Southern Half
by Jeff
Image text: Also, if you read his speech at Rice, all his arguments for going to the moon work equally well as arguments for blowing up the moon, sending cloned dinosaurs into space, or constructing a towering penis-shaped obelisk on Mars.
Not much to explain here.
Here's the full text of the speech to Rice.
Here's the full text of the 1961 speech to Congress.
Worst-Case Scenario
by Jeff
Image text: To get serious analyses of hurricanes and oil slicks, see Jeff Masters' blog. To get serious discussions of worst-case scenario thinking, see Bruce Schneier's blog. To get enough Vitamin D, don't read any blogs and go outside instead.
This comic is about the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that is leaking from one of BP's oil rigs. Just in case you have been under a rock for weeks or are reading this from the past.
Michael Bay is the director of the Transformers series amongst other movies that are famous for explosions, explosions and even bigger explosions and of course impossible and improbable situations. Bay has been featured in xkcd before for his potential remake of Harriet the Spy.
James Carville is a CNN political commentator and Louisiana native. He has already said that the govermental response to the oil spill was "too lax and too slow".
Here's Jeff Masters' blog on Weather Underground and Bruce Schneier's blog.
Retro Virus
by Jeff
Image text: He says this is the year of Linux on the desktop! The world of Windows will fade any moment now!
The image text is a continuation of the comic and an excerpt from Howard Dean's Friendster from 2003.
In the comic, when he says that he is cleaning viruses, the other characters in the comic list off other things from 2003, including Kazaa a P2P filesharing app that was the number 1 source of viruses because of the questionable sources of all of the files on Kazaa. Additionally, Howard Dean, was popular in 2003 when he was running for president in the Democratic primary before his unfortunate screaming speech which drove him down in the poles and out of the race. Lastly, there is Friendster, which was extremely popular in 2003 and is still around today, but I'm not sure anyone uses it.
If viruses are so 2003, spyware is so 2010.
Two-Party System
by Jeff
Image text: I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party.
This comic is taking a typical internet argument that the two party system is ruining American politics and taking it to a class president election in a school.
Approval voting is the type of voting in which the voter can vote for as many candidates as you would like. In a way, any candidate you "approve" of.
IRV or Instant - runoff voting is the type of voting in which the voter ranks their choices from 1 on down.
The Bull Moose Party is also known as the Progressive Party and it was formed when Teddy Roosevelt lost the nomination to William Taft.
The idea of the image text is that with the ability to vote for more than one person, that would develop more chances for additional political parties.
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.