Editing Talk:2741: Wish Interpretation

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To all you people reading the discussion, why can't I add my own person page? I mean, is a year too new? I think I know, [[User:No Idea If There&#39;s A Character Limit LMAO|(but I&#39;m not completely sure.)]] ([[User talk:No Idea If There&#39;s A Character Limit LMAO|talk]]) 23:29, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
:Oh, you have to have an old enough account to make one? I had been wondering how to. [[User:Thexkcdnerd|Thexkcdnerd]] ([[User talk:Thexkcdnerd|talk]]) 00:02, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
::To "No Idea If There's A Character Limit LMAO": I have granted your wish, hope that will teach you a valuable lesson. If the Thexkcdnerd or any one else need the same favor just write me a message on my page --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 08:06, 24 February 2023 (UTC). 
:::He already [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/User_talk:No_Idea_If_There%27s_A_Character_Limit_LMAO had one] with several comments in it already, not sure how there's two now??? And personally, I never looked into how to make a Talk page, didn't have one for years until someone made mine a couple of months ago. :) [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 05:25, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Ironically, a banknote created by a genie would be counterfeit, although the odds of legal trouble over $20 are nonetheless low.  23:43, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
:It doesn't have to be. The genie could take one away from someone, or just get one that's been lost. Also, the sentence for counterfeiting is the same regardless of the denomination. [[User:SDSpivey|SDSpivey]] ([[User talk:SDSpivey|talk]]) 00:31, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
:The sentence for counterfeiting may be the same but the probability someone would actually go through the trouble of prosecuting you for $20 is much less than say $10,000 [[Special:Contributions/172.70.214.151|172.70.214.151]] 03:04, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
::The US Treasury Dept. prosecutes every case it can prove. [[User:SDSpivey|SDSpivey]] ([[User talk:SDSpivey|talk]]) 04:06, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
:::So 2 things: First of all they need to prove it. For that someone has to notice. Not every 20-Dollar-note will be scanned, and I guess the genie could make a pretty good copy (if he needs to copy it). Also noone said US-Dollar. The Genie could make a twist and use one of over 20 other currencies called dollar. Not sure if US Treasury Dept. would be interested in that :D by the way, the eastern caribean dollar has the short "XCD" - does anyone think that a thousand of those would be labeled XkCD? --[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 13:13, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
::::Or he could use Monopoly money. Or Geniedollars. He never said it would be legal tender, after all.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.86.148|172.70.86.148]] 14:42, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
:::::For me, Monopoly Money has always been in £s (the board I always used going from Old Kent Road to Mayfair, naturally), though I've noticed that online (hyperinternational) representations, that I see in game-ads, now seem to use a special "barred-M" currency symbol (to copy how £, €, ¥ and $ are variously barred versions of L, E, Y and S).
:::::What Cueball-genie would use is an interesting phosophical question. I suspect he just gets whatever he needs (for personal use) out of petty cash and settles it up later. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.152|172.70.91.152]] 15:47, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
::Yes, I've read some story where a wish-granting entity generated money by re-printing money lost in some catastrophe (like, burned down, sunk in ship or something). Technically, such banknote is counterfeit, but it's impossible to prove it. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 00:58, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
:::A all powerful genie could make a 20 dollar bill that is now valid without taking it from anyone. Just making a new one and changing reality so it is one of the "real" bills. Also after all the trouble with Black Hat and the Genie offering the bill I'm sure it is valid. Suggesting he has his own money it ridiculous. What should he use those for? I'm sure it is a perfectly valid 20 dollar bill. And the discussion above is irrelevant for such a powerful genie. ;-) --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 08:18, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
::::What would he have it for? For buying his frappegenieos, obviously.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.56|172.70.85.56]] 09:08, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

That's cool. Try https://what-if.xkcd.com/23/. Part 1. I need a new signature. [[User:No Idea If There&#39;s A Character Limit LMAO|(but I&#39;m not completely sure.)]] ([[User talk:No Idea If There&#39;s A Character Limit LMAO|talk]]) 23:46, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I would (as the genie) just teleport Black Hat to the desert. No other trickery or devastation needed. [[User:SDSpivey|SDSpivey]] ([[User talk:SDSpivey|talk]]) 00:34, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

