Understocked
by Jeff
Image meta text: My biology grad student friends tell me that different types of alcohol don't actually have different effects. I trust their expertise, not because of the 'biology' part, but because of the 'grad student'.
This comic is a reference to the situation that happened in Cambridge, MA between Harvard professor Henry Gates and a Cambridge police officer. The officer thought that Gates was breaking into a house, but it turned out that Gates was breaking into his own house. Heated words were exchanged and President Obama invited both men to the White House to "have a beer" and talk about the incident.
This comic takes that one step further and asks what if there was no beer in the White House that night and instead just tequilla. Instead of talking about the situation, all the men would end up having a wild night and all end up in jail. Anecdotal evidence points to the fact that tequilla makes someone wilder than just beers. However, the writer's friends say the opposite of what the cartoon presents.
Lease
by Jeff
Image meta tag: You should talk to the girl down the hall; I think you'd like her. Lemme know if you find out why she's ordering all those colored plastic balls.
This cartoon is one of many that addresses the troubles with growing up while staying close to youth.
The meta tag references this xkcd comic in which the character stumbles upon a girl who's apartment is filled with colored play balls like in a ball pit.
Avoidance
by Jeff
Image meta text: Hobby: seeing how many menu selections you can get someone to go through before they realize you're not an automated system and/or hang up.
Someone has to record all the annoying phrasing on all the hold menus and "This call cannot be completed as dialed...". Right?
In this comic, the reason the character cannot reach the woman who gave him the number is that she recognizes his number and utilizes her "voice work for Verizon" to convince him he has the wrong number. She picked up the first time because she did not recognize the number. Sadly, now he will never reach her.
Woodpecker
by Jeff
Image meta text: If you don't have an extension cord I can get that too. Because we're friends! Right?
The main character in this comic gets the woodpecker a power drill for the woodpecker's first birthday. Sounds like the woodpeckers life will be significantly easier with this new present.
Threesome
by Jeff
Image meta text: I wanted us to try finding an approximate numeric solution, but noooo.
For the three body problem, it is a math and astronomy problem about the gravity interaction between 3 different "bodies". Scholarpedia has this about the problem. "The [three body] problem is to determine the possible motions of three point masses m_1, m_2, and m_3, which attract each other according to Newton's law of inverse squares. ... While the two-body problem is integrable and its solutions completely understood, solutions of the three-body problem may be of an arbitrary complexity and are very far from being completely understood."
And obviously, with a threesome, there is literally three bodies. The comic is making a pun on that.
Estimation
by Jeff
Image meta tag: They could say "the connection is probably lost," but it's more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.
This comic is a hilarious reference to the inaccuracy of Windows to judge how long it will take to complete a task. It will vault from one extreme to another until it finally tells you that there is "less than a minute remaining" for about 20 minutes.
Disaster Voyeurism
by Jeff
Image meta text: Hurricane forums are full of excited comments about central pressure and wind speed and comparisons to Camille and 1931 and 1938, with hastily-tacked-on notes about how it will be tragic if anyone dies and they hope it's a dud.
This comic has "Black Hat" reappear with a monologue about the things he enjoys to do. There certainly is quite a bit of "rubbernecking" when a hurricane occurs. Weather Channel certainly has its highest ratings of the year.
Sheeple
by Jeff
Image meta text: Hey, what are the odds -- five Ayn Rand fans on the same train! Must be going to a convention.
Ayn Rand was a Russian-born American novelist and activist whose most famous books include, Atlas Shrugged, Anthem and The Fountainhead. She was philosophical pro-individual and anti-collectivism.
The word "sheeple" is to refer to people who blindly follow direction without thinking for themselves. It is mainly used in the phrase "Wake up Sheeple!", in reference to people who are accepting the party line.
Sheeple coordinates with Ayn Rand's novel, Anthem, set in the distant future in which the word "I" has been abolished and the "evils" of the communal values have created a new dark age.
2038
by Jeff
Image text: If only we'd chosen 1944-12-02 08:45:52 as the Unix epoch, we could've combined two doomsday scenarios into one and added a really boring scene to that Roland Emmerich movie.
This comic is explained by Ricardo. My name is Ricardo Almeida, I'm a systems analyst from Brazil and a big fan of xkcd, Star Trek (my online persona is Worf), and all things related to science and sci-fi.
if you want to link somewhere here's my Facebook profile page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1181078057&v=info
In this comic Randal makes fun of the "Y2K bug" craze and the UNIX 32-bit clock. The UNIX clock "runs out" at exactly 03:14:08 UTC on 19 Jan 2038, with the same potential for "disaster" as the "Y2K bug". As UNIX system engineers are switching to a 64-bit clock, this problem will be averted before it becomes an issue.
In the alt text he makes fun of the prophets of the apocalypse that predict the world ending in 21 Dec 2012 and suggests that if we had chosen 08:45:52 UTC on 02 Dec 1944 as the UNIX epoch (or start time) we could have combined these two apocalyptic scenarios into one, and added a boring scene to the 2009 "2012" movie.
Randal actually made a mistake in his calculations in this one. His epoch time puts the end of the UNIX clock at 12:00:00 UTC on 20 Dec 2012 (midday), a full 12 hours before the December 21. The correct epoch should be 20:45:52 UTC on 02 Dec 1944.
Extrapolating
by Jeff
Image meta text: By the third trimester, there will be hundreds of babies inside you.
The math in this comic is extrapolating that if in the period of a day to go from 0 to 1, that means that the next day you should go from 1 to 2 and so on. Extrapolating is usually used on graphs with more data points than 1!
The same can be said for the meta text. O to 1 baby, then 1 to 2 babies and so on.