Talk:3046: Stromatolites - Revision history

Mathmannix at 02:01, 13 February 2025

2025-02-13T02:01:07Z

172.71.160.32 at 22:00, 7 February 2025

2025-02-07T22:00:23Z

172.70.91.11 at 14:40, 6 February 2025

2025-02-06T14:40:42Z

141.101.98.187 at 09:24, 6 February 2025

2025-02-06T09:24:58Z

172.70.35.190: /* Parody? (with an evolutionary theory) */ new section

2025-02-06T07:07:17Z

‎Parody? (with an evolutionary theory): new section

141.101.98.187 at 17:05, 5 February 2025

2025-02-05T17:05:50Z

162.158.41.94 at 14:54, 5 February 2025

2025-02-05T14:54:37Z

172.71.146.32 at 14:07, 5 February 2025

2025-02-05T14:07:53Z

172.70.163.167 at 13:10, 5 February 2025

2025-02-05T13:10:17Z

172.70.206.163: explain why

2025-02-05T11:04:23Z

explain why

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 :But cousins is fairly 'easy' (so long as the records, or reasonable presumptions, exist), as there steadily become so many potential common ancestors by various different branches that you might easily find a fathers'-sides co-ancestry point just by having surname clues (to bridge any actual gaps in the paperwork) where a more direct mothers'-sides relationship might be lost. (That's the ''official'', ancestry, of course... Blood descent could well depart significantly from that, whether or not anyone (who 'matters') thinks/'knows' differently at the time.)
 :By the same measure, you have also found the (possibly!) most recent common ancestor... You know there ''must be one'', of course, but placing them is subject to all the issues of lack of records (or misdirecting ones) giving you problems. But Beret Guy seems to think his efforts are accurate. And, knowing his expectation-based powers, he probably has. No real parody of evolution, just simplifying away the necessarily messy parts of its long-term study. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.11|172.70.91.11]] 14:40, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
 == The [[What If? chapters|What If? article index]] project ==

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 <!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.-->
 Yay, another Beret Guy appearance! '''[[User:42.book.addict|<span style="font-family:Cormorant Garamond;font-size:9pt;color:#A9C6CA">42.book.addict</span>]]<sup>[[User talk:42.book.addict|<span style="font-family:Cormorant Garamond;font-size:6pt;color:#516874">Talk to me!</span>]]</sup>''' 03:46, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
 I'm not sure if I'm trying to remember Bloom County and the penguin (Opus) or Snoopy by Schulz because  of the last panel. Shrug. Prolly both. Warm is good. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.175.208|172.70.175.208]] 06:08, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

← Older revision		Revision as of 14:40, 6 February 2025
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	Parody? (with an evolutionary theory). Several news sites (tabloids?) occasionally write news about people being extremely distantly related to (e. g. 17th-order cousins and above) each other. This comic takes it to the extreme case of being related to the bacteria that created stromatolites. The evolutionary theory shown in the comic is that every organism (Bacteria and Archaea s. l.) is related. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.35.190\|172.70.35.190]] 07:07, 6 February 2025 (UTC)		Parody? (with an evolutionary theory). Several news sites (tabloids?) occasionally write news about people being extremely distantly related to (e. g. 17th-order cousins and above) each other. This comic takes it to the extreme case of being related to the bacteria that created stromatolites. The evolutionary theory shown in the comic is that every organism (Bacteria and Archaea s. l.) is related. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.35.190\|172.70.35.190]] 07:07, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
		+	:As already covered by a prior comic, we have (nth-)cousins all over the place. A lot of store was set by Obama being 10th cousins with Bush Jr, but also 15th cousin to Churchill and 9th cousin to ''Brad Pitt'' (with Hillary Clinton being 9th cousin to Angelina Jolie).
		+	:But cousins is fairly 'easy' (so long as the records, or reasonable presumptions, exist), as there steadily become so many potential common ancestors by various different branches that you might easily find a fathers'-sides co-ancestry point just by having surname clues (to bridge any actual gaps in the paperwork) where a more direct mothers'-sides relationship might be lost. (That's the ''official'', ancestry, of course... Blood descent could well depart significantly from that, whether or not anyone (who 'matters') thinks/'knows' differently at the time.)
		+	:By the same measure, you have also found the (possibly!) most recent common ancestor... You know there ''must be one'', of course, but placing them is subject to all the issues of lack of records (or misdirecting ones) giving you problems. But Beret Guy seems to think his efforts are accurate. And, knowing his expectation-based powers, he probably has. No real parody of evolution, just simplifying away the necessarily messy parts of its long-term study. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.11\|172.70.91.11]] 14:40, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

	== The [[What If? chapters\|What If? article index]] project ==		== The [[What If? chapters\|What If? article index]] project ==

