Talk:2679: Quantified Self

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This could also be a call back to the Billy Path comics run in Family Circus. I don't have time today to add that research though. 172.70.214.59 16:00, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

The xkcd 100: Family Circus seems relevant enough and readers can go to that page for an explanation of "Billy paths" and the OCD connection. Mrob27 (talk) 00:24, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Here is an explanation of what it is about https://www.reddit.com/r/OCD/comments/1ve309/invisible_thread_attached_to_my_back_am_i_the/ -- Florian F (talk) 18:11, 30 September 2022‎ (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I was going to guess sorting Google Maps Directions by sustainability announced this past Wednesday. https://blog.google/products/search/new-ways-to-make-more-sustainable-choices/ 172.69.134.17 18:53, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
How is this comic about optimizing for sustainability?
It is about optimizing a particular attribute of maps directions. Sustainability is the most recent such attribute announced (two days prior to the comic) by a top-3 commerical maps directions provider. 172.70.214.183 06:04, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Google optimizes paths for distance and time for a long time already. The announcement is about optimizing for fuel efficiency instead. The comic clearly speaks about measuring distance but not about fuel consumption.
The comic also insists on the topological features of constructions, namely whether there is a hole. This has nothing to do with fuel efficiency. And how does pulling a string taut measure fuel efficiency? I don't understand.
The newspapers are full of events that happened 3 days ago. What makes Google's announcement more relevant to the comic than other news? Florian F (talk) 09:29, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Are you saying your OCD interpretation is more likely? Do you have any sources compatible with WP:RSP? How do those sources compare to an annual software release announcement by a top-10 tech company? 162.158.166.125 09:34, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
What I am saying is that the Google announcement as reliable as it is, is totally irrelevant to this comic. It is both optimization of a path. So what? It doesn't shed any light on any peculiarity of the comic. If you can explain why the red line is affected by bridges and an arch, but not by buildings or mountains, in the context of sustainability an fuel reduction, you might have a case. Florian F (talk) 15:35, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
The connection is clear to me: there is a new way to select paths based on a metric nobody has been using before. I don't feel the same way about the link to Math Work which is far more of a stretch, so I uncommented the first two sentences and the references, but deleted that link. 172.70.211.126 05:12, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
What is clear is that you need to tailor your description in a very abstract way to make it look related. The context is completely different. And the reference to google maps doesn't explain any part of the comic strip. Florian F (talk) 11:53, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
All of the things in that Google blog post involve the quantified self as a central idea, not just the maps part. 162.158.166.125 21:04, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
I think you're way off. I don't see any hint that it's about OCD. If it's similar to the condition you referenced, it's just a coincidence. The whole thing needs to be started from scratch. 108.162.221.105 20:41, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
That is why this site exists. To explain things you don't see. I don't think many people are familiar with this compulsion about an imaginary string retracing your path in space, but when you are, it is spot on. Florian F (talk) 23:09, 30 September 2022 (UTC)


GOOMHR!Randall is _always_ looking through your eyes - Although for me it was the opposite aim. I've had periods of time when I wouldn't even like (if I noticed, I wasn't like OCD or anything[1]!!!) to make a return journey that meant I even crossed the road at a different point and thus passed under a different telegraph wire between a different set of adjacent poles, on the presumption that if I were to 'retract my path' then it would be irrevocably looped around at least one telegraph poles. (But normal lamp-posts were Ok... the path-'string' could just pass over and around the top and continue to retract. And it could pass above/below anything movable like cars, people, etc.) My ideal would be to be topologically contracted to zero length. Nut I wasn't actually obsessed by it, just... sometimes noticed when I was forced to do something that would cause such 'problems' and might deliberately ensure that any such loop was fully reversed (in strict reverse order to any such transit adding them in) if at all possible. Of course, once it was spoilt by one end of the journey being held by a loop, the rest didn't matter so much. 162.158.34.71 18:21, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

[1] Not even CDO, which is like OCD but ordered alphabetically!
I definitely am also someone who always played it your way, the reverse XKCD. My cats play it straight though, running into the house, through, and out a different entrance repeatedly one day, then the other way the day after. 172.68.210.45 19:35, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
Yeah, I was always trying to avoid "entangling" my path as well. I suppose it's not just nightmares that can be "oddly universal"--childhood superstitious compulsions might be the same way, at least among the nerd population! 172.70.174.41 00:07, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
Red string of Fate

