explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:2842: Inspiraling Roundabout

2023-10-17T04:58:57Z

162.158.3.12:

First edit. I'm unfamiliar with the road rules in the comic so I just added the transcript in it's most basic form. [[User:OmniDoom|OmniDoom]] ([[User talk:OmniDoom|talk]]) 02:00, 17 October 2023 (UTC)
:don't worry, even a wrong explanation is better than no explanation because it tricks people into being correct for you [[User:Certified_nqh|Me]]<sup>[[[285: Wikipedian Protester|''citation needed'']]][[Category:Pages using the "citation needed" template]]</sup> 03:15, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

added longer explanation [[User:Certified_nqh|Me]]<sup>[[[285: Wikipedian Protester|''citation needed'']]][[Category:Pages using the "citation needed" template]]</sup> 03:05, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Could we create a category for these "traffic" or "driving" related comics? This would include this comic and the previous, and others that relate to driving/cars/traffic. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.37|172.70.211.37]] 04:02, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

in left lane driving countries this would work pretty well as a roundabout

Talk:2820: Inspiration

2023-08-27T06:59:05Z

162.158.3.12: comment

Apples that fall off the tree on the moon cause less pain, could that also be a motive for his proposal? APB [[Special:Contributions/162.158.129.220|162.158.129.220]] 13:18, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Here we see Cueball as W. B. Yeats, inventing the silver apples of the moon. [[User:Aasasd|Aasasd]] ([[User talk:Aasasd|talk]]) 03:24, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Ah yes, another jab at red delicious apples from Randall. I love it. [[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|Trogdor147]] ([[explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Miscellaneous#Help_with_Creating_a_User_Page|talk]]) 03:39, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
:"Another"? would you mind linking to previous jab(s) so that we may link to it/get a category created for these jabs, and link to that category? - [[User:Vaedez|Vaedez]] ([[User talk:Vaedez|talk]]) 10:27, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
::One prior [[388: Fuck Grapefruit|comic 'jab']], for which the explanations refers to his book-jab at them. There ''may'' be more, that was just from memory, but not sure Cat-worthy just yet. But a direct reference link can wait until someone has searched for more/better, maybe. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.76.197|141.101.76.197]] 13:18, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Uhh, Randall was lacking inspiration for a comic? I saw nothing worth a comic, so I came here. Seems like Randall just doesn’t like Red Delicious.—Besides, is there a better word than “jab”? Mockery?--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.246.196|172.70.246.196]] 06:30, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
:If this is a running gag, should there be some kind of category for it, like Category:My Hobby does? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.179.63|172.70.179.63]] 08:03, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
::Actually, Randall stole (inadvertently, I'm sure) this from a running gag in a famous French BD named Rubrique-à-Brac [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubrique-%C3%A0-Brac]. Isaac Newton is a recurring character who regularly gets hit in the head with different objects. [[User:Vfp15|Vfp15]] ([[User talk:Vfp15|talk]]) 23:10, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

This feels a bit like a pun that he expected a "tasty" apple but found a "delicious" instead--or maybe just an assertion that the name of Red Delicious apples is a lie. - [[User:Vaedez|Vaedez]] ([[User talk:Vaedez|talk]]) 10:19, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
:It absolutely is a lie, but there's a reason for that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgZNDTJSvJQ&pp - [[Special:Contributions/172.70.179.41|172.70.179.41]] 16:10, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Why didn't Randall draw Newton's hair when he was fully capable of doing so in [[626: Newton and Leibniz]]?
[[Special:Contributions/172.70.39.35|172.70.39.35]] 11:48, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
:Because it's not Newton. From the apple story,some people seem to have got the impression that Newton was the first to observe gravity, and therefore "was he really such a genius? I reckon I'd have noticed things falling to the floor". The comic makes fun of these would-be discoverers of the laws of gravitation, and presents an alternative inspirational moment that might be equally likely to these lesser intellects without the benefit of hindsight.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.167|172.70.85.167]] 12:09, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

The Apple in question was a Flower of Kent - Newton saw it fall, not on his head ...

the mention of the moon could be referencing the moon landing, that occurred the day prior to the comic's release, confirming ice deposits (meaning potential for apple growing). I don't think the cueball in the comic represents newton but rather someone parodying Newton, possibly they thought for a moment that the apple fell from the moon [visible in the background], and then got the inspiration for moon apples. it is also possible that cueball hoped that moon apples would hurt less (or maybe grow bigger)

