Convincing
by Jeff
Image text: And if you labeled your axes, I could tell you exactly how MUCH better.
This comic is a typical xkcd compilation. Relationships, math, graphs and of course, the twist.
Cueball wants to get back together with Cutie (or Megan), but she declines and shows him a graph showing why. She thinks that the downward trend of the graph will convince him that their relationship is also in decline. But, Cueball takes that as this is a girl who does not follow proper protocol and label her axes (plural for axis) on her graph. We do not even know the unit of measure on the graph, let what each axis corresponds to.
For all we know, the horizontal axis could be labeled "Time" and the vertical axis could be labeled "Crappiness of Relationship" or "Unawesomeness of Relationship". In that case, a downward trend would be positive.
In the twist, Cueball sees that he can do better than this girl and switches his position and decides HE is going to break up with HER.
Guest Week: Bill Amend (FoxTrot)
by Jeff
Image text: Guest comic by Bill Amend of FoxTrot, an inspiration to all us nerdy-physics-majors-turned-cartoonists, of which there are an oddly large number.
The top comic is a reference to this famous xkcd comic. The sudo command in linux allows a user to run as a "super-user", thus allowing them to execute the command they wish.
The next comic is a pun on the word "attractive". The girl thinks he is using it in the fashion that he likes he and is interested in her. He's using it in the gravitational pull way.
The next comic is a reference to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Which, if you read explain xkcd, you should know like the back of your hand.
The third comic, is a play on the sound of the word "aye". Aye is a word used when taking a verbal vote that is used to signify a positive, like yes. Additionally, aye sounds like the letter i. In this case, the mathematician in Congress is voting the square root of -1, which comes out to an imaginary number known as i. And since i sounds the same as "aye", that is how a mathematician votes.
Five-Minute Comics: Part 3
by Jeff
Image text: Resulting in The Little Rock 9x + C.
Top: Reference to the Japanese attack on the American base of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii that brought the US into World War II.
High Middle: I believe this is a reference to perl scripting language. And the comic is also a reference to how much more persuasive you can be if you say that you saw a study defending your argument.
High Left: Don't know why women try to breastfeed anyone on the bus. I haven't seen that happening on all the buses I've been on. Maybe I've been on the wrong buses?
High Right: Coke and pop rocks makes a crazy foaming explosion in your mouth, but I'm not sure where the phone and creepy girls comes from.
Lower High Middle: This is a reference to the Billy Joel song called "We Didn't Start the Fire". But, I guess, the police suspected him anyway.
Middle Left: In 1957, Eisehower ordered the Little Rock Arkansas Schools integrated, which means that there were no longer black schools and white schools, there were just schools. But, of course integrate can also have a math meaning and in this comic, the police are putting up an integration symbol next to the school. The image text is also a reference to this.
Middle Right: This one is pretty self-explanatory. Typical horror movie set up, this time with smart phones.
Lower Middle Left: This is a reference to the children's story, the 3 Little Pigs. As the story progresses, each pig builds his house out of stronger material to try to fend off the Big Bad Wolf. In this comic, there is a lot more pigs, and a lot more increasingly strong materials. The elements in the comic is strontium which is (thanks Wikipedia!) is a chemical element with the symbol Sr and the atomic number 38. An alkaline earth metal, strontium is a soft silver-white or yellowish metallic element that is highly reactive chemically.
Lower Middle: The phrase "Fastest gun in the west" is usually reserved for how fast a cowboy can draw. In this case, this is a pun on that and the gun actually "runs" races.
Lower Right: Scientists use centrifuges to separate elements. In this comic, the pun is on the phrase "separate the men from the boys", which is a typical American (at least I think it's just American) phrase for a hard task that is forces you to see who is capable and who is not.
Bottom Left: Typical xkcd. SETI and Narnia in one comic. If you have seen the movies or read the Narnia series by CS Lewis, time works differently once you go through the wardrobe to get to Narnia. Time passes much more quickly in Narnia. So, Cueball is capitalizing on that by putting his computer in Narnia to be able to do more work in less "real" time. SETI@home is the search for extraterrestrials by using extra processing power of computers that go to the screeensaver. Foldilng@home is a similar idea, but this is with protein folding.
Bottom Right: This is a reference to the old TV show, the Honeymooners in which the male character, Ralph always threatens his wife by saying "One of these days, Alice, Pow right in the kisser". Which is an old-timey threat of him hitting her in the mouth. In this comic, instead of the "pow" sound effect, all the waterslide sounds are used.
Five-Minute Comics: Part 1
by Jeff
Image text: The wolves thin the RAID arrays, removing the slowest and weakest disks to keep the average seek speed high.
The set up for these comics are explained at the top by Randall, so let's dig into a few.
Top left - Jupiter, the planet, comes so close to the Earth that it becomes a character in the comic. And because it is so massive and has a huge gravitational field, it asks the characters if they would like to use that pull as a slingshot. In that case, some object in space would fly close enough to a massive body to increase its speed using the gravity of the planet or star while circling the object and "slingshot" themselves out the other side.
Top Middle - A pony is a typical or stereotypical young girl's dream gift. In this case, instead of rescuing the girl from the well, he pushes a pony down there too, I guess to make her feel better.
