explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

522: Google Trends

2019-02-06T19:08:00Z

172.68.150.52:

{{comic
| number = 522
| date = December 26, 2008
| title = Google Trends
| image = google_trends.png
| titletext = Obama has been writing Lincoln/Obama erotic fan fiction on his secret livejournal. Excerpt: Lincoln lay back on the bed, nude save for his trademark stovepipe hat. 'Tell me,' he purred seductively, as he and Obama formed a more perfect union. 'When you come, is it 10% ethanol?'
}}

==Explanation==

{{w|Google Search|Google}} keeps track of which searches are most popular in which regions as part of more general data mining to improve their service. For the enjoyment/education of others, they release select, non-personal parts of this data under the banner "[http://www.google.com/trends/ Google Trends]."

The first statistic – that "Men kissing" was popular in {{w|Utah}}, a state known for possessing a large population with very conservative social values, including opposition to homosexuality – is real. The others are made up for the sake of the joke. In order:

*'''"Installing Ubuntu" – Redmond, WA''': {{w|Ubuntu}} is a {{w|Linux}} distribution; {{w|Redmond, Washington}} is home to {{w|Microsoft}}, the company that makes rival operating system {{w|Microsoft Windows|Windows}}.
*'''"Running for President in 2010" – Wasilla, AK''': 2010 was not a presidential election year in the United States; {{w|Wasilla, Alaska}} is home to {{w|Sarah Palin}}, a politician known for making such gaffes and who was {{w|John McCain}}'s {{w|running mate}} in the {{w|United States presidential election, 2008|2008 election}} that occurred a few weeks before this comic.
*'''"Lincoln Fan Fiction" – Chicago, IL''': {{w|Abraham Lincoln}} was the US president from 1861 to his assassination in 1865; {{w|Chicago, Illinois}} is home to {{w|Barack Obama}}, who apparently reads (presumably {{w|erotic}}) {{w|fanfiction}} about the former president.
*'''"Raptors on Hoverboards" – Somerville, MA''': {{w|Velociraptors}} are a favorite xkcd topic; There are also frequently references to ''{{w|Back to the Future}}'' as with the {{w|hoverboards}} here. {{w|Somerville, Massachusetts}} is home to [[Randall Munroe]]. The speed of a ''Raptor on Hoverboard'' is given in [[526: Converting to Metric]].
*'''"How is babby formed" – Wasilla, AK''': "How is babby formed?" was the title (and most of the content) of an infamous Yahoo! Answers question (see the title text of [[481: Listen to Yourself]] and [[550: Density]]). Wasilla, Alaska is, again, home to {{w|Sarah Palin}}; a few months prior to this comic's release, Sarah Palin revealed that her daughter, {{w|Bristol Palin}}, was pregnant.
*'''"I hate this website" – Mountain View, CA''': {{w|Mountain View, California}} is home to {{w|Google}}'s headquarters. The implication is that Google employees are putting "I hate this website" into Google.

With regards to the excerpt Randall provides in the title text:
*{{w|Slash fiction}} is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on homosexual behavior.
*Lincoln/Obama (pronounced Lincoln slash Obama) fan fiction normally should be between Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.
*However we later see that {{w|Lincoln (car)|Lincoln}} is a car.
*The "more perfect union" line comes from the preamble to the US Constitution: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..."
*{{w|Ethanol}} is the more scientific name for drinking alcohol, or simply alcohol.
*"{{w|Common ethanol fuel mixtures#E10_or_less|10% ethanol}}" refers to automotive gasoline that includes 10% ethanol (usually made from corn or other vegetables), with the hopes of reducing the dependence on oil for fuel.
*With regards to the title-text, the verb "[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/come come]" means "to have an orgasm" or "to ejaculate". In this mock slash fiction the Lincoln is supposed to ejaculate gasoline, and expects Obama to do the same.

==Transcript==
:Bloggers were recently amused to discover that,
:according to Google Trends, the search term:
:"men kissing" is most popular in conservative Utah.
:A few other embarrassing correlations:

:[A two column table]

:;Search Term
::Top City
----
:;Installing Ubuntu
::Redmond, WA

:;Running for President in 2010
::Wasilla, AK

:;Lincoln Fan Fiction
::Chicago, IL

:;Raptors on Hoverboards
::Somerville, MA

:;How is babby formed?
::Wasilla, AK

:;I hate this website
::Mountain View, CA

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Linux]]
[[Category:Velociraptors]]
[[Category:Google Search]]
[[Category:Homosexuality]]

2104: Biff Tannen

2019-01-28T22:10:43Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 2104
| date = January 28, 2019
| title = Biff Tannen
| image = biff_tannen.png
| titletext = I can't help myself; now I want to read a bunch of thinkpieces from newspapers in Biff's 1985 arguing over whether the growth of the region into a corporate dystopia was inevitable.
}}

==Explanation==

This comic is based on ''{{w|Back to the Future II}}''. In this movie, the character Biff Tannen steals the time machine, which is the main plot device, and uses it to go back in time from 2015 to 1955. He then gives Marty McFly’s sports almanac, containing the outcomes of 50 years (1950–2000) worth of sporting events, to his younger self. His younger self uses this sports almanac to make millions by successfully betting on {{w|horse races}}. He then forms a company, and calls it [https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/BiffCo BiffCo]. While in the movie the protagonists reverse this, by stealing the almanac back, Cueball imagines the universe where BiffCo exists as continuing to exist in parallel. This is consistent with the {{w|multiverse}} theory.

The movie is set in the fictional town of Hill Valley, California. When the protagonists return to 1985, they find that Biff has turned the town’s “Courthouse Square” into a 27-story casino, and generally taken over Hill Valley. Cueball interprets this as “the decline of the city, and general social decay”.

''[https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Elegy-Memoir-Family-Culture/dp/0062300547 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.]'' is a book, published in June 2016, that gives an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town, and offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class. This comic is a play on the title of this book, which has been described as explaining the “social, regional, and class” issues in white working-class America. The white American working class was a key factor in the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, and many critics have interpreted the book as an explanation of his election, which was deemed improbable by many analysts before it happened. Netflix [https://deadline.com/2019/01/netflix-hillbilly-elegy-ron-howard-movie-deal-40m-1202541118/ purchased the rights] to an upcoming film adaptation of the book three days before this comic, prompting another wave of criticism of the book's theories.

Cueball is proposing a similarly-titled book, set in the ''Back to the Future II'' universe where BiffCo exists, that would describe the supposed factors leading to the rise of Biff Tannen in Hill Valley. In that universe, while the rise of Biff—and the subsequent decay of the city—is the result of his using a future sports almanac to cheat at sports betting, the rest of the population would have to guess at the structural societal issues that might have caused Biff’s otherwise inexplicable success. Thus, Cueball compares such blind guessing with the analysis contained in ''Hillbilly Elegy''.

This makes White Hat Guy angry, because it’s such a painfully long setup for a really stupid pun. There is also a decent chance that the book White Hat Guy is currently reading is ''Hillbilly Elegy'', which would make the joke more insulting to him, as it compares the book to useless theorizing about an event which was really caused by time traveling. After seeing similar symptoms in our society, perhaps he would consider that we are living in such a world predetermined to negative effects. It would probably frustrate him that being optimistic for the future and hoping for a changing society would be an effort in vain, when the universe is similarly tampered with by time-travellers. Alternatively, he is enjoying the book and is angry at the insult to it.

[[Randall]] is known to have [[1756: I'm With Her|supported the opposing candidate before Trump was elected]], having made a comic just to promote her, and particularly [[1779: 2017|sad comics]] following his election. Therefore, he may have made this comic as an insult to a book which supposedly explains the election of the candidate he opposed, by comparing it to useless (and wrong) theorizing. It may also be intended as an insult to Trump himself, by comparing the dystopian universe where Biff rose to power (albeit not as President) to the actual universe where Trump rose to power.

The title text continues this comparison by mentioning thinkpieces from newspapers that would appear in the ''Back to the Future II'' universe where BiffCo exists. Various thinkpieces did appear in real life newspapers in an attempt to explain Trump’s rise to power after his election, and asking whether it was inevitable.

As ''{{w|Back to the Future II}}''’s important October 2015 setting date approached, commentators began noting the similarities between the older version of the character Biff Tannen and then presidential candidate Donald Trump. When the comparison was brought to the attention of the film’s writer, Bob Gale, in an interview, he [https://www.thedailybeast.com/back-to-the-future-writer-biff-tannen-is-based-on-donald-trump# stated] that elements of Tannen’s personality were actually based on Trump, who was already well known in the late 1980s for his work in real estate and tabloid controversies. Thus, there is a real connection between Biff Tannen and Donald Trump. This supports the comparison between the two made by Randall.

==Transcript==

:[Cueball talks while walking up behind White Hat, who is reading in an armchair.]
:Cueball: You know, in the universe where Biff Tannen took Marty McFly’s sports almanac back in time, the people wouldn’t have any counterfactuals to work with.
:Cueball: Their world would be ''the'' world.

:[White Hat turns his head to look at Cueball as he keeps talking.]
:Cueball: They would have spent decades debating which structural problems enabled the rise of BiffCo, the decline of the city, and general social decay.
:Cueball: Everyone would find reasons it confirmed their pet theory.

:Cueball: I'm going to write a book set in that universe. I'll call it ''Hill Valley Elegy''.
:[White Hat turns his head back to his book in disgust.]
:White Hat: ... I ''hate'' you.

{{comic discussion}}

2102: Internet Archive

2019-01-23T21:20:52Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 2102
| date = January 23, 2019
| title = Internet Archive
| image = internet_archive.png
| titletext = The fact that things like the npm left-pad incident are so rare is oddly reassuring.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a BOT. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

:[Ponytail and Cueball are walking to the right.]
:Ponytail: The Internet Archive is so weird. If it didn't exist, it would sound totally implausible.
:Cueball: ''Seriously.''

:Cueball: Do you ever worry about how reliant we are on systems that someone happens to maintain for some reason but which could disappear at any time?

:[Ponytail and Cueball are seen in silhouette from a distance.]
:Ponytail: Yeah -- the same thing freaks me out about having a body.
:Cueball: I know, right?? I don't even know what half these parts ''do''!
:Ponytail: And yet if they stop, we die!
:Cueball: Probably best not to think about it.

{{comic discussion}}

761: DFS

2018-12-19T21:44:32Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 761
| date = July 2, 2010
| title = DFS
| image = dfs.png
| titletext = A breadth-first search makes a lot of sense for dating in general, actually; it suggests dating a bunch of people casually before getting serious, rather than having a series of five-year relationships one after the other.
}}

==Explanation==
In this comic [[Hairy]] is preparing for his date with [[Ponytail]], and has just finished with a shower, as seen from the fact that he is wearing a towel around his waist.

He is also preparing mentally by thinking about which [[#Situations|situations]] he might encounter during the date. Since he cannot know for sure he is performing a "blind search" in his head. When doing a blind search in computing, there are two main tactics—{{w|depth-first search}} (DFS), and {{w|breadth-first search}} (BFS).

Hairy uses the '''DFS''' technique, as indicated in the comic title, which means going as far as you possibly can down one path before looking at other possibilities. This turns out to be a bad idea, as Hairy's searches takes him out of a tangent. Instead of preparing for his date, Hairy instead spent the whole time [[#Snake venom|doing research]] on {{w|snake venom}}, to the exclusion of even getting dressed in time for the arrival of his date. The way the last panel is the only panel and at the far right in the second row vs. four panels in the top row, indicates all the time he has used on DFS. And although he may realize his mistake, throwing up his arms, he has to tell [[Ponytail]] the fact he has found out that the {{w|inland taipan}}'s has the deadliest venom of any snake (see [[#Snake venom|more]] below).

By contrast, a breadth-first search will look only minimally into a topic before moving on to another; any new depth exposed by this minimal check will be added to a list of stuff to do later. This would have allowed Hairy to briefly check many more things within the time allotted, and probably still have been able to get dressed.

The relationship advice given in the title text on using breadth-first search may not be meant too seriously. However, one might be more sure about what kind of person one is looking for after already having dated a few people. But then the right one, might have slipped by. It is by no means certain that you can return to one of the first persons you dated after having dated another dozen.

It is, however, not very useful, if you wish to have a stable family life, to "only" be with a person for five years. So DFS is for sure a bad way to find out who you wish to spend you life with. One might conclude that blind search is not a good way to find your significant other. But for most people, there is no other way to search.

Hairy also has a situation where he goes out of a tangent in [[1518: Typical Morning Routine]].

==Situations==
Hairy begins to think of several situations to prepares for.

===First step===
In the first panel there are four situations:
#Medical emergency
##This is the situation he continues with in the second step.
#Dancing
##He probably doesn't think he is good enough at dancing, or simply doesn’t like it.
##It could also be because he is uncertain what she expects, of if she wishes to dance with him at all.
#Food too expensive
##It probably means that he is expected to pay (at least for himself, but probably also for his date)
##This is a simple problem, if he does his search first. He just has to choose a restaurant he can afford.
#Bee eating contest (?)
##This situation is cut off, so it is hard to be certain what it says.
##The above is the best guess so far.
##It could be a joke on {{w|Spelling bee}} contests and "normal" {{w|Competitive eating|eating contest}}.

===Second step===
In the second panel there are also four situations continuing the first option from the first panel:
#Medical emergency
##Snakebite
###This is the situation he continues with in the third step.
##{{w|Lightning strike}}
###Very unlikely event to happen on any given date.
##Fall from chair
###This could happen, especially if he is clumsy when holding the chair for her...
##Tracheal bowing (?)
###This situation is cut off very much. The above is just a good guess.

===Third step===
In the third panel there are four types of snakes with questions marks as to whether they are dangerous. This is a continuation of the first option from the second panel:
#Medical emergency
##Snakebite
###Corn snake
###Garter snake
###Copperhead
###Coral snake (?)
####This situation is cut off very much. The above is just a good guess.

This third step takes him to his computer in the fourth panel where he does lots of research on [[#Snake venom|snake venom]].

===Snake venom===
{{w|Median lethal dose|LD50}}, or median lethal dose, is the dose of a toxin required to kill 50% of the population studied, usually expressed in milligrams of toxin per kilogram of body mass, and most often for {{w|rats}} or another type of {{w|guinea pig}}.

The {{w|inland taipan}}'s venom does, indeed, have the second, (only to sea snakes) lowest median lethal dose among snake venoms. (Fortunately, it is extremely shy in temperament, and will always escape danger rather than bite if it can, which is why it isn't considered to be a particularly dangerous snake.)

Incidentally, {{w|Corn snake|corn snakes}} and {{w|garter snakes}} are not even remotely dangerous to humans (in fact they're the most popular pet snakes), and of the four different species commonly known as "{{w|agkistrodon|copperheads}}," the only dangerously venomous one is ''{{w|deinagkistrodon acutus}}'' or sharp-nosed viper that only lives in Southeast Asia. In the US the snake going by the name of ''copperhead'' is the {{w|agkistrodon contortrix}}.

The item that is almost entirely cut off by the thought bubble seems to be "{{w|coral snake}};" coral snakes are in a similar position as the inland taipan: extremely venomous, but also extremely reclusive.

==Transcript==
:[In a frame that breaks the top of the first panels frame:]
:Preparing for a date:

:[Hairy with wet hair and a towel around his waist thinks with his hand to his chin. There are four situations, but it is not possible to read the fourth line.]
:Hairy: What situations might I prepare for?
::1) Medical emergency
::2) Dancing
::3) Food too expensive

:[Close-up on Hairy's face, who is still thinking. There are again four situations, but again it is not possible to read the fourth line.]
:Hairy: Okay, what kind of emergencies can happen?
::1) A) Snakebite
::: B) Lightning strike
::: C) Fall from chair

:[Zoooming out again to full figure of Hairy. He is still thinking... There are four snakes, but again it is not possible to read the fourth line. The word Danger stands beneath the three dots above the "?" after each snake.]
:Hairy: Hmm. Which snakes are dangerous? Let's see...
:::::::Danger
::1)A)a) Corn snake ?
::: b) Garter snake ?
::: c) Copperhead ?

:[Hairy is sitting down in a chair with a laptop in his lap, while still wearing the towel.]
:Hairy: The research comparing snake venoms is scattered and inconsistent. I'll make a spreadsheet to organize it.

:[Bottom panel is larger than top four, and aligned to right. Ponytail meets Hairy on his front stoop. She is carrying a purse, and looks down at the towel he is still wearing. Hairy holds his arms in the air.]
:Ponytail: I'm here to pick you up. You're not dressed?
:Hairy: By LD50, the inland taipan has the deadliest venom of any snake!

:[Below this last panel are the following caption:]
:'''I really need to stop using depth-first searches.'''

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Romance]]

Talk:2007: Brookhaven RHIC

2018-06-24T01:37:51Z

172.68.150.52:

I think the correct explanation has to do with relativistic mass. Accelerated gold ions will have an increased (relativistic) mass. Therefore, the gold coming out of the accelerator will have a higher value than the input. You just have to sell by mass. --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.78.22|172.68.78.22]] 16:14, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
:The relativistic mass angle and calculation is interesting and amusing, but my impression of the intention is simply that--from a certain point of view--the entire accelerator is nothing but an extremely expensive and convoluted way to transport gold from Point A to Point B. An extremely small quantity of gold, yes--but that is part of the point.

:By adding the gold shop into the loop, he is simply pointing up the "gold delivery" aspect of the accelerator. Again, this isn't a really efficient gold delivery scheme but the very ridiculousness of it is the point. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.52|172.68.150.52]] 01:37, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

:Yeah, we need to calculate the increase of mass at 99.99, 99,999, 99,9999 percent of the speed of light. I didn't check but I'm curious how many 9s we need to reach the mass of the Earth for a single gold nuclei. Nevertheless the speed is zero again when you collect them, or you have to move at the same speed, but than you can't measure that increase because you're in the same reference -- and back on Earth your own mass would have grown out far beyond the mass of our Milky Way. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:11, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
::Mass is an invariant quantity. What is increased is the total energy, E=sqrt(p^2+m^2). As previously mentioned, when they are delivered they would have to be measured in a comoving frame in which case no increase in "mass" would be noticed.-- [[Special:Contributions/162.158.146.70|162.158.146.70]] 20:46, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
:::Sorry, you know what ''invariant'' means in physics? And you can't sum p and m (simply squared both) by using the Einstein conventions c=1, it's in fact E2=m4+p2 -- I fear most people still don't understand. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:02, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
::::Comes across a bit condescending considering m^2c^4=(mc^2)^2, not (mc)^4. The mass is the rest mass, which is always the same, considering it is measured at rest. It is a misnomer to call the total energy the mass. The physics you're describing is correct, I just take issue with the wording. I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear enough. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.146.70|162.158.146.70]] 22:29, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
Isn't a typical cash-for-gold store where you would take your gold and walk out with cash for your gold? It sounds like Randall's proposal is gold-for-cash stores instead. [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 19:03, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
: It makes sense if his proposal is to sell the gold to the stores, where he would just need the stores to agree to buy the high speed particles. I thought he was suggesting consumers would buy the excess gold particles in the stores, but that's probably not what he meant. [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 19:14, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

My first thought here was that he was proposing a gold-ion particle beam weapon. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.240|162.158.106.240]] 20:10, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

The destination in the middle appears to be the actual location of a cash for gold shop [https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cash+for+Gold/@40.8009993,-72.8694024,13z/data=!4m8!1m2!2m1!1scash+for+gold!3m4!1s0x0:0xd50dc29c3fa0b22f!8m2!3d40.8023428!4d-72.8620523?hl=en according to google maps]. The other ones don't seem to exist though.
[[Special:Contributions/162.158.88.176|162.158.88.176]] 01:43, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
: Actually all three locations exists in real life. From left to right (north to south): New York Gold Center, Cash for Gold, and Gold Traders Inc. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.142|162.158.134.142]] 07:03, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

If anyone wants to calculate the revenue of the project: particles move at 0.99995c and according to one source they use less than 1/1000000 Gramm of gold in 20years(idk they could probably use more if they wanted). Current gold price is about 1280€ per kg
19:22, 16 June 2018 (UTC)some dude that forgot highschool physics19:22, 16 June 2018 (UTC)~21.10:16 June 2018 (UTC) {{unsigned ip|172.68.51.202}}

I suppose that RHIC will generate gold nuclei only, not providing electrons to build-up complete atoms. Thus the objection is "I won't buy gold without electrons, because I will find highly positive electric charges from protons-only projectiles". {{unsigned ip|172.68.10.184}}

My thought was, that Randall proposes to use existing gold particles in shops for the collision, instead of using gold provided by the research program. Thus potentially saving miniscule amounts of gold. - MN (anonymous) {{unsigned ip|141.101.76.82}}
:When I read this, it felt possible to me, but then I realized: calling that spot "Diverter" indicates the flow is the other way. Then I noticed the grey arrows ALSO indicating the flow is the other way. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 04:16, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

The comic proper was pushing the envelope of weirdness, but the pun in the title text is golden. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.246.158|172.68.246.158]] 12:29, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Ok im gonna atempt to calculate the revenue. At the start of the RHIC is EBIS Electron Beem Ion Scource. Acourding to to (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_Beam_Ion_Trap) it can contain anything from a few thousands to many millions of Particles. Im goingt to assume 1 Million particles at the time for gold. The paricles in Ebis are charged for 30 milliseconds (https://www.bnl.gov/rhic/video.php?v=156).Im therefore going to assume a possible firerate of 50 milliseconds = 0,05s. This amounts to 630720000 poosible fireings per year. and therfore roughtly 630720000*10^6=63072*10^10 paricles per year. This is around 1.05*10^(-9)Mol. Sice one Mol of gold is 197 gramm this is about 2*10^(-7)gramm= 20 mikrogramms. The paricles travel at 0.99995c. I'm affaid of the last step of the calc so im gonna let someone else do it. The Current gold price is at 36493€ per Kg (Source Google).13:24, 18 June 2018 (UTC)me mathstudent13:24, 18 June 2018 (UTC) {{unsigned ip|172.68.51.166}}
:Ok I overcame my fear asked Wolfram alpha and it said that at 0.99995c 20 mikorgramm equal around 600kg,ok 600*36493=21835800€13:50, 18 June 2018 (UTC)~me a mathsstudent13:50, 18 June 2018 (UTC)~ {{unsigned ip|172.68.51.64}}

All of this is just fine - so long as the gold stores don't stop the gold moving in order to weigh it. Honestly, I think he'd be better off using Heisenburg's uncertainty principle - if they try to weigh the gold very accurately, then because they won't be able to determine its precise position, he can sell it to all three stores at once. {{unsigned ip|172.69.69.34}}

Somehow, coming here and finding out this is a real map, and those are real stores, makes this like 1,000 times funnier to me, LOL! Maybe Randall noticed the alignment, how these three stores are roughly in a line, and he got inspired. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 04:16, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Talk:2007: Brookhaven RHIC

2018-06-24T01:37:02Z

172.68.150.52: Point of gold delivery

I think the correct explanation has to do with relativistic mass. Accelerated gold ions will have an increased (relativistic) mass. Therefore, the gold coming out of the accelerator will have a higher value than the input. You just have to sell by mass. --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.78.22|172.68.78.22]] 16:14, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
:The relativistic mass angle and calculation is interesting and amusing, but my impression of the intention is simply that--from a certain point of view--the entire accelerator is nothing but an extremely expensive and convoluted way to transport gold from Point A to Point B. An extremely small quantity of gold, yes--but that is part of the point.