1255: Columbus

2015-09-02T16:41:12Z

162.158.3.12: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1255
| date = August 23, 2013
| title = Columbus
| image = columbus.png
| titletext = And thus was smallpox introduced into the previously Undying Lands.
}}

==Explanation==
[[White Hat]] tells two children that Christopher Columbus knew the world was round, but that others believed it to be flat. However, this is a false narrative known as the {{w|Myth of the Flat Earth}}. Educated people in Columbus's time knew the world was round, and knew the approximate radius of the Earth. Columbus claimed that the distance to sail west from Europe to Asia was drastically lower than others believed, but {{w|Christopher Columbus#Geographical considerations|he was wrong about this}}. If another continent and the "{{w|West Indies}}" had not been fortuitously in the right place, Columbus and his crew probably would have died at sea.

As White Hat begins his explanation, Megan objects, though not explaining why. White Hat continues, so Megan interrupts, saying that Columbus went in a straight line as the world curved away, ending up in {{w|Valinor}} and the {{w|Undying Lands}}. Megan's story is an allusion to ''{{w|The Silmarillion}}'', by {{w|J. R. R. Tolkien}}, set in the same world as ''{{w|The Lord of the Rings}}'' and ''{{w|The Hobbit}}''. The claim that Columbus sailed on a tangent to the surface alludes to how the elves' ships leave the curved sea surface and sail in a straight line to reach Valinor on the same route that they sailed when the world was still flat. The mentions of a silmaril and the morning star are a reference to {{w|Eärendil|Eärendil the Mariner}}, the only mortal sailor to reach the Undying Lands, with one of the {{w|Silmaril}}s. Megan humorously conflates the two myths, suggesting that they are both equally false. In Megan's telling, Columbus ends up as the morning star, which is actually the planet {{w|Venus}} (the same fate as Eärendil in Tolkien's mythology).

The joke is that when White Hat tells her to stop making up the story, Megan pointedly replies "You first", indicating that she originally complained about White Hat's retelling of the Columbus story because his account didn't really happen, and so he was also "making things up". Megan's fantasy tale was then delivered to make a point.

The title text refers to the {{w|Smallpox#History|transfer of smallpox}} to North America by Europeans, which caused the deaths of untold millions of Native Americans. The introduction of smallpox to the Undying Lands would indeed make their name ironic. However, the Undying Lands are named after immortal {{w|Valar}}, {{w|Maiar}}, and {{w|elf (Middle-Earth)|Elves}} living there, not because they confer immortality. A more proper name would be the Lands of the Undying, and Valar, Maiar, and Elves are not susceptible to diseases in Tolkien's mythos in any case.

==Transcript==
:[White Hat talks to two children.]
:White Hat: Everyone said the world was flat, but Columbus knew it was round.
:Megan (off-screen): *Sigh* No, no, no.

:[Megan walks on-screen.]
:White Hat: So he took his ships and sailed west—
:Megan: —in a line tangent to the surface. The sea fell away, and he landed in ''Valinor.''

:Megan: A silmaril on his brow, he wanders the heavens as the morning star, still believing he reached India.
:White Hat: Stop making stuff up.
:Megan: You first.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]
[[Category:LOTR]]

Talk:1537: Types

2015-06-15T00:59:06Z

162.158.3.12:

Relevant: WAT talk https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat {{unsigned ip|‎108.162.254.108}}

Are (6) and (7) about completing sequences?

If the sequence was [1, 2, 3, ?] we would expect the ? to be a placeholder for 4. So [1, 2, 3]+2 is wrong := FALSE. But [1, 2, 3]+4 is correct := TRUE. {{unsigned ip|141.101.99.22}}

