands and looking at reader.]<br />
:Merry Christmas from XKCD <3<br />
:[The last panel is blank.]<br />
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{{comic discussion}}<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Black Hat]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]<br />
[[Category:Christmas]]<br />
[[Category:Programming]]<br />
[[Category:Star Wars]]<br />
[[Category:Velociraptors]]</div>31.111.87.233https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:525:_I_Know_You%27re_Listening&diff=38712Talk:525: I Know You're Listening2013-05-28T09:30:47Z<p>31.111.87.233: </p>
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<div>Whether or not this is what the Citation request needs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager#Criticism would be helpful. Most people tend to go for the "What if it's the ''wrong'' god that you believe in?" counter to the wager. i.e. the parts of your religious observance that most please Zeus might well anger Odin greatly, or something similar for any two gods (pantheonic ''or'' sole Authority, this factor also being a major issue of choice) that you might care to compare between. This is mostly covered in the "Argument from inconsistent revelations" section of the above, it appears.<br />
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Personally my favoured counter-argument is that any sufficiently omniscient god worth his pillar-of-salt should ''know'' whether you are Wagering, and probably has a special area of Hell (or Tantarus) reserved for those that try to toady up to him by faking a belief (covered by the "Argument from inauthentic belief" section). I choose to believe that an honest non-believer might at least get a look-in at any middle-ground afterlife (regardless of their lack in belief of same), but I also don't have amy great reason to believe that this attitude is going to reward me, either.<br />
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(c.f. also the assumption that 'innocents', and people who have never been exposed to the Word Of God<sup>TM</sup> are entitled to a free pass to some non-Hell level of afterlife, the punishment only applying after having been introduced to the whole Judeo-Christian system of post-death existence. On this basis, missionaries that go out and inform remote tribespeoples and oceanic islanders of the state of affairs are actually potentially making things a lot worse for their target audience than they ''would'' have been... Assuming that they're right in the first place.)<br />
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But note that, for every philosophical argument, there's an equal and opposite philosophical argument. I just plan on being good in the mortal world (where I know I will be rewarded, or at least regarded in a reasonably good light, if perhaps a bit of a doorstep) and if this doesn't help out when I hypothetically find myself at the Pearly Gates then I probably wouldn't have hit on the right form and combination of observances anyway so its not a wager that I could have reasonably 'won'.<br />
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This is, of course, way heavier an edit than I had intended, and I'm not suggesting that this is the best intepretation, just my own, and probably not worth a discussion over. [[Special:Contributions/31.111.87.233|31.111.87.233]] 09:28, 28 May 2013 (UTC)<br />
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(Forgot to say... non-deity eavesdroppers probably wouldn't have the omniscience, so go ahead and randomly profess your belief in them! [[Special:Contributions/31.111.87.233|31.111.87.233]] 09:30, 28 May 2013 (UTC))</div>31.111.87.233https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:525:_I_Know_You%27re_Listening&diff=38711Talk:525: I Know You're Listening2013-05-28T09:28:32Z<p>31.111.87.233: Created page with "Whether or not this is what the Citation request needs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager#Criticism would be helpful. Most people tend to go for the "What if it's..."</p>
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<div>Whether or not this is what the Citation request needs, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager#Criticism would be helpful. Most people tend to go for the "What if it's the ''wrong'' god that you believe in?" counter to the wager. i.e. the parts of your religious observance that most please Zeus might well anger Odin greatly, or something similar for any two gods (pantheonic ''or'' sole Authority, this factor also being a major issue of choice) that you might care to compare between. This is mostly covered in the "Argument from inconsistent revelations" section of the above, it appears.<br />
<br />
Personally my favoured counter-argument is that any sufficiently omniscient god worth his pillar-of-salt should ''know'' whether you are Wagering, and probably has a special area of Hell (or Tantarus) reserved for those that try to toady up to him by faking a belief (covered by the "Argument from inauthentic belief" section). I choose to believe that an honest non-believer might at least get a look-in at any middle-ground afterlife (regardless of their lack in belief of same), but I also don't have amy great reason to believe that this attitude is going to reward me, either.<br />