By adding the gold shop into the loop, he is simply pointing up the "gold delivery" aspect of the accelerator. Again, this isn't a really efficient gold delivery scheme but the very ridiculousness of it is the point.
:Yeah, we need to calculate the increase of mass at 99.99, 99,999, 99,9999 percent of the speed of light. I didn't check but I'm curious how many 9s we need to reach the mass of the Earth for a single gold nuclei. Nevertheless the speed is zero again when you collect them, or you have to move at the same speed, but than you can't measure that increase because you're in the same reference -- and back on Earth your own mass would have grown out far beyond the mass of our Milky Way. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 18:11, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
::Mass is an invariant quantity. What is increased is the total energy, E=sqrt(p^2+m^2). As previously mentioned, when they are delivered they would have to be measured in a comoving frame in which case no increase in "mass" would be noticed.-- [[Special:Contributions/162.158.146.70|162.158.146.70]] 20:46, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
:::Sorry, you know what ''invariant'' means in physics? And you can't sum p and m (simply squared both) by using the Einstein conventions c=1, it's in fact E2=m4+p2 -- I fear most people still don't understand. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 22:02, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
::::Comes across a bit condescending considering m^2c^4=(mc^2)^2, not (mc)^4. The mass is the rest mass, which is always the same, considering it is measured at rest. It is a misnomer to call the total energy the mass. The physics you're describing is correct, I just take issue with the wording. I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear enough. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.146.70|162.158.146.70]] 22:29, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
Isn't a typical cash-for-gold store where you would take your gold and walk out with cash for your gold? It sounds like Randall's proposal is gold-for-cash stores instead. [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 19:03, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
: It makes sense if his proposal is to sell the gold to the stores, where he would just need the stores to agree to buy the high speed particles. I thought he was suggesting consumers would buy the excess gold particles in the stores, but that's probably not what he meant. [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 19:14, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

My first thought here was that he was proposing a gold-ion particle beam weapon. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.240|162.158.106.240]] 20:10, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

The destination in the middle appears to be the actual location of a cash for gold shop [https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cash+for+Gold/@40.8009993,-72.8694024,13z/data=!4m8!1m2!2m1!1scash+for+gold!3m4!1s0x0:0xd50dc29c3fa0b22f!8m2!3d40.8023428!4d-72.8620523?hl=en according to google maps]. The other ones don't seem to exist though.
[[Special:Contributions/162.158.88.176|162.158.88.176]] 01:43, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
: Actually all three locations exists in real life. From left to right (north to south): New York Gold Center, Cash for Gold, and Gold Traders Inc. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.142|162.158.134.142]] 07:03, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

If anyone wants to calculate the revenue of the project: particles move at 0.99995c and according to one source they use less than 1/1000000 Gramm of gold in 20years(idk they could probably use more if they wanted). Current gold price is about 1280€ per kg
19:22, 16 June 2018 (UTC)some dude that forgot highschool physics19:22, 16 June 2018 (UTC)~21.10:16 June 2018 (UTC) {{unsigned ip|172.68.51.202}}

I suppose that RHIC will generate gold nuclei only, not providing electrons to build-up complete atoms. Thus the objection is "I won't buy gold without electrons, because I will find highly positive electric charges from protons-only projectiles". {{unsigned ip|172.68.10.184}}

My thought was, that Randall proposes to use existing gold particles in shops for the collision, instead of using gold provided by the research program. Thus potentially saving miniscule amounts of gold. - MN (anonymous) {{unsigned ip|141.101.76.82}}
:When I read this, it felt possible to me, but then I realized: calling that spot "Diverter" indicates the flow is the other way. Then I noticed the grey arrows ALSO indicating the flow is the other way. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 04:16, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

The comic proper was pushing the envelope of weirdness, but the pun in the title text is golden. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.246.158|172.68.246.158]] 12:29, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Ok im gonna atempt to calculate the revenue. At the start of the RHIC is EBIS Electron Beem Ion Scource. Acourding to to (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_Beam_Ion_Trap) it can contain anything from a few thousands to many millions of Particles. Im goingt to assume 1 Million particles at the time for gold. The paricles in Ebis are charged for 30 milliseconds (https://www.bnl.gov/rhic/video.php?v=156).Im therefore going to assume a possible firerate of 50 milliseconds = 0,05s. This amounts to 630720000 poosible fireings per year. and therfore roughtly 630720000*10^6=63072*10^10 paricles per year. This is around 1.05*10^(-9)Mol. Sice one Mol of gold is 197 gramm this is about 2*10^(-7)gramm= 20 mikrogramms. The paricles travel at 0.99995c. I'm affaid of the last step of the calc so im gonna let someone else do it. The Current gold price is at 36493€ per Kg (Source Google).13:24, 18 June 2018 (UTC)me mathstudent13:24, 18 June 2018 (UTC) {{unsigned ip|172.68.51.166}}
:Ok I overcame my fear asked Wolfram alpha and it said that at 0.99995c 20 mikorgramm equal around 600kg,ok 600*36493=21835800€13:50, 18 June 2018 (UTC)~me a mathsstudent13:50, 18 June 2018 (UTC)~ {{unsigned ip|172.68.51.64}}

All of this is just fine - so long as the gold stores don't stop the gold moving in order to weigh it. Honestly, I think he'd be better off using Heisenburg's uncertainty principle - if they try to weigh the gold very accurately, then because they won't be able to determine its precise position, he can sell it to all three stores at once. {{unsigned ip|172.69.69.34}}

Somehow, coming here and finding out this is a real map, and those are real stores, makes this like 1,000 times funnier to me, LOL! Maybe Randall noticed the alignment, how these three stores are roughly in a line, and he got inspired. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 04:16, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Talk:2005: Attention Span

2018-06-19T20:57:18Z

172.68.150.52:

Do you think the book being referenced is a Dragon Lance book?[[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.24|162.158.106.24]] 04:33, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
: I think with the "thicker than its wide" comment, it does sound like Dragonlance Chronicles. Also, it IS a classic [[Special:Contributions/162.158.155.104|162.158.155.104]] 07:40, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
:: Also, hasn’t Randall expressed interest in the works of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman in the past. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.118|108.162.245.118]] 17:50, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
:: Btw I hopped over to the forums to see if they had any good ideas, it didn’t yield much but one person suggested one of the Deathgate Cycle books, another suggested a Brandon Sanderson book, though none to my knowledge have Dragons on the cover, and someone else suggested it might be a D&D rulebook, though I don’t know of any of those that meet the thickness described[[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.118|108.162.245.118]] 18:32, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
: Sounds like a Wheel of Time omnibus, if such a thing actually exists. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.148|108.162.216.148]] 16:29, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:: If you're talking about omnibus editions of a series, there are many that could easily get this thick. But I'm at a loss to think of a single book that is thicker than it is wide. Although my mass-market paperback edition of ''Les Misérables'' comes pretty close (but has nothing to do with fantasy). [[User:Shamino|Shamino]] ([[User talk:Shamino|talk]]) 15:09, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
::: I'm certain Randall's employing hyperbole. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.214|162.158.134.214]] 21:18, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
:Or it could be one of the alternate art covers of one of the Dark Sword books, or is that too deep a cut even for Randall? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.24|162.158.106.24]] 22:46, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
: I doubt he's referring to any real book, but rather making use of the fact that fantasy novels tend to be notoriously long and involving a ridiculous image (a dragon with a sword in its teeth) to show that this particular book is of dubious quality. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.212.83|108.162.212.83]] 16:52, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

The comic contains a hyperlink to what appears to be exactly the kind of article Cueball apparently "''just'' finished reading", or at least my mobile reader is picking up a hyperlink. I've added a small note about this; I'm not linking the article directly for personal reasons. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.227|108.162.221.227]] 05:51, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
: I linked it. If it's linked in the original then it should be here, too. Maybe it belongs more to the trivia section, I don't know, but it definitely has to be shown here somewhere. On a side node: did Randall ever do something like that before? [[User:Elektrizikekswerk|Elektrizikekswerk]] ([[User talk:Elektrizikekswerk|talk]]) 06:53, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:: Linking other content behind the image? Yes, I think he did it several times before. The only actual comic I remember, however, is [[351: Trolling]]. --[[User:YMS|YMS]] ([[User talk:YMS|talk]]) 09:17, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:Considering that the link contains a link to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jltKnDlH_OA I believe that omission is no an option [[Special:Contributions/162.158.234.58|162.158.234.58]] 09:51, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:::[[1723: Meteorite Identification]], [[1506: xkcloud]], [[1572: xkcd Survey]]... just to name a few more. [[User:Herobrine|Herobrine]] ([[User talk:Herobrine|talk]]) 09:55, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:::: Ah, very well :) The difference between those three and this one and 351 is that in the latter the link is "hidden". The others say "Click here" either directly or in alt-text. And in xkcloud it isn't an external link. Whatever. Maybe we should consider making a category of them? [[User:Elektrizikekswerk|Elektrizikekswerk]] ([[User talk:Elektrizikekswerk|talk]]) 11:04, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

I must admit to never having watch the seminal movie Surf ninjas but wikipedia tells me there is not only a novelisation, by A L Singer (Peter Lerangis) but also the screenplay. {{unsigned|Arachrah}}

I once advanced the theory that Sodor is the future of Mordor after the machines won and evolved into trains. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.51|162.158.62.51]] 12:46, 11 June 2018 (UTC) Jedman67
: Sounds like Mieville's Railsea. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.148|108.162.216.148]] 16:29, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Dragonsbane isn't nearly long enough to meet the thickness requirement --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.75.196|162.158.75.196]] 17:17, 11 June 2018 (UTC)RyanR

Does anyone feel like the punchline is misplaced? Start with claim that he has no attn span any more, then she lists various overly long works he clearly does read while he protests and defends, then he concludes with punchline "no attn span for anything good." In fact, she should probably deliver the line, after discovering what he has on his bookshelf. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.122.42|162.158.122.42]] 20:25, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:The key here was diminishing attention span with age, so he indicated "...for anything good ANYMORE." The joke is that this isn't something that changed. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.112|108.162.216.112]] 22:13, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

What bumps me about this comic is that the book Megan describes to make her point sounds like it would be an excellent well-structured book, very high quality reading, akin to Lord Of The Rings (Cueball even specifies it's a classic). REALLY doesn't fit with the theme of low quality crap reading this comic is going for. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 04:51, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

I've read all of the books mentioned as possible matches. And none of them have dragons holding a sword in their mouth. And since the book cover sounds EXACTLY like something I would enjoy reading, I really must insist that we demand that Randall admit which book he was referring to. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.90.22|172.68.90.22]] SiliconWolf

I wonder if the book Megan spots on the bookshelf is a sly reference to the classic (but rather staid) computer-science textbook "''Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools''" by Aho, et al, AKA "The Dragon book". The cover of the first edition ''does'' has both a dragon & a sword on it, althought the sword isn't in the dragon's mouth, and it is a bit thinner than it is wide. [[User:JamesCurran|JamesCurran]] ([[User talk:JamesCurran|talk]]) 20:05, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

"Thicker than it's wide - It's a classic" is probably referencing the "If it's longer than it's wide, it's a phallus" joke poem. {{unsigned ip|172.68.239.107}}

"It is unclear how one could possibly spend six hours reading such an article." Hmm, it appears you are unfamiliar with this concept called the "World Wide Web." See, any given article has small text snippets indicated by a special color or style called "hyperlinks". Clicking a hyperlink will take you to a different article, typically on a topic relevant to the original article or phrase linked. This hyperlinked article will again link to several more articles, and so on for each succeeding article. Clicking from link to link is an activity often referred to as "browsing cyberspace" and, if pursuing an interesting topic, a reader can easily spend several hours browsing from link to link exploring just about any given topic.

For more information about this astonishing phenomenon, please consult [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfMrVKnGzwg any 1990s guide to the vast new online arena called the world-wide web]. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.52|172.68.150.52]] 20:55, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Talk:2005: Attention Span

2018-06-19T20:55:11Z

172.68.150.52:

Do you think the book being referenced is a Dragon Lance book?[[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.24|162.158.106.24]] 04:33, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
: I think with the "thicker than its wide" comment, it does sound like Dragonlance Chronicles. Also, it IS a classic [[Special:Contributions/162.158.155.104|162.158.155.104]] 07:40, 12 June 2018 (UTC)
:: Also, hasn’t Randall expressed interest in the works of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman in the past. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.118|108.162.245.118]] 17:50, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
:: Btw I hopped over to the forums to see if they had any good ideas, it didn’t yield much but one person suggested one of the Deathgate Cycle books, another suggested a Brandon Sanderson book, though none to my knowledge have Dragons on the cover, and someone else suggested it might be a D&D rulebook, though I don’t know of any of those that meet the thickness described[[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.118|108.162.245.118]] 18:32, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
: Sounds like a Wheel of Time omnibus, if such a thing actually exists. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.148|108.162.216.148]] 16:29, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:: If you're talking about omnibus editions of a series, there are many that could easily get this thick. But I'm at a loss to think of a single book that is thicker than it is wide. Although my mass-market paperback edition of ''Les Misérables'' comes pretty close (but has nothing to do with fantasy). [[User:Shamino|Shamino]] ([[User talk:Shamino|talk]]) 15:09, 13 June 2018 (UTC)
::: I'm certain Randall's employing hyperbole. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.214|162.158.134.214]] 21:18, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
:Or it could be one of the alternate art covers of one of the Dark Sword books, or is that too deep a cut even for Randall? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.24|162.158.106.24]] 22:46, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
: I doubt he's referring to any real book, but rather making use of the fact that fantasy novels tend to be notoriously long and involving a ridiculous image (a dragon with a sword in its teeth) to show that this particular book is of dubious quality. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.212.83|108.162.212.83]] 16:52, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

The comic contains a hyperlink to what appears to be exactly the kind of article Cueball apparently "''just'' finished reading", or at least my mobile reader is picking up a hyperlink. I've added a small note about this; I'm not linking the article directly for personal reasons. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.227|108.162.221.227]] 05:51, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
: I linked it. If it's linked in the original then it should be here, too. Maybe it belongs more to the trivia section, I don't know, but it definitely has to be shown here somewhere. On a side node: did Randall ever do something like that before? [[User:Elektrizikekswerk|Elektrizikekswerk]] ([[User talk:Elektrizikekswerk|talk]]) 06:53, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:: Linking other content behind the image? Yes, I think he did it several times before. The only actual comic I remember, however, is [[351: Trolling]]. --[[User:YMS|YMS]] ([[User talk:YMS|talk]]) 09:17, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:Considering that the link contains a link to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jltKnDlH_OA I believe that omission is no an option [[Special:Contributions/162.158.234.58|162.158.234.58]] 09:51, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:::[[1723: Meteorite Identification]], [[1506: xkcloud]], [[1572: xkcd Survey]]... just to name a few more. [[User:Herobrine|Herobrine]] ([[User talk:Herobrine|talk]]) 09:55, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:::: Ah, very well :) The difference between those three and this one and 351 is that in the latter the link is "hidden". The others say "Click here" either directly or in alt-text. And in xkcloud it isn't an external link. Whatever. Maybe we should consider making a category of them? [[User:Elektrizikekswerk|Elektrizikekswerk]] ([[User talk:Elektrizikekswerk|talk]]) 11:04, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

I must admit to never having watch the seminal movie Surf ninjas but wikipedia tells me there is not only a novelisation, by A L Singer (Peter Lerangis) but also the screenplay. {{unsigned|Arachrah}}

I once advanced the theory that Sodor is the future of Mordor after the machines won and evolved into trains. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.51|162.158.62.51]] 12:46, 11 June 2018 (UTC) Jedman67
: Sounds like Mieville's Railsea. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.148|108.162.216.148]] 16:29, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Dragonsbane isn't nearly long enough to meet the thickness requirement --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.75.196|162.158.75.196]] 17:17, 11 June 2018 (UTC)RyanR

Does anyone feel like the punchline is misplaced? Start with claim that he has no attn span any more, then she lists various overly long works he clearly does read while he protests and defends, then he concludes with punchline "no attn span for anything good." In fact, she should probably deliver the line, after discovering what he has on his bookshelf. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.122.42|162.158.122.42]] 20:25, 11 June 2018 (UTC)
:The key here was diminishing attention span with age, so he indicated "...for anything good ANYMORE." The joke is that this isn't something that changed. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.112|108.162.216.112]] 22:13, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

What bumps me about this comic is that the book Megan describes to make her point sounds like it would be an excellent well-structured book, very high quality reading, akin to Lord Of The Rings (Cueball even specifies it's a classic). REALLY doesn't fit with the theme of low quality crap reading this comic is going for. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 04:51, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

I've read all of the books mentioned as possible matches. And none of them have dragons holding a sword in their mouth. And since the book cover sounds EXACTLY like something I would enjoy reading, I really must insist that we demand that Randall admit which book he was referring to. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.90.22|172.68.90.22]] SiliconWolf

I wonder if the book Megan spots on the bookshelf is a sly reference to the classic (but rather staid) computer-science textbook "''Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools''" by Aho, et al, AKA "The Dragon book". The cover of the first edition ''does'' has both a dragon & a sword on it, althought the sword isn't in the dragon's mouth, and it is a bit thinner than it is wide. [[User:JamesCurran|JamesCurran]] ([[User talk:JamesCurran|talk]]) 20:05, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

"Thicker than it's wide - It's a classic" is probably referencing the "If it's longer than it's wide, it's a phallus" joke poem. {{unsigned ip|172.68.239.107}}

"It is unclear how one could possibly spend six hours reading such an article." Hmm, it appears you are unfamiliar with this concept called the "World Wide Web." See, any given article has small text snippets indicated by a special color or style called "hyperlinks". Clicking a hyperlink will take you to a different article, typically on a topic relevant to the original article or phrase linked. This hyperlinked article will again link to several more articles, and so on for each succeeding article. Clicking from link to link is an activity often referred to as "browsing cyberspace" and, if pursuing an interesting topic, a reader can easily spend several hours browsing from link to link exploring just about any given topic.