The oldest "Wish that I wish I didn't wish" I am personally aware of is Midas turning everything he touched into gold, including the food he tried to eat and his beloved daughter. Personally, I'd wish that the genie teach me a lesson. [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 03:16, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
: Another such example from Greek mythology is that the goddess Eos married a mortal man called Tithonus, and asked Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life. Unfortunately, she asked for eternal '''life''' rather than eternal '''youth''', so Tithonus aged at the normal rate with predictably unfortunate results. (This one is important to bear in mind if a genie or god grants you a wish, and you're tempted to try for immortality...) [[User:Zoid42|Zoid42]] ([[User talk:Zoid42|talk]]) 15:16, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

It's kinda funny how a citation is needed for claiming that wishing rain doesn't exist is bad because Randall will just cover it in "What If 3" 20:59, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
:He already replaced the rain with candy in What If 2. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.129.151|162.158.129.151]] 07:28, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
::Citation needed is used way too much{{citation needed}} and we are already two that have removed two of those from the explanation. It is rarely funny{{citation needed}} and should really only be used when a citation is needed{{citation needed}}. ;-) --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 08:18, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

The proper way of teaching Black Hat a lesson would be twisting his wish to make it beneficial to humanity. [[User:Tkopec|Tkopec]] ([[User talk:Tkopec|talk]]) 08:20, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

"And I want you to put it in my house." / [POOF!] - "Here, I turned your house into a Klein bottle."
[[Special:Contributions/172.71.160.39|172.71.160.39]] 08:25, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
:That would better satisfy "And I want my house to contain it", from one single-step literalist perspective... Wishes-gone-strange ''usually'' work on the basis of the 'laziest' misinterpretation (with or without the intention of mallice) that doesn't require too much reinterpretation.
:But how to misinterpret "put it in my house"? Hmmm... Nothing to suggest that it must stay there. Perhaps everything is going to be squeezed in through the front door and (Niagra Straw-like) eventually pushes most out of the back door. The house structure (but not fixtures and fittings) magically strengthened to continue being houselike, even as whatever the back yard is like (before it gets its own turn of being sequentially transported through) fills up with mountains (literally!) of the resulting wreckage/mishmash.
:But not sure if the house itself is not already "in the house", i.e. its structure, to be exempt by prior "in"ness (if not ownership)... I'm not a genie, and have not gone through the rather extensive training/job-orientation that they clearly go through. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.34|172.70.90.34]] 14:56, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
::Wouldn't the simplest thing be to just turn the house inside-out?[[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.151|172.70.91.151]] 16:48, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
:::"I've turned your house inside-out, and we redefine 'inside' and 'outside'.  Everything, including the house itself, is within the 'outside' surface of the house."  Except the small amount of air 'outside', of course.  See also the "Asylum" in Douglas Adams's ''So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish''. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 16:55, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
::::This idea has already been used by Randall in [[2403: Wrapping Paper]] --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 08:20, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

I had a good laugh when I saw [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2741:_Wish_Interpretation&diff=prev&oldid=306692 one of these 'corrections']. US English mandates "fulfill", where the UK/etc English version is "fulfil", yet it also goes the other way and uses words like "reveler" where most (all?) other versions of English would prefer "reveller".
<br />And would hope that, whenever words get USified, the editor involved realises (or "realizes", yet surprisingly not ever "realizez"!) that they aren't actually correcting typos (like they sometimes comment), merely relocalising the wordz.. sorry.. ''words''! :P [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.65|172.71.178.65]] 15:21, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
:...--[[User:JLZ0kTC5|JLZ0kTC5]] ([[User talk:JLZ0kTC5|talk]]) 01:02, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

In https://xkcd.com/1086/, it's shown that Black Hat gained the ability to wish on his eyelashes via wish; and if his wish on February 6th is anything to go by it's likely that whichever entity granted that wish deliberately misinterprets wishes in much the same way as this genie wants to. Should this be mentioned in the explanation? --[[User:A Stingray|A Stingray]] ([[User talk:A Stingray|talk]]) 19:47, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