The drawing looks like the red thread connecting people in chinese mythology. -162.158.91.188 18:21, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

What happens to the string if you crawl under a car which then drives off?172.70.134.141 20:05, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

You probably would only count objects that were stationary after you passed them.Anonymouscript (talk) 21:10, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
If it can conceivably move over your 'thread', then it isn't a 'tangling loop'. You have to allow for any degree of mysterious topological optimisation that can magically unhook itself from anything that can be unhooked from, no matter how much work it has to do to do so, and if that has to include choosing just the right time (with perfect prescience, where necessary!) to allow it to untangle wherever/whenever possible. 162.158.34.205 21:25, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
That doesn't make sense, taken to the extreme, since all things will turn to dust eventually.162.158.107.42 21:47, 30 September 2022 (UTC)
Within the period of your concern (e.g. per daily routine), I would presume. That gantry over the road will be (partially, perhaps in stages) dissasembled for maintenance at some point, if not outright taken down, allowing an arbitrarily future-sensitive thread to not be caught up in it any more. Tachyonic thread-behaviour could happily unwrap around the time before the gantry (or bridges, or arch) were built, and as for the house... Before completion or after the next F5 tornado, the 4D constraints are far less (a line snagged permanently in a 4D 'passage' suggests something a bit more interesting, given a closed door doesn't 'snag' in 3D, only the use of two different doorways, with or without actual doors). But limiting it to a daily assesment bookends the whole 4D construct with a virtual lintel over (and under, in the t-dimension) any potential gap for thread-movement that might be considered a way to be optimising to minimal necessary set of straight-line distances... Well, unless you learn the gantry was only assembled that morning, or that it had sufficient Ship Of Theseus-style repairs during the day, or a truck hit it by the end of the day... then it still acts as a looped-snagger
The car is trivial, in comparison, as we know it drives away in the posited scenario (and within the duration of the scenario). Even if our mental thread-pull does not allow us to tug it under the firmly ground-planted tyres, by reducing to periods of instaniousness as the 'trapped' thread is then rolled over (and even more tightly trapped, without violating the 'through solid matter' issue) you reach a point where it is now rolled off of (no longer underneath the car at all) so you can consider it untrapped. Unlike any thread that was threaded in through the driver's side door but out again through the passenger-side one, which traps loops completely (except for convertables, of course, or if Black Hat subsequently does a more width-wise version of the "cut'n'shut", with or without the "shut" bit.
But that's just my interpretation. Thread-line obsessions probably come in various flavours and twists (can a thread-line knot about itself? And, insofar as the car example, is it basically forced to stay 'loose' but looped under the car as it drives, at least until enough of the car's wheels lose contact with the ground due to excessive speed over a humped bridge or even speedbump?) and I can't speak for all of them, but my reasonable (FCVO 'reasonable') assessment suggests that there are get outs and constraints that might be more universal than not. 172.70.91.48 01:47, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
When it was all about the OCD

This is about a type of OCD where some people feel like they have an imaginary string connecting them to where they come from. As they move around, that string gets entangled and they feel the urge to untangle it. When they enter a car, they feel the need to exit the car from the same door, or else the string will be trapped as forever passing through the car. When they enter a building, they feel they need to exit using the same doorway(s), to avoid entangling the string in the building.

Some cases, like turning around a lamp post are OK because you can imagine removing the loop over the top of the lamp post, such that it is not really entangled.

There may not be an official clinical name for this variety of OCD, but one suggested one is the "imaginary path-string".

Randall treats this OCD like a new measure to add to one's quantified self. The quantified self normally refers to the collection of measurements about your activity, like the number of steps you walk in a day, or monitoring your weight, blood pressure or calories intake. Here, Cueball measures his OCD, i.e. how long this imaginary string has become at the end of the day, after mentally untangling the string as much as possible with valid changes, like moving it around objects, but never through solid matter.

Unlike most people with this OCD, who feel the urge to minimize it, Randall/Cueball takes the opposite stance and actually prefers to maximize the (optimally minimal) length of that imaginary string.

The alt text tells about all the things that become useful adjuncts to this way of thinking and measuring, such as passing (one way) through any tube, tunnel or frame made of solid material that could thus capture the imaginary string and help to keep its ultimate distance as lengthy as possible. All of these situations are dreaded by the people with the more traditional version of OCD.