For more information about this astonishing phenomenon, please consult any 1990s guide to the vast new online arena called the world-wide web. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.52|172.68.150.52]] 20:55, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Talk:2003: Presidential Succession

2018-06-06T22:44:44Z

172.68.150.52:

Aw, but what about Morgan Freeman? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.11|108.162.221.11]] 04:43, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
:And Kiefer -designated survivor- Sutherland?[[Special:Contributions/141.101.104.83|141.101.104.83]] 08:24, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
:Morgan Freeman> "I do solemnly swear / that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States..." [[User:Linker|Linker]] ([[User talk:Linker|talk]]) 12:39, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Academy awards have been won by actors playing kings / queens - of England, the United Kingdom and Siam - Princes - of Denmark - and Prime Ministers of Great Britain and even the President of the Uniter States / Member of the house of Representatives, but I do not believe it has been won by an actor playing a state govenor. Mind you it is not clear if an actor playing a prison govenor, would count. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 11:30, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
: Broderick Crawford, actually. I've added him. To the best of my ability to determine, the opposite group (Governors Award recipients who have played characters named Oscar) appears to be an empty set. I'll note that I don't have a really comprehensive filmography for {{w|Jean-Claude Carrière}}, but I consider it fairly unlikely that he ever played a character by that name. [[User:Squeamish Ossifrage|Squeamish Ossifrage]] ([[User talk:Squeamish Ossifrage|talk]]) 16:08, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Bill Pullman's eldest daughter Maesa is a film composer with an IMDB page in her own right. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 11:30, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Top 5 US astronauts? I only count three. Who are the other two? [[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.76|172.68.150.76]] 12:15, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

As of September 3, 2017, the 5 US astronauts with the most total time in space are Peggy Whitson (665 days), Jeff Williams (534), Scott Kelly (520), Mike Fincke (382), and Mike Foale (374), according to https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-station-astronaut-record-holders. Michael Lopez-Alegria has the second-most time in space for a single spaceflight (215 days, compared to Scott Kelly, 340). [[User:The Dining Logician|The Dining Logician]] ([[User talk:The Dining Logician|talk]]) 12:59, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Mike Foale was born in Louth - so ineligible. Michael Lopez-Alegria was born in Spain ditto [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 15:26, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

The non-US-citizen-being-in-line-for-the-Presidency thing has already been cleared up IRL - several Presidential cabinets have had non-natural-born-US citizens on them (current Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao was born in Taiwan; in the past Madeline Albright was born in the then-Czechoslovakia). All the serious succession lists I've ever seen just list them and skip over them. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.51|162.158.62.51]] 13:19, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

How do we decide who gets a bye in the jousting tournament? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.147|162.158.74.147]] 13:30, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
:Random draw, probably. There's no jousting rankings AFAIK to enable any kind of seeding like in tennis. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.51|162.158.62.51]] 15:16, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Anyone with a jousting ranking would not need a bye. [[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 15:26, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Anyone else think it's interesting that Kate gets a "if available" but Tom Hanks doesn't? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.62.184|172.69.62.184]] 16:23, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

I assume, but am too lazy to do all the maths, that the person born closest to Europa would be the one closest in time to the point Sun Earth and Jupiter are in line.
I found a table of opposition distances here: http://www.ianridpath.com/jupiter.htm
[[User:Arachrah|Arachrah]] ([[User talk:Arachrah|talk]]) 18:26, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

All of this talk about ''where'' people were born is very misleading. The general opinion is that you have to have been a citizen from birth, not born in the U.S. (or a U.S. territory or whatever). Ted Cruz was born in Canada, but he would have been eligible had he won the nomination and the election. See http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/mar/26/ted-cruz-born-canada-eligible-run-president-update/ for discussion. —[[User:TobyBartels|TobyBartels]] ([[User talk:TobyBartels|talk]]) 20:56, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
*Yes, Kate Brown (governor of Oregon) should be restored to Randall's line of succession, because she was born in Spain while her father was serving in the U.S. Air Force. Presumably she's a U.S. citizen by birth and thus eligible for the presidency. --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.52|172.68.150.52]] 22:44, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

2003: Presidential Succession

2018-06-06T22:43:19Z

172.68.150.52:

{{comic
| number = 2003
| date = June 6, 2018
| title = Presidential Succession
| image = presidential_succession.png
| titletext = Ties are broken by whoever was closest to the surface of Europa when they were born.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a DESIGNATED SURVIVOR - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

The {{w|United States presidential line of succession}} is the order of people who serve as president if the current incumbent president is incapacitated, dies, resigns, or is removed from office.

The {{w|Presidential_Succession_Act#Presidential_Succession_Act_of_1947|Presidential Succession Act of 1947}} was an act by the U.S. Congress that revised the presidential order of succession to its current order. This act, though never challenged in the courts, may not be constitutional for two reasons. First, it is unclear whether members of Congress can be designated in the line of succession. Secondly, the act allows for a cabinet officer to be "replaced" as acting President by a new Speaker of the House or a new President Pro Tempore of the Senate.

An additional concern regarding the Act is that after the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, the line of succession list the members of the Cabinet in the order that their department was established with the oldest departments first, irrespective of the Secretary's personal fitness or appropriateness of the office. The Department of Homeland Security is in charge of the security and protection of the United States and its citizens and would probably already be privy to sensitive intelligence and briefings related to national security, but because it is the latest of the Departments to have been established (in 2003) the Secretary of Homeland Security is all the way at the bottom of the current Presidential line of succession at 18th, behind other Secretaries such as that of Agriculture (9th) and Education (16th).

The full text of the Second Report of the Continuity of Government Commission can be found here: <https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_continuity_of_government.pdf>. A short, readable summary, including the report's recommended new line of succession, is here: <https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-continuity-of-the-presidency-the-second-report-of-the-continuity-of-government-commission/>. The first 6 members of the commission's list are included in the current line of succession, after which they specificy that 5 new people should be appointed specifically for the purpose of succeeding the presidency if needed. Randall's list begins with these 11 people (stuffing all 5 of the new appointees into #7); afterwards, his list continues with more politicians, actors who have played Presidents, athletes, and others.

Randall's list omits the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, as well as many other cabinet positions. He is probably simply following the commission's report in this. But perhaps he does not find those people qualified to become President of the United States, or is concerned about the constitutionality of lawmakers becoming President. However, he does not seem to be concerned about constitutionality, because he included the entire line of succession to the British throne, most of whom do not meet the requirement to be a natural-born citizen of the United States.{{Citation needed}}

Randall's list includes several other people who also might not be eligible to become President either because they are not natural-born U.S. citizens (e.g., as of the time of the comic's publication, {{w|Serena Williams}} had withdrawn from her last match in the {{w|French Open}} to {{w|Maria Sharapova}}, who is Russian) or they are under 35 years of age ({{w|Russell Westbrook}}, the reigning NBA Most Valuable Player at the time of the comic's publication, was only 29 years old). These would mainly be athletes due to the relatively global reach of the four major professional sports leagues in North America and the fact that 35 is quite old for a professional athlete, let alone one who is good enough to win the league MVP. Presumably, those who wouldn't qualify for the office of President would be skipped over like in real life -- at the comic's publication, {{w|Elaine Chao}} was the Secretary of Transportation and would normally be 14th in line, but because she is a naturalized citizen of the US (she was born in Taiwan) she would not qualify for the office if the line came to her.

This is another comic in the continuing line of comics about American politics, especially after the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016.

==Order of succession==
{| class="wikitable sortable"
!#
!Randall's order
!Current order by the 1947 Act
!Notes
|-
|1
|President
|President
|Not generally considered part of the line of succession, as incumbents cannot "succeed" to their own post. (This should really be item 0 on the list.)
|-
|2
|Vice president
|Vice president
|No change
|-
|3
|Secretary of State
|Speaker of the House of Representatives
|Moved up from 5th position. This is likely a serious suggestion. Existing rules of succession hand Executive power to the leaders of the Legislative branch if the President and Vice-President are both killed or removed from power. This is troubling for a number of reasons. One is that the Executive and Legislative branches are supposed to act as independent checks on one another's power, and so are supposed to be kept separate. Another issue is that the Executive and Legislative branches are frequently controlled by political rivals from different political parties. In such a case, assassins could effectively reverse the results of Presidential elections if they managed to kill the President and Vice-President in a short period of time (which is used as part of the twist ending in {{w|White House Down}}). Additionally, leaders of the House and Senate aren't as deeply connected to the military and diplomatic missions of the country, and so would have a hard time maintaining continuity, particularly if an attack or disaster killed multiple national leaders at once. These problems could all be addressed by keeping the initial Line of Succession confined to the Executive branch of government.
|-
|4
|Secretary of Defense
|President pro tempore of the Senate
|Moved up from 7th position
|-
|5
|Secretary of Homeland Security
|Secretary of State
|Moved up from 19th position, possibly to highlight the Attorney General's place in the current order
|-
|6
|Attorney General
|Secretary of the Treasury
|Moved up from 8th position
|-
|7
|Five people who do not live in Washington DC, nominated at the start of the President's term and confirmed by the Senate
|Secretary of Defense
|{{w|Washington, D.C.}} is the capital of the United States, and is where the {{w|White House}}, the President's residence, is located. Presumably this provision covers the case where much of the government, including positions 1–6 here, are killed by a natural disaster or attack in Washington, D.C.

This suggestion establishes no qualifications for these people, but the fact that they'd need to be confirmed by the Senate suggests that they would be chosen to be competent for the role. It is also unclear if an order is determined among these 5 or if they take up a joint presidency. This suggestion is taken from the Second Report of the Continuity of Government Commission as a potential mechanism to ensure members of succession are not in Washington DC during a catastrophic attack.
|-
|8
|{{w|Tom Hanks}}
|Attorney General
|Academy Award-winning American actor. This is the first unambiguously unserious suggestion.{{Citation needed}} Tom Hanks is very popular and considered exceptionally likeable by many Americans, but has never served in public office or displayed any particular affinity for politics. The implication is that Mr. Hanks would be easily accepted as a leader, based solely on his personal charm.
|-
|9
|State Governors, in descending order of state population at last census
|Secretary of the Interior
|Also taken from Second Report of the Continuity of Government Commission. At the time of publication, the last {{w|United States Census}} was the 2010 Census. As California is the most populous state, Gov {{w|Jerry Brown}} would be first in line.

See also the {{w|2010_United_States_Census#State_rankings|state population rankings}} and the {{w|list of current United States governors}}. As worded, this criterion would exclude territorial governors (and the Mayor of Washington, D.C.).
|-
|10
|Anyone who won an Oscar for playing a governor
|Secretary of Agriculture
|Oscars, or {{w|Academy Awards}}, are annual film awards awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. At the time of publication, the only Oscar awarded for playing a governor was {{w|Broderick Crawford}}'s 1949 Best Actor award for the fictional Willie Stark in ''{{w|All the King's Men (1949 film)|All the King's Men}}'' (a character based on {{w|Huey Long}}). However, Crawford died in 1986, so would be unable to serve as President.

May be a reference to the {{w|Political career of Arnold Schwarzenegger}}: a highly-lauded actor who became governor of California, but did not win an Oscar or play a governor before being elected. (As a naturalized citizen, he is also ineligible for the Presidency.)
|-
|11
|Anyone who won a Governor's award for playing someone named Oscar
|Secretary of Commerce
|The {{w|Governors Awards}} are an annual award ceremony hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to present lifetime achievement awards within the film industry. As this award is a lifetime achievement award, it does not seem possible that an actor could win this award for simply playing someone named Oscar. Notwithstanding the nature of the award, at the time of publication, no recipient of a Governors Award has played a character named Oscar.

Obviously, the joke is that changing the order of the words from the previous proposal produces something that could actually exist.
|-
|12
|{{w|Kate McKinnon}}, if available
|Secretary of Labor
|Comedic actress famous for being a cast member on {{w|Saturday Night Live}}. She is known for her character work and celebrity impressions. She has recently done impersonations of members of the Trump administration including Spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. She also played Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign and presumably would have played her when she was President had she won; but since Clinton lost, McKinnon has not actually played a President.
|-
|13
|Billboard Year-End Hot 100 Singles artists #1 through #10 (for groups, whoever is credited first in name, liner notes, etc)
|Secretary of Health and Human Services
|The {{w|Billboard Hot 100}} is the music industry standard record chart in the United States for singles, published weekly by Billboard magazine. The weekly data is aggregated into a cumulative {{w|Billboard Year-End}} (based on a "year" that ends the third week of November, in order to meet December publication deadlines). At the time of publication, the most recent such list was the {{w|Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 2017}}.

Based on that list, the artists considered for the presidential succession would be: {{w|Ed Sheeran}}, {{w|Luis Fonsi}}, {{w|Bruno Mars}}, {{w|Kendrick Lamar}}, Alex Pall (of {{w|The Chainsmokers}}), {{w|Quavo|Quavoius Keyate Marshall}} (of {{w|Migos}}), {{w|Sam Hunt}}, {{w|Dan Reynolds}} (of {{w|Imagine Dragons}}), and {{w|Post Malone}}. There are only nine names instead of ten because The Chainsmokers had two of the top 10 singles in 2017. Of these, only Luis Fonsi (40 years old, and born in Puerto Rico) is legally eligible for the office; Sheeran was born in the UK, and the other seven are too young.
|-
|14
|The top 5 US astronauts in descending order of total spaceflight time
|Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
|Astronauts are highly respected and rigorously selected, but most have little involvement in politics. According to [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-station-astronaut-record-holders NASA], the top 5 US astronauts by cumulative space time are: {{w|Peggy Whitson}}, {{w|Jeffrey Williams (astronaut)|Jeff Williams}}, {{W|Scott Kelly (astronaut)|Scott Kelly}}, {{w|Mike Fincke}}, and {{w|Mike Foale}}. However, Foale is British-born and would not be eligible for the position.
|-
|15
|{{w|Serena Williams}} (or, if she lost her most recent match, whoever beat her)
|Secretary of Transportation
|As of the time of publication, Serena Williams was the top female tennis player (though not the world #1 ranking, because she took time off for pregnancy). She is arguably the greatest female tennis player of all-time, winning 39 {{w|Grand Slam (tennis)|Grand Slam}} titles, including 23 women's singles titles. At the time of publication Serena Williams did win her most recent match (third round French Open 2018 on June 2nd), although she withdrew from her next match against Maria Sharapova (which perhaps should count as a loss, especially if she withdrew in order to preserve her place in the line of succession and led the terrorist attack that killed everybody in place ahead of her).

If her most recent defeat was to a non-US player, it is unclear whether that person would still qualify for President (the current succession list skips over anyone who would not normally qualify for not being a natural-born US citizen).
|-
|16
|The most recent season NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL MVPs
|Secretary of Energy
|MVP stands for {{w|Most Valuable Player}}. The 4 listed leagues are the major sports leagues in the United States, the {{w|National Basketball Association}} (NBA), the {{w|National Football League}} (NFL), {{w|Major League Baseball}} (MLB), and the {{w|National Hockey League}} (NHL).

As of the time of publication, the most recent MVPs for the listed sports are {{w|Russell Westbrook}} (NBA), {{w|Tom Brady}} (NFL), {{w|José Altuve}} and {{w|Giancarlo Stanton}} (MLB has two, one for the American League and one for the National League), and {{w|Connor McDavid}} (NHL). Of these, only Brady would qualify for the list - Altuve and McDavid are not US citizens (the former is from Venezuela and the latter from Canada), and Westbrook (29) and Stanton (28) are too young.
|-
|17
|{{w|Bill Pullman}} and his descendants by absolute primogeniture
|Secretary of Education
|American actor, known for playing President Thomas J. Whitmore in the 1996 film ''{{w|Independence Day (1996 film)|Independence Day}}''.

Absolute primogeniture is a form of succession where the oldest direct descendant regardless of gender receives the title. This is contrasted to {{w|Male-preference primogeniture}}, in which males come before females in the order of the throne, whether the males were born first or not. This may be a reference to the British law {{w|Succession to the Crown Act 2013}}, which changed the order of the throne from male-preference primogeniture to absolute primogeniture. This act allows {{w|Princess Charlotte of Cambridge|Princess Charlotte}} to retain her place in line before {{w|Prince Louis of Cambridge|Prince Louis}}.

As of the present, Pullman's immediate descendants consist of three children, with Maesa Pullman being the oldest at age 29, so all are currently too young for the presidency.
|-
|18
|The entire line of succession to the British throne
|Secretary of Veterans Affairs
|According to the Constitution, only a natural-born citizen of the United States can become President, which means that at least most of the line of succession to the British throne is ineligible. However, it is possible that someone in the line of succession to the British throne either is a dual citizen (especially one who is a U.S. citizen based on place of birth and a British citizen based on having a parent who was a British citizen descended from Sofia of Hanover) or is not British (a person from outside of Britain can become King; for example, some, including George the First, were from what is now Germany).

The first 57 names on the list are {{w|Succession_to_the_British_throne#Current_line_of_succession|here}}, as of the time of publication. [https://lineofsuccession.co.uk/?date=2018-06-06 British Line of Succession on 6 June 2018] shows the list as it was at the comic's publication. American citizens [http://articles.latimes.com/1988-02-11/news/vw-42233_1_royal-house have, at times] been on the list, but no natural-born Americans are currently in the top 100. In theory, however, the full British succession list includes several thousand people (living descendants of {{w|Sophia of Hanover}} who are not Roman Catholic or otherwise disqualified), and it is possible that one or more such people would also be eligible to be President of the United States.

The humor here derives from the fact that the United States was established by declaring independence from the United Kingdom, with rejection of the British monarchy being a basic founding principle, and a core principle of US governance. To appoint the British monarchy to the American presidency would contradict the basic goals of American independence. Alternatively, it may reference the recent wedding of {{w|Prince Harry}} to {{w|Meghan Markle}}, although she is not in the order of succession to the British throne (and she is planning to give up her U.S. citizenship in favour of British citizenship, so her children (who would come immediately after Harry in the British line of succession) would not be born U.S. citizens either). A similar sequence of events was the plotline of the comedy film ''{{w|King Ralph}}, which saw an American become the British monarch after the death of the royal family.
|-
|19
|The current champion of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating contest
|Secretary of Homeland Security
|The {{w|Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest}} is an annual American hot dog competitive eating competition sponsored by {{w|Nathan's Famous}} held on July 4th. As of the time of publication, the most recent men's winner is {{w|Joey Chestnut}} and the women's winner is {{w|Miki Sudo}}. Neither is currently old enough to assume the office.
|-
|20
|All other US citizens, chosen by a 29-round single-elimination Jousting tournament
|''None''
|Effective for a population up to 536,870,912 individuals (2^29) which would be enough to cover the entire US population (estimated at around 325 million at time of publication), although additional rounds can be added should the population grow further.

This is probably a reference to the Matter of Britain (e.g., {{w|The Sword in the Stone (film)}}), where, after the death of Uther Pendragon, with no known successor to the throne of England for years, it is decided that the winner of a jousting tournament shall be crowned. However, Arthur, the Wart, pulls the Sword from the Stone.
|}

The title text mentions whoever was closest to the surface of {{w|Europa}} when they were born. Europa is a moon of Jupiter, so most people would be very far from its surface when they were born. However, depending on the relative positions of Earth and Jupiter when you were born, you could easily have been tens of millions of kilometers closer. Alternatively, Randall could be playing on how Europa sounds like Europe.

===List of specific individuals===
Based on the comic's defined criteria for the order of succession, these are the specific individuals in that order, as of the date the comic was published:
{| class="wikitable sortable"
!Order
!Name
!Reason
!Notes
|-
|1
|{{w|Donald Trump}}
|{{w|President of the United States}}
|
|-
|2
|{{w|Mike Pence}}
|{{w|Vice President of the United States}}
|
|-
|3
|{{w|Mike Pompeo}}
|{{w|United States Secretary of State}}
|
|-
|4
|{{w|Jim Mattis}}
|{{w|United States Secretary of Defense}}
|
|-
|5
|{{w|Kirstjen Nielsen}}
|{{w|United States Secretary of Homeland Security}}
|
|-
|6
|{{w|Jeff Sessions}}
|{{w|United States Attorney General}}
|
|-
|7
|{{w|Tom Hanks}}
|Tom Hanks
|As Donald Trump did not appoint anyone to fill position #7 on Randall's line of succession, Hanks immediately follows after Sessions.
|-
|8
|{{w|Jerry Brown}}
|Governor of California
|
|-
|9
|{{w|Greg Abbott}}
|Governor of Texas
|
|-
|10
|{{w|Andrew Cuomo}}
|Governor of New York
|
|-
|11
|{{w|Rick Scott}}
|Governor of Florida
|
|-
|12
|{{w|Bruce Rauner}}
|Governor of Illinois
|
|-
|13
|{{w|Tom Wolf}}
|Governor of Pennsylvania
|
|-
|14
|{{w|John Kasich}}
|Governor of Ohio
|
|-
|15
|{{w|Rick Snyder}}
|Governor of Michigan
|
|-
|16
|{{w|Nathan Deal}}
|Governor of Georgia
|
|-
|17
|{{w|Roy Cooper}}
|Governor of North Carolina
|
|-
|18
|{{w|Phil Murphy}}
|Governor of New Jersey
|
|-
|19
|{{w|Ralph Northam}}
|Governor of Virginia
|
|-
|20
|{{w|Jay Inslee}}
|Governor of Washington
|
|-
|21
|{{w|Charlie Baker}}
|Governor of Massachusetts
|
|-
|22
|{{w|Eric Holcomb}}
|Governor of Indiana
|
|-
|23
|{{w|Doug Ducey}}
|Governor of Arizona
|
|-
|24
|{{w|Bill Haslam}}
|Governor of Tennessee
|
|-
|25
|{{w|Mike Parson}}
|Governor of Missouri
|
|-
|26
|{{w|Larry Hogan}}
|Governor of Maryland
|
|-
|27
|{{w|Scott Walker (politician)|Scott Walker}}
|Governor of Wisconsin
|
|-
|28
|{{w|Mark Dayton}}
|Governor of Minnesota
|
|-
|29
|{{w|John Hickenlooper}}
|Governor of Colorado
|
|-
|30
|{{w|Kay Ivey}}
|Governor of Alabama
|
|-
|31
|{{w|Henry McMaster}}
|Governor of South Carolina
|
|-
|32
|{{w|John Bel Edwards}}
|Governor of Louisiana
|
|-
|33
|{{w|Matt Bevin}}
|Governor of Kentucky
|
|-
|34
|{{w|Mary Fallin}}
|Governor of Oklahoma
|The governor of Oregon would normally fall between Kentucky and Oklahoma. However, {{w|Kate Brown}} was born in Spain and so is not eligible.
|-
|35
|{{w|Dannel Malloy}}
|Governor of Connecticut
|
|-
|36
|{{w|Kim Reynolds}}
|Governor of Iowa
|
|-
|37
|{{w|Phil Bryant}}
|Governor of Mississippi
|
|-
|38
|{{w|Asa Hutchinson}}
|Governor of Arkansas
|
|-
|39
|{{w|Jeff Colyer}}
|Governor of Kansas
|
|-
|40
|{{w|Gary Herbert}}
|Governor of Utah
|
|-
|41
|{{w|Brian Sandoval}}
|Governor of Nevada
|
|-
|42
|{{w|Susana Martinez}}
|Governor of New Mexico
|
|-
|43
|{{w|Jim Justice}}
|Governor of West Virginia
|
|-
|44
|{{w|Pete Ricketts}}
|Governor of Nebraska
|
|-
|45
|{{w|Butch Otter}}
|Governor of Idaho
|
|-
|46
|{{w|David Ige}}
|Governor of Hawaii
|
|-
|47
|{{w|Paul LePage}}
|Governor of Maine
|
|-
|48
|{{w|Chris Sununu}}
|Governor of New Hampshire
|
|-
|49
|{{w|Gina Raimondo}}
|Governor of Rhode Island
|
|-
|50
|{{w|Steve Bullock (American politician)|Steve Bullock}}
|Governor of Montana
|
|-
|51
|{{w|John Carney (politician)|John Carney}}
|Governor of Delaware
|
|-
|52
|{{w|Dennis Daugaard}}
|Governor of South Dakota
|
|-
|53
|{{w|Bill Walker (U.S. politician)|Bill Walker}}
|Governor of Alaska
|
|-
|54
|{{w|Doug Burgum}}
|Governor of North Dakota
|
|-
|55
|{{w|Phil Scott (politician)|Phil Scott}}
|Governor of Vermont
|
|-
|56
|{{w|Matt Mead}}
|Governor of Wyoming
|
|-
|57
|{{w|Kate McKinnon}}
|Kate MicKinnon
|If she is available. Entries #10 and 11 on Randall's list have no eligible members.
|
|-
|58
|{{w|Luis Fonsi}}
|Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 2017, #2 artist
|Fonsi is the only eligible individual under the Billboard criterion.
|-
|59
|{{w|Peggy Whitson}}
|Astronaut, 665 days in space
|
|-
|60
|{{w|Jeffrey Williams (astronaut)|Jeff Williams}}
|Astronaut, 534 days in space
|
|-
|61
|{{w|Scott Kelly}}
|Astronaut, 520 days in space
|
|-
|62
|{{w|Mike Fincke}}
|Astronaut, 382 days in space
|
|-
|63
|{{w|Serena Williams}}
|Serena Williams
|The fifth astronaut is not American-born. Serena's place on this list assumes that you do not count her withdrawal against Maria Sharapova as a ''loss''; if that counts as a loss, then subsequent entries move up one position (as Sharapova is ineligible).
|-
|64
|{{w|Tom Brady}}
|{{w|National Football League Most Valuable Player Award|NFL MVP}}
|The MVPs of all other listed sports leagues are ineligible for the office.
|-
|65
|{{w|Bill Pullman}}
|Bill Pullman
|None of his children are old enough to become President at this time.
|-
|66
|''TBD''
|Jousting tournament
|Assuming that no eligible member of the British order of succession exists. The Nathan's Hot Dog Eating champions are too young to hold the office.
|}

