Talk:2800: Down
Shouldn't it be geolocated, to be rotated accordingly? 172.71.160.110 12:35, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
- You need to know where and when you are. Taking the 220 degrees (why not 140?) currently in the transcript as correct, that means Mars is at 50° azimuth, which a versatile but overly-fiddly astronomy app I have (why doesn't it remember I do manual orientation? ...it's flat out wrong when it tries to do it from device settings/current orientation!) suggests that Mars will reach 50° 'up', for me, at about 16:30 local time (could have checked when it fell back down to that again, but I didn't) at which point I could easily be sat facing whichever direction puts "Mars down" at a similar angle to the one seen in the comic. But it will change throughout the day, every day that it applies. 172.70.162.244 13:05, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
Why didn't Orson Scott Card get cowriting props for this one?
I'm TenGolf and I started the explanation! 172.70.131.6 15:03, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
I'm not so sure about the "relative to gravity in actuality" - there's no objective reason why "down" must follow gravity. (Take Ender's Game - "The enemy's gate is down") DownGoer (talk) 15:07, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
- That's not the directional sense of "down". When it's used as a direction, it's towards the center of whatever body currently exerts the most gravity -- if you're on Earth it's towards the Earth's center, if you're on the Moon it's towards the Moon's center, etc. "Down" has other senses, like "the computer is down" that just refers to whether it's functioning. Barmar (talk) 17:16, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
- 241:_Battle_Room Relevant here? —Purah #126 (talk) 00:41, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
- For the case of Ender's Game, it isn't a matter of ignoring/spiting gravity, but the disorientattling lack of gravity in the arena makes tactics difficult to maintain when everyone has a different 'up' (when going concentrating on 'forward to the enemy').
- Rethinking it as being 'down to the enemy' (and perhaps revisualising as cylindrical/spherical coordinates as you are looking 'down that well') gives you a better resilience of comprehension whenever you get spun around and need to make sure you're still singing to the same (directional) hymnsheet as your team.
- Though, if I recall the film correctly, they re-established the "single orietation standard" whereby (whatever the script said) there seemed to be the obligatory common (and perpendicular to the line of attack/defence) 'up', just for the sake of the audience's own 2D-plane (with maybe 0.5d of 'elevation') sensibilities. 172.70.162.109 07:54, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
This may be a reference to the band named Down Left Forte. 172.71.154.156 23:37, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
When I first tried to access this comic, Explain XKCD's server didn't respond. For a second I thought it was some sort of joke page in the same vein as 404. --172.70.85.111 10:49, 12 July 2023 (UTC)
I am over 2 bottles of wine deep tonight. This comic looks like I feel.
In the space opera board game Twilight Imperium, one of the factions, the L1Z1X, has labelled their home planet "[0.0.0]" and their flagship "[0.0.1]". This would imply that their coordinate system, both orientation and distance, is dependant on the relative positions of these two objects. --172.68.146.77 11:17, 13 July 2023 (UTC)