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 :Personally, I'd like the existing six to be tightened up (somehow, yet to go through them to work out how), but each has good points in. Could you be happier with just less loquacious verbosity, but presenting the same general scope in less space? (Probably not, but depends exactly which elements are "pointless digression" in your POV...) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.163.167|172.70.163.167]] 13:10, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
 :Tolkien wrote this about critique of his <em>Lord of the Rings</em>: "... for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved." In the absence of a polling system, how are folk to assess the significance of individual comments? One could do a Musk run through the text, roiling the explain-xkcd community and thereby creating a disturbance in the Force, without actually improving the read. The uncharacteristically poor handling of the science underlying the comic complicates efforts to achieve conciseness and clarity. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.146.32|172.71.146.32]] 14:07, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
 == The [[What If? chapters|What If? article index]] project ==
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 We would love your help (especially if you have the first book)! We've prepared a [[What If? chapters|to-do list]] at the top of the page, containing everything that needs to be done, if you're interested. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 07:00, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

← Older revision		Revision as of 07:07, 6 February 2025
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	We would love your help (especially if you have the first book)! We've prepared a [[What If? chapters\|to-do list]] at the top of the page, containing everything that needs to be done, if you're interested. --[[User:FaviFake\|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake\|talk]]) 07:00, 4 February 2025 (UTC)		We would love your help (especially if you have the first book)! We've prepared a [[What If? chapters\|to-do list]] at the top of the page, containing everything that needs to be done, if you're interested. --[[User:FaviFake\|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake\|talk]]) 07:00, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
		+
		+	== Parody? (with an evolutionary theory) ==
		+
		+	Several news sites (tabloids?) occasionally write news about people being extremely distantly related to (e. g. 17th-order cousins and above) each other. This comic takes it to the extreme case of being related to the bacteria that created stromatolites.
		+
		+	The evolutionary theory shown in the comic is that every organism (Bacteria and Archaea s. l.) is related. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.35.190\|172.70.35.190]] 07:07, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

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 :::...this would have required someone else to have (give or take a small proportion of BG's generations, due to mismatches) done the same work as BG ''and then'' the work that we're now excusing BG as having not done. Hard to know how that would happen
 :::Theoretically, if the website/database was ''live'' at the point of the point of Most Recent Common Human Ancestor, that individual could establish the 'further back' (ready for BG's search to find them and latch on to it), or at least as far back as a prior MRCA that also had the website hand to pre-establish yet further back (for as many further iterations as necessary), which might even be tied in with ''how'' sufficiently(?) detailed core family tree data. But then BG's Special Powers is reliant upon finding a website that actually predates the web ('90s) and the internet ('70s), and networked databases ('60s), and programmable computers ('40s), and keyboards (let's say the 1700s), and mice (the paleocene, who would have probably prefered using {{w|Gopher (protocol)|gopher}}), that was somehow still interacted with in order to set things up ready for BG's own (more trivial) direct miracles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.163.167|172.70.163.167]] 13:10, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
 Six paragraphs should be four. Too much non-explanatory and otherwise pointless digression. I'm sure the people who write it don't realize how much it turns off people coming here to read an explanation. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.215.72|172.70.215.72]] 11:03, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

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 : [[2608: Family Reunion]] estimates about 50 billion generations to the MRCA with plants; this would have taken about a century at a speed of 15 clicks per second. Bacteria reproduce extremely fast - or at least modern ones do - which could easily add a few trillion generations (and a few thousand years of clicking) on the bacterial side of the ancestry. In other words, "thousands of years" is likely an overestimate but not ''that'' much of one. (Obviously the time becomes very feasible if Beret Guy used a site that summarized the ancestry.) --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.111.134|162.158.111.134]] 20:25, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
 ::Typically the way it works is you work back so far and then find a connection to a ''pre-existing'' tree, so he wouldn't need to go very far back to get to a tree that covered all modern humans, provided someone had already done the work beyond that point before him.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.29|172.70.91.29]] 10:27, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
 Six paragraphs should be four. Too much non-explanatory and otherwise pointless digression. I'm sure the people who write it don't realize how much it turns off people coming here to read an explanation. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.215.72|172.70.215.72]] 11:03, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
+:Which two paragraphs? And we already have long paragraphs, but if we joined two pairs together then you'd be happy? Counting just paragraphs is not a good measure, whatever you really mean. And I guarantee that most of what you'd want to remove is only subjectively unnecessary.
 == The [[What If? chapters|What If? article index]] project ==

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:04, 5 February 2025
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	::Typically the way it works is you work back so far and then find a connection to a ''pre-existing'' tree, so he wouldn't need to go very far back to get to a tree that covered all modern humans, provided someone had already done the work beyond that point before him.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.29\|172.70.91.29]] 10:27, 5 February 2025 (UTC)		::Typically the way it works is you work back so far and then find a connection to a ''pre-existing'' tree, so he wouldn't need to go very far back to get to a tree that covered all modern humans, provided someone had already done the work beyond that point before him.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.29\|172.70.91.29]] 10:27, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

−	Six paragraphs should be four. Too much non-explanatory and otherwise pointless digression. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.215.72\|172.70.215.72]] 11:03, 5 February 2025 (UTC)	+	Six paragraphs should be four. Too much non-explanatory and otherwise pointless digression. I'm sure the people who write it don't realize how much it turns off people coming here to read an explanation. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.215.72\|172.70.215.72]] 11:03, 5 February 2025 (UTC)