Top Right - Just like nature conservatories have reintroduced wolves to back to nature, this systems administrator has reintroduced wolves to his nature, the server room. The image text is connected to this comic and references how wolves will thin herds of animals by attacking the weakest and slowest animals. In this case, the admin is speaking in the text. Obviously, wolves cannot eat RAID hard drives. But, as usual, Randall is comparing two widely different ideas. In the RAID HD case, you would want to thin the slowest RAID arrays so that you would be writing data only to the fastest drives. Because the drives are RAID arrays, there is multiple copies of each data, so the array would not miss a beat if one drive (or two) were taken by wolves.
Middle Right - I'm not so sure this one makes any sense, because it involves the magic flute from Legend of Zelda the video game series, Bach and Wagner, two famous composers, and a ring cycle from Tron. Seems like something out of a strange dream.
Middle Upper Right - Given Randall's predilection for "Yo Momma" jokes, this is another one gone wrong.
Bottom - This is a standard xkcd comic. Take a solid idea over the first three frames and then take it farther and then too far. In this case, it ends up with a hotness rating of a girl in your bio class wearing your mom's skin. Uh, gross.
If anyone can decipher Middle Left, I'd love to hear what you think. Only thing I can think of is Trig like Trigonometry.
Applied Math
by Jeff
Image text: Dear Reader: Enclosed is a check for ninety-eight cents. Using your work, I have proven that this equals the amount you requested.
Donald Knuth is a computer scientist that has written several computer science textbooks and he offers rewards for anyone finding errors in his publications. The first error found in each book is worth $2.56. Other errors and suggestions are worth less than $2.56, but a check is still sent out if Dr. Knuth finds them to be reasonable.
In this comic, Black Haired Girl uses a proof to invalidate logic itself. And then, she writes a letter to Dr. Knuth to collect her money for the 1,317,408 errors in The Art of Computer Programming at $2.56 each.
In the image text is the reply from Dr. Knuth in which he uses Black Haired Girl's logic disproving proof to evaluate her work down to 99 cents.
Mu
by Jeff
Image text: As the CoKF approaches 0, productivity goes negative as you pull OTHER people into chair-spinning contests.
This comic is using typical scientific terms to show how productive you can be with how "loose" or "tight" your desk chair is. The left side of the graph is the most "loose" and the right is the most "tight". Seems about right to me.
In the image text, CoKF means Coefficient of Kinetic Friction.
One-Liners
by Jeff
Image text: 'Upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Flash player to view THIS content, bitch.' ::triggers detonator::
Alright, the idea of this one is fairly straightforward, but I'll explain it anyway! In action movies, the hero usually says a catch phrase before killing off the last bad guy. In the Die Hard movies, it was "Yippee-kay-ya Motherfucker" and you get the idea.
Let's start explaining from less likely to more.
In the first frame, a memory hole is probably what is behind the character on the left in the frame, which is used to destroy or permanently alter potentially embarrassing documents and paperwork.
Frame two is pretty self explanatory, one character is mentioning that there is a problem with the math by the other character.
Frame three is reference to the US Federal Interest Rate, which is raised and lowered by the US Government.
Frame four is a reference to any internet agreement that usually is 7 million pages long that companies require you to read before you download some software or install a program. Some do not require you to scroll all the way down to the bottom before clicking "I Accept" in regards to the terms. Others do require scrolling to the bottom.
Frame five (which is hilarious if I do say so myself and I wish it would catch on) has three ways we can go with Bangarang. First it is the cry of the Lost Boys in the movie Hook. Secondly, it is a Jamaican slang word for a disturbance or an uproar. Thirdly, probably a result of the first two, it is a media player for KDE builds of Linux.
Lastly, the image text is a reference to websites that have content that is only available if you have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. You will inevitably get this message if you try to view one of these websites on the Apple iPhone.
Los Alamos
by Jeff
Image text: The test didn't (spoiler alert) destroy the world, but the fact that they were even doing those calculations makes theirs the coolest jobs ever.
Los Alamos is the site where the US founded a military base to test the Manhattan Project, where they tested nuclear devices and bombs. As it says in the comic, in 1945 was during World War II, when the Los Alamos site was active.
These nuclear explosions are what the three scientists are talking about in the first two frames.
And then, in the last two frames, the scientists are talking about trigonometry. People use the mnemonics SOH CAH TOA to remember the relationships between sine, cosine and tangent. The bold letters below are the contributions to the mnemonics (Thanks Wikipedia for the below).
- Sine = Opposite ÷ Hypotenuse
- Cosine = Adjacent ÷ Hypotenuse
- Tangent = Opposite ÷ Adjacent
This mnemonic can be used in its reverse, but COH SAH TOA is definitely wrong.
Even though there is no line to the word in the fourth frame, we are left to believe that the scientist on the left or Steve is the one asking about the trigonometry calculation.
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?
3×9
by Jeff
Image text: Handy exam trick: when you know the answer but not the correct derivation, derive blindly forward from the givens and backward from the answer, and join the chains once the equations start looking similar. Sometimes the graders don't notice the seam.
Alright, this math equation only works because 9 is the square of 3, but this is fun none the less.
3 x 9 = 3 x the square root of 81 (the square root of 81 is 9).
That also equals 81 divided by 3 and then he solves the division by hand to get 27.
This is obviously not the way you solve the problem, but he uses handy math tricks like turning a square root into a division symbol to attempt to trick the math grader as he mentions in the image text.