Talk:1669: Planespotting

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 17:46, 18 April 2016 by 141.101.80.72 (talk) (Suggested the browser "user agent" explanation.)
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How would one even pronounce "Mk. IVII"? IV is 4, VII is 7. I could see an argument for treating it as a really bizarre way to say 6. Or, if we treat it as two distinct digits (as opposed to a two-digit number), it could be either "1-7" or "4-2".

"Usage in ancient Rome varied greatly and remained inconsistent in medieval and modern times." But AFAIK each numeral only stood for a fixed amount, never for a "digit" (in the sense that its value could specify ones or tens depending on its position). So six ((5 - 1) + 1 + 1) is a plausible interpretation, though definitely not standard; but 17 or 42 would be treating Roman numerals as if they were Arabic. Huttarl (talk) 16:03, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I think that's actually MI, or 1001. 162.158.214.222 16:12, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I assume there are other parts of this that are similarly nonsensical to people who know what Cueball thinks he's talking about. 108.162.221.32 14:43, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

When I first read the comic before the explanation I was assuming Cueball was roughly, and poorly, describing a Bombardier DHC-8. It is also known as a Q400 and is a twin-engine turboprop. The silhouette looks vaguely like it.R0hrshach (talk) 15:56, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
Wholeheartedly agreed on it being a DHC-8 version, which could be a Q400. The engine nacelles appear to extend behind the wing (unlike an ATR42/72 or Do328), and the T-tail eliminates a lot of other regional prop possibilities. It also ties in with Cueball calling it a "Q404". 108.162.237.170 17:07, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

There are so many things wrong about this comic. .42 (talk) 14:53, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Maybe I'm totally off base, but this reminds me of something called "Vaynespotting". In League of Legends, there's a character named Shauna Vayne. She has an extremely high skill-ceiling and skill-floor. Vaynespotting is a minigame where other players receive imaginary points for calling out a bad Vayne player when that player makes aggressive maneuvers, but doesn't have the skill to pull it off. Thefance (talk) 15:38, 18 April 2016 (UTC)


Is that black hat or white hat? 108.162.221.65 15:10, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Probably White Hat, but it is impossible to say. Have corrected explanation Kynde (talk) 16:11, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Fixed the title text explanation regarding the hydroelectric plant. The water going over the dam still falls down (reservoir -> dam -> out of the plane?), but lifting the water in the plane would take more energy than the plant would produce.108.162.237.170 17:02, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

To me this comic looks like a clear reference to the "user agent" property of a browser notorious for being long, nonsensical and bearing little relationship to the version and the type of browser the client actually uses. E.g. In my Chromium this value is: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/49.0.2623.108 Chrome/49.0.2623.108 Safari/537.36. 141.101.80.72 17:46, 18 April 2016 (UTC)