==Transcript==
: A proposal for a new presidential line of succession
: Current politics aside, most experts agree the existing process is flawed. The Presidential Succession Act of 1947 is probably unconstitutional on several counts, and there are many practical issues with the system as well.
: (For more, see the surprisingly gripping ''Second Report of the Continuity of Government Commission'', June 2009.)
: Proposed line of succession:
:# President
:# Vice president
:# Secretary of State
:# Secretary of Defense
:# Secretary of Homeland Security
:# Attorney General
:# Five people who do not live in Washington DC, nominated at the start of the president's term and confirmed by the Senate
:# Tom Hanks
:# State Governors, in descending order of state population at last census
:# Anyone who won an Oscar for playing a governor
:# Anyone who won a Governor's award for playing someone named Oscar
:# Kate McKinnon, if available
:# Billboard year-end Hot 100 singles artists #1 through #10 (for groups, whoever is credited first in name, liner notes, etc)
:# The top 5 US astronauts in descending order of total spaceflight time
:# Serena Williams (or, if she lost her most recent match, whoever beat her)
:# The most recent season NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL MVPs
:# Bull Pullman and his descendants by absolute primogeniture
:# The entire line of succession to the British throne
:# The current champion of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating contest
:# All other US citizens, chosen by a 29-round single-elimination Jousting tournament

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Politics]]

1997: Business Update

2018-05-24T23:53:33Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1997
| date = May 23, 2018
| title = Business Update
| image = business_update.png
| titletext = Our customers keep sending us their personal information, even though we've repeatedly asked them to stop. The EU told me I'm the heir to some ancient European throne that makes me exempt from the GDPR, but we should probably still try to fix that.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by THE KITCHEN SINK - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic shows a meeting at Beret Guy's business (as seen in [[:Category:Beret Guy's Business|these other comics]]). As usual, those in the business demonstrate a misuse of business terminology and take strange happenings within the business in stride.

Though maintaining a semblance of business-savviness through the use of many corporate buzzwords, it becomes clear that what is normally metaphorical in a usual boardroom meeting is here quite likely meant literally. The Quarterly Reports, described as "looking good," may be literally physically attractive (rather than recording successful business dealings). Knowing Beret Guy, it seems likely that the office is full of coins or dollar bills, and not simply economically well-off.

Stocks (as in the stock market, a.k.a. shares) are being manufactured. Stocks are valuable, so from an outside perspective making more of them would create value. However, the humor of this situation is that in real life, creating shares from nothing would reduce the value of existing shares (as the combined value of stocks should add up to the total value of the company... so creating more stocks means each has to be worth less to make the addition balance out). This is ironic in that typically stocks represent the value of the company, rather than being the product being created.

Individual customers are experiencing physical growth, though most businesses would be more concerned with a growth in the number of customers supporting the business. If the customers are not children they are likely very concerned by this rapid growth.

Assets liquidated in a thermostat glitch were literally melted (which could also be a reference to [https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/iot-hacking-thermometer.html a hack of a thermostat in a casino that lead to a massive data loss]).

The kitchen sink producing original content was not generating unique ideas or its own TV shows (commonly called original content), but instead leaking from the faucet (or possibly flooding from the sewer).

It is also worth noting that the "largest source of revenue" may not be producing much if any revenue at all; it can still be the biggest if there are no others. On the other hand, past experience with Beret Guy's business would indicate that this company is [[1032: Networking|making plenty of money]], though they aren't necessarily sure [[1493: Meeting|how]].

Transmuting lead into gold was a {{w|Nuclear transmutation#Alchemy|goal of alchemists}} for many centuries. It is actually now possible to accomplish transmutation of lead into gold, and gold into lead. Via modern nuclear methods, it is actually far easier to turn gold into lead than the reverse. While the expense far exceeds the value of the gold produced by such methods, it seems plausible that, given Beret Guy's surpassing strangeness, his company may be successfully and cheaply transmuting large quantities of lead into gold and back again. Since gold is worth much more than lead in today's market, the first transmutation could indeed result in major profit, while the reverse would obviously result in major losses, and be a rather pointless undertaking for a typical, profit-oriented business.

In the last panel, "the girl from ''The Ring''" refers to Sadako Yamamura, the antagonist of {{w|The Ring (film series)|the ''Ring'' series by Koji Suzuki}}, who has been referenced by xkcd several times in the past as in [[396: The Ring]]. Beret Guy claims she has made several appearances in their video conferences, which may be possible if someone has hacked their video feed to play footage from the 2002 movie. However, some of Beret Guy's employees then proceed to remark that she has made contributions to the meetings in question, implying that the image of Yamamura is not only alive but sentient and communicating with the employees, a possibility that, if accurate, is accepted with surprising nonchalance by Beret Guy's employees. It's also possible that Yamamura is simply the recording from the series, and her contributions are just in keeping with the general tone of the company's video conferences. Either way, it would appear that Beret Guy's sheer eccentricity has affected his staff to the point that a digital spectre would not be an abnormal employee.

The title text refers to the May 25 deadline to implement the European Union's {{w|GDPR|General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)}}; this comic parodies a business meeting about what the company is doing to prepare for it. However, while normally the problem would be how to handle the customers' personal information that the company requires to retain in order to do business, in this case it seems the company does not require personal information at all, and instead, customers are sending them theirs on their own. Even more bizarrely, Beret Guy was told by the EU (or at least he thinks he was told by the EU) that he is exempt because he is royalty of some kind (though, of course, such exemption is not a real part of GDPR), but he wants to do it anyway, just to be on the safe side.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[Beret Guy, Ponytail, Hairy, Hairbun and Megan sit around a table, left to right. Beret Guy and Megan are sitting on chairs at the ends. All others are behind the table with no visible chairs. All characters face Beret Guy]
:Beret Guy: Quarterly reports are looking good.
:Beret Guy: Our office is full of cash, we're producing stocks faster than ever before, and our customers are experiencing rapid growth.
:Beret Guy: Any updates?

:[Closeup on Ponytail, facing left]
:Ponytail: Bad news: many of our assets were liquidated this morning due to a thermostat glitch.
:Ponytail: Good news: the sink in the kitchen has stopped producing original content.

:[Same as panel one, but characters are facing Megan]
:Beret Guy: How are our finances?
:Megan: Our biggest source of revenue is our ongoing project to transmute lead into gold.
:Megan: Our biggest expense is our project to transmute it back.

:[Closeup on Beret Guy, facing right, offset to the left of the panel. Two characters speak from off-panel right]
:Beret Guy: Lastly, any luck getting the girl from ''The Ring'' to stop showing up in our video conferences?
:From Right 1: No, but honestly, she's made some good contributions.
:From Right 2: Yeah, I think we should hire her.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Beret Guy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairbun]]
[[Category:Beret Guy's Business]]

1997: Business Update

2018-05-24T23:52:55Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1997
| date = May 23, 2018
| title = Business Update
| image = business_update.png
| titletext = Our customers keep sending us their personal information, even though we've repeatedly asked them to stop. The EU told me I'm the heir to some ancient European throne that makes me exempt from the GDPR, but we should probably still try to fix that.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by THE KITCHEN SINK - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic shows a meeting at Beret Guy's business (as seen in [[:Category:Beret Guy's Business|these other comics]]). As usual, those in the business demonstrate a misuse of business terminology and take strange happenings within the business in stride.

Though maintaining a semblance of business-savviness through the use of many corporate buzzwords, it becomes clear that what is normally metaphorical in a usual boardroom meeting is here quite likely meant literally. The Quarterly Reports, described as "looking good," may be literally physically attractive (rather than recording successful business dealings). Knowing Beret Guy, it seems likely that the office is full of coins or dollar bills, and not simply economically well-off.

Stocks (as in the stock-market, a.k.a. shares) are being manufactured. Stocks are valuable, so from an outside perspective making more of them would create value. However, the humor of this situation is that in real life, creating shares from nothing would reduce the value of existing shares (as the combined value of stocks should add up to the total value of the company... so creating more stocks means each has to be worth less to make the addition balance out). This is ironic in that typically stocks represent the value of the company, rather than being the product being created.

Individual customers are experiencing physical growth, though most businesses would be more concerned with a growth in the number of customers supporting the business. If the customers are not children they are likely very concerned by this rapid growth.

Assets liquidated in a thermostat glitch were literally melted (which could also be a reference to [https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/iot-hacking-thermometer.html a hack of a thermostat in a casino that lead to a massive data loss]).

The kitchen sink producing original content was not generating unique ideas or its own TV shows (commonly called original content), but instead leaking from the faucet (or possibly flooding from the sewer).

It is also worth noting that the "largest source of revenue" may not be producing much if any revenue at all; it can still be the biggest if there are no others. On the other hand, past experience with Beret Guy's business would indicate that this company is [[1032: Networking|making plenty of money]], though they aren't necessarily sure [[1493: Meeting|how]].

Transmuting lead into gold was a {{w|Nuclear transmutation#Alchemy|goal of alchemists}} for many centuries. It is actually now possible to accomplish transmutation of lead into gold, and gold into lead. Via modern nuclear methods, it is actually far easier to turn gold into lead than the reverse. While the expense far exceeds the value of the gold produced by such methods, it seems plausible that, given Beret Guy's surpassing strangeness, his company may be successfully and cheaply transmuting large quantities of lead into gold and back again. Since gold is worth much more than lead in today's market, the first transmutation could indeed result in major profit, while the reverse would obviously result in major losses, and be a rather pointless undertaking for a typical, profit-oriented business.

In the last panel, "the girl from ''The Ring''" refers to Sadako Yamamura, the antagonist of {{w|The Ring (film series)|the ''Ring'' series by Koji Suzuki}}, who has been referenced by xkcd several times in the past as in [[396: The Ring]]. Beret Guy claims she has made several appearances in their video conferences, which may be possible if someone has hacked their video feed to play footage from the 2002 movie. However, some of Beret Guy's employees then proceed to remark that she has made contributions to the meetings in question, implying that the image of Yamamura is not only alive but sentient and communicating with the employees, a possibility that, if accurate, is accepted with surprising nonchalance by Beret Guy's employees. It's also possible that Yamamura is simply the recording from the series, and her contributions are just in keeping with the general tone of the company's video conferences. Either way, it would appear that Beret Guy's sheer eccentricity has affected his staff to the point that a digital spectre would not be an abnormal employee.

The title text refers to the May 25 deadline to implement the European Union's {{w|GDPR|General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)}}; this comic parodies a business meeting about what the company is doing to prepare for it. However, while normally the problem would be how to handle the customers' personal information that the company requires to retain in order to do business, in this case it seems the company does not require personal information at all, and instead, customers are sending them theirs on their own. Even more bizarrely, Beret Guy was told by the EU (or at least he thinks he was told by the EU) that he is exempt because he is royalty of some kind (though, of course, such exemption is not a real part of GDPR), but he wants to do it anyway, just to be on the safe side.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[Beret Guy, Ponytail, Hairy, Hairbun and Megan sit around a table, left to right. Beret Guy and Megan are sitting on chairs at the ends. All others are behind the table with no visible chairs. All characters face Beret Guy]
:Beret Guy: Quarterly reports are looking good.
:Beret Guy: Our office is full of cash, we're producing stocks faster than ever before, and our customers are experiencing rapid growth.
:Beret Guy: Any updates?

:[Closeup on Ponytail, facing left]
:Ponytail: Bad news: many of our assets were liquidated this morning due to a thermostat glitch.
:Ponytail: Good news: the sink in the kitchen has stopped producing original content.

:[Same as panel one, but characters are facing Megan]
:Beret Guy: How are our finances?
:Megan: Our biggest source of revenue is our ongoing project to transmute lead into gold.
:Megan: Our biggest expense is our project to transmute it back.

:[Closeup on Beret Guy, facing right, offset to the left of the panel. Two characters speak from off-panel right]
:Beret Guy: Lastly, any luck getting the girl from ''The Ring'' to stop showing up in our video conferences?
:From Right 1: No, but honestly, she's made some good contributions.
:From Right 2: Yeah, I think we should hire her.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Beret Guy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairbun]]
[[Category:Beret Guy's Business]]

1997: Business Update

2018-05-24T23:51:08Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 1997
| date = May 23, 2018
| title = Business Update
| image = business_update.png
| titletext = Our customers keep sending us their personal information, even though we've repeatedly asked them to stop. The EU told me I'm the heir to some ancient European throne that makes me exempt from the GDPR, but we should probably still try to fix that.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by THE KITCHEN SINK - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic shows a meeting at Beret Guy's business (as seen in [[:Category:Beret Guy's Business|these other comics]]). As usual, those in the business demonstrate a misuse of business terminology and take strange happenings within the business in stride.

Though maintaining a semblance of business-savviness through the use of many corporate buzzwords, it becomes clear that what is normally metaphorical in a usual boardroom meeting is here quite likely meant literally. The Quarterly Reports, described as "looking good," may be literally physically attractive (rather than recording successful business dealings). Knowing Beret Guy, it seems likely that the office is full of coins or dollar bills, and not simply economically well-off.

Stocks (as in the stock-market, a.k.a. shares) are being manufactured. Stocks are valuable, so from an outside perspective making more of them would create value. However, the humor of this situation is that in real life, creating shares from nothing would reduce the value of existing shares (as the combined value of stocks should add up to the total value of the company... so creating more stocks means each has to be worth less to make the addition balance out).

This is ironic in that typically stocks represent the value of the company, rather than being the product being created.

Individual customers are experiencing physical growth, though most businesses would be more concerned with a growth in the number of customers supporting the business. If the customers are not children they are likely very concerned by this rapid growth.

Assets liquidated in a thermostat glitch were literally melted (Could also be a reference to [https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/iot-hacking-thermometer.html a hack of a thermostat in a Casino that lead to a massive data loss.]);

The kitchen sink producing original content was not generating unique ideas or its own tv shows (commonly called original content), but instead leaking from the faucet (or possibly flooding from the sewer).

It is also worth noting that the "largest source of revenue" may not be producing much if any revenue at all; it can still be the biggest if there are no others. On the other hand, past experience with Beret Guy's business would indicate that this company is [[1032: Networking|making plenty of money]], though they aren't necessarily sure [[1493: Meeting|how]].

Transmuting lead into gold was a {{w|Nuclear transmutation#Alchemy|goal of alchemists}} for many centuries. It is actually now possible to accomplish transmutation of lead into gold, and gold into lead. Via modern nuclear methods, it is actually far easier to turn gold into lead than the reverse. While the expense far exceeds the value of the gold produced by such methods, it seems plausible that, given Beret Guy's surpassing strangeness, his company may be successfully and cheaply transmuting large quantities of lead into gold and back again. Since gold is worth much more than lead in today's market, the first transmutation could indeed result in major profit, while the reverse would obviously result in major losses, and be a rather pointless undertaking for a typical, profit-oriented business.

In the last panel, "the girl from ''The Ring''" refers to Sadako Yamamura, the antagonist of {{w|The Ring (film series)|the ''Ring'' series by Koji Suzuki}}, who has been referenced by xkcd several times in the past as in [[396: The Ring]]. Beret Guy claims she has made several appearances in their video conferences, which may be possible if someone has hacked their video feed to play footage from the 2002 movie. However, some of Beret Guy's employees then proceed to remark that she has made contributions to the meetings in question, implying that the image of Yamamura is not only alive but sentient and communicating with the employees, a possibility that, if accurate, is accepted with surprising nonchalance by Beret Guy's employees. It's also possible that Yamamura is simply the recording from the series, and her contributions are just in keeping with the general tone of the company's video conferences. Either way, it would appear that Beret Guy's sheer eccentricity has affected his staff to the point that a digital spectre would not be an abnormal employee.

The title text refers to the May 25 deadline to implement the European Union's {{w|GDPR|General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)}}; this comic parodies a business meeting about what the company is doing to prepare for it. However, while normally the problem would be how to handle the customers' personal information that the company requires to retain in order to do business, in this case it seems the company does not require personal information at all, and instead, customers are sending them theirs on their own. Even more bizarrely, Beret Guy was told by the EU (or at least he thinks he was told by the EU) that he is exempt because he is royalty of some kind (though, of course, such exemption is not a real part of GDPR), but he wants to do it anyway, just to be on the safe side.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[Beret Guy, Ponytail, Hairy, Hairbun and Megan sit around a table, left to right. Beret Guy and Megan are sitting on chairs at the ends. All others are behind the table with no visible chairs. All characters face Beret Guy]
:Beret Guy: Quarterly reports are looking good.
:Beret Guy: Our office is full of cash, we're producing stocks faster than ever before, and our customers are experiencing rapid growth.
:Beret Guy: Any updates?

:[Closeup on Ponytail, facing left]
:Ponytail: Bad news: many of our assets were liquidated this morning due to a thermostat glitch.
:Ponytail: Good news: the sink in the kitchen has stopped producing original content.

:[Same as panel one, but characters are facing Megan]
:Beret Guy: How are our finances?
:Megan: Our biggest source of revenue is our ongoing project to transmute lead into gold.
:Megan: Our biggest expense is our project to transmute it back.

:[Closeup on Beret Guy, facing right, offset to the left of the panel. Two characters speak from off-panel right]
:Beret Guy: Lastly, any luck getting the girl from ''The Ring'' to stop showing up in our video conferences?
:From Right 1: No, but honestly, she's made some good contributions.
:From Right 2: Yeah, I think we should hire her.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Beret Guy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairbun]]
[[Category:Beret Guy's Business]]

1996: Morning News

2018-05-23T16:15:45Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

<noinclude>:''"1996", this comic's number, redirects here. For the comic named "1996", see [[768: 1996]].''</noinclude>
{{comic
| number = 1996
| date = May 21, 2018
| title = Morning News
| image = morning_news.png
| titletext = Support your local paper, unless it's just been bought by some sinister hedge fund or something, which it probably has.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a DEAR OLD GRANNY - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

[[Megan]] is complaining to [[Hairbun]] about her easy access to infuriating national news stories and bad opinions (editorial articles and commentary) and worries that it may be having a negative effect on her, either by promoting misinformation, by distraction, or by prompting adverse emotional reaction to content.

Hairbun sarcastically tells Megan that things were different in her time, then states how access to infuriating stories via newspapers required only a tiny bit more time and effort during a morning routine.

Megan counters this idea and says that while it is true that newspapers provided the sort of national news she is being provoked by, they also had much more ''local'' news mixed in (which may be of a lighter nature, sometimes referred to in a derogatory sense as "fluff" news pieces), to which Hairbun agrees.

Megan also raises the point that bad opinions were not granted wide distribution. Hairbun is rather less quick to agree to this, and suggests that Megan not check that, revealing that Megan’s assertion isn’t entirely true.

