Image text: The SLS head engineer plans to invite Shania Twain to stand under the completed prototype, then tell her, 'I don't expect you to date me just because I'm a rocket scientist, but you've gotta admit--this is pretty fucking impressive.'

SLS, which stands for Space Launch System (naturally) is the new launch program being designed by NASA to replace the retired Space Shuttle launch system.  In the first frame, Cueball is showing Black Hat something about the SLS, possibly a video on his phone or other portable electronic device.

As usually with his appearances, Black Hat is causing trouble.  Here, Black Hat is by as much as I can find, telling the truth, because Nazi-Germany era scientists like Wernher von Braun, who was one of the developers of the Saturn V launch vehicle, came over to NASA and helped develop NASA's space program.

Black Hat's assumption in the last frame is obviously a bridge too far (which is where the joke is in the comic), but he gets his desired reaction out of Cueball, who is hanging his head.

Shania Twain comes into this comic in the image text because in her song "That Don't Impress Me Much", she sings: "Okay, so you're a rocket scientist/That don't impress me much".  But, the image text argues that if she stood under the new SLS prototype, she would admit it was in fact, impressive.

Image text: The Roanoke Lost Colonists founded Roanoke, the Franklin Expedition reached the Pacific in 2009 when the Northwest Passage opened, and Jimmy Hoffa currently heads the Teamsters Union--he just started going by 'James'.

First and foremost, thanks to Berg for covering for me while I was on vacation on Friday.  Make sure you follow him on twitter and tumblr.  But, only if you like to laugh.

In this comic, Amelia Earhardt's plane comes back to land after it went missing in 1937.  Earhardt was presumed dead and that her plane went down sometime during her journey.  But, this comic supposes what if instead it just took her from 1937-2011 to fly around the Earth without really aging a day.

The image text proposed a few more solutions to mysteries including the lost colonists of Roanoke, who were one of the first groups to come to America, but suddenly disappeared, leaving their colony untouched.  The Franklin Expedition was a British voyage in 1845 to study the Northwest passage that also disappeared somewhere in northern Canada.  Jimmy Hoffa was the famous Teamsters Union leader who went missing in 1975 and is presumed dead (and possibly murdered).

Image text: Themistocles said his infant son ruled all Greece -- "Athens rules all Greece; I control Athens; my wife controls me; and my infant son controls her." Thus, nowadays the world is controlled by whoever buys advertising time on Dora the Explorer.

Themistocles was an Ancient Greek politician and this comic and image text are about uncommon chains of command.

The President of the United States is at the top of the US Nuclear Chain of Command, but the Engineer is technically above him because the button would not work without the Engineer and the Engineer is in charge of configuring how the button works.  Just in case you are not familiar with movie and TV depictions, the "Red Button" is usually a worst case scenario as it launches all nuclear capabilities.

In the image text is a similar joke placed at the top of the chain of command, this time in Ancient Greece.  Since Themistocles' infant son ruled all of Greece, where did his infant son get any ideas?  If this were current day, the infant son would get his ideas from advertisements shown on the show Dora the Explorer.  Dora the Explorer is a very popular animated television series shown on the Nickelodeon networks staring a child named Dora who explores. (Hence the name.)

Image text: Socrates could've saved himself a lot of trouble if he'd just brought a flashlight, tranquilizer gun, and a bunch of rescue harnesses.

Get it?  It's his brain talking.

The 911 operator references Plato's cave.  This is a reference to an allegory by Plato in which he creates a world in which prisoners are chained against a wall and know only the shadows that cross the wall and how they create their own reality from those shadows.  They would create words for the things they were seeing, but that would only correspond to the shadows and not the physical things themselves.

The image text continues with the Plato's cave as Randall (the comic's author) is saying that Socrates (Plato's teacher) should have just gone into the cave and brought the prisoners out instead of dealing with the extended allegory.  I think the tranq gun is for the prisoners so they don't completely freak out while being taken out of the cave.

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.

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...

Image text: Stephen Douglas actually died soon after the debates and election, but if you demand historical accuracy in your webcomics you should be reading Hark! A Vagrant.

The image text is correct, Lincoln's Gettsyburg Address was in 1863 and Stephen Douglas died in 1861 of Typhoid.

And of course, the link to Hark! A Vagrant.