Curious - if you put all the objects of the world's surface into Black Hat's house, would that be a neutron star, or would it get to a micro black hole? {{unsigned ip|172.70.85.56|19:49, 23 February 2023}}
:The Schwarzschild radius of the whole Earth is less than 1cm, so we can say for sure that an accumulation of 'just' all things upon its surface into a volume the size of any house would be far short of gravitational collapse into a singularity.  
:I don't offhand know how much stuff there actually will be, thoug. We could start by extrapolating from [https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/science-and-health/2018/5/29/17386112/all-life-on-earth-chart-weight-plants-animals-pnas something like this] to work out how dense a packing you'd need in any given volume of house.
:Likely still not anywhere near neutronium level, I'm guessing, because a tablespoon of neutron star apparently is the mass of Mt Everest, and you could fit a lot of tablespoons (or pour a lot of tablespoons'-worth of stuff into, though the distinction itself hardly matters) into even the smallest "bedsit" living space. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.86.128|172.70.86.128]] 21:01, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
:an Earth-mass neutron star wold be 305m in diameter (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star#Density_and_pressure).  If you compress that down to the size of a typcal house, it would collapse into a black hole (question 3 here: https://www.astro.umd.edu/~miller/teaching/questions/neutron.html therefor if you have a house-size neutron star and add enough mass to make an earth-mass neutron star, it would collapse to a black hole).  Ergo, if you have earth-mass matter in the space of a house, it would immediately become a singularity, and collapse down to the size of a coin.  however, there is also another possibility, depending on how the genie adds the mass to the house.  If the genie simple adds matter to the house, if slow enough it would start to undergo fusion and radiate the energy away.  Third possibility. There is no known process to get neutronium except in supernovae, so we have to assume the genie will simply start with a house-sized amount of neutronium, and added mass. This would quickly form a VERY SMALL black hole.  Adding mass from here would put the material in the BH's accretion disk; some would fall in, some would stay in the disk, and some would radiate away. - Weylin Piegorsch [[Special:Contributions/172.70.34.186|172.70.34.186]] 03:22, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
::Everything in the world could mean the entire universe too. And even if just the Earth, what then about Earth it self? If threes are things then what about rocks? If rocks are things then what about molten rocks? And if that's a thing then the entire Earth should be in the house. Still it would not become a black hole. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 08:18, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
:::If it's everything in the XKCD world, then it's all 2-dimensional, so would have no mass. The genie could just colour in Black Hat's house solid black (the blackest black there is) and erase everything else XKCD from existence, including Black Hat himself. And the genie. Of course, that would meet essentially the same problem as the 'never rain' scenario.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.101|172.70.90.101]] 09:17, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
:::Ooh I like previous answer :)  But to "not a black hole" - an Earth-mass neutron star (assuming you can make one) would be 300m in diameter.  That's bigger than a typical house.  I suppose you could consider "House of God", which means Genie could get away with making no changes at all, or Buckingham Palace, which might just be big enough to fit that neutron star.  Otherwise, to get the neutron star down to the size of a house, once you get it *just a little* smaller than 300m it near-instantly collapses to a Black Hole.  So a Earth-mass black hole is far smaller than a house, but there is no possible Earth-mass thing the size of a house, excpet perhaps the accretion disk around a near-Earth mass black hole. -Weylin Piegorsch [[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.167|162.158.78.167]] 17:22, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
::::For everything ''in'' the world, I would not expect to count the entire world (or universe!) itself. ''Maybe'' whole mountains (or significant volumes of water, or swathes of atmosphere) as it encompasses "things of importance" within (unexcavated diamonds, all the fish, every in-flight airplane?), but not significant amounts of lithosphere (on top of the pedosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere). So we're nowhere near an Earth-mass, by my estimation. But IANAGenie, so I haven't been shown the SOP or manual that covers such interpretations...  [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.137|172.71.178.137]] 19:25, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
:::::For everything ''in'' the world, and assuming that the genie isn't trying hard to twist things to a harmless interpretation, I'd expect everything from the lithosphere down. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 22:44, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