"+2 appears to be applying a unary + to the number 2" : or it adds the number of the line, 10, to 2 => 12. Also, the eleventh line, "2+2" may add 2 to all the following 2, explaining line 12. (that theory is from a friend of mine) [[User:Seipas|Seipas]] ([[User talk:Seipas|talk]]) 12:17, 12 June 2015 (UTC)
: Also, for the lines 6 and 7, the operation "[1,2,3]+x" may add x to the set [1,2,3] and return true if the operation succeeded or false if not. Adding 2 to the set [1,2,3] returns false because 2 is already in [1,2,3]. [[User:Seipas|Seipas]] ([[User talk:Seipas|talk]]) 12:23, 12 June 2015 (UTC)
:: I thought it was doing element-wise addition and then comparing "[6] > [3,4,5]" (using the line number in the joke, like in line 10). The problem here is that line 6 should return true and line 7 should return false. [[User:Rand|Rand]] ([[User talk:Rand|talk]]) 15:46, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Yellowish Blue: http://www.livescience.com/17948-red-green-blue-yellow-stunning-colors.html is NaN! {{unsigned ip|108.162.221.129}}

''"The ironic thing is that fractions with 2 in the nominator are not the kind of numbers that typically suffer from floating point impreciseness."''
- This is not technically correct. Should read "fractions with 'power of 2' in the '''de'''nominator. However, the 3/2 would cause precision errors. {{unsigned ip|108.162.221.129}}
: I don't know proper English wording for things, but 3/2=3*2^-1, so it would be represented exactly under IEEE-754 too. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.89.217|141.101.89.217]] 13:58, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Is there more to this comic, a fixed set of rules that can tie all the examples together, or does each line make its own joke independently? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.5|108.162.219.5]] 12:54, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

;"normally"

<blockquote>This would make sense if it was <code>[] + 2</code></blockquote>

It really wouldn't. Javascript returns <code>"2"</code> (god knows why) and Python gives an error. Don't really feel like testing many other languages, but I also think it's not really a logical assumption to make at all. Can't think of a reason for <code>[] + 2</code> to return <code>[2]</code>... ever. It ''might'' make a little bit of sense in Randall's oddly typed language, but not in any sane one. --[[User:TotempaaltJ|TotempaaltJ]] ([[User talk:TotempaaltJ|talk]]) 12:35, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

: Javascript first converts <code>[]</code> (the empty array) to the empty string (using the rule "stringify each element and join with a comma"), then treats the operation as <code>"" + 2</code>, which results in conversion of the other operand to string and then concatenation. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.97.214|141.101.97.214]] 12:46, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

line 4: asci code of N + 2 = asci code of P [[User:SirKitKat|sirKitKat]] ([[User talk:SirKitKat|talk]]) 13:07, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

My favourite xkcd in a while. =8o) Of the list I got a good laugh out of numbers 8 and 13. [[User:Jarod997|Jarod997]] ([[User talk:Jarod997|talk]]) 13:11, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

I think a lot of this is his joke about programming languages loving the number 4. 2 + "2" = "4", [1,2,3] + 4 = true, 2+2 = DONE, and the range one all seem to support this. Also reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/221/ {{unsigned ip|173.245.52.112}}

Why isn't yellowish blue just green? [[User:Djbrasier|Djbrasier]] ([[User talk:Djbrasier|talk]]) 16:18, 12 June 2015 (UTC)
:Because yellow and blue don't make green. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.158|108.162.237.158]] 23:33, 12 June 2015 (UTC)
::It does with my paint kit. Isn't that subtractive mixing. I feel like I've just traveled to a version of [[1268: Alternate Universe]], except I'm the only one here who went to kindergarten. What am I missing? [[User:Djbrasier|Djbrasier]] ([[User talk:Djbrasier|talk]]) 02:28, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
:::Since this is a Programming language, it must be talking about RGB colors, where green is a base color and yellow is mixed using red and green. So a "yellowish blue" would contain all base colors, resulting in white – and that's propably why Randall's language returns NaN.[[Special:Contributions/141.101.92.42|141.101.92.42]] 08:39, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
::The only {{w|color wheel}} I know has purple (not blue) opposite yellow and orange (not yellow) opposite blue. If that is incorrect, then wikipedia needs some serious editing. [[User:Djbrasier|Djbrasier]] ([[User talk:Djbrasier|talk]]) 02:31, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

line 4: I read NaP as Not a Problem. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.12|141.101.104.12]] 17:00, 12 June 2015 (UTC)
: So did I. [[User:Xynariz|Xynariz]] ([[User talk:Xynariz|talk]]) 23:12, 12 June 2015 (UTC)
: To me, the (2/0) looks like a person curled up on bed with the +2 as the Z's indicating sleeping which I believe was the intention on top of 'P' being 2 chars more than 'N'