The title text is a reference to the fact that many seemingly independent local newspapers are owned by one of a small handful of large corporations, such as New Media and Gannett, a little-known fact that many may find disconcerting.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Missing a few key points}}
:[Megan, looking on a smartphone in her hand, and Hairbun are standing together and talk.]
:Megan: Every morning, before my eyes even focus all the way, I read a bunch of infuriating national news stories and bad opinions. I wonder what this is doing to my brain.
:Megan: It's probably not great.

:[Zoom in to the head of Hairbun.]
:Hairbun: Back in my day, we had to pay people to '''''print out''''' infuriating news stories and bring them to our door. And we waited until we had stumbled out to the '''''kitchen''''' to read them.
:Hairbun: '''''Totally''''' different.

:[Frameless panel, zoom out on both while Megan has lowered her hand holding the phone.]
:Megan: OK, fair. But newspapers at least had more local news mixed in, right?
:Hairbun: Yeah, true.

:[Same as last panel, except it has a border]
:Megan: I bet they weren't full of bad opinions.
:Hairbun: Yyyyyes.
:Hairbun: All our opinions were good. It was a remarkable time.
:Hairbun: Please don't go check.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairbun]]

1995: MC Hammer Age

2018-05-21T14:51:18Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1995
| date = May 18, 2018
| title = MC Hammer Age
| image = mc_hammer_age.png
| titletext = Wait, sorry, I got mixed up--he's actually almost 50. It's the kid from The Karate Kid who just turned 40.
}}

==Explanation==

This is the first comic to combine the [[:Category:My Hobby|My Hobby]] series with the theme of listing facts that [[:Category:Comics to make one feel old|make one feel old]].

In the comic [[Cueball]] (as [[Randall]], as it is his hobby) is asking [[White Hat]] if he wants to feel old. (This exact opening phrase was used by [[Megan]] in [[1898: October 2017]]). Cueball doesn't wait for an answer, though like Megan did, but tells White Hat that {{w|MC Hammer}} just turned 40. Surprisingly, at first, this doesn't really make White Hat feel old, he actually feels this is rather normal (compared to his own age). MC Hammer is a pop rapper/singer who was most popular in the early 1990's for ''{{w|U Can't Touch This}}'' with the catch phrase ''{{w|Hammer Time|Stop: Hammer Time}}'', and {{w|hammer pants|shiny}} {{w|baggy pants|baggy}} pants often incorrectly referred to as {{w|parachute pants}}.

So at first it seems that Randall's attempt to make White Hat feel old has failed miserably. However in the caption Randall explains that this is part of his hobby. By "lowballing" the facts to begin with he can make people feel really old when he tells them the truth, so they learn that the correct number (age/years ago, your age at the time etc.) is even worse than the first opening statement.

In the title text he then tells White Hat the "truth": "Wait, sorry, I got mixed up--he's actually almost 50. It's the kid from The Karate Kid who just turned 40." So this suddenly adds ten more years to MC Hammers age, and that little kid from the Karate Kid movies... is he already 40 years old. Now White Hat probably feels a bit old. In the original {{w|The Karate Kid}} (the first 3 movies) {{w|Ralph Macchio}} was the actor who starred as Karate Kid. And he seemed so young...

The real blow, comes when White Hat (and most likely the reader), now intrigued goes home and looks these two people up on Wikipedia. Ralph Macchio was already much older than the kid he portrays in the movie, a school kid - [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087538/trivia?item=tr0565736 he was 22 years old] when shooting the first movie. On the day this comic came out, both MC Hammer and Ralph Macchio were both 56 years old. And Ralph is the older one of the two being born in 1961, while Hammer was born in 1962. (In fact, Macchio is older now than {{w|Pat Morita}}, who played his mentor in ''The Karate Kid'', was when that film was released.)

So even in the title text, the corrections are both "lowballed" facts, so still preserving the maximum effect while adding more credibility to the claims, so people already start to feel old before the last 6 years is added to Hammer's and 16(!!) years to Macchio's age.

Of course, this is assuming they ''do'' look it up, and if they believe Randall the first time, there is no reason to assume this will happen. However, then they probably already feel old from the first correction.

Note that in the other ''make one feel old'' comics Randall did not apparently indulge in this new hobby of lowballing facts. As far as we can tell, those were all accurate for the time the comic was created. But if this is a new hobby, we may need to examine newer "feel old" comics extra carefully from now on. (If we want to feel even older that is.)

==Transcript==
:[Cueball and White Hat are walking together.]
:Cueball: Want to feel old? MC Hammer just turned 40.
:White Hat: Wow.
:White Hat: I mean, I guess that's not too surprising, right?
:White Hat: It's been a long time.

:[Caption below the panel:]
:My hobby: Deliberately lowballing "Want to feel old" factoids to set up a bigger payoff later when they learn the correct number.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]
[[Category:Comics to make one feel old]]
[[Category:My Hobby]]

1992: SafetySat

2018-05-12T21:11:19Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1992
| date = May 11, 2018
| title = SafetySat
| image = safetysat.png
| titletext = During launch, in the event of an unexpected sensor reading, SafetySat will extend prongs in all directions to secure itself and any other cubesats safely in the launch vehicle until the source of the problem can be determined.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a CubeSat so dangerous, I corrupted the image file and crashed the server (the first image upload was corrupt)- Maybe expand it a little? Some of the individual items need more explaining. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

{{w|CubeSat}} is a standard format for small satellites that can fit in a 10×10×10 cm format with a mass of less than 1.3 kg. They have been widely used by academics for research satellites, and by both small and large companies.

CubeSats are often launched as a additional payload on commercial launches but also deployed from the {{w|International Space Station}} at the {{w|Kibo (ISS module)|Kibo-Module}} or other airlocks. All these satellites are orbiting the Earth in a low orbit and since they have no propulsion system they are also become a part of {{w|space debris}} when they are out of control. And eventually they will reenter earth's atmosphere without any further hazard.

Only a few days before this comic was released the first interplanetary CubeSats called {{w|Mars Cube One}} were launched together with NASA's probe {{w|InSight}} aiming to the planet {{w|Mars}}.

There are multiple safety rules to ensure that the CubeSat cannot damage the primary payload. However, the joke in this comic is that [[Randall]]'s design seeks to break as many rules as possible.

Items counterclockwise from bottom left:

;Americium corners
{{w|Americium}} is a very dense and radioactive substance. Depending on the amount of americium involved, this alone could shoot the mass over the 1.3 kg mass limit. The isotope 241Am is used in smoke detectors but also proposed for use in {{w|Radioisotope thermoelectric generator|radioisotope thermoelectric generators}} in spaceflight.

;Guncotton
A form of {{w|nitrocellulose}}; an explosive.

;Crude Oil
{{w|Exxon Valdez oil spill}}, {{w|Deepwater Horizon explosion}}... need we say more? Of course the leakable volume would not be near those levels, but plenty dangerous nonetheless if it were to leak though a faulty seal... And this is not helped by the fact that it is in orbit or if it leaks during launch...

;Volatile Epoxy Seal
When this goes, everything gets coated in flammable crude oil.

;Celebratory Firework
Explosive fire source that can hit other satellites in the vicinity.

;CFCs/Ozone-depleting CFC Spritzer
{{w|Chlorofluorocarbons}} (CFCs) are fully halogenated paraffin hydrocarbons that contain only carbon, chlorine, and fluorine, produced as volatile derivative of methane, ethane, and propane. {{w|Freon}} is a common example of a CFC, and the use of CFCs has been linked to a depletion of the Earth's {{w|ozone layer}} leading many countries to ban their use. So spritzing CFCs in an area closer to the Ozone layer sounds like a good idea?

;Laser Pointer (Hubble-Seeking)
Aiming a red laser at a visible light telescope is really bad for the telescope in question and its optics{{Citation needed|reason=Not obvious to non-experts why visible-light laser is damaging to a telescope designed to read visible spectrum, disruptive perhaps?|date=May 2018}}.

;Laser Pointers (Fixed)
These three laser points will effectively point in 3 different random directions, which is not safe for other objects around this Cubesat{{Citation needed|reason=Why is a laser pointer dangerous?|date=May 2018}}.

;SDR/{{w|Software-Defined Radio}} (Code Editable via Public Wiki)
A radio which can be programmed to broadcast and receive in a range of frequencies, and formats. Since anyone could change the radio's instructions; the radio could interfere with other satellites, or with the launch vehicle. This counts as a huge security risk, as ''anyone'' could edit it.

;BIC Mini-Lighter
Fire source, resting on the can of crude oil. The pressurized butane could also make the lighter burst, but in space without oxygen the lighter never would ignite. And even if the inside of the CubeSat contains some oxygen in weightlessness a flame would go out very soon.

;Rare-Earth Magnets
{{w|Rare-earth magnets}} are very powerful magnets that have a high likelihood of messing up the electronics on nearby electronics, like other CubeSats. Might also stick to other satellites.

;Wet Sand Dispenser
Possible reference to the {{w|Kessler syndrome}}, which refers to a hypothetical situation wherein there are enough objects floating around in low earth orbit that collisions between objects might result in a "domino effect," each collision causing more collisions and breaking objects into smaller pieces of space debris, which increase the likelihood of further collisions.

;Batteries (eBay)
The quality of batteries bought on the auction site can vary widely, and certain batteries exposed to conditions outside their design specifications can {{w|Battery_(electricity)#Explosion|explode or leak corrosive acids}}. These batteries might also be connected to the adjacent spark plug.

;Solar Panel (Found)
The quality of the solar panel and the power it produces would have to be investigated thoroughly before being cleared for space flight.

;Spark Plug
Fire source, if it was connected to electricity. Excess mass if not.

;Title text
Prongs that extend in the event of an unexpected sensor reading at launch could damage the rocket and/or nearby CubeSats/payloads. Along with this, it is not unlikely that this CubeSat might be the source of any internal problem that might arise; in such a situation, having such a dangerous CubeSat further secure itself would be counterproductive.

==Transcript==
:[A prototype for a small cube-shaped "CubeSat" satellite, with labels on various components.]

:[Labeled on top:]
:Rare-Earth Magnets
:Bic Mini Lighter
:Software-Defined Radio (code editable via a public wiki)

:[Labeled on right:]
:Laser Pointers (fixed)
:Laser Pointer (Hubble-seeking)
:Ozone-Depleting CFC Spritzer

:[Labeled on bottom:]
:Celebratory Firework
:Volatile Epoxy Seal
:Filler (Guncotton)

:[Labeled on left:]
:Americium Corners
:Spark Plug
:Solar Panel (found)
:Batteries (eBay)
:Wet Sand Dispenser

:[Labeled from within drawing in white text on top of a black rectangle:]
:Crude Oil

:[Caption below the panel:]
:My CubeSat proposal was the first to be rejected for violating every design and safety requirement simultaneously.

{{comic discussion}}

1992: SafetySat

2018-05-11T19:56:24Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */

1985: Meteorologist

2018-04-27T17:06:06Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 1985
| date = April 25, 2018
| title = Meteorologist
| image = meteorologist.png
| titletext = Hi, I'm your new meteorologist and a former software developer. Hey, when we say 12pm, does that mean the hour from 12pm to 1pm, or the hour centered on 12pm? Or is it a snapshot at 12:00 exactly? Because our 24-hour forecast has midnight at both ends, and I'm worried we have an off-by-one error.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Needs some more Wiki links. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

Although we’re constantly exposed to them, many (most?) people don’t understand the details of how to properly interpret weather forecasts. But even beyond the normal questions, there can be much more complex issues hide beyond those (though most people will not care for those). This comic takes this to the ridiculous extreme of the weather reporters coming from some other profession where you look into those questions. It shows questions asked by three different people with different backgrounds: mathematics, linguistics, and (in the title text) software development. While some of those questions have actual answers (which you'd expect someone working in that job to know, such as the definition of "scattered showers" and how it's determined, what a "chance of rain" means, and so on), each professional finally ends up with questions that are almost disturbing in how they cannot be answered. (So management ends up calling security to remove those announcers).

The first meteorologist, [[Cueball]], has a background in pure math. His forecast states that each of the next five hours has a 20% chance of rain. As a mathematician he sees how limited that information is. There is no information about whether or how those probabilities are correlated. This becomes obvious if you ask the question "How likely is it to rain this afternoon" (a question even some non-mathematicians might be interested in). [[Cueball]] states that he does not know (as no one only getting the information about 20% rain in each hour can know). And then lists some scenarios that all fit the the description, but have totally different results for "How likely is it to rain this afternoon?"

The first thing a mathematician would ask (and [[Cueball]] does here) is asking if those 5 events are independent. Events are independent if the outcome of one of them is unrelated to the outcome out of the others, i.e. knowing whether it rained at 3 pm has no effect on whether it rains at 4 pm. (Rain is very seldom independent, as usually having rain in one hour increases the chance to rain in another hour). Another common extreme in probability theory is a set of mutually exclusive events. In this example that would be the scenario that it rains for sure but will only rain exactly one hour but not the rest. (Also possible but quite unlikely).

In the second panel he continues to discuss what scattered showers means. Like most of the other weather terms in this comic, the term "scattered showers" is one whose technical definition is largely unknown but appears simple enough that most people would assume they understand what it means. "Scattered" refers to when the rain covers roughly 30% to 50% of the area. To somebody who doesn't know this, like the first meteorologist, there's still the very valid question of how likely it is to rain in a specific spot, and how this is affected by the previous chance of rain. Not to mention, the percentage that defines "scattered showers" implicitly assumes a surface area that is accounted into the percent. Cueball rightly asks clarification on how large the location used to determine "scattered showers" is.

While the all but the last question of the first part of the second panel can be answered by looking up their definitions, the last one is "What if you have two locations you are worried about?" This is an extremely complex question. Because there is no chance at all to answer this question from the answers of the previous questions or even from most other data a forecast might usually produce. To answer this you'd most likely need to do all the whether modeling and super computer runs of the forecast again with a different algorithm that looks at those two locations. (And for any other two locations you'd need to do the same thing again). This is a common effect in mathematics: While for example a classification of one linear function between two vector spaces is a solved problem (which everyone will learn if they study mathematics), the classification of pairs of linear functions is something no one had yet any idea how to even start.

Finally in that panel Cueball begins to explain that he has asked the management about these things, but that they have stopped replying to his e-mails. At this point he spots the security guy coming over, and the screen goes black in to a technical difficulty screen that excuses this behavior to the viewers.

Questioning these things on air is likely confusing to the watchers, although they are all valid questions. But this may lose viewers and the news network is afraid of this. The technical difficulty panel further cements this, apologizing for hiring a person with a pure math background. Often seen as one that do not understand how to talk to regular people.

When they get back on air gain a new meteorologist, [[Blondie]], steps in. The management enquires (on air) to make sure she is not also a mathematician. She states no, but tells that she has a linguistics degree, which the management thinks is fine, and thus believes they have prevented the problem with Cueball. However, this proves to be in vain, as Blondie goes into a tangent once more but from a linguistics standpoint, rather than a mathematical one, detailing the true meaning of the word "it" as referring to the weather. After one panel of this the management calls for security again.

While, at the most basic level, human speech is broken into subject, object, and verb; for some reason we are capable of producing and comprehending speech without both objects or verbs, but there is a certain "resistance" to speech without a subject. Thus if you are in the passenger seat of a car going down the highway and happened to see some deer in the trees nearby, you could simply say "Deer.", rather than "there is a deer over there", deer being the subject of the sentence. However, if you noticed that it had begun to rain, you could not simply say "Raining." on it's own. Feel how that sentence just seems weird? Hence we have developed the tendency to use the filler word "it" despite the fact that when we say "It's raining." the "it" is not a reference to the clouds producing the rain, but the general state of the rainfall around us. (McWhorter, John. Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-linguistics-the-science-of-language.html )

The first question is again quite harmless, and both possible answers ("it" being a {{w|dummy pronoun}} or referring to the weather) are valid answers, but the second question is much more disturbing.
In "It's hot out, and getting bigger" the first part of the sentence might be a dummy pronoun or it might reference the weather. But the second part breaks it: With a dummy pronoun "getting bigger" would be the impersonal action, which is not what is meant. It is referencing something (the hotness, that is getting bigger). But if the it references this entity in the second part, by grammatical rules it would also have to reference that in the first part. But "The hotness is hot out" makes no sense at all.
This is again a common occurrence with informal speech: From a grammatical point of view, it is pure non-sense. But it still has meaning people understand. So if you want a proper descriptive grammar, it needs to cope with those cases. But then most such informal sentences would be special cases. (Case of point: What is the grammatical function of the "out" in that sentence?)

In the title text, the news station has made the same error again, by this time hiring a software developer as the third meteorologist. This last person is stating concerns about the feasibility of the time system used to correlate to the weather patterns. Because it appears simple, many people would simply assume they understand what is being said when a meteorologist talks about "12pm" or "1pm". However, because software developers frequently have to deal with things such as specifying exactly what time-label means what, the new meteorologist begins to wonder what time period is actually meant on a per-hour forecast. On such an hour forecast does 12pm refer to the hour from 12 to 1pm, from 11:30 to 12:30 or is it actually only to the weather precisely at 12:00 that is referred to? The software developer also worries about an {{w|off-by-one error}}, which is a common error in software development occurring when boundary conditions include one element too few or too many: when counting by 24 once every set period (for example), it is common to forget whether the count should stop at 23 or at 24, especially if the number 0 (midnight) is included. In the 24-hour forecast, that means there's 25 hours represented every day, and the software developer worries that these 25 hours might add up and, every progressive day, the forecast is one more hour off.

Of course it should be pointed out that hiring someone without any meteorological training to read the weather does not make them an actual meteorologist, no more than say hiring a bricklayer as a doctor would actually make them a real doctor.

===Answering the Comic's Questions===

Management would certainly answer the mathematician's questions! The questions themselves have been asked of meteorologists before, and NOAA has published relevant answers for [https://www.weather.gov/ffc/pop probability of precipitation], as well as [https://www.weather.gov/bgm/forecast_terms timing and the meanings of particular forecast words]. The naming is also addressed [https://www.weather.gov/media/ajk/brochures/ConvectivevsStratiform.pdf here].

Regarding probability of precipitation, NOAA forecasts give the probability that it will rain at all at any given point in an area. To rephrase it, it is the probability of rain occurring '''at all''' within a forecast area, multiplied by the percentage of area affected by the rain. The "forecast area" is a clearly defined area of land and can be seen in the map of any official National Weather Service forecast. [https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=34.0732&lon=-118.3963 Here is an example].

Regarding the timing of the forecast, an hourly forecast gives the probability for each particular hour, stretching from the time listed to right before the next hour listed. So, the forecast for noon describes the time period from noon to 1pm. The forecasts for individual hours can be correlated; for this reason, the NOAA generates forecasts that stretch over longer time periods, giving a useful estimate for that time range. Thus, the chance of rain for "Today" specifically means: what is the chance of it raining at any given location during any time between 6am and 6pm?

Regarding phrases like "scattered showers", this specifically means a 25-54% probability of precipitation from convective cloud sources. Other phrases, and when they are used, are detailed in [https://www.weather.gov/media/ajk/brochures/ConvectivevsStratiform.pdf the chart at the end of this PDF].

So, to conclude:

* "How likely is it to rain this afternoon?" We don't know, you need to show the 12pm to 6pm forecast, not the hourly.
* "Is each hour independent? Correlated?" Hourly values are given for that hour only. They can be correlated, hence why they can't be used to calculate the answer to "How likely is it to rain this afternoon?"
* "Is rain guaranteed and we're just unsure of the timing?" You cannot tell from the data given. It's possible (though unlikely), that this is the case.
* "It says 'scattered showers.' Is this the chance of rain '''somewhere''' in your area?" Yes, it is, and it means the the rain will come from convective cloud sources with a probability of precipitation somewhere between 25 and 54%.
* "How big is your area?" It's detailed in the forecast the mathematician would be reading from.
* "What if you have two locations you're worried about?" Then all chances are off. While the other open questions like "How likely is it to rain this afternoon?" might have an answer management could supply, for this they do not really have any chance at all.
* "Hey, when we say 12pm, does that mean the hour from 12pm to 1pm, or the hour centered on 12pm? Or is it a snapshot at 12:00 exactly?" It means the hour from noon to 12:59pm.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball is presenting a weather forecast while seated with his folded hands resting on a table. A graphic to the left of Cueball shows the weather for five consecutive hours from 12pm to 4pm, each with a rainy cloud icon and the same percentage of 20% written below the icon. The TV channel's logo is shown on the bottom left, with the 4 in a white font inside a black circle.]
:Cueball: Our forecast says there's a 20% chance of rain for each of the next five hours.
:Cueball: How likely is it to rain this afternoon? It's a simple question, but I don't know the answer. Is each hour independent? Correlated? Or is rain guaranteed and we're just unsure of the timing?

:12pm  1pm  2pm  3pm  4pm
:  20%  20%  20%  20%  20% 
:News
:  4
:''Weather''

:[Cueball still sits at the table, but the weather graphic is gone and he looks to the right.]
:Cueball: It says "scattered showers." Is this the chance of rain '''''somewhere''''' in your area? How big is your area? What if you have two locations you're worried about?
:Cueball: I've asked management, but they've stopped answering my emails, so—Hang on, the security guy is coming over.