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(c.f. also the assumption that 'innocents', and people who have never been exposed to the Word Of God<sup>TM</sup> are entitled to a free pass to some non-Hell level of afterlife, the punishment only applying after having been introduced to the whole Judeo-Christian system of post-death existence. On this basis, missionaries that go out and inform remote tribespeoples and oceanic islanders of the state of affairs are actually potentially making things a lot worse for their target audience than they ''would'' have been... Assuming that they're right in the first place.)<br />
<br />
But note that, for every philosophical argument, there's an equal and opposite philosophical argument. I just plan on being good in the mortal world (where I know I will be rewarded, or at least regarded in a reasonably good light, if perhaps a bit of a doorstep) and if this doesn't help out when I hypothetically find myself at the Pearly Gates then I probably wouldn't have hit on the right form and combination of observances anyway so its not a wager that I could have reasonably 'won'.<br />
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This is, of course, way heavier an edit than I had intended, and I'm not suggesting that this is the best intepretation, just my own, and probably not worth a discussion over. [[Special:Contributions/31.111.87.233|31.111.87.233]] 09:28, 28 May 2013 (UTC)</div>31.111.87.233https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:527:_Keynote&diff=38695Talk:527: Keynote2013-05-28T08:45:50Z<p>31.111.87.233: Created page with "Of course, with the benefit of hindsight we can be fairly sure that this all arose either because of more severe health problems than hinted at or more severe ''medication'' t..."</p>
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<div>Of course, with the benefit of hindsight we can be fairly sure that this all arose either because of more severe health problems than hinted at or more severe ''medication'' to attempt to overcome what was happening. [[Special:Contributions/31.111.87.233|31.111.87.233]] 08:45, 28 May 2013 (UTC)</div>31.111.87.233https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:547:_Simple&diff=38651Talk:547: Simple2013-05-27T22:05:35Z<p>31.111.87.233: </p>
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<div>This is possibly even another take by xkcd at conspiracy theories such as the one in http://xkcd.com/966/ <br />
:In this comic too he presents conspiracy theories against each other, the black hole with the guidance system.<br />
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The fact that the reference of something bad happening is to the Black hole theories comes from the fact that the comic was drawn the same time the theories were most predominant.<br />
:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_high_energy_particle_collision_experiments#Micro_black_holes [[User:Mr Andersom|Mr Andersom]] ([[User talk:Mr Andersom|talk]]) 13:40, 13 April 2013 (UTC)<br />
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I ''don't'' think there's a joke here regarding "particle accelerators not having a guidance system" (paraphrasing the first paragraph of explanation, currently). Maybe there's a confusion about the phrase "the particle accelerator's tertiary F.E.L. Guidance System"? The FEL (Free Electron Laser, IIRC) itself is a tunable lasing 'cavity' for electrons that is magnetic, not optical, in nature, but (again, IIRC) is supplied with electrons at relativistic speeds by way of a particle accelerator (depending on which FEL, sometimes dedicated to the FEL and sometimes "from a main multipurpose ring", such as the LHC might be). Particle acceleration requires that the particles ''being'' accelerated be constrained within the ring (when being brung up to speed or collided within the ring's in-line experiment zones) or redirected out of the ring (or allowed to depart it, but still in a controlled manner) if being used for an out-of-ring experiment. It's true that particles being smashed are thrown together rather haphazardly (when compared, say, with collisions at the scale of vehicle crash tests), but there's actually quite a lot of sophisticated detection equipment used to work out the path of the particles so that ''guidance'' can be applied by magnetic fields (separately from the 'corner turning' ones and/or including those). I think I would consider such systems (including the ones that 'extract' particles for use in off-ring experiments) worthy of the title "guidance systems", albeit external to the particle as opposed to on-board like on a smart missile... And so if (and I haven't checked, so colour me wrong if I turn out to be so) the complex has at least three FELs attached, it's reasonable to assume that the third of these (hierarchically speaking) has, like its brethren, a particle guidance system involved at some point to ensure the electron supply is suitably contained and piped into it... Or it refers to the third of (at least three) beam-guiding systems for the ''lone'' FEL. Maybe even this means something active within the magnetic "wiggler" assembly of the FEL itself, or even (if this is what they do) on the output to the FEL leading ''into'' the LHC itself... But whichever it is, it the relevent FEL Guidance System surely exists in some form or other.<br />
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...TL;DR; - I'm pretty much sure the joke is more of an "[[Up_Goer_Five|Up-goer 5]]" nature... I also don't see any reference to Black Holes/conspiracy theories... It's just doing an "If this part is broken, you will not <strike>go to space</strike> collide any particles today" thing, surely? [[Special:Contributions/31.111.87.233|31.111.87.233]] 22:05, 27 May 2013 (UTC)</div>31.111.87.233