Frogger
by Berg
Image Text: I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.
In case you’ve been living under a rock your entire life, Frogger is a classic video game in which you, the frog, are trying to cross a freeway (or a swamp). Your crossing is fraught with danger, so you’ve got to dodge traffic in order to make it across safely. It’s a simple game, and doesn’t deal with the real world consequences of stepping out in front of a truck, as today’s xkcd does.
When the comic starts, everything’s fine. There’s a frog on the side of the freeway, and he’s not bothering anybody. When he hops out to make his crossing, however, the driver of the semi swerves to avoid him, causing the sedan to his right (more on that in a moment) to slam into his cab, causing a pretty severe traffic accident. The frog then retreats back to the side of the freeway, though whether or not he’s fleeing carnage or a guilty conscience is up for debate.
Now then, concerning the truck driver. There’s a large grassy area off to his left, and yet he chooses to swerve to his right, into traffic. Given that we can see the freeway at a resolution fine enough to make out lines on the road and that the frog seemed to have no barrier to hop onto the freeway, we can presume there’s no guard rail preventing the truck driver from swerving left. Even if there was, it would be hard to imagine a scenario in which this truck driver is risking more by going through a guard rail than he is by swerving into traffic. The most plausible explanation is that the grey car was in his blind spot. Our truck driver is in this way redeemed, for rather than making an illogical choice to swerve into traffic when he didn’t need to, he’s made a logical choice to keep his truck on the road by merging into what he thinks is an empty lane. This way, he minimizes damage to his truck and any interruption to traffic flow. Of course, he’s miscalculated, and carnage ensues.
…or does it? The image text adds another layer to the reality here, suggesting that what we’ve been watching isn’t real, but a hyper realistic Frogger game being presented for evaluation. Apparently, the memo to make it “more realistic” was misinterpreted. Konami had wanted better graphics, not a more real simulation of what would happen if a frog jumped out in front of a truck. Of course, that’s not even a real Konami- it’s a fake Konami that exists in the xkcd universe, which is of course a series of scenarios imagined in Randall Munroe’s mind. And even Randall Munroe might not exist as more than a mental illusion, produced by some sort of coordinated data parallax put on the web, but if THAT was the case then he’d be-
You know what? I’m gonna go gargle with Thorazine and call it a night.
Period Speech
by Berg
Image Text: The same people who spend their weekends at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals will whine about the anachronisms in historical movies, but no one else will care.
Ah, language- the great social agreement of symbolic representation which enables someone like me, sitting in Los Angeles to communicate with someone like you, who I presume lives somewhere on the internet (nice place, by the way, but you should put your porn away before you have people over). Today's xkcd is about the inherent slipperiness of language, and how very little of what we say today will sound coherent to a future observer.
Consider English. Modern English is thought to have settled into it's current form (more or less) sometime in the 16th century. Before Modern English, however, were Middle English (mayhap you've heard of the Canterbury Tales?) and Old English (mayhap you've heard of Beowulf?). Middle English is close enough to Modern English that you can almost read it, but Old English is far enough away, linguistically, that it requires some study to be able to read.
The point xkcd is making, then, is that 400 years from now, bits of dialect and slang that to us seem quite disparate ("forsooth" is hundreds of years old, while "grok" entered the lexicon in '61) will seem quite similar to all but the most avid linguistic scholars. After all, if you were presented with 5th century slang and 9th century slang, chances are you wouldn't notice any difference.
Those who would notice the difference are addressed in the image text- they'll be the folks at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals. Those aren't a thing yet, but we can imagine that these would be fringe affairs, attended by only the most devoted of nerds (a term brought into the language by none other than Dr. Seuss in 1950). As such, their opinions as to the accuracy of slang presented in historical movies from the future represent the minority view, even if it is correct.
All The Girls
by Berg
Image text: You know that I'll never leave you. Not as long as she's with someone.
Today's comic is pretty straightforward. A young couple (whom I'll refer to as Cueball and Cutie, just because I like the way that sounds) is in love. In the first panel, Cueball says he's lucky to have Cutie, a perfectly fine thing to say to someone when you're in love. In the second panel, Cueball tells Cutie he loves her most out of all the girls in the world, which is again a perfectly fine thing to say when you're in love. Trouble sets in, however, in the third panel, where Cueball offers his qualifying statement, that he loves Cutie the most of the subset of girls who also love Cueball back.