:[A black screen is shown with white text and two short white lines between each of the three segments of text. The TV logo is shown below the last text, with the white 4 inside a gray circle with a white border.]
:''Technical Difficulties''
:—
:''We apologize for hiring a meteorologist with a pure math background.''
:—
:''We'll be back on the air shortly.''
:
:<big>News</big>
:  <big><big>4</big></big>

:[Blondie now sits at the desk, in the same position as Cueball, but without the graphic. She looks to the right towards a person who speaks to her from outside the panel. This voice is indicated with two square speech bubbles, connected with a double line and with a small arrow pointing to the right off-panel from the top bubble.]
:Blondie: Sorry about that. Hi, I'm your new meteorologist.
:Person off-panel: And you're not a mathematician, right?
:Blondie: No. I do have a linguistics degree.
:Person off-panel: That's fine.

:[Blondie continues in the same position but now looks into the camera at the viewers. The off-panel person only speaks one word, which again is inside a square speech bubble with a small arrow pointing to the right off-panel.]
:Blondie: It might rain this afternoon.
:Blondie: But what is "it" here? Is it a true dummy pronoun, as in the phrase "It's too bad?" Or is the weather an entity?
:Blondie: Also, what if I say, "It's hot out, and getting bigger?"
:Person off-panel: Security!

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Blondie]]
[[Category:News anchor]]

1986: River Border

2018-04-27T17:02:27Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 1986
| date = April 27, 2018
| title = River Border
| image = river_border.png
| titletext = I'm not a lawyer, but I believe zones like this are technically considered the high seas, so if you cut a pizza into a spiral there you could be charged with pieracy under marinaritime law.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a PIERACY [sic] EXPERT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

[[Ponytail]] explains to [[Megan]] that the Missouri-Nebraska state line is based off the river. She then explains that the river once changed course abruptly, and that the state line didn't move with it. That meant that they were on the Missouri side of the river, but in Nebraska. It then occurred to [[Megan]] that she could break Nebraska state laws and the police couldn't catch her (because the river was in the way). The final panel shows [[Megan]] going to cut a pizza into a spiral. The joke is that [[Megan]] thinks it's illegal because nobody does it.

The title text claims the region [[Ponytail]] and [[Megan]] are in is considered the high seas. It sets up a pizza pun about piracy under maritime law: "Pieracy" combines ''pie'' another name for a pizza and "piracy". Marinara sauce is frequently served with pizza, so "Maritime" law is rendered "Marinaritime"

==External Links==
[https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5270132,-95.6954944,10627m/data=!3m1!1e3 Google map of the region suggested by the comic]

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[Ponytail and Megan are standing next to a river.]
:Ponytail: This is a cool spot.
:Ponytail: The Missouri-Nebraska state line follows this river. If the river's path changes gradually, the border moves with it.

:[A map is shown.]
:Ponytail: But when it ''abruptly'' changes course, the border stays behind.
:Ponytail: This is a spot where that happened. We're on the Missouri side, but we're in Nebraska.

:[Cuts back to Ponytail and Megan standing.]
:Megan: Wow.
:Megan: So...
:Megan: We can commit all the crimes we want here and the cops can't do a thing!

:[Megan points her finger up.]
:Ponytail: What? No. Why would you even think that?
:Megan: I'm going to cut a pizza into a ''spiral!''
:Ponytail: That's not even illegal!
:Megan: ''Crimes!''

{{comic discussion}}

1985: Meteorologist

2018-04-25T16:11:54Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

1980: Turkish Delight

2018-04-20T22:35:10Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 1980
| date = April 13, 2018
| title = Turkish Delight
| image = turkish_delight.png
| titletext = I take it Narnia doesn't have Cinnabons? Because if you can magic up a plate of those, I'll betray whoever.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by BOT - I guess we could expand the second paragraph? But I don't know what to add... Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

''{{w|The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe}}'' is a fantasy novel by British novelist {{w|C. S. Lewis}}, the first published and best known of seven novels in ''{{w|The Chronicles of Narnia}}''. In it, a group of four sibling children discover another world called Narnia. At the beginning of the story, the land is in a perpetual winter caused by the {{w|White Witch}} (the antagonist of the story). One of the children, {{w|Edmund Pevensie}}, is approached by the White Witch and offered {{w|Turkish delight}}, a type of confection, in exchange for leading the other children to her. What the book says and what the movie leaves out is he doesn't know the sweets are enchanted by the White Witch to make the eater want them the more they eat them. Not a full mind control, but more of a strong urge to get more.

Turkish delight is very different from typical confections found in the modern Western world and isn't very popular in the United States. [[Randall]] comments that he was very disappointed when he tried Turkish delight, after having read in the novel about how delicious the characters considered it. If he were in Edmund's shoes, he would not have been persuaded.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2005/12/the_lion_the_witch_and_the_really_foul_candy.html It is not uncommon for present-day Narnia fans to be disappointed when they try Turkish delight], as different as it is to modern confections. However, in the late Victorian era when Lewis grew up, [https://www.tor.com/2016/08/08/why-was-turkish-delight-the-ultimate-temptation-in-c-s-lewis-narnia/ Turkish delight was very popular in England]. Because it was nearly impossible for local confectioners to make properly, it had to be imported from Turkey, at great expense, making it a status symbol for the wealthy and a rare treat for those with less money. When Lewis wanted to come up with the perfect temptation for Edmund, he drew on his own childhood memories of a favorite rare and expensive treat--which would have been even harder to come by because of [https://flashbak.com/sugar-rationing-in-world-war-2-photos-13598/ sugar rationing during World War II], when the story was set. It also serves to emphasize how powerful the White Witch is for her to be able to offer such an expensive and hard-to-obtain treat so easily.

{{w|Cinnabon}} (referenced in the title text) is a popular chain restaurant in the USA which serves mostly {{w|cinnamon roll|cinnamon buns}} covered in a thick, sugary glaze. The chain is not well known in Britain, but has recently opened a [https://www.cinnabon.co.uk/store-locator/ few restaurants], mainly in the London area. (A more common UK equivalent of the cinnamon bun is the {{w|Chelsea bun}}.{{Citation needed}}) There are presumably no branches of Cinnabon in Narnia.

A prescriptivist might claim that the title text contains a grammatical mistake: the word should be "whomever," as that is the objective case. However, a descriptivist would point out that many dialects no longer maintain this distinction except in highly formal contexts. Incorrect grammar is stylistically appropriate here: The author would lose control of himself to the point where he would betray anyone. A breakdown of formal grammatical correctness would accompany such a loss of control.

==Transcript==
:[A person wearing a cap, a fur coat, and gloves sits in a sled handing over a plate with small cubic pieces on it to a small boy with dark hair standing beneath. The boy reaches one hand to the plate.]
:Person in the sled: Have some Turkish delight. If you betray your family, there's more where that came from.

:[The boy tastes one piece.]

:[The boy looks at that piece.]

:[The boy looks up, to the direction where the gift came from, the piece still in his hands.]
:Boy: Wow.
:Boy: This is...
:Boy: not great.

:[Caption below:]
:The ''Narnia'' books gave me a really unrealistic impression of how good Turkish delight tastes.

==Trivia==
*The world of Narnia is a recurring theme in [[xkcd]], with previous prominent appearances in [[665: Prudence]], [[821: Five-Minute Comics: Part 3]], [[969: Delta-P]], and [[1786: Trash]].
*Randall has previously expressed disappointment when the taste of a food item does not match a promise implicit in its name. If Turkish Delight is not a delight, likewise Red Delicious apples are not delicious, according to [[388: Fuck Grapefruit]] and [[1766: Apple Spectrum]] and a footnote on [https://books.google.com/books?id=tgZIBAAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q&f=false this What If page].

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Fiction]]
[[Category:Chronicles of Narnia]]

1982: Evangelism

2018-04-18T15:59:08Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1982
| date = April 18, 2018
| title = Evangelism
| image = evangelism.png
| titletext = The wars between the "OTHER PRIMATES OPEN THEM FROM THE SMALL END" faction versus the "BUT THE LITTLE BIT OF BANANA AT THE SMALL END IS GROSS" faction consumed Europe for generations.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a 2 METER FARENHEIT LOVER - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This comic presents a scale of intensity of evangelism. [[Randall]] defines the ''intensity'' of evangelism by some uncommon attributes:

;''Religious proselytizers''
Religious proselytizers are, of the groups on this list, most known for intense evangelism in popular culture, yet Randall contrasts them in this strip with four other groups which he finds to be even more intense in their evangelism.

;''People who want the US to switch to metric'' and ''People who want the US to switch to metric but keep Fahrenheit''
Unlike most of the world, the US uses [[wikipedia:United States Customary Units|US customary units]] instead of metric units. Some people wish for this to change.

;''People who threw away their socks and bought all one kind''
text needed...

;''People who open bananas from the other end''
Some people prefer to open bananas from the opposite end of the traditional opening end.

The title text is a fictional argument that apparently somehow tore apart Europe. It is about how bananas are supposed to be opened, so it is absurd for this to have actually happened.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[A single frame is shown. The header reads:]
:People by intensity of evangelism
:[An arrow points from left to right. The text above:]
:More intense

:[A line is drawn from left to right with five markers on it.]
:[Marker on the left:]
:Religious proselytizers
:[Marker in the middle:]
:People who want the US to switch to metric
:[Marker slightly right of the middle:]
:People who want the US to switch to metric but keep Fahrenheit
:[Marker at the beginning of the last quarter:]
:People who threw away their socks and bought all one kind
:[Marker at the right:]
:People who open bananas from the other end

{{comic discussion}}

1979: History

2018-04-16T22:30:36Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */ wording edits

{{comic
| number = 1979
| date = April 11, 2018
| title = History
| image = history.png
| titletext = HISTORIANS: We've decided to trim the past down to make things more manageable. Using BCE/CE, would you rather we lose the odd-numbered or even-numbered years?
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a HISTORIAN. Needs to be expanded. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This comic quotes a [https://www.newspapers.com/clip/19134214/httpswwwxkcdcom1979/|a lengthy section of the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph's September 30, 1881 issue]. The tragic event referenced throughout is the {{w|Assassination of James A. Garfield|assassination of President James A. Garfield}}. Interestingly, the article is about how closely studied the incident will or will not be in the future. Garfield's assassination is rarely more than a quick note in a history class, leaving only the "dry and tedious" historians to comb through the details.

The writer also notes that vast quantities of accounts exist of the national grief and trauma caused by Garfield's murder, and wonders whether students in the future will bother to read those accounts to understand it, or simply let historians sum it up without conveying the vastness of the response. That fear at least did prove well-founded; most students are not aware of the fallout of the assassination, or indeed, of Garfield at all. [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] are discomfited by the fact there exists a vast, untapped store of information that they have never read, about an event they know little to nothing about despite it apparently causing nationwide trauma. This leads to a larger point about the vastness of history, and the extreme difficult of learning all of it.

The article itself references other events that would have been in recent memory at the time of publication and draws some conclusions about which will be considered more important in the future.

For example, it cites the defeat of Roscoe Conkling as a serious event that would fade in importance when compared to Garfield's assassination. Conkling was a senator in Garfield's party who resigned in protest of Garfield's policies assuming that he would easily win re-election by the state legislature--but then failed to achieve re-election due to party factions and political infighting.

Interestingly [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F03x0cd,%2Fm%2F0b22w a comparison of Google search frequency for the years 2004-2018] shows that Garfield is indeed searched for many times more often than Conkling. Conkling's failure to be re-elected by the New York state legislature, which seemed so vitally important at the time, is summarized by a brief two sentences near the bottom of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Conkling Conkling's Wikipedia article] and not even mentioned in the biography's summary. So the writer does appear to be correct that Conkling's re-election defeat was an episode that was of high importance as a current event that in the future was to become not much more than an obscure footnote.

The writer speculates that there may not be any event in American history that matches the level of grief caused by Garfield's assassination, not even that of Lincoln. Here the writer is further off the mark, because in current historical memory, the Lincoln assassination is still a towering, defining event, whereas Garfield's is, comparatively speaking, a footnote.

The bolded sections of the text emphasize some of the main points of the article for the modern reader and may also be another way Munroe makes the point that future readers are unlikely to have the patience to read lengthy, detailed explanations of past events. If they have time to pay attention at all, future readers will want the essence boiled down to a few major highlights.

The title text indicates that there is more information about the past than can be researched by the manpower of available historians at this time. For whatever reason, be it lack of funding to carry out research or lack of interested people becoming historians, the facetious solution is to just ignore events of either even or odd numbered years. This would essentially halve the amount of data to go through and the amount of time to go through it, but it would be at the detriment of our understanding of all of the context of said events. As an example World War 2 started and ended on odd years, but some of the most tide-turning battles (Fall of France, most of Stalingrad, D-Day) happened on even years.

Although this format with small panels above and below a larger one has been seen before, there could be an extra joke this time, if it is seen as if there were originally five panels to the comic, but the second and fourth (the even ones) were removed.

==Transcript==
:[In a small panel top left, Cueball walks up to Megan who is sitting on an office chair holding a tablet showing a screen full of (to the reader) unreadable text.]
:Megan: I read this article in an old newspaper, and I can't stop thinking about it.

:[Below is a large panel twice as wide as the first, and much longer. It contains the newspaper clip that Megan talks about. Three sections of the text is in normal black font, the rest is in gray font:]
:'''The public events of the last three months are of the class which will go into its permanent history. We have been living in an atmosphere of history which will be immortally preserved.''' Even the brief series of important dates to be collated for the use of the schoolboys of centuries hence will contain the day of the assassination, and the day of the death of President Garfield. 

:The intermediate events co-related, like the defeat of Roscoe Conkling, will be of great interest, but will scarcely be likely to stand prominently out from the page of history written in 1881. To us who have been the witnesses, so to speak, of the tragic incidents of the times, it seems entirely probable that future generations will eagerly scan every feature of the recent bereavement which the nation has suffered. 

:'''How accurately will future generations know the immense volume of grief and sorrow which has rolled over the land? Will those who come after us ever be able to understand the extent of our loss?''' Is there anything in the first century of our history—even the death of the great Lincoln—which can be used as a parallel? 

:Perhaps a careful reading of the daily papers of the present. period may give some future antiquarian a fine idea of the feelings of the nation during the past summer. '''But these journals are so large, so full of detail, that we imagine the coming American will never find time to read the record.''' He must depend on a brief statement, meagerly compiled by some dry and tedious historian. 

:::-The Bloomington Daily Pantagraph 
::: September 30,th 1881 

:[The third and final panel is the same size as the first, below and to the right. It contains a zoom in on Cueball and Megan talking.]
:Cueball: Man. The past is so '''''big. '''''
:Megan: How do historians even cope?
:Cueball: I have no idea.
:Megan: I honestly have enough trouble just with the present.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]

1979: History

2018-04-16T22:29:50Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */ clarity

{{comic
| number = 1979
| date = April 11, 2018
| title = History
| image = history.png
| titletext = HISTORIANS: We've decided to trim the past down to make things more manageable. Using BCE/CE, would you rather we lose the odd-numbered or even-numbered years?
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a HISTORIAN. Needs to be expanded. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This comic quotes a [https://www.newspapers.com/clip/19134214/httpswwwxkcdcom1979/|a lengthy section of the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph's September 30, 1881 issue]. The tragic event referenced throughout is the {{w|Assassination of James A. Garfield|assassination of President James A. Garfield}}. Interestingly, the article is about how closely studied the incident will or will not be in the future. Garfield's assassination is rarely more than a quick note in a history class, leaving only the "dry and tedious" historians to comb through the details.

The writer also notes that vast quantities of accounts exist of the national grief and trauma caused by Garfield's murder, and wonders whether students in the future will bother to read those accounts to understand it, or simply let historians sum it up without conveying the vastness of the response. That fear at least did prove well-founded; most students are not aware of the fallout of the assassination, or indeed, of Garfield at all. [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] are discomfited by the fact there exists a vast, untapped store of information that they have never read, about an event they know little to nothing about despite it apparently causing nationwide trauma. This leads to a larger point about the vastness of history, and the extreme difficult of learning all of it.

The article itself references other events that would have been in recent memory at the time of publication and draws some conclusions about which will be considered more important in the future.

For example, it cites the defeat of Roscoe Conkling as a serious event that would fade in importance when compared to Garfield's assassination. Conkling was a senator in Garfield's party who resigned in protest of Garfield's policies assuming that he would easily win re-election by the state legislature--but then failed to achieve re-election due to party factions and political infighting.

Interestingly [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F03x0cd,%2Fm%2F0b22w a comparison of Google search frequency for the years 2004-2018] shows that Garfield is indeed searched for many times more often than Conkling. Conkling's failure to be re-elected by the New York state legislature, which seemed so vitally important at the time, is summarized by a brief two sentences near the bottom of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Conkling Conkling's Wikipedia article] and not even mentioned in the biography's summary. So the writer does appear to be correct that Conkling's re-election defeat was an episode that was of high importance as a current event that in the future was to become not much more than an obscure footnote.

The writer speculates that there may not be any event in American history that matches the level of grief caused by Garfield's assassination, not even that of Lincoln. Here the writer is further off the mark, because in current historical memory, the Lincoln assassination is still a towering, defining event, whereas Garfield's is, comparatively speaking, a footnote.

The bolded sections of the text emphasize some of the main points of the article for the modern reader and may also be another way Munroe makes the point that future readers are unlikely to have the patience to read lengthy, detailed explanations of past events. If they have time to pay attention at all, they will want the essence boiled down to a few major highlights.

The title text indicates that there is more information about the past than can be researched by the manpower of available historians at this time. For whatever reason, be it lack of funding to carry out research or lack of interested people becoming historians, the facetious solution is to just ignore events of either even or odd numbered years. This would essentially halve the amount of data to go through and the amount of time to go through it, but it would be at the detriment of our understanding of all of the context of said events. As an example World War 2 started and ended on odd years, but some of the most tide-turning battles (Fall of France, most of Stalingrad, D-Day) happened on even years.

Although this format with small panels above and below a larger one has been seen before, there could be an extra joke this time, if it is seen as if there were originally five panels to the comic, but the second and fourth (the even ones) were removed.

==Transcript==
:[In a small panel top left, Cueball walks up to Megan who is sitting on an office chair holding a tablet showing a screen full of (to the reader) unreadable text.]
:Megan: I read this article in an old newspaper, and I can't stop thinking about it.

:[Below is a large panel twice as wide as the first, and much longer. It contains the newspaper clip that Megan talks about. Three sections of the text is in normal black font, the rest is in gray font:]
:'''The public events of the last three months are of the class which will go into its permanent history. We have been living in an atmosphere of history which will be immortally preserved.''' Even the brief series of important dates to be collated for the use of the schoolboys of centuries hence will contain the day of the assassination, and the day of the death of President Garfield. 

:The intermediate events co-related, like the defeat of Roscoe Conkling, will be of great interest, but will scarcely be likely to stand prominently out from the page of history written in 1881. To us who have been the witnesses, so to speak, of the tragic incidents of the times, it seems entirely probable that future generations will eagerly scan every feature of the recent bereavement which the nation has suffered. 

:'''How accurately will future generations know the immense volume of grief and sorrow which has rolled over the land? Will those who come after us ever be able to understand the extent of our loss?''' Is there anything in the first century of our history—even the death of the great Lincoln—which can be used as a parallel? 

:Perhaps a careful reading of the daily papers of the present. period may give some future antiquarian a fine idea of the feelings of the nation during the past summer. '''But these journals are so large, so full of detail, that we imagine the coming American will never find time to read the record.''' He must depend on a brief statement, meagerly compiled by some dry and tedious historian. 

:::-The Bloomington Daily Pantagraph 
::: September 30,th 1881 

:[The third and final panel is the same size as the first, below and to the right. It contains a zoom in on Cueball and Megan talking.]
:Cueball: Man. The past is so '''''big. '''''
:Megan: How do historians even cope?
:Cueball: I have no idea.
:Megan: I honestly have enough trouble just with the present.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]

1979: History

2018-04-16T22:25:10Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */ clarity

{{comic
| number = 1979
| date = April 11, 2018
| title = History
| image = history.png
| titletext = HISTORIANS: We've decided to trim the past down to make things more manageable. Using BCE/CE, would you rather we lose the odd-numbered or even-numbered years?
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a HISTORIAN. Needs to be expanded. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This comic quotes a [https://www.newspapers.com/clip/19134214/httpswwwxkcdcom1979/|a lengthy section of the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph's September 30, 1881 issue]. The tragic event referenced throughout is the {{w|Assassination of James A. Garfield|assassination of President James A. Garfield}}. Interestingly, the article is about how closely studied the incident will or will not be in the future. Garfield's assassination is rarely more than a quick note in a history class, leaving only the "dry and tedious" historians to comb through the details.

The writer also notes that vast quantities of accounts exist of the national grief and trauma caused by Garfield's murder, and wonders whether students in the future will bother to read those accounts to understand it, or simply let historians sum it up without conveying the vastness of the response. That fear at least did prove well-founded; most students are not aware of the fallout of the assassination, or indeed, of Garfield at all. [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] are discomfited by the fact there exists a vast, untapped store of information that they have never read, about an event they know little to nothing about despite it apparently causing nationwide trauma. This leads to a larger point about the vastness of history, and the extreme difficult of learning all of it.

The article itself references other events that would have been in recent memory at the time of publication and draws some conclusions about which will be considered more important in the future.

For example, it cites the defeat of Roscoe Conkling as a serious event that would fade in importance when compared to Garfield's assassination. Conkling was a senator in Garfield's party who resigned in protest of Garfield's policies assuming that he would easily win re-election by the state legislature--but then failed to achieve re-election due to party factions and political infighting.

Interestingly [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F03x0cd,%2Fm%2F0b22w a comparison of Google search frequency for the years 2004-2018] shows that Garfield is indeed searched for many times more often than Conkling. Conkling's failure to be re-elected by the New York state legislature, which seemed so vitally important at the time, is summarized by a brief two sentences near the bottom of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Conkling Conkling's Wikipedia article] and not even mentioned in the biography's summary. So the writer does appear to be correct that Conkling's re-election defeat was an episode that was of high importance as a current event that in the future was to become not much more than an obscure footnote.

