November
by Jeff
Image text: November marks the birthday of Charles Schulz, pioneer of tongue awareness.
This comic is an homage to Charles Schulz the creator of the comic Peanuts, who was born on November 26, 1922. Here's the comic in question by Schulz with Black Hat playing the Linus role, in a way and Cueball, the Lucy role. In both comics, when you start thinking about your tongue, you can't stop thinking about it. Similar in the way that if you start thinking about your breathing, you stop breathing unless you consciously think to breathe.
(ed note: And now I can't stop thinking about my tongue and have to think to breathe...)
This link also indicates that Schulz's comic is not completely about tongue awareness, instead has deeper meaning about one's existence in the world.
Caroling
by Jeff
Image text: For a thousand generations we vowed never to forget how his soldiers feasted on our brother Stephen.
Here are the lyrics for the first part of the Christmas Carol, "Good King Wenceslas"
Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even;
Brightly shone the moon that night, tho' the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight, gath'ring winter fuel.
First and foremost, Wenceslas was not a king, but merely a duke. The "kingship" was given to him ceremonially after his death. Secondly, the Wenceslas that the carol is about did not massacre any people and I'm sure that this is Black Hat merely playing a prank on unsuspecting innocent carolers. (As an aside, does anyone "carol" at random people's houses anymore? Seems like an antiquated notion. Plus, who wants people singing loudly in front of their house?)
The image text references "the Feast of Stephen" which is also known as the "Feast of St. Stephen" or "St. Stephen's Day", which is a holiday celebrated on the 26th or 27th of December, depending on the Western or Eastern church respectively. It is not actually a feast of a person named Stephen, instead a celebration of the Saint.
Hotels
by Jeff
Image text: 'Rating: 1/5. Room filled to brim with semen, and when front desk clerk opened mouth to talk, bedbugs poured out.'
Alright, it is pretty clear what Black Hat is doing here. He is putting bad reviews on all the hotels he has stayed at and likes and wants to stay in again, which lowers demand. But, he claims it is not low enough to put them out of business. Which seems strange to me. He knows that his reviews lowers demand enough for the hotel to lower prices, but not enough to put them out of business. That seems like a very fine line there.
The tragedy of the commons," is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen."
I think Cueball is right and the tragedy of the commons does not apply here.
In the last frame, Black Hat references the invisible hand which is the term economists use to describe the self-regulating nature of the marketplace. Black Hat appears to be taking advantage of this invisible hand by metaphorically stabbing it with a knife and eating it.
Chin-Up Bar
by Jeff
Image text: Those few who escaped found the emergency cutoff box disabled. The stampede lasted two hours and reached the bottom three times.
In this comic, our old friend, Black Hat rides up the longest escalator in the country and when he gets to the top, he puts a retractable chin-up bar at about waist height. This causes a massive pile-up on the escalator as people are pushed back by the bar while the escalator is pushing them forward.
In the image text we find out that Black Hat has also disabled the emergency cutoff box to further the pile-up and stampede.
Stud Finder
by Jeff
Image text: According to every stud finder I've tried to use, my walls contain a rapidly shifting network of hundreds and hundreds of studs.
In this comic, Cueball is attempting to hang a painting. But, in order to hang his painting, he will need to find a stud, which is a vertical piece of wood in the wall that allows the painting to hang more securely. The device used to find the studs is call a "stud finder" originally enough.
When Cueball can't find the stud finder, he asks our old friend Black Hat if he has seen the stud finder. However, instead of suggesting where it might be, Black Hat starts to introduce his new product "A Stud Finder Finder". But Cueball cuts him off before he can finish.
Speculation
by Berg
Image text: 'I was pretty good at skeet shooting, but was eventually kicked off the range for catching the clay pigeons in a net and dispatching them execution-style.'
Hello all, Berg here.
You might remember my goings-on from last summer around this same time, when Jeff went on sabbatical. As he has once again been lured away by the siren song of vacation, I'll be filling in for him this week. Let's get started, shall we?
I am perhaps the worst person on the planet to try to explain today's xkcd, as I don't use Google +, IRC, or even Facebook (Though I do have a profile, I've never logged in. It's a long story). Luckily, I think there's only one real joke here, and it occurs in the fourth and fifth panel. That, I can handle.
The conversation in the first three panels is fairly banal- it's a quick rumination on the nature of social networking platforms, and a brief reflection on their evolution. Whether or not everybody switches over to Google+ or stays on Facebook is of no matter, as evidenced by the fact that AOL and IRC still both have devoted (if dwindling) followings.
