Difference between revisions of "594: Period"

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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(Explanation: Better wording IMHO)
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| titletext = 413 nanohertz, by the way.
 
| titletext = 413 nanohertz, by the way.
 
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:Voice: If I could get up I'd smack you.
 
:Voice: If I could get up I'd smack you.
  
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[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
 
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
 
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[[Category:Physics]]

Revision as of 13:19, 23 March 2013

Period
413 nanohertz, by the way.
Title text: 413 nanohertz, by the way.

Explanation

A woman's menstrual cycle, also called her period, is a process marked by a few days of abdominal cramps occurring roughly once a month.

"Period" is also the term in mathematics for a measure of the rate at which something happens. It measures the length of time between occurrences. For example, a full moon happens about once every 29.5 days, so its period is 29.5 days. By taking the inverse of this, we can get a different measurement, its frequency - the number of times an event happens within a given length of time. This is usually measured in hertz (pronounced the same as "hurts"), which is the number of times something happens in a second.

The off-screen girl has her period every 28 days (her period has a period of 28 days, if you will). Since we can calculate the frequency based on the period, we can, indeed, calculate her "uterus-hertz" (or her "uterus hurts").

Yes, this has all been a setup to a terrible pun.

413 nanohertz is the correct frequency of an event with a period of 28 days, as shown here by Google Calculator.

Transcript

Voice: Ugh. Stupid uterus.
Cueball: Hey, your period is every 28 days, right?
Voice: Yes, why?
Cueball: Well, period = T = 1/f.
Voice: So?
Cueball: Using this, we can calculate something you already know.
Voice: What?
Cueball: Your uterus-hertz.
Voice: If I could get up I'd smack you.


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Discussion

...And angular velocity: 1.97 mHz 108.162.231.30 23:29, 14 December 2014 (UTC) This just makes me sad for Homestuck. ----

One must wonder whether Randall noticed the Homestuck connection at the time of making this comic. He is, apparently, a fan, as Homestuck is linked on the main xkcd site, but this comic was made within only a few months of the comic's start, so he mightn't have heard of it yet.--173.245.52.151 03:36, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

This is about 16 cents away from a very, very, *very* low A, for what it's worth. 162.158.75.180 22:18, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't speak... uh... I have no idea what language you're speaking. This comment is incomprehensible to me. 172.69.33.173 18:49, 10 November 2020 (UTC)
Apparently cents is a musical term that has a correlation to frequency. The A is a musical note. [1] 162.158.187.129 02:35, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
Okay, that makes absolutely no cents whatsoever. 172.69.34.78 18:30, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
A cent is a frequency ratio of 21/1200 to 1. Just as there are 20 decibels in a 10-fold increase in sound amplitude, there are 100 cents in a semitone and 12 semitones in an octave. --Tepples (talk) 03:29, 2 September 2021 (UTC)
A(-27), to be exact, though I don't believe there's actually any standard notation for notes lower than C0. 172.70.130.161 23:30, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

@TheSmartestNoob - This 'correction' of grammer seems not to have fixed anything, and actually broken it. I undid it, and I would have explained this on your own Talk page, but you don't have one and I wouldn't be able to create it. Did you mean to rewrite it as "A period is also called a menstrual cycle. It is a process marked by (etc...)"? But still, I can't see a problem with the current (again, as of now) version. 172.69.79.203 18:44, 12 March 2022 (UTC)