Line 3 is missing its prompt. There does not appear to be any relevance to the joke, nor has anyone yet explained why it should be missing. Typo? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.183|108.162.221.183]] 17:10, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

:I haven't noticed it until I saw your comment. It seems deliberate to me. Hard not to notice that when writing the fourth line. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.48|108.162.221.48]] 19:24, 13 June 2015 (UTC)BK201

Note that some programming languages avoid the problem of overloaded '+' operator between operands of vividly different types by using other symbols for string concatenation (be it "a"~"b" or "a"."b") and numerical addition. The real WTF is abusing '+' for string concatenation, which has very different properties from numerical addition, not being symmetrical for example: concat("aa", "bb") == "aabb", while concat("bb", "aa") == "bbaa" != "aabb". --[[User:JakubNarebski|JakubNarebski]] ([[User talk:JakubNarebski|talk]]) 17:38, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Series of comics? I don't recall any others about Randall's new programming language... [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.29|141.101.98.29]] 19:13, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

;+2
I think this is a japanese language joke. The + sign can also refer to the kanji 十, which is 10 in japanese. This would explain the result being twelve. 十二, or 10 2, is twelve in japanese. {{unsigned|Rafaeladson}}

I think number 5 is an escaped quote (two consecutive double quotes yields one double quote), a plus sign, and another escaped quote. The result is shown with an alternate form of escaped quotes (the apostrophe and double quote can both be used to show a string). NSIS scripting language uses this notation.[[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.180|108.162.221.180]] 20:19, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Clearly this is what the xkcd phone's OS is written in (with some help from StackOverflow) {{unsigned ip|162.158.68.113}}

Great job at explaining the outputs. I clearly would have missed some interpretations without your insights. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.254.146|108.162.254.146]] 21:10, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

The joke on line [10] really doesn't seem to be a Chinese/Japanese language joke. We can see that the language interacts much more directly with line numbers from the inter-line joke between lines [11] and [14], where line [12] becomes [14] because the value of 2 has become 4. This is provable by observing that the line after [14] is [13], showing that the previous line really is still line [12], it simply displays as [14] because the value of 2 has changed. This absurdly direct interaction between the code and its line number makes the joke on line [10] make a lot more sense, as a Chinese/Japanese language joke here seems much too contrived and out-of-place considering the nature of the other jokes in the comic. Not to mention, if the joke on line [10] was really concerning the code's interaction with its line number, it would set up nicely for introducing the inter-line joke between lines [11] and [14].[[Special:Contributions/188.114.106.89|188.114.106.89]] 03:35, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

As a speaker of Japanese, the explanation "[In the Japanese number system] the plus sign is instead the symbol 十" sounds even more absurd than if someone said that English speakers use the small letter "t" as an addition symbol. "十" (ten) and "＋" (full-width plus) are different glyphs and using them interchangeably would certainly not be useful. Although depending on language skill and display font they may visually seem more equal than they're supposed to. 08:28, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

* #5—I'm surprised we've missed the obvious joke: quotations within quotations. the double-quatation "I think so." gets single-quoted within another quotation: "He said, 'I think so.'"
* The word is "complements", not "opposites", on the colour wheel. I think the joke is likely that most people think of "yellowish blue" as "green"—as it would be on an artists' colour wheel. Regardless, complements on an RGB colour wheel should not result in NaN—it would result in a mix of yellow (255, 255, 0) and blue (0, 0, 255), which is white (255, 255, 255).
* [[Special:Contributions/108.162.226.174|108.162.226.174]] 12:23, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Is it bad that all I understood at first was the last one?{{unsigned|LuigiBrick}}

"yellowish blue" is actually parsed in HTML to be a red colour: #e00000 which is between pure red and "chucknorris". See here: http://randomstringtocsscolor.com/ [[Special:Contributions/162.158.3.12|162.158.3.12]] 00:55, 15 June 2015 (UTC)Martin

In response to the comment above that a mix of yellow (255, 255, 0) and blue (0, 0, 255) would be white (255, 255, 255): you could just as easily claim that the result would be black (0, 0, 0) ;-) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.3.12|162.158.3.12]] 00:59, 15 June 2015 (UTC)Martin

Talk:1537: Types

2015-06-15T00:55:11Z

162.158.3.12: