Editing Talk:821: Five-Minute Comics: Part 3

Regarding Lucy, Peter, et al, the four children in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe...  They're not ''foster'' children (except in the broadest possible parallel), but ''Evacuees''.  A huge number of children from many of the major cities of the UK were packed off in WW2 to be temporarily housed in more rural places, to escape The Blitz.  (Many more, but a minor fraction, had been packed off to British Overseas Territories, and other friendly territories...  Some part of this overseas cohort were children of richer parents who could afford to send their kids on 'holiday' well out of harm's way when things looked like they may get "a bit sticky", quite a lot of the rest were mostly orphans and the like, possibly ''including'' children currently in provisional foster-care, with few links to real family to keep them in the UK who were basically herded off to The Colonies, e.g. Australia, Canada...)  From personal reading of the Narnia books I'd definitely say that the children (and their contemporaries) are upper-middle class at worst (not inner-city ne'er-do-wells...  the classic quote apparently being of a city teacher saying as how his kids had left him for Evacuation saying "We is...", but returned after the general threat had lessened saying the rural variation of "Us be..."...  The Pevensies, Eustace Scrub and Jill Pole were definitely of a higher-class than these stereotypes, although Prof. Kirke, in his youth and Polly Plummer sound at least ''financially'' lower in class... yet above the status King Frank the First had, whilst still a hansom-cab driver in our world), and there's most definitely living parents in the picture (see The Last Battle for how things ''stood'').  And it just occurs to me that a family of four kids, in fact, would have been dreadfully lucky to have been either fostered ''or'' Evacuated to to the same place...  Good job Prof. Diggory was there with space for them, eh? ;) ...Anyhow, just saying.  Don't even know if it's worth changing this one word in the explanation, but FYI. [[Special:Contributions/31.110.91.76|31.110.91.76]] 00:01, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

A further note on the Narnia panel:
At an earlier point in xkcd (#665), a woman (who appears to be Megan) discovers the wardrobe and begins conducting experiments. So Randall could be refering to her, and not the original children of the story, thus making some of these points arbitrary. On the other hand, in neither drawing are the subjects clearly identified, though the presence of computing would indicate a later time period than WWII.  [[Special:Contributions/75.101.102.252|75.101.102.252]] 09:58, 5 May 2013 (UTC)


And a final one on Narnia: SETI is looking for signs of extraterrestrial life.  Doing your computation in a whole other world full of non-human sentients is...ironic, to say the least. [[Special:Contributions/209.6.194.68|209.6.194.68]] 21:18, 7 May 2013 (UTC)


I think the centrifuge panel could also be a reference to sperm washing or sperm washing for gender selection, which are used in methods like IVF to select certain sperm for insemination. {{unsigned|213.203.138.251}}
:I think it's just a silly reference to centrifuges, not a reference to a specific centrifuge based procedure. -Pennpenn [[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.162|108.162.250.162]] 06:43, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

I don't know what languages Randal speaks but would it be coincidence that the wolf asks "What is this shit?" while referring to strontium while stront is a Dutch word for shit? [[User:Tharkon|Tharkon]] ([[User talk:Tharkon|talk]]) 00:57, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

: That's really interesting and needs to be said in the explanation, although it looks more like "SHTT". {{unsigned ip|198.41.238.16}}

::Added that. [[User:Herobrine|Herobrine]] ([[User talk:Herobrine|talk]]) 13:19, 26 April 2018 (UTC)


No.6 - I didn't see the integral sign at first, so I thought the text was referring to <i>dis</i>-integrate, as the US military is notorious for dropping bombs on schools! [[User:The Cat Lady|-- The Cat Lady]] ([[User talk:The Cat Lady|talk]]) 15:36, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

Another problem with the Narnia fast time thing: whoever the computer-owner is (I like the Megan theory above in the comments), she'd have to have something much faster than a direct backbone connection to download all those work units and upload all those results in an hour. 19:53, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

In 2022 entire catalog of Folding@HOME was actually solved in few hours although the company responsible for it claims they used artificial intelligence to achive this. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.87.61|162.158.87.61]] 15:21, 31 January 2023 (UTC)