The writer speculates that there may not be any event in American history that matches the level of grief caused by Garfield's assassination, not even that of Lincoln. Here the writer is further off the mark, because in current historical memory, the Lincoln assassination is still a towering, defining event, whereas Garfield's is, comparatively speaking, a footnote.

The bolded sections of the text emphasize some of the main points of the article for the modern reader and may also be another way Munroe makes the point that future readers are unlikely to have the patience to read lengthy, detailed explanations of past events but, if they have time to pay attention at all, will want the essence boiled down to a few major highlights.

The title text indicates that there is more information about the past than can be researched by the manpower of available historians at this time. For whatever reason, be it lack of funding to carry out research or lack of interested people becoming historians, the facetious solution is to just ignore events of either even or odd numbered years. This would essentially halve the amount of data to go through and the amount of time to go through it, but it would be at the detriment of our understanding of all of the context of said events. As an example World War 2 started and ended on odd years, but some of the most tide-turning battles (Fall of France, most of Stalingrad, D-Day) happened on even years.

Although this format with small panels above and below a larger one has been seen before, there could be an extra joke this time, if it is seen as if there were originally five panels to the comic, but the second and fourth (the even ones) were removed.

==Transcript==
:[In a small panel top left, Cueball walks up to Megan who is sitting on an office chair holding a tablet showing a screen full of (to the reader) unreadable text.]
:Megan: I read this article in an old newspaper, and I can't stop thinking about it.

:[Below is a large panel twice as wide as the first, and much longer. It contains the newspaper clip that Megan talks about. Three sections of the text is in normal black font, the rest is in gray font:]
:'''The public events of the last three months are of the class which will go into its permanent history. We have been living in an atmosphere of history which will be immortally preserved.''' Even the brief series of important dates to be collated for the use of the schoolboys of centuries hence will contain the day of the assassination, and the day of the death of President Garfield. 

:The intermediate events co-related, like the defeat of Roscoe Conkling, will be of great interest, but will scarcely be likely to stand prominently out from the page of history written in 1881. To us who have been the witnesses, so to speak, of the tragic incidents of the times, it seems entirely probable that future generations will eagerly scan every feature of the recent bereavement which the nation has suffered. 

:'''How accurately will future generations know the immense volume of grief and sorrow which has rolled over the land? Will those who come after us ever be able to understand the extent of our loss?''' Is there anything in the first century of our history—even the death of the great Lincoln—which can be used as a parallel? 

:Perhaps a careful reading of the daily papers of the present. period may give some future antiquarian a fine idea of the feelings of the nation during the past summer. '''But these journals are so large, so full of detail, that we imagine the coming American will never find time to read the record.''' He must depend on a brief statement, meagerly compiled by some dry and tedious historian. 

:::-The Bloomington Daily Pantagraph 
::: September 30,th 1881 

:[The third and final panel is the same size as the first, below and to the right. It contains a zoom in on Cueball and Megan talking.]
:Cueball: Man. The past is so '''''big. '''''
:Megan: How do historians even cope?
:Cueball: I have no idea.
:Megan: I honestly have enough trouble just with the present.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]

1979: History

2018-04-16T22:22:01Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */ link to google search summary of Garfield vs Conkling

{{comic
| number = 1979
| date = April 11, 2018
| title = History
| image = history.png
| titletext = HISTORIANS: We've decided to trim the past down to make things more manageable. Using BCE/CE, would you rather we lose the odd-numbered or even-numbered years?
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a HISTORIAN. Needs to be expanded. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This comic quotes a [https://www.newspapers.com/clip/19134214/httpswwwxkcdcom1979/|a lengthy section of the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph's September 30, 1881 issue]. The tragic event referenced throughout is the {{w|Assassination of James A. Garfield|assassination of President James A. Garfield}}. Interestingly, the article is about how closely studied the incident will or will not be in the future. Garfield's assassination is rarely more than a quick note in a history class, leaving only the "dry and tedious" historians to comb through the details.

The writer also notes that vast quantities of accounts exist of the national grief and trauma caused by Garfield's murder, and wonders whether students in the future will bother to read those accounts to understand it, or simply let historians sum it up without conveying the vastness of the response. That fear at least did prove well-founded; most students are not aware of the fallout of the assassination, or indeed, of Garfield at all. [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] are discomfited by the fact there exists a vast, untapped store of information that they have never read, about an event they know little to nothing about despite it apparently causing nationwide trauma. This leads to a larger point about the vastness of history, and the extreme difficult of learning all of it.

The article itself references other events that would have been in recent memory at the time of publication and draws some conclusions about which will be considered more important in the future.

For example, it cites the defeat of Roscoe Conkling as a serious event that would fade in importance when compared to Garfield's assassination. Conkling was a senator in Garfield's party who resigned in protest of Garfield's policies, then failed to achieve re-election; interestingly [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F03x0cd,%2Fm%2F0b22w a comparison of Google search frequency for the years 2004-2018] shows that Garfield is indeed searched for many times more often than Conkling. Conkling's failure to be re-elected by the New York state legislature, which seemed so vitally important at the time, is summarized by a brief two sentences near the bottom of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Conkling Conkling's Wikipedia article] and not even mentioned in the biography's summary. So the writer does appear to be correct that this is an episode that was of high importance as a current event that in the future was to become not much more than an obscure footnote.

The writer speculates that there may not be any event in American history that matches the level of grief caused by Garfield's assassination, not even that of Lincoln. Here the writer is further off the mark, because in current historical memory, the Lincoln assassination is still a towering, defining event, whereas Garfield's is, comparatively speaking, a footnote.

The bolded sections of the text emphasize some of the main points of the article for the modern reader and may also be another way Munroe makes the point that future readers are unlikely to have the patience to read lengthy, detailed explanations of past events but, if they have time to pay attention at all, will want the essence boiled down to a few major highlights.

The title text indicates that there is more information about the past than can be researched by the manpower of available historians at this time. For whatever reason, be it lack of funding to carry out research or lack of interested people becoming historians, the facetious solution is to just ignore events of either even or odd numbered years. This would essentially halve the amount of data to go through and the amount of time to go through it, but it would be at the detriment of our understanding of all of the context of said events. As an example World War 2 started and ended on odd years, but some of the most tide-turning battles (Fall of France, most of Stalingrad, D-Day) happened on even years.

Although this format with small panels above and below a larger one has been seen before, there could be an extra joke this time, if it is seen as if there were originally five panels to the comic, but the second and fourth (the even ones) were removed.

==Transcript==
:[In a small panel top left, Cueball walks up to Megan who is sitting on an office chair holding a tablet showing a screen full of (to the reader) unreadable text.]
:Megan: I read this article in an old newspaper, and I can't stop thinking about it.

:[Below is a large panel twice as wide as the first, and much longer. It contains the newspaper clip that Megan talks about. Three sections of the text is in normal black font, the rest is in gray font:]
:'''The public events of the last three months are of the class which will go into its permanent history. We have been living in an atmosphere of history which will be immortally preserved.''' Even the brief series of important dates to be collated for the use of the schoolboys of centuries hence will contain the day of the assassination, and the day of the death of President Garfield. 

:The intermediate events co-related, like the defeat of Roscoe Conkling, will be of great interest, but will scarcely be likely to stand prominently out from the page of history written in 1881. To us who have been the witnesses, so to speak, of the tragic incidents of the times, it seems entirely probable that future generations will eagerly scan every feature of the recent bereavement which the nation has suffered. 

:'''How accurately will future generations know the immense volume of grief and sorrow which has rolled over the land? Will those who come after us ever be able to understand the extent of our loss?''' Is there anything in the first century of our history—even the death of the great Lincoln—which can be used as a parallel? 

:Perhaps a careful reading of the daily papers of the present. period may give some future antiquarian a fine idea of the feelings of the nation during the past summer. '''But these journals are so large, so full of detail, that we imagine the coming American will never find time to read the record.''' He must depend on a brief statement, meagerly compiled by some dry and tedious historian. 

:::-The Bloomington Daily Pantagraph 
::: September 30,th 1881 

:[The third and final panel is the same size as the first, below and to the right. It contains a zoom in on Cueball and Megan talking.]
:Cueball: Man. The past is so '''''big. '''''
:Megan: How do historians even cope?
:Cueball: I have no idea.
:Megan: I honestly have enough trouble just with the present.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]

1979: History

2018-04-16T22:19:41Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */ updated Conkling bits & info about bolded sections of the article based on discussion page

{{comic
| number = 1979
| date = April 11, 2018
| title = History
| image = history.png
| titletext = HISTORIANS: We've decided to trim the past down to make things more manageable. Using BCE/CE, would you rather we lose the odd-numbered or even-numbered years?
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a HISTORIAN. Needs to be expanded. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This comic quotes a [https://www.newspapers.com/clip/19134214/httpswwwxkcdcom1979/|a lengthy section of the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph's September 30, 1881 issue]. The tragic event referenced throughout is the {{w|Assassination of James A. Garfield|assassination of President James A. Garfield}}. Interestingly, the article is about how closely studied the incident will or will not be in the future. Garfield's assassination is rarely more than a quick note in a history class, leaving only the "dry and tedious" historians to comb through the details.

The writer also notes that vast quantities of accounts exist of the national grief and trauma caused by Garfield's murder, and wonders whether students in the future will bother to read those accounts to understand it, or simply let historians sum it up without conveying the vastness of the response. That fear at least did prove well-founded; most students are not aware of the fallout of the assassination, or indeed, of Garfield at all. [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] are discomfited by the fact there exists a vast, untapped store of information that they have never read, about an event they know little to nothing about despite it apparently causing nationwide trauma. This leads to a larger point about the vastness of history, and the extreme difficult of learning all of it.

The article itself references other events that would have been in recent memory at the time of publication and draws some conclusions about which will be considered more important in the future.

For example, it cites the defeat of Roscoe Conkling as a serious event that would fade in importance when compared to Garfield's assassination. Conkling was a senator in Garfield's party who resigned in protest of Garfield's policies, then failed to achieve re-election; interestingly a comparison of Google search frequency shows that Garfield is indeed searched for many times more often than Conkling today. Conkling's failure to be re-elected by the New York state legislature, which seemed so vitally important at the time, is summarized by a brief two sentences near the bottom of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Conkling Conkling's Wikipedia article] and not even mentioned in the biography's summary. So the writer does appear to be correct that this is an episode that was of high importance as a current event that in the future was to become not much more than an obscure footnote.

The writer speculates that there may not be any event in American history that matches the level of grief caused by Garfield's assassination, not even that of Lincoln. Here the writer is further off the mark, because in current historical memory, the Lincoln assassination is still a towering, defining event, whereas Garfield's is, comparatively speaking, a footnote.

The bolded sections of the text emphasize some of the main points of the article for the modern reader and may also be another way Munroe makes the point that future readers are unlikely to have the patience to read lengthy, detailed explanations of past events but, if they have time to pay attention at all, will want the essence boiled down to a few major highlights.

The title text indicates that there is more information about the past than can be researched by the manpower of available historians at this time. For whatever reason, be it lack of funding to carry out research or lack of interested people becoming historians, the facetious solution is to just ignore events of either even or odd numbered years. This would essentially halve the amount of data to go through and the amount of time to go through it, but it would be at the detriment of our understanding of all of the context of said events. As an example World War 2 started and ended on odd years, but some of the most tide-turning battles (Fall of France, most of Stalingrad, D-Day) happened on even years.

Although this format with small panels above and below a larger one has been seen before, there could be an extra joke this time, if it is seen as if there were originally five panels to the comic, but the second and fourth (the even ones) were removed.

==Transcript==
:[In a small panel top left, Cueball walks up to Megan who is sitting on an office chair holding a tablet showing a screen full of (to the reader) unreadable text.]
:Megan: I read this article in an old newspaper, and I can't stop thinking about it.

:[Below is a large panel twice as wide as the first, and much longer. It contains the newspaper clip that Megan talks about. Three sections of the text is in normal black font, the rest is in gray font:]
:'''The public events of the last three months are of the class which will go into its permanent history. We have been living in an atmosphere of history which will be immortally preserved.''' Even the brief series of important dates to be collated for the use of the schoolboys of centuries hence will contain the day of the assassination, and the day of the death of President Garfield. 

:The intermediate events co-related, like the defeat of Roscoe Conkling, will be of great interest, but will scarcely be likely to stand prominently out from the page of history written in 1881. To us who have been the witnesses, so to speak, of the tragic incidents of the times, it seems entirely probable that future generations will eagerly scan every feature of the recent bereavement which the nation has suffered. 

:'''How accurately will future generations know the immense volume of grief and sorrow which has rolled over the land? Will those who come after us ever be able to understand the extent of our loss?''' Is there anything in the first century of our history—even the death of the great Lincoln—which can be used as a parallel? 

:Perhaps a careful reading of the daily papers of the present. period may give some future antiquarian a fine idea of the feelings of the nation during the past summer. '''But these journals are so large, so full of detail, that we imagine the coming American will never find time to read the record.''' He must depend on a brief statement, meagerly compiled by some dry and tedious historian. 

:::-The Bloomington Daily Pantagraph 
::: September 30,th 1881 

:[The third and final panel is the same size as the first, below and to the right. It contains a zoom in on Cueball and Megan talking.]
:Cueball: Man. The past is so '''''big. '''''
:Megan: How do historians even cope?
:Cueball: I have no idea.
:Megan: I honestly have enough trouble just with the present.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]

Talk:1979: History

2018-04-16T21:55:26Z

172.68.150.52: format edit

Heh. I accidentally misread the line, so I thought it said: "I honestly have enough trouble with just the ''president''". [[User:Linker|Linker]] ([[User talk:Linker|talk]]) 11:48, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:Same here. Then I thought "What the heck?" and read the last line again. Lol. [[User:Herobrine|Herobrine]] ([[User talk:Herobrine|talk]]) 13:20, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
::And same here, lol! I was actually wondering about what the possible motivations could have been to use Megan as the character to say that. Then I read it again :D [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.172|162.158.255.172]] 14:26, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:::Considering Randall's opinion on Trump, it made a little sense. But he hasn't ever attacked him directly.[[User:Linker|Linker]] ([[User talk:Linker|talk]]) 15:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
::::It's a reach, but it's POSSIBLE this was the intention. Planting the seed by talking about a president, then a comment closely resembling "I honestly have enough trouble just with the president". It may have garnered the intended response. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.172|162.158.255.172]] 14:04, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

I only make comments, and let others figure out how to edit it into the above. I once read someplace that there is a reasonable limit to accurate historical research at about 3 centuries- events more than 300 years in the past become more mythological than factual, and events more than 500 years in the past are so remote that we can't even begin to understand the culture in which they occurred. While there are famous exceptions to this rule, they occur entirely in the realms of either archaeology or theology and religion, not in the science of history.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 13:32, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:What is "accurate historical research"? No scientist would use those words. And a historian as an expert - let's say of the Roman Empire or the medieval - would strictly disagree. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 15:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

:Even shorter periods of time. There were a lot of changes in the twentieth century. I was born in 1960. At that time, there were people alive before the automobile, powered airflight, the telephone. How about photocopiers which really got going in the 1970s? Can any of you younger people understand not being able to photocopy something? Then, there are the developments in computers and mobile phones.
:On a USENET newgroup that I follow -- alt.talk.royalty -- there is one monarchist who posts a series of posts on Queen Elizabeth II. Sort of. He takes the current length of her reign and goes back that far before it (less a day, I think). He then describes the world at that time and finishes with "Consider all the changes, natural and manmade, visited upon the world in all the time since. And now consider this...Queen Elizabeth II has been on the Throne for MOST of that time since then." Twice her reign length from present time is now in the 1880s. A very different world.
:[[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.220|108.162.216.220]] 15:16, 11 April 2018 (UTC) Gene Wirchenko genew@telus.net

My maternal grandfather was born in 1873. When I was a child, he told me glorious stories about living in a log cabin in Michigan as a child, riding his penny-farthing bicycle as a teenager, and moving to a boomtown called Venice (CA) in the 1920s. He was 30 when the Wright Brothers made their first flight, and he wound up manufacturing aircraft parts during WWII. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.106|172.68.54.106]] 08:36, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

The link to the actual page of the paper is fantastic - especially the ads along the right side - "Anti-Morbific, the Great Liver and Kidney Remedy" and "Trash's Magnetic Ointment". So, a question - there's no by-line. Is there any way to figure out who wrote this? I assume maybe multiple people, like and editorial board? [[User:DanB|DanB]] ([[User talk:DanB|talk]]) 13:36, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Regarding the link to the actual page of the paper, the article immediately after it talks about a discussion over the tariffs on whiskey, beer, and tobacco covering the differences of opinion within the Democrat and Republican parties and protectionism vs free trade and producers vs consumers concluding that the tax is good because it could be used to pay down the national debt and finance national education initiatives. Despite burgeoning taxes the speculated benefits never arrived. We deceive ourselves if we believe that the discussions we have today were never debated before. The debate is eternal and the promised goods are never delivered. [[User:Rtanenbaum|Rtanenbaum]] ([[User talk:Rtanenbaum|talk]]) 21:15, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

I think this comic is referencing how so many people are commenting on how unprecedented Trump’s presidency has been, how it’ll be the sort of think future students will read about in history classes, and overall how dramatic it is, like you’d find unbelievable, even in a movie. This comic is commenting on how people in the moment often think that way, yet Trump’ll likely be a footnote in 200 years too. [[User:PotatoGod|PotatoGod]] ([[User talk:PotatoGod|talk]]) 19:24, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

:I need to comment, but I'll do my best to temper it a bit. I think it's a stretch to think this is saying anything about Trump. It seems like this comic is just a reflection on how difficult it is to ever have a complete and thorough account of everything that happens in the history of our world. The best we can hope for is a summary of the general facts, but that will always omit important details - as it says, history is BIG! In summary, can we not make every comic about Trump, please? [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 20:43, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

There is an erroneous period at the end of the first line of the last paragraph: "...the present. period may...". I added the period to the transcript, but I'm not sure if the local policy is to include "[sic]" in the transcript, to note that in an "errors" section, etc. I'd invite someone who knows the policy to edit the page accordingly. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.69.46|172.69.69.46]] 20:50, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Seems to me like most of the major events in history classes (at least the events I can remember the year of) happened on even years: 1066, 1492, 1776, 1812, ...
[[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.251|162.158.79.251]] 23:29, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

;Second lesson
I think, there is a second lesson in this strip: We tend to massively overestimate the importance of current events, and Americans specifically tend to overestimate the importance of their presidents. Today, Garfield is just <s>a cartoon character</s> one of many presidents, in 100 years Kennedy will also be seen as just one of even more presidents, and one day, even 9/11 will be only something that happened sometime in the distant past.

In other words: Not only is history bigger than we think, we also tend to exaggerate the importance of current events. --[[Special:Contributions/141.101.77.170|141.101.77.170]] 12:51, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

;Conkling vs Garfield

Quoting the current version of the article:

:For example, it cites the defeat of Roscoe Conkling as a serious event that would fade in importance when compared to Garfield's assassination. Conkling was a senator in Garfield's party who resigned in protest of Garfield's policies, then failed to achieve re-election; contrary to the writer's belief, both these events have faded into roughly the same level of obscurity.

I'm going to disagree that Conkling's defeat & Garfield's assassination are events at the same level of obscurity. First off, Garfield is at least mentioned on lists of U.S. presidents and lists of presidents who were assassinated. This type of material is available in, for example, pretty much every U.S. elementary school. I believe I've got a placemat with Garfield's name, face, and dates (along with those of all the other U.S. presidents) in my kitchen at this very moment. Kids love it . . .

Meanwhile, Conkling's name is not widely known at all even in the U.S. and his re-election defeat is not even mentioned in the top-line summary of his Wikipedia article (it's way down in the detail section halfway through the article, but doesn't make the article summary). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Conkling

I don't know how you objectively measure the prominence of one historical character or event over another, but just for example Garfield's wikipedia article is about 4X as long as Conkling's. And mentions the assassination in the very first sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield

[[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.52|172.68.150.52]] 14:18, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
:The number of Google searches might also be a useful indicator https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0b22w,%2Fm%2F03x0cd {{unsigned ip|162.158.88.68}}
::Aha, yeah. That puts the Garfield/Conkling ratio at 34/2 over about 14 years of Google searches. So Garfield is searched for roughly 17X as often as Conkling.

