Talk:3037: Radon

The sun is a white star. It looks yellow from within the atmosphere because blue light is scattered out of it, the same reason the sky is blue. How did physicist Randall not know that? Nitpicking (talk) 20:26, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Randall is almost certainly a Superman fan, and we all know that Kryptonians get their powers from yellow suns. Barmar (talk) 21:07, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia disagrees; The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (G2V), informally called a yellow dwarf, though its light is actually white. It formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud. 172.71.23.87 20:43, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Your quote agrees with me. As @Starstar says below, it might be intentional on his part. Nitpicking (talk) 20:53, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

No "his quote" doesn't?? (Unless I'm understanding your meaning with "his quote") Yes the sun is White. HOWEVER, it is NOT called a "white star". Stars aren't categorized by color but by tempeture. Which I mean I guess it sorta means their catagorized by color but thats being nitpicky. Our sun is 5,772 K, which according to wikipedia means its a class-G star which is known by the not nerds as a yellow dwarf. Being a physicist means Randell is VERY aware of the category of our Sun. Repeat, the Sun is called a "yellow dwarf", therefore is Ponytail said "white star", she'd be talking about a star that is 9000 K and therfor NOT our Sun. Seriously this was like a 5 minute google search. Apollo11 (talk) 21:01, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

At any rate, I believe it plays into Ponytail just goofing around more than being precise Starstar (talk) 22:12, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps it is intentional? Starstar (talk) 20:36, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Possible trivia: The effect used in the title text for "²³⁸Umbrella" does NOT use html formatting. It uses unicode for the almost-but-not-technically superscripted "238" before "Umbrella." On some systems, this renders with the "23" being larger than and slightly below the level of the "8". Whether Randall knew of this effect or not is a mystery. If he did know, his motivations are a mystery. Maybe the 8 is radioactive and emitted a non-massless particle, thereby making it smaller (less mass != less volume, but go with it here) and more buoyant (less weight) in the presence of the adjacent characters. 198.41.227.105 21:19, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

You can't use HTML markup in the title attribute, so there's no other way to do super/sub-scripting there. He could have used JavaScript to emulate the title attribute, though. Barmar (talk) 21:38, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

What do people think of Hairstylist Wannabe's near-total rewrite of the explanation? While they added lots of technical details about radon, I think they missed much of the humor. Ponytail's comments are typical of the kind of things a home inspector or repair person will say to the owner, not really "flippant". Barmar (talk) 21:48, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

I like the facts but i changed the joke explantion back. Apollo11 (talk) 22:07, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

The rewrite has waaaaay too much detail. This site is for explaining what's going on in a comic, not repeating everything you know that's related, however remotely, to the comic. Just add wikilinks to things! Like, do we really need to have repeated here how much ²³⁸U the Earth contains? How much radiation one experiences from uranium? I vote to remove a lot of the detail and just explain the comic. DKMell (talk) 23:45, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

Possible trivia: 238 Umbrella is a common weight for a patio umbrella stand. -- TallJason (talk) 22:53, 13 January 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I started to write another paragraph:

The primary reason why the radon is considered more deadly than the original uranium (and thorium) is its nature as a heavy gas; the earlier states of decay remain stuck in the original rock, interstitially, whereas radon more freely leaches out. This quickly disperses to extremely diluted levels in the open air but, being a gas that is denser than air, it can accumulate to low (but potentially significant) levels in a cellar or basement, having few natural air-currents to drive the heavier gas atoms out of the sump in which the radon sits. Although each atom does not last long in this state, the resulting polonium, bismuth or lead atoms (all being isotopes that are themselves radioactive) can find themselves drifting as dust particles initially (and, after settling, easily disturbed), with the potential

...but it got out of hand. Was going to edit it down (and correct anything I'd accidentally mispoken/misedited/ispunctuated, in the initial fervour) when I'd finished, but I've got to go somewhere, so leaving it as possible inspiration for someone else to use/ignore/tear part/whatever. Have fun. 172.68.205.92 23:50, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

"possible inspiration for someone else" Good stuff, but surely it already exists (without xkcd context) many other places? Can be just linked? PRR (talk) 02:33, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

I thought, the title text was a reference to nuclear umbrella. 172.68.50.200 07:45, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

"This process will render the Earth uninhabitable for humans within approximately 5 billion years." That seems very optimistic. Isn't it more like 1 billion years? --Coconut Galaxy (talk) 10:05, 14 January 2025 (UTC)