944: Hurricane Names
Explanation
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) gives names to hurricanes, going through the alphabet and resetting at "A" at the beginning of the year. For example, the North Atlantic hurricanes in 2012 were named "Alberto", "Beryl", "Chris", "Debby", ... When the alphabet is exhausted, the hurricanes are named with Greek letters. This has happened only once, in 2005; see The Saga of Epsilon and Zeta.
There have never been enough hurricanes in one season to exhaust both the English and Greek alphabet, and Randall is hypothesizing what the names would be if this happened. In the comic, the WMO has named the hurricanes using random words out of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The humor here is intrinsic: "Hurricane Eggbeater" is a bizarre and hilarious name.
The title text puts takes this surreal twist to an extreme; Randall now makes a joke about set theory. The impossibly long hurricane season exhausts the OED completely, so the WMO starts numbering them 1, 2, 3, 4, ... This infinite supply of hurricane names works until the number of hurricanes becomes uncountably infinite. A set is countably infinite if it can be mapped one-to-one to the set of natural numbers. By a trick called Cantor diagonalization, it's possible to prove that the set of real numbers is not countably infinite, and thus you can't label the real numbers with the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, ... In this scenario, the set of hurricanes becomes uncountably infinite and thus can't be labeled with the WMO's natural numbers either.
At this point, the meteorologists give up decide to name all the hurricanes "Steve", which is popular on the internet as an arbitrary, generic name. (Ironically, this makes "Steve" no longer arbitrary.) On April 13, 2011, Internet personality Chuggaconroy uploaded a Pikmin walkthrough that popularized "Steve" as a "random" name.
Transcript
- [A weather reporter sits behind a desk with an image of the Gulf of Mexico and surrounding land masses displayed to his left. 9 hurricane symbols are scattered across the map, primarily over Cuba.]
- Reporter: After the latest wave of hurricanes, not only have we run through the year's list of 21 names, but we've also used up the backup list of Greek letters. All subsequent storms will be named using random dictionary words.
- Reporter: The newly-formed system in the gulf has been designated "Hurricane Eggbeater", and we once again pray this is the final storm of this horrible, horrible season.
Discussion
Actually, "Abel and Steve" is a play on the phrase "Adam and Steve"[1]
Also, a hurricane spins around destructively like an eggbeater. 24.41.66.114 04:52, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
Marik Ishtar's Millenium Rod can control men and women named "Steve" I wonder if it can control storms named "steve"?99.102.154.28 01:47, 6 August 2013 (UTC)
There's only a matter of time when this happens and a there's a "Hurricane Hurricane". Malamanteau314 (talk) 04:39, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Why not name them after the polar coordinates that they formed at? Wwei23 (talk) 02:35, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
Interesting Fact: You cannot have hurricanes all over the surface of the earth, as there has to be two points with no wind. For a mathematical proff you can check the Hairy Ball theorem. [2] 188.114.111.35 11:05, 28 July 2017 (UTC) Julio 13:00 28 Jul 2017
Dammit, Steve... PotatoGod (talk) 21:10, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
- I think Steve may not be very good at his job. L-Space Traveler (talk) 12:18, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
"Your forecast for tomorrow is Steve. Good luck." sounds really ominous to me. Kind of along the lines of "May the odds be ever in your favour". 172.69.234.132 01:38, 24 July 2019 (UTC) Cye