Editing 2803: Geohydrotypography

{{comic
| number    = 2803
| date      = July 17, 2023
| title     = Geohydrotypography
| image     = geohydrotypography_2x.png
| imagesize = 339x389px
| noexpand  = true
| titletext = The Atlantic is expanding at about 10 ppm (points per month).
}}

==Explanation==
This comic is another entry in the "[[:Category:My_Hobby|My Hobby]]" series of comics.

{{w|Plate tectonics}} is the understanding that the Earth's lithosphere is divided up into separate 'plates', which carry the continents and (in the case of the Atlantic) are slowly moving apart under geological action that mostly drives the respective coastlines away from the deep center of the ocean. Here, Randall explains that if the surface of the Atlantic Ocean were covered in a certain size of printed text (as if its surface were a giant sheet of printed paper, which it is not{{citation needed}}), the shifting of the continents would increase the amount of text by about 100 words per second.

[[Randall]] says that his hobby is geohydrotypography, which is a compound of 'geo' (from the Greek for earth), 'hydro' (water), 'typo' (type, as in printing) and 'graphy' (a descriptive science) - in other words, the arrangement of letters, words and symbols on the water surfaces of the earth. He may mean that he enjoys studying such arrangements, and/or that he likes arranging such text himself.

The title text is a pun on "ppm," which is generally understood to mean "parts per million" (a dimensionless unit of concentration). Here, it instead describes the rate of the ocean's expansion, about 40 millimeters per year, in "points per month." A point in typography is 1/72 of an inch, or 127/360 =~ 0.3528 millimeters. The expansion sideways would steadily allow more characters on the first line (and thus intermittently more words, 'unwrapping' the first word seen on the next line) and cascading this effect onto every subsequent line spread out vertically along the roughly 13,000km (depending upon your choice of limits) North/South 'height' of the writing medium.

The initialism PPM has {{w|PPM|many possible interpretations}} other than the fanciful "points per month". Two interpretations that would be relevant to the situation in the comic would be "parts per million" which can refer to the amount of a substance dissolved in water such as the oceans, and "pages per minute" which refers to the speed of printers.

The exact calculation needs various assumptions. Font families of a given well-defined vertical size/separation can each exhibit varying general widths of character, and be subject to various possible degrees of [[kerning]], depending upon what precise choice of text is made (unless using a strictly a fixed-width font). The spacing between successive lines would need to be chosen. The word that does (or does not) have to be wrapped at the first line-break can affect which groups of words may (or may not) need to wrap on subsequent lines, in a cascading effect that can create almost chaotic changes from just a single reassessment. However, the {{w|law of large numbers}} would likely minimize the effect of this variability, such that an estimate from known averages would yield a result with a very small amount of relative error. It is not known which (ballpark) number Randall assigned as the current word count as of posting the comic.

The exact extent of the Atlantic Ocean can also be differently interpreted: where it meets the Southern and Arctic oceans, whether to include bordering 'seas' such as the Gulf of Mexico and Mediterranean and Caribbean Seas, what to do where the 'text' may have to cross/break-across islands (e.g., the Bahamas, Azores, etc., some of these being treated as Atlantic boundaries with the comic's relatively much larger size of "ocean text"), possibly even whether to track the precise tidal inundations at the coastlines at any particular moment, which would make the resulting word count per second probably fluctuate with the tides (unless high-/low-/median watermarks were actually chosen as standard). All these factors, and more, make it difficult to precisely define the total number of characters (and thus words) that would fit, though the annual increase in the approximate area of the ocean could allow us to assume some approximately greater number of characters (based upon an approximation of their average page-area requirements) which could be divided by the approximate number needed for a general corpus of words (and its spacing) to determine the approximate additional text that could now be added for any given span of time. Knowing Randall, he has used the best approximations that he could find and determined that the possible cumulative errors were not unacceptable.

Relying on the lost nursery rhyme "44.1 million square miles the Atlantic ocean is", and confirming on Wikipedia, about 5 trillion characters would fit. Assuming 1 byte per character, that's the amount of RAM on just 2 Summit supercomputers, the fastest supercomputer as of 7/2023. Quick testing on a modern laptop shows that Chrome takes about 0.1 second to add 1 character to a DIV element per million characters already there. For example: if a paragraph is already 50 million characters long, adding one character takes 5 second. To keep up with the 100 words per second at a barely acceptable 24 frames per second, the laptop would need to be 10 billion times faster - not that difficult, if humanity would dedicate one laptop per human for this task, and the complexity of this amount of parallel processing was solved. On the other hand, only 50,000 Summits would be needed. Please keep in mind these are very approximate numbers, as Chrome is always getting better, and there are many possible optimizations, including perhaps a new company would compete with Google rendering ocean-size paragraphs.

Note that the text as it appears on the globe in the comic is not 12 point, but instead is close to 1.5 billion point.

==Transcript==
:[A depiction primarily of the Atlantic Ocean and the surrounding landmasses. The land is black, leaving the oceans and seas white except for the following words written in sixteen lines of text (from just below the tip of Greenland/Arctic Ocean down to slightly above the Falkland Islands/Southern Ocean) that are, for the most part, wrapped between the Atlantic coastline 'margins' (as defined by the Americas on the left and Europe/Africa on the right, or significant island groups:]

:If you 
:covered 
:the surface of 
:the Atlantic Ocean 
:with twelve-point 
:printed text, 
:with the lines 
:wrapping at 
:the coasts, the 
:expansion of 
:the ocean basin 
:due to plate 
:tectonics would 
:increase your word 
:count by about 100 
:words per second.

:[Caption below the panel:]
:My Hobby: Geohydrotypography

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:My Hobby]]
[[Category:Maps]]
[[Category:Geology]]
[[Category:Language]]