Now, on it's surface it would appear that Cueball is making a hollow statement, in that the subset of girls who love him back must be smaller than the set of all the girls in the world, and we assume, because we are nerds, that that subset is probably only a few girls in size. I like to be optimistic, though, and presume that Cueball, due to his smooth head and sentimental heart, is loved by nearly all the girls in the world, and so his sentiment is still very sweet.
The image text, however, crushes any optimism one might have in the situation. Written in Cueball's voice, we have another compliment/qualifier pair. Cueball assures Cutie that he'll never leave her- so long as she's with someone. Cueball clearly has an unrequited love for another, and so really is being as shitty as we all thought he was originally. Please forgive my false optimism- I know now what a cold, cruel place the world can be.
...and now, off to Comic-Con I go, where I shall find out what a crowded, stinky place the world can be. I'm learning a lot today!
War
by Berg
Image Text: They offered to make me a green beret, but I liked my regular one. Although it gets kind of squashed under my helmet.
Today's comic seems to be a parable about the perils of love during wartime. Our protagonist is seen here leaning against his pack behind a low wall, surely a good hiding spot for any gentleman with a rifle and scope. Judging by the letter he's in the midst of writing, he has a complex relationship with Cordelia. On the one hand, she's attractive. On the other hand, she's a sniper, as evidenced by the shots fired mid-missive. Cordelia's ire works against her, though, as her volley of shots has revealed her own position atop the maintenance shed. We can presume that in a matter of minutes, this love affair will go sour as the love letter is wrapped around a live grenade and "delivered," so to speak. War is indeed hell.
As to the image text, the green berets are worn only by Special Forces soldiers. It takes a lot of training to become a green beret, and as evidenced by our protagonist's clever use of decoys to outwit a sniper, he may be qualified for the honor. It sounds, however, as he didn't understand the proposition, preferring his regular beret instead. Further evidence for his idiocy is given immediately thereafter, as he confesses that he wears a beret under his helmet.
1996
by Berg
1996
Image Text: College board issues aside, I have fond memories of TI-Basic, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything... but friends. (Although, with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried)
Ok gang- quicker post than is my custom tonight. I'm on the West Coast, it's late, and I need to be up in the morning. At any rate, here goes nothing:
As is well understood by anybody who has even a passing familiarity with the Singularity, there has been a stunning amount of progress in pretty much any measurable dimension of technology in the past 14 years. In today's comic, we laugh at our prior naivete, pointing out that what would be a non-functionally awful computer now was considered state of the art in 1996. Likewise with a Palm Pilot, arguably a precursor to today's omnipresent smartphones. Texas Instrument calculators, however, appear to have been left behind, not having made any significant advances since the newly discovered issues of Computer Shopper were published. Thus, while we groan at how awful our state of the art technologies truly were in 1996, we are reminded that some technologies have remained in relative stasis over the years.
The image text reminds us that when they were new, TI calculators (I had a TI-86, m'self) were relatively powerful tools if you knew how to use them. TI-Basic was a fairly versatile programming language that could be used to make anything from games to reference files to computational programs. If it wasn't for the ability to program a TI calculator to make it look like you didn't have any programs on it, I would have lost my copies of Tetris and Nibbles a dozen times over as my paranoid Chem professor went around deleting programs willy-nilly before tests.
The second half of the image text is a reminder to those of us who felt like Gods for knowing how to program that power comes at a price- in this case, the power to program a calculator costs friends. Since no program yet devised can truly pass a Turing test, even the most sophisticated Chatterbot (programs designed to mimic conversation) can't quite qualify as a friend. Someday, though... someday...
Temper
by Jeff
Image text: Mr. Rogers projected an air of genuine, unwavering, almost saintly pure-hearted decency. But when you look deeper, at the person behind the image ... that's exactly what you find there, too. He's exactly what he appears to be.
Hello neighbors...
Mr. Rogers is awesome!
Green Flash
by Jeff
Image text: The exact cause of the phenomenon is unknown, but it's thought to be linked to atmospheric refraction and you getting a really cool car.
The green flash is an atmospheric optical phenomena in which a small green spot will appear above or around the sun as it sets below the horizon. The green flash occurs because of refraction of different colors of light. Green light is higher frequency than red and orange light and so green light stays visible after the red and orange lights are blocked by the Earth. Wikipedia has a great gallery of examples of the green flash. Personally, I have been looking for the green flash my whole life and have never seen it. The name is slightly a misnomer as it is not really a flash at all, but stays for a few minutes.
The Tesla roadster is a new car from the Tesla Motors. All of the Tesla Motors cars run entirely on electricity. Check out the car here, as it is a pretty sweet little sports car. No wonder the Black Hat Character wants to smash the other character over the head with the bottle he is holding to steal the car.
Dilution
by Berg
Image Text: Dear editors of Homeopathy Monthly: I have two small corrections for your July issue. One, it's spelled "echinacea," and two, homeopathic medicines are no better than placebos and your entire magazine is a sham.
Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine which makes bold claims as to its efficacy without offering any sound science to back it. Although the angles from which one can viably attack homeopathy are as diverse as they are numerous, this particular panel is taking on serial dilution. In a serial dilution, a substance is dissolved in solution. The solution is then divided, and diluted. This dilution is then divided and diluted, and then the dilution of the dilution may be divided and diluted again, and again, and again.
While serial dilution does serve a function in many legitimate procedures, homeopathic remedies prepared using serial dilution are often diluted so much that none of the original substance remains in the final preparation. This point was proven dramatically by noted skeptic James Randi at TED 2007, when he ingested a purportedly lethal dosage of homeopathic sleeping pills on stage. Spoiler alert: James Randi is still alive.
So, back to the comic. The couple in question is preparing a serial dilution of semen and expecting its potency to either remain constant or perhaps increase, resulting in a pregnancy. However, we the ever-so-well-informed xkcd reader know full well that if James Randi isn't dead, then that lovely young woman isn't getting pregnant. If she can't get pregnant, then she can't pass on whatever part of her or her partner's genetic makeup it is that makes them susceptible to a belief in homeopathy. Since the couple's belief in homeopathy is negatively affecting their ability to have offspring, its lowering their fitness (Darwinian fitness, not gym membership fitness). A belief in homeopathy which is so strong that it prevents it's believers from having offspring is therefore an evolutionary dead end, and is not selected for.
This point is underscored by the image text, which is playfully realized in this comic as a letter to the editors of Homeopathy Monthly, a fictional homeopathy magazine which we can imagine is of some import the homeopathic community. The jab against homeopathy is set up with a classic use of the foot-in-the-door technique, opening up with a nitpicky correction about the spelling of "echinacea." Now that the editors of homeopathy are paying attention, the payload is delivered and their passion is called out for being what it is: a complete sham.
One Two
by Berg
Image Text: Cue letters from Anthropology majors complaining that this view of numerolinguistic development perpetuates a widespread myth. They get to write letters like that because when you're not getting a real science degree you have a lot of free time.
First off- in case you breezed past the "by" line, this is Berg, not Jeff. I'm gonna be updating the site periodically whenever Ol' Jeffaroo needs a helping hand. Pleasure to meet you. And now, on to the explanation...
Today's comic shows us a television screen featuring The Count, a Sesame Street character of some renown who's a fan of counting (and probably has some sort of Autistic Spectrum Disorder). He counts, as he is known to do, but runs out of numbers after 2, defaulting then to "Many." The implication, based on the caption, is that The Count is presenting a counting lesson for primitive cultures, who don't have a sophisticated enough system of numbers to express anything larger than 2 specifically.
Based on the 2005 documentary "The World According to Sesame Street," there is reason to believe that if there were a culture who's numeric system was this simple that this is indeed the Sesame Street that was created for them. After all, if Rruga Sesam (Kosovo) can have a bit about how to identify and avoid old landmines, why wouldn't this fictional culture's Sesame Street have a simplified version of The Count?
The image text is fairly self-explanatory, but still worth picking apart- it's a clear dig at Anthropology, and by extension the rest of the so-called "soft sciences." Soft science is a derisive categorization of many social sciences, or fields of study in general who's methodology falls very much under the umbrella of science, but who's areas of study require the use of more subjective conjecturing than objective analysis of data (I'm looking at you, Sociology). Soft sciences, such as Anthropology, are therefore seen by many as less rigorous than hard sciences, such as Physics.
The author is suggesting, then, that the lack of rigor necessary to earn a degree in Anthropology enables its students to pursue less important lines of inquiry- such as "is Xkcd sensitive to stereotypes of primitive cultures?" The answer to which is, of course, NO.
Workaround
by Jeff
Image text: I once worked on a friend's dad's computer. He had the hard drive divided into eight partitions, C: through H:, with a 'Documents' directory tree on each one. Each new file appeared to be saved to a partition at random. I knew enough not to ask.
As long as they are not asking you for help... as far as you know their computer is working perfectly. Ignorance is bliss.