Talk:2611: Cutest-Sounding Scientific Effects

Can I suggest that anyone who replaces the hyphen/minus-sign in "foo - bar" (or, usually, "foo - breakout - bar" as some sort of bracketting side-comment) don't replace " - " with "–” or "—” without the spaces, as it makes it look even more like the unintended hyphenisation that they probably think they're avoiding. At least preserve the spacing. That said, there generally is another way.
If commas would be too confusing (e.g. proximity to a list (and especially Oxford Commas, which confuse things more!)) then parenthesising would be best. If you're too scared to nest brackets (and ellipses/etc don't seem viable …perhaps leave to the Discussion page?) then probably you just need to rewrite into several more atomic sentences rather than one huge run-on one that needs so many different pause/sotto-voce-effect in the internalised narration. As you can see, I run into this problem often enough. In this comment I've slightly broken a couple of my own rules (by omission) just because it makes a better exemplar to not rewrite to avoid.
However this is just general advice to the other mdash/ndash 'correctors' who pop up. In this article it was the transcript where "Effect A - Effect B" became "Effect A–Effect B", looking like "A-Effect" (or, actually "Effect-B", to reflect the true ordering seen). Obviously it represents the line between, but no hyphen or dash is there to be read, and it would have been as valid to use " / " as separator, except for the use (unspaced) in "Bouba/kiki". It would be nice to know what screen-readers think of every option — how they voice them, etc…
Perhaps a " [is bracketed with] " transcript-label would be best (with the spaces, naturally). But I leave it up to someone else to think about. I'm still a bit overinvolved with the 'hyphen-like dashes' issue, as you can see, which often makes me a bit sharp and terse. For which I apologise, as with this whole 'getting off of my chest' commentary that I've a feeling I have either under-explained or over-explained. Or, simultaneously, both! 172.70.90.145 08:44, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

Maybe 172.69.79.209 08:54, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

It was I who changed to dashes. Both dash length and spacing was, to the best of my ability, those that Wikipedia described for sport games and other “symmetrical” pairs. If it turned out unsuitable for this page, I think that another layout entirely would be preferable to the current solution. But for sure I won’t fight for it.

While False (talk) 09:03, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

Clearly this is going to end with a final of Cutaneous Rabbit - Woozle. Which combines to give you a self-reinforcing erroneous belief that someone is tapping your arm. 172.69.79.209 08:56, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

I could see there being an actual Perky/Cutaneous Rabbit draw (in both senses of the word, though I haven't checked to see if either have lost out yet on the official poll), whichbis when you are convinced that you are in fact only imagining the tapping moving up your arm, but it actually is!!! 172.70.162.5 09:59, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

Russian bots have obviously got involved and manipulated the polling, because 5 out of the 8 have gone the wrong way, and the Cutaneous Rabbit has been eliminated.172.69.79.153 09:36, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

So... Who's setting up an actual bracket for this? Should we each create our own brackets? [[Special:Contributions/{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] ([[User talk:{{{1}}}|talk]]) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Randall's running one (see Twitter link near top), though I forget when the first-round polls are said to be closing (did it say 10 hours, when I checked for myself?) and as I'm not registered on a Twitter it's just a spectator sport for me and I'll probably rely on some other editor bringing the results over to ExplainXKCD when they are made known and putting them in the section now prepared on the Explanation page. Nothing to stop you making your own predictions/desires known ahead of the actual results, but it'd be purely a personal thing until enough people locally state their thoughts this to establish a (possibly different) ExpXKCD consensus result by manual collation of a completely scientifically-unregorous alternate poll. (Sounds like too much work for little added benefit, but maybe someone wants to do it anyway...) 172.70.90.211 16:44, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

Reading the wiki article about the Dr. Fox effect, in which they used "an actor, Michael Fox" I had to do a double take because I thought they were talking about Michael J. Fox. Now that would be a charismatic teacher! 172.70.211.72 01:45, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

The J in Michael J. Fox's name is completely meaningless, it is ONLY there to differentiate him from this other Michael Fox. :) (I've heard that he has said in interviews it stands for "Genius") NiceGuy1 (talk) 03:32, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

I can't think of a reason why "Bouba/kiki effect" was the winner of the tournament. The name isn't particularly funny or cute. The effect itself isn't the most interesting one offered. Is it a meme or a popular culture reference? Or bots? These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For (talk) 22:18, 1 May 2022 (UTC)

Obviously Randall rigged the voting right throughout the tournament, solely so that he could make the Bouba vs Kiki joke. That explains the travesty of it beating Cutaneous Rabbit in the first round. I mean, it's a rabbit! And how can it be cuter than having cute-aneous in its name?172.69.79.153 10:23, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

The Bouba effect won! https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1520519518388375557 172.69.134.17 01:31, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

I tried to upload the image at https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FRn4cWjWUAAtwIs?format=jpg but it says I don't have permissions. Omgwtfargh (talk) 01:53, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

I refuse to acknowledge any list that does not include the "atto-fox effect (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267293649_Killing_the_atto-fox_A_new_algorithm_for_deterministic_simulation_in_discrete_state_space) 108.162.221.177 23:56, 3 July 2022 (UTC) Abbysaurus_Rex