Talk:1335: Now

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 02:36, 27 February 2014 by 173.245.54.56 (talk)
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| custom    = [http://c.xkcd.com/redirect/comic/now]

This doesn't work. Maybe if we added *.xkcd.com/* to the (external) image whitelist or something? 108.162.231.121 07:27, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

A fine suggestion. I'm probably going to shoot for full archival like we did with time, but this is an ample good solution in the meantime. Davidy²²[talk] 07:30, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
Hold on, having wee issues, will resolve soon. Davidy²²[talk] 07:37, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Here is a scaled animation of every image. The full size version was too big for me to upload.

Ti84p (talk) 07:47, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

For Australia and New Zealand, at least, the clock shows local time with summer time factored in. I bet that it undergoes some changes in March and April as various jurisdictions go on or off daylight saving. 108.162.249.224 09:20, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Good point! I added this to the explanation. —TobyBartels (talk) 13:15, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
There's also British Summer Time and all the other national seasonal adjustments(1)... could you perhaps de-specify the "move the list of North American cities and regions for Daylight-Saving Time (which is the same thing as Summer Time)" statement to remove the inadvertent US-centrism? Maybe "...of northern-latitudes cities for Daylight-Saving Time or equivalent Summer Time designation"..? (Definitely could be better phrased than I just put, though.)
(1) Note, they don't even all switch at the same time, necessarily. If Randall is going to change the basic map template (pre-rotation) for any Summer/non-Summer transition, he's probably going to have to do it multiple times each spring/autumn, as various regions jiggle about. 141.101.99.41 13:52, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
Exactly, they don't all switch at the same time. North America isn't mentioned to be US-centric, it's mentioned because the change happens there first. Sure, we could bring up BST and all the rest, but there's no need to make the discussion longer than necessary. (The original wording also was not US-centric, privileging the non-US term "Summer Time" that's used where it's currently being observed, but somebody changed that.) —TobyBartels (talk) 18:14, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
I made that change just to use the same title as the Wikipedia page to which we are linking. I don't feel strongly about it. --BlueMoonlet (talk) 18:46, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

As for the map itself, I think the title text should provide the exact time for the location under the cursor, by doing calculations for the mouseover event and updating the t.t. accordingly. I imagine it is doable for Randall. For accuracy's sake, the Antarctic region could be excluded. 141.101.89.225 12:19, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Or maybe someone'll fancy doing it as a userscript. 141.101.89.225 12:23, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

I made a version that the user can rotate themselves. It only loads a single image. http://c0la.s3.amazonaws.com/xkcd1335.html 173.245.53.182 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The gif image is very good to understand this comic. However it would be very nice if it rotated a little slower. Instead of one turn every ten seconds it could be one every minute. 173.245.50.84 14:37, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

When I look a little off-centre, it always seems that South America is about to catch up with Antarctica, but it never does! —TobyBartels (talk) 18:14, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

He used an Azimuthal equidistant projection?!?!? ;_; Swhouseworth (talk) 16:20, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, should have been equal area! —TobyBartels (talk) 18:14, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Question: If there are 24 Hours in a day, why in the description does it go from hour 0 to hour 21? That's only 22 hours. Where are the other 2 hours? Even if it isn't listed on the comic (I think it's the time zones in the Atlantic between Eastern Brazil and the UK - basically UTC-1hr and UTC-2hr), shouldn't there be spaces in the charts showing those hours? I don't think any of the islands in that region use those time zones (opting instead to use GMT - like Iceland for example), but I think those hours should still be included since they are on the static part of the map. Also, it makes sense to me that the center of the words NOON and MIDNIGHT are edges of segments themselves, making 24 segments in total. Randall just couldn't draw those discrete segments and also easily have the words written for our convenience. --Dangerkeith3000 (talk) 16:46, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Every time zone is used somewhere in international waters (well, every one that's a whole number of hours off of Universal Time), so they certainly should all be included. —TobyBartels (talk) 18:14, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
Added South Georgia as UTC-2 and Cape Verde as UTC-1. According to Wikipedia, coastal Brazil and Greenland are both UTC-2 during the summer, but Brazil just ended summer time last Sunday (Feb. 23), and Greenland won't start until late March. There are approximately no permanently inhabited places that use UTC-2 all year, so I just went with South Georgia because it's historically significant. Fryhole (talk) 20:20, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Randall's continent naming scheme is interesting. The most commonly taught model in the U.S. has seven continents, but the purple continent is Australia rather than Oceania. The name Oceania is common in Spanish-speaking countries, but those places generally have a six-continent model with the Americas merged. Is Randall's model standard anywhere? Fryhole (talk) 20:00, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Kamchatka is probably a reference to 850: https://xkcd.com/850/ 108.162.216.48 20:22, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Hey, I'd just like to note that GIMP "Optimize for GIF" reduced the GIF size to 7.1MiB from current 9.3MiB. If I reduced the colours to 32, which still looked "good enough" in my opinion, the GIF was only 3.5MiB. http://m8y.org/tmp/temp.gif (optimize) http://m8y.org/tmp/temp2.gif (optimize + colour reduction)

It might be worth replacing to improve load times. You might want to make your own since I didn't check frame times or anything, I just ran "index" and "optimize" and then exported 108.162.219.77 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

You are right, but that picture should be less then 1MB. I will do some tests, and if it does work I will talk about this. --Dgbrt (talk) 23:51, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
m'k - well. Using 20 colours and scaling it down 50% resulted in 1.1MiB... http://m8y.org/tmp/temp3.gif
I'm now at the time frame at "Rude to call", but nevertheless the PNG files have to be optimized to a GIF, after that an animated GIF should be much smaller. --Dgbrt (talk) 01:03, 27 February 2014 (UTC)
I'm guessing an indexed APNG could be smaller (due to more efficient compression) than a GIF, but unfortunately I don't thing apngasm is as efficient as GIMP's optimize for gif feature.