:::::: I'm actually good with the above two rebuttals.  I personally would advocate for an interpretation of "in the world" to include supra-surface features, though where you draw that line (stratosphere? ionosphere? magnetosphere? Hill sphere minus moon's Hill sphere?) would be open to debate.  However, I think that might be an interesting debate for another forum.  In the context of interpreting this comic, "in" == lithosphere-only vs "in" = lithosphere-on-down vs "in" = lithosphere-on-down plus some amount of atmosphere/magnetosphere/Hill sphere I think would all be valid interpretations.  it's likely that lithosphere-on-down plus any definition of atmosphere that excludes the moon is probably fairly close in mass (though I didn't research that). For anything the includes the entire mass of Earth, it's likely a black hole would eventually form (though there are outlier cases where it may simply result in a fusion-based radiation explosion).  For lithosphere only, if we take the lower value from here https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-total-mass-of-the-Earths-crust and then convert that to neutron-star size here... well actually I couldn't find an easy reference to figure that out (likely because it's a VERY obscure question).  But if we take Earth mass of 6×10^24 kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass), and ratio it, lithosphere is 2.4x10^22 / 6x10^24 = 4x10^-3 earth masses.  Assuming a neutron star has uniform density for all masses (not a valid assumption but lithosphere-mass neutron stars can't be created by non-genie means, so whatever), we can then ratio the volumes of the resulting neutronium spheres.  Earth-mass neutron star is 300m radius, V = pi*R^2 therefor V(E)/V(l) = pi*(300m)^2 / pi*R(l)^2, or the radius of a lithosphere-size neutron star is R(l) = 300m*sqrt(V(l)/V(E)).  Since we're assuming ratios, V(l)/V(E) = 1/4*10^-3 = 250, which results in the radius of a lithosphere-size neutron star of 300m/sqrt(250) = 19m radius, or 38m diameter.  At that point, it really depends on the size of Black Hat's house - 38m is within reasonable width of a house.  Er... a rather large house, but still reasonable size.  To be fair, this is the radius of a resultant neutron star, and a 38m-wide house is much more box-ish than spherical, so it would likely still need to get squished to fit that size house, where that "squishing" would still force it to collapse into a BH.  However, since were talking genie magic - if we consider the largest houses, they may (I don't know, I'll assume) have a volume comparable to sphere of 19m radius, and therefor the genie's magic would be able to contain it within the boundaries of the house.  So to summarize: given what is in the comic, and reasonable interpretations, there may be a fusion-radiation explosion; or a very weird neutron star; or a BH; or a BH with accretion disk radiating like crazy; and all of these may be sitting either the void of space or atop a lithosphere-less Mantle (and I'm too tired to think through THAT ramification), and any of these may or may not be sitting inside some kind of atmosphere.  Since all of those possibilities are reasonable, therefor it is ambiguous and unanswerable exactly what would happen, given the limited data in the comic.  Regardless, one things is certain: NONE of these are happy outcomes. At least the Moon likely would be fine.  I hope.  Maybe I should book the next ULA launch, with some building materials.... - Weylin Piegorsch [[Special:Contributions/172.70.174.43|172.70.174.43]] 01:57, 25 February 2023 (UTC) ***UPDATED*** to correct volume formula (had previously used area formula), and anyway I had the math wrong: V = (4/3)pi*r^3 -> if we cancel the (4/3)pi, V(E)/V(l) =  r(E)^3/r(l)^3 -> r(l) = ((V(l)/V(E))*r(E)^3)^(1/3) = (250*305)^(1/3) = 42m radius of lithosphere-mass neutronium sphere.  That's a bit big for any house, but the biggest houses in the world (https://www.magicbricks.com/blog/biggest-house-in-the-world/122852.html) have enough volume for it, assuming genie magic can constrain it to an appropriate shape, and assuming genie magic can add additional pressure to overcome the unsuitably-low gravity to overcome electron degeneracy pressure threatening to make it explode.  Therefor, corrected math, but ultimatey the same results. - Weylin Piegorsch [[Special:Contributions/172.71.223.26|172.71.223.26]] 21:28, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
:::::::Given the secondary specification of all the "people, money, trees...", I'm more inclined to believe that the interpretation of "in" has by that point been defined as (a possibly further objective subset of) the range of soil-to-stratosphere... [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.173|172.71.242.173]] 06:01, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

At least it's not the lamp out of [[879: Lamp]]. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.184|172.69.79.184]] 12:39, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Reminds me of an XFiles episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_Souhaite

"This is likely a reference to Roald Dahl's 'The Umbrella Man', a short story about a man who scams people by getting them to buy his stolen umbrellas for £20."  I highly doubt that.  In the Roald Dahl story, the man sells his stolen umbrellas for one pound, not twenty, and the genie isn't buying Black Hat's umbrella.  There seems to be no connection.  I think that claim should be removed from the page.  [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.84|172.70.130.84]] 19:39, 7 March 2023 (UTC)