...because someone just deleted it, and didn't even appear to attempt to replace it with anything useful themselves. (It did need a lot of editing, but not sure it is totally inapplicable, given the demonstrated familiarity with the basic concept by Randall's target audience...) 162.158.34.205 21:25, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

I also had a preoccupation with this sort of thing, for a while as a child. My magic thread was a remnant of the umbilical cord, with one end permanently anchored in the hospital where I was born. I had little or no knowledge of the fundamental nature of matter and just thought of it as a rubber band that was too small to see or feel. Like in the comic and other comments here, it could magically stretch as much as needed and would un-stretch when possible. I did not consider changing behaviour (e.g. choosing an exit to leave a building) because I had no desire for it to be longer or shorter, and it was clearly far too late to make a significant difference. I did spend quite some time thinking of all the places the thread must have gotten caught (as in the comic) and estimating its total length. (I did not consider airports, or my estimate would have been far longer). Mrob27 (talk) 06:17, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Comics with color, red-line subset

As Category:Comics with color doesn't have a currently extant Talk-page to it, mentioning it here (although not sure if this one counts, as much, for my suggestion). Many CwC examples are basically "monochrome with added red" ('corrections' to periodic tables, e.g.) that are distinct from "having lines of various colours" (like multidata plottings), which are in turn distinctive from floodfilled or brushstroked multihue images. A simple(ish) algorithm could autoclassify all images with any non-greyscale pixels in them, but (from a human perspective, which is definitely my kind of perspective!) I think that we could sub-split CwC candidates into something like "(Monochrome) Comics with added red lines", and the rest. Doubtless some are going to be edge-cases (is this one technically a red-line one? Probably, but it's not really the same as a 'correction/annotation' red-lined comic), but such subcategorisation might still be broadly useful. - Just a wild idea, that you could perhaps safely ignore. 172.70.90.117 02:25, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Are there any reliable sources for the OCD interpretation, or merely a collection of anecdotes? If the former, please spell out and wikilink OCD. 172.71.158.119 07:24, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

I have some questions about the Google Maps Directions sustainability and related Google features; please see:

Firstly, has Google published a cost-benefit analysis comparing the sharply increased profits and productivity from work-from-home to the value of coastal region commercial office space holdings and leases? 172.70.214.59 08:49, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Added, except I TLDRed on those six links lol. 162.158.166.185 08:57, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
This looks totally irrelevant to me. Florian F (talk) 09:29, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Did you miss these three?
? 162.158.166.125 09:31, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
No, seriously? You think this comic has to do with google employees working from home?

I deleted the entire OCD interpretation section because I couldn't figure out how to comment it out. 172.71.158.89 10:59, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Usual HTML commenting-out would do it. Put a <!-- before it and a --> after it. (There's no valid 'tag-end' --!>. The special tag as a whole is <!-- COMMENTED CONTENTS HERE -->, though why it isn't <!-- --/> more closely aligned with XML standards for singleton tags I couldn't tell you. ;)
However, I feel you're just missing the fact that this is provably a thing (to various degrees as exquisitely described both here and on external links) and as valid as subject for Randall's parody as stepping only in valid patterns or not even upon the floor at all. But you've made the change, so... 172.69.79.211 21:47, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Glad to see some people have some sense. Florian F (talk) 22:34, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
I put the proper HTML markers to comment out the old OCD section (that the anonymous editor thought was too long?) and restored the citations with a much shorter explanation and two relevant XKCD comics (735 floor and 100 family circus). Mrob27 (talk) 22:39, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
Now you can do the same with the Google Maps Sustainability hypotheses that so far hasn't proven any relevance to the comic. But do I repeat myself? Florian F (talk) 22:34, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
I'm inclined to agree. I'll put the same block-comment tags around that Google Sustainability paragraph. Mrob27 (talk) 22:50, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
r/whoosh

We need a "I don't get it" tag for these strips. We could call it "r/whoosh". (to be fair, I understand the comics, but I don't personally find it neither fascinating, nor interesting, nor funny, nor depicting an interesting fact, nor something I can relate about, and I don't think I'm going to be the only one... YMMV to those who feel differently). Ralfoide (talk) 17:09, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

A thought about the world of this comic

The world created by these locations looks like the world of the original Starcraft's third Terran mission, "Desperate Alliance," the one where you have to survive for thirty minutes. Just a thought.

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