explain xkcd:Museum
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| Inverted Catenaries |
 Title text: Some tires are marketed as 'all-shape tires,' but if driven in a climate with both inverted catenary falls and triangle falls, they wear out really fast. |
Explanation
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This is incomplete: This page was created BY A TRAPEZOIDAL WHEEL. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
During the winter, in snowy areas, people need to replace their typical, all-season tires with snow tires made specifically for the slick environment. In this comic, instead of snow, rounded shapes called inverted catenary curves fall from the skies. On a plane covered in inverted catenaries all the same size, square wheels whose side length matches the arc length of the catenary are capable of rolling smoothly, contrary to how they would act on a normal road. Regular wheels would cause a significantly bumpier ride on this terrain, so Cueball plans to swap them out with square wheels to better suit the season.
Mathematicians have found what types of roads would suit weird wheels the most, and inverted catenary curves are best suited for a square wheel. People have made real tracks demonstrating this.
Note however, this assumes the catenaries are arranged periodically with no spacing between them, fully cover the surface, and are consistent in shape and orientation. The orientation also would restrict the direction of travel, effectively meaning your vehicle would be travelling on rails. Changes in direction could be managed using catenaries whose arc length was consistent but whose segment length varied, with the variations in vertical size being accommodated by vehicles' suspension systems, but letting the direction changes be controlled by drivers (e.g. branching roads) would require complex 3D road surface shapes.
The title text mentions all-shape tires (as a play on all-terrain tire), which is advertised to supposedly fit any shape road. However, different shapes would require very different wheels; for example, falling triangles would form a sawtooth road, for which one would optimally require wheels pasted together from pieces of an equiangular spiral. Any hypothetical all-shape wheel would wear out very quickly on most surfaces.
Transcript
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This is one of 27 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
- [Megan and Cueball are walking together as inverted catenary curves fall from the sky. A few have landed in a regular formation, all flat-side down and evenly spaced, with some touching each other.]
- Cueball: Oh wow, the first inverted catenary fall of the year!
- Cueball: Time to swap out my all-season tires for square ones.
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Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
pixels-assembly-3.png
how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. βWhile False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!
- (Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
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