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...
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.