And then, Black Hat shoots a crossbow bolt through the basketball.
It's a symbolic gesture. When Black Hat says he's not the 'catch' type, what we're really meant to take away from the comic is that Black Hat will do what he wants to do, regardless of what his friends are doing. They're shooting hoops, he's on his phone. They're playing catch, he's got a crossbow. In the image text, we hear of another instance of him playing by his own rules at a skeet shooting range. Given how good his aim with the crossbow is, it's a bit surprising to hear he was kicked out.
The point is that Black Hat doesn't care about universal acceptance. Black Hat cares about Black Hat. The fact that he's not the catch type symbolizes that while statisticians may portray social networkers as a sort of hive mind that will gravitate towards one platform over another, at the end of the day that hive mind is made up of innumerable individuals, many of whom will share Black Hat's easily summarized world view: My way.
Thanks for reading, guys! I'll be here all week while Jeff cruises around the Pacific Northwest. See you in a few days!
Cell Phones
by Jeff
Image text: He holds the laptop like that on purpose, to make you cringe.
In this comic, after hearing about the "Cell Phones Don't Cause Cancer" study, Black Hat plots "Total Cancer Incidence" per 100,000 and "Cell Phone Users" per 100 on the same graph. The graph in frame 3 shows that the number of cell phone users rises after the number of cancer incidence, which makes Black Hat comically come to the conclusion that Cancer causes Cell Phones.
Also, since the image text asks, yes, the way that Black Hat holds the laptop in frame 2 totally makes me cringe.
The Cloud
by Jeff
Image text: There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord.
This comic is a reference to all of the companies that are rolling out "cloud" services like Google's and Amazon's music service and Apple's aptly named iCloud music service that will be announced this week.
Also, in this comic is a reference to caching and a Roomba. Caching is the way that remote sites would locally store data from the "The Cloud" to prevent from putting too much pressure on Black Hat's non-Enterprise class cable modem. The Roomba is a round vacuum that runs automatically around the house. The Roomba begins to learn the dimensions of rooms, however, apparently it has never learned not to run over the cord.
This comic makes me think of the British sitcom "The IT Crowd" in which they showcase a box that they make the rest of their non-Tech coworkers believe is "The Internet".
Guest Week: Jeffrey Rowland (Overcompensating)
by Jeff
Image text: Guest comic by Jeffrey Rowland of Overcompensating/Wigu. Jeffrey is famous as the picture on the Wikipedia article on 'Necrosis'.
Here's the link to Overcompensating. And here's the link to Necrosis wikipedia entry. I'm not putting that image up here, blech.
Pumpkin Carving
by Jeff
Image text: The Banach-Tarski theorem was actually first developed by King Solomon, but his gruesome attempts to apply it set back set theory for centuries.
This comic is a reference to the American custom of carving pumpkins to set out on porches and front steps for the American holiday of Halloween, which occurs on October the 31st. The pumpkins has the inside emptied out and a face or design carved in the side. Then a light in placed inside (usually a candle). These are called "Jack-O'-Lanterns". The Jack-O' -Lantern in the 3rd frame is the typical and standard design for a carved pumpkin.
On to the comic. In the 2nd frame, Black Hat is putting Nitroglycerin (an explosive) into his carved pumpkin in the hopes that someone will attempt to smash it and it will explode. Black Hat references chest pains because Nitroglycerin is used to open blood vessels to quickly improve blood flow when someone has chest pains.
In the 3rd frame, Cutie is our typical emotional xkcd comic. She is projecting herself onto the jack-o'-lantern as she tries to distract herself with holiday traditions that won't work to distract her.
In the 4th frame, the Banach-Tarski theorem referenced in the image text says that if you carve up a 3-dimensional ball, in this case a pumpkin, to a finite number of pieces, you can then reassemble the pieces into two different balls - identical to the original. The Banach-Tarski theorem is also called a paradox for obvious reasons. The person off-screen in that frame references the Axiom of Choice which is a mathematical axiom that says that given an infinite set of buckets or bins (each that contain more than one object) - it is possible to select only one object from each bucket. I'm not sure how it relates to the comic, but something to do with how Cueball chose to go with the Banach-Tarski paradox for the way he was going to carve his pumpkin. Anyone else have an idea?
I am not certain with the King Soloman reference means in the image text. Any biblical scholars out there want to have a go at it?