::Abraham Lincoln compared with Garfield comes out as 37/1. So Garfield is indeed far more obscure than Lincoln, but Conkling is more obscure yet, according to the Google searches. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.52|172.68.150.52]] 21:54, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

; Boldface?
Can anyone speculate on what Randall was trying to achieve with the selective use of '''boldfaced''' text in the comic? [[User:JohnHawkinson|JohnHawkinson]] ([[User talk:JohnHawkinson|talk]]) 16:41, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
:Interesting question. I've entered it into the incomplete reason. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 17:25, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
::I believe it's Randall's way of providing a "TL;DR" version, that anyone not inclined to read that entire (rather large) block of text can just read the bold parts to grasp the gist of what the article, and by extension Randall, is trying to say (I DO feel like if someone only reads the bold text, they'll get the point of the article, at least the part that's striking Randall/Megan). [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 05:16, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Talk:1979: History

2018-04-16T21:54:18Z

172.68.150.52: Google search comparison of Lincoln vs Garfield vs Conkling

Heh. I accidentally misread the line, so I thought it said: "I honestly have enough trouble with just the ''president''". [[User:Linker|Linker]] ([[User talk:Linker|talk]]) 11:48, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:Same here. Then I thought "What the heck?" and read the last line again. Lol. [[User:Herobrine|Herobrine]] ([[User talk:Herobrine|talk]]) 13:20, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
::And same here, lol! I was actually wondering about what the possible motivations could have been to use Megan as the character to say that. Then I read it again :D [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.172|162.158.255.172]] 14:26, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:::Considering Randall's opinion on Trump, it made a little sense. But he hasn't ever attacked him directly.[[User:Linker|Linker]] ([[User talk:Linker|talk]]) 15:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
::::It's a reach, but it's POSSIBLE this was the intention. Planting the seed by talking about a president, then a comment closely resembling "I honestly have enough trouble just with the president". It may have garnered the intended response. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.172|162.158.255.172]] 14:04, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

I only make comments, and let others figure out how to edit it into the above. I once read someplace that there is a reasonable limit to accurate historical research at about 3 centuries- events more than 300 years in the past become more mythological than factual, and events more than 500 years in the past are so remote that we can't even begin to understand the culture in which they occurred. While there are famous exceptions to this rule, they occur entirely in the realms of either archaeology or theology and religion, not in the science of history.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 13:32, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:What is "accurate historical research"? No scientist would use those words. And a historian as an expert - let's say of the Roman Empire or the medieval - would strictly disagree. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 15:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

:Even shorter periods of time. There were a lot of changes in the twentieth century. I was born in 1960. At that time, there were people alive before the automobile, powered airflight, the telephone. How about photocopiers which really got going in the 1970s? Can any of you younger people understand not being able to photocopy something? Then, there are the developments in computers and mobile phones.
:On a USENET newgroup that I follow -- alt.talk.royalty -- there is one monarchist who posts a series of posts on Queen Elizabeth II. Sort of. He takes the current length of her reign and goes back that far before it (less a day, I think). He then describes the world at that time and finishes with "Consider all the changes, natural and manmade, visited upon the world in all the time since. And now consider this...Queen Elizabeth II has been on the Throne for MOST of that time since then." Twice her reign length from present time is now in the 1880s. A very different world.
:[[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.220|108.162.216.220]] 15:16, 11 April 2018 (UTC) Gene Wirchenko genew@telus.net

My maternal grandfather was born in 1873. When I was a child, he told me glorious stories about living in a log cabin in Michigan as a child, riding his penny-farthing bicycle as a teenager, and moving to a boomtown called Venice (CA) in the 1920s. He was 30 when the Wright Brothers made their first flight, and he wound up manufacturing aircraft parts during WWII. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.106|172.68.54.106]] 08:36, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

The link to the actual page of the paper is fantastic - especially the ads along the right side - "Anti-Morbific, the Great Liver and Kidney Remedy" and "Trash's Magnetic Ointment". So, a question - there's no by-line. Is there any way to figure out who wrote this? I assume maybe multiple people, like and editorial board? [[User:DanB|DanB]] ([[User talk:DanB|talk]]) 13:36, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Regarding the link to the actual page of the paper, the article immediately after it talks about a discussion over the tariffs on whiskey, beer, and tobacco covering the differences of opinion within the Democrat and Republican parties and protectionism vs free trade and producers vs consumers concluding that the tax is good because it could be used to pay down the national debt and finance national education initiatives. Despite burgeoning taxes the speculated benefits never arrived. We deceive ourselves if we believe that the discussions we have today were never debated before. The debate is eternal and the promised goods are never delivered. [[User:Rtanenbaum|Rtanenbaum]] ([[User talk:Rtanenbaum|talk]]) 21:15, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

I think this comic is referencing how so many people are commenting on how unprecedented Trump’s presidency has been, how it’ll be the sort of think future students will read about in history classes, and overall how dramatic it is, like you’d find unbelievable, even in a movie. This comic is commenting on how people in the moment often think that way, yet Trump’ll likely be a footnote in 200 years too. [[User:PotatoGod|PotatoGod]] ([[User talk:PotatoGod|talk]]) 19:24, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

:I need to comment, but I'll do my best to temper it a bit. I think it's a stretch to think this is saying anything about Trump. It seems like this comic is just a reflection on how difficult it is to ever have a complete and thorough account of everything that happens in the history of our world. The best we can hope for is a summary of the general facts, but that will always omit important details - as it says, history is BIG! In summary, can we not make every comic about Trump, please? [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 20:43, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

There is an erroneous period at the end of the first line of the last paragraph: "...the present. period may...". I added the period to the transcript, but I'm not sure if the local policy is to include "[sic]" in the transcript, to note that in an "errors" section, etc. I'd invite someone who knows the policy to edit the page accordingly. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.69.46|172.69.69.46]] 20:50, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Seems to me like most of the major events in history classes (at least the events I can remember the year of) happened on even years: 1066, 1492, 1776, 1812, ...
[[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.251|162.158.79.251]] 23:29, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

;Second lesson
I think, there is a second lesson in this strip: We tend to massively overestimate the importance of current events, and Americans specifically tend to overestimate the importance of their presidents. Today, Garfield is just <s>a cartoon character</s> one of many presidents, in 100 years Kennedy will also be seen as just one of even more presidents, and one day, even 9/11 will be only something that happened sometime in the distant past.

In other words: Not only is history bigger than we think, we also tend to exaggerate the importance of current events. --[[Special:Contributions/141.101.77.170|141.101.77.170]] 12:51, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

;Conkling vs Garfield

Quoting the current version of the article:

:For example, it cites the defeat of Roscoe Conkling as a serious event that would fade in importance when compared to Garfield's assassination. Conkling was a senator in Garfield's party who resigned in protest of Garfield's policies, then failed to achieve re-election; contrary to the writer's belief, both these events have faded into roughly the same level of obscurity.

I'm going to disagree that Conkling's defeat & Garfield's assassination are events at the same level of obscurity. First off, Garfield is at least mentioned on lists of U.S. presidents and lists of presidents who were assassinated. This type of material is available in, for example, pretty much every U.S. elementary school. I believe I've got a placemat with Garfield's name, face, and dates (along with those of all the other U.S. presidents) in my kitchen at this very moment. Kids love it . . .

Meanwhile, Conkling's name is not widely known at all even in the U.S. and his re-election defeat is not even mentioned in the top-line summary of his Wikipedia article (it's way down in the detail section halfway through the article, but doesn't make the article summary). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Conkling

I don't know how you objectively measure the prominence of one historical character or event over another, but just for example Garfield's wikipedia article is about 4X as long as Conkling's. And mentions the assassination in the very first sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield

[[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.52|172.68.150.52]] 14:18, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
:The number of Google searches might also be a useful indicator https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0b22w,%2Fm%2F03x0cd {{unsigned ip|162.158.88.68}}
::Aha, yeah. That puts the Garfield/Conkling ratio at 34/2 over about 14 years of Google searches. So Garfield is searched for roughly 17X as often as Conkling.

Abraham Lincoln compared with Garfield comes out as 37/1. So Garfield is indeed far more obscure than Lincoln, but Conkling is more obscure yet, according to the Google searches. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.52|172.68.150.52]] 21:54, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

; Boldface?
Can anyone speculate on what Randall was trying to achieve with the selective use of '''boldfaced''' text in the comic? [[User:JohnHawkinson|JohnHawkinson]] ([[User talk:JohnHawkinson|talk]]) 16:41, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
:Interesting question. I've entered it into the incomplete reason. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 17:25, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
::I believe it's Randall's way of providing a "TL;DR" version, that anyone not inclined to read that entire (rather large) block of text can just read the bold parts to grasp the gist of what the article, and by extension Randall, is trying to say (I DO feel like if someone only reads the bold text, they'll get the point of the article, at least the part that's striking Randall/Megan). [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 05:16, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

1981: Rickrolling Anniversary

2018-04-16T15:00:39Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1981
| date = April 16, 2018
| title = Rickrolling Anniversary
| image = rickrolling_anniversary.png
| titletext = Want to feel old? The 'want to feel old?' factoid meme dates back to around 2011, closer to the Bush/Kerry election than to today.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a Rickroller - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic is another one in the "feeling old" series. This one deals with the memes {{w|Rickrolling}} and "want to feel old?" (title text).
In the comic, Megan and Cueball discuss the 10th anniversary of the peak of rickrolling, and after a beat panel, note that they are old.

Cueball's comment in the final panel, "We've known each other for so long", is the first line of the second verse of the song "{{w|Never Gonna Give You Up}}" on which rickrolling is based.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

:Cueball: This month marks ten years since the peak of the Rickrolling phenomenon.

:Megan: Seriously?
:Megan: Wow. Happy anniversary, I guess.

:Cueball: We've known each other for so long.
:Megan: We really have.

{{comic discussion}}

1981: Rickrolling Anniversary

2018-04-16T14:58:11Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 1981
| date = April 16, 2018
| title = Rickrolling Anniversary
| image = rickrolling_anniversary.png
| titletext = Want to feel old? The 'want to feel old?' factoid meme dates back to around 2011, closer to the Bush/Kerry election than to today.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a Rickroller - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
This comic is another one in the "feeling old" series. This one deals with memes rick rolling and "want to feel old?" (title text).
In the comic, Megan and Cueball discuss the 10th anniversary of the peak of rick rolling, and after a beat panel, note that they are old.
==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

:Cueball: This month marks ten years since the peak of the Rickrolling phenomenon.

:Megan: Seriously?
:Megan: Wow. Happy anniversary, I guess.

:Cueball: We've known each other for so long.
:Megan: We really have.

{{comic discussion}}

1980: Turkish Delight

2018-04-13T22:58:14Z

172.68.150.52: add cat

Talk:1980: Turkish Delight

2018-04-13T22:51:57Z

172.68.150.52:

whomever[[Special:Contributions/172.68.26.71|172.68.26.71]] 15:42, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Randall is a known Animorphs fan, and Cinnabon is portrayed in the books as being foremost among the favourite foods of Andalites when in human morph. Possibly the title text is meant to introduce the narrator as one? It wouldn't be the [[769:_War|first time]] that mousing over has revealed the identity of a character in the strip. [[User:D5xtgr|D5xtgr]] ([[User talk:D5xtgr|talk]]) 17:57, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Would it be useful to include an explanation of what Turkish Delights are and what they’re made from? It could help to explain why he might be let down. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.211.82|172.68.211.82]] 19:41, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
*This might be helpful for background [http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2005/12/the_lion_the_witch_and_the_really_foul_candy.html The Lion, the Witch, and the Really Foul Candy] [[User:Odysseus654|Odysseus654]] ([[User talk:Odysseus654|talk]]) 21:22, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

One point that might be worth mentioning, is that this happens during World War II, more specifically during The Blitz (the Kids were being sent off to the professor's to get them out of the city, since the city was being bombed to crap. This kind of thing was rather common.) Rationing had been in place for some time, and ANY sort of confectionery would've been exceedingly difficult to come by. Poor Edmund probably hadn't had any candy at all for months. -Graptor [[Special:Contributions/172.68.58.95|172.68.58.95]] 22:00, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
*Candy was definitely in short supply during the war, and it was still being rationed in the UK even at the time ''The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'' was published. But the witch offered Edmund ''any'' kind of food he might want, and what he requested was Turkish delight, which she magically conjured up. (''"What would you like best to eat?" "Turkish Delight, please, your Majesty," said Edmund. The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle onto the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight.'') It wasn't like the witch had only Turkish delight to offer and Edmund was grateful for it only because he had no other access to candy. He could have requested chocolate bars or some other kind of candy from the witch, if he had wanted to. --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.52|172.68.150.52]] 22:51, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

1980: Turkish Delight

2018-04-13T22:33:47Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */

1980: Turkish Delight

2018-04-13T14:46:06Z

172.68.150.52: /* Explanation */

1980: Turkish Delight

2018-04-13T14:37:30Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

Talk:1979: History

2018-04-12T14:19:47Z

172.68.150.52:

Talk:1979: History

2018-04-12T14:18:35Z

172.68.150.52:

Heh. I accidentally misread the line, so I thought it said: "I honestly have enough trouble with just the ''president''". [[User:Linker|Linker]] ([[User talk:Linker|talk]]) 11:48, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:Same here. Then I thought "What the heck?" and read the last line again. Lol. [[User:Herobrine|Herobrine]] ([[User talk:Herobrine|talk]]) 13:20, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
::And same here, lol! I was actually wondering about what the possible motivations could have been to use Megan as the character to say that. Then I read it again :D [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.172|162.158.255.172]] 14:26, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:::Considering Randall's opinion on Trump, it made a little sense. But he hasn't ever attacked him directly.[[User:Linker|Linker]] ([[User talk:Linker|talk]]) 15:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
::::It's a reach, but it's POSSIBLE this was the intention. Planting the seed by talking about a president, then a comment closely resembling "I honestly have enough trouble just with the president". It may have garnered the intended response. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.172|162.158.255.172]] 14:04, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

I only make comments, and let others figure out how to edit it into the above. I once read someplace that there is a reasonable limit to accurate historical research at about 3 centuries- events more than 300 years in the past become more mythological than factual, and events more than 500 years in the past are so remote that we can't even begin to understand the culture in which they occurred. While there are famous exceptions to this rule, they occur entirely in the realms of either archaeology or theology and religion, not in the science of history.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 13:32, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:What is "accurate historical research"? No scientist would use those words. And a historian as an expert - let's say of the Roman Empire or the medieval - would strictly disagree. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 15:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

:Even shorter periods of time. There were a lot of changes in the twentieth century. I was born in 1960. At that time, there were people alive before the automobile, powered airflight, the telephone. How about photocopiers which really got going in the 1970s? Can any of you younger people understand not being able to photocopy something? Then, there are the developments in computers and mobile phones.
:On a USENET newgroup that I follow -- alt.talk.royalty -- there is one monarchist who posts a series of posts on Queen Elizabeth II. Sort of. He takes the current length of her reign and goes back that far before it (less a day, I think). He then describes the world at that time and finishes with "Consider all the changes, natural and manmade, visited upon the world in all the time since. And now consider this...Queen Elizabeth II has been on the Throne for MOST of that time since then." Twice her reign length from present time is now in the 1880s. A very different world.
:[[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.220|108.162.216.220]] 15:16, 11 April 2018 (UTC) Gene Wirchenko genew@telus.net

My maternal grandfather was born in 1873. When I was a child, he told me glorious stories about living in a log cabin in Michigan as a child, riding his penny-farthing bicycle as a teenager, and moving to a boomtown called Venice (CA) in the 1920s. He was 30 when the Wright Brothers made their first flight, and he wound up manufacturing aircraft parts during WWII. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.106|172.68.54.106]] 08:36, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

The link to the actual page of the paper is fantastic - especially the ads along the right side - "Anti-Morbific, the Great Liver and Kidney Remedy" and "Trash's Magnetic Ointment". So, a question - there's no by-line. Is there any way to figure out who wrote this? I assume maybe multiple people, like and editorial board? [[User:DanB|DanB]] ([[User talk:DanB|talk]]) 13:36, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Regarding the link to the actual page of the paper, the article immediately after it talks about a discussion over the tariffs on whiskey, beer, and tobacco covering the differences of opinion within the Democrat and Republican parties and protectionism vs free trade and producers vs consumers concluding that the tax is good because it could be used to pay down the national debt and finance national education initiatives. Despite burgeoning taxes the speculated benefits never arrived. We deceive ourselves if we believe that the discussions we have today were never debated before. The debate is eternal and the promised goods are never delivered. [[User:Rtanenbaum|Rtanenbaum]] ([[User talk:Rtanenbaum|talk]]) 21:15, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

I think this comic is referencing how so many people are commenting on how unprecedented Trump’s presidency has been, how it’ll be the sort of think future students will read about in history classes, and overall how dramatic it is, like you’d find unbelievable, even in a movie. This comic is commenting on how people in the moment often think that way, yet Trump’ll likely be a footnote in 200 years too. [[User:PotatoGod|PotatoGod]] ([[User talk:PotatoGod|talk]]) 19:24, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

:I need to comment, but I'll do my best to temper it a bit. I think it's a stretch to think this is saying anything about Trump. It seems like this comic is just a reflection on how difficult it is to ever have a complete and thorough account of everything that happens in the history of our world. The best we can hope for is a summary of the general facts, but that will always omit important details - as it says, history is BIG! In summary, can we not make every comic about Trump, please? [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 20:43, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

There is an erroneous period at the end of the first line of the last paragraph: "...the present. period may...". I added the period to the transcript, but I'm not sure if the local policy is to include "[sic]" in the transcript, to note that in an "errors" section, etc. I'd invite someone who knows the policy to edit the page accordingly. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.69.46|172.69.69.46]] 20:50, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Seems to me like most of the major events in history classes (at least the events I can remember the year of) happened on even years: 1066, 1492, 1776, 1812, ...
[[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.251|162.158.79.251]] 23:29, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

;Second lesson
I think, there is a second lesson in this strip: We tend to massively overestimate the importance of current events, and Americans specifically tend to overestimate the importance of their presidents. Today, Garfield is just <s>a cartoon character</s> one of many presidents, in 100 years Kennedy will also be seen as just one of even more presidents, and one day, even 9/11 will be only something that happened sometime in the distant past.

In other words: Not only is history bigger than we think, we also tend to exaggerate the importance of current events. --[[Special:Contributions/141.101.77.170|141.101.77.170]] 12:51, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

;Conkling vs Garfield

:For example, it cites the defeat of Roscoe Conkling as a serious event that would fade in importance when compared to Garfield's assassination. Conkling was a senator in Garfield's party who resigned in protest of Garfield's policies, then failed to achieve re-election; contrary to the writer's belief, both these events have faded into roughly the same level of obscurity.

I'm going to disagree that Conkling's defeat & Garfield's assassination are events at the same level of obscurity. First off, Garfield is at least mentioned on lists of U.S. presidents and lists of presidents who were assassinated. This type of material is available in, for example, pretty much every U.S. elementary school. I believe I've got a placemat with Garfield's name, face, and dates (along with those of all the other U.S. presidents) in my kitchen at this very moment. Kids love it . . .

Meanwhile, Conkling's name is not widely known at all even in the U.S. and his re-election defeat is not even mentioned in the top-line summary of his Wikipedia article (it's way down in the detail section halfway through the article, but doesn't make the article summary). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Conkling

I don't know how you objectively measure the prominence of one historical character or event over another, but just for example Garfield's wikipedia article is about 4X as long as Conkling's. And mentions the assassination in the very first sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield

[[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.52|172.68.150.52]] 14:18, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

Talk:1979: History

2018-04-12T14:14:40Z

172.68.150.52: Relative obscurity of Garfield vs Conkling

Heh. I accidentally misread the line, so I thought it said: "I honestly have enough trouble with just the ''president''". [[User:Linker|Linker]] ([[User talk:Linker|talk]]) 11:48, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:Same here. Then I thought "What the heck?" and read the last line again. Lol. [[User:Herobrine|Herobrine]] ([[User talk:Herobrine|talk]]) 13:20, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
::And same here, lol! I was actually wondering about what the possible motivations could have been to use Megan as the character to say that. Then I read it again :D [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.172|162.158.255.172]] 14:26, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:::Considering Randall's opinion on Trump, it made a little sense. But he hasn't ever attacked him directly.[[User:Linker|Linker]] ([[User talk:Linker|talk]]) 15:22, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
::::It's a reach, but it's POSSIBLE this was the intention. Planting the seed by talking about a president, then a comment closely resembling "I honestly have enough trouble just with the president". It may have garnered the intended response. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.255.172|162.158.255.172]] 14:04, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

I only make comments, and let others figure out how to edit it into the above. I once read someplace that there is a reasonable limit to accurate historical research at about 3 centuries- events more than 300 years in the past become more mythological than factual, and events more than 500 years in the past are so remote that we can't even begin to understand the culture in which they occurred. While there are famous exceptions to this rule, they occur entirely in the realms of either archaeology or theology and religion, not in the science of history.[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 13:32, 11 April 2018 (UTC)
:What is "accurate historical research"? No scientist would use those words. And a historian as an expert - let's say of the Roman Empire or the medieval - would strictly disagree. --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 15:12, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

:Even shorter periods of time. There were a lot of changes in the twentieth century. I was born in 1960. At that time, there were people alive before the automobile, powered airflight, the telephone. How about photocopiers which really got going in the 1970s? Can any of you younger people understand not being able to photocopy something? Then, there are the developments in computers and mobile phones.
:On a USENET newgroup that I follow -- alt.talk.royalty -- there is one monarchist who posts a series of posts on Queen Elizabeth II. Sort of. He takes the current length of her reign and goes back that far before it (less a day, I think). He then describes the world at that time and finishes with "Consider all the changes, natural and manmade, visited upon the world in all the time since. And now consider this...Queen Elizabeth II has been on the Throne for MOST of that time since then." Twice her reign length from present time is now in the 1880s. A very different world.
:[[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.220|108.162.216.220]] 15:16, 11 April 2018 (UTC) Gene Wirchenko genew@telus.net

My maternal grandfather was born in 1873. When I was a child, he told me glorious stories about living in a log cabin in Michigan as a child, riding his penny-farthing bicycle as a teenager, and moving to a boomtown called Venice (CA) in the 1920s. He was 30 when the Wright Brothers made their first flight, and he wound up manufacturing aircraft parts during WWII. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.106|172.68.54.106]] 08:36, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

The link to the actual page of the paper is fantastic - especially the ads along the right side - "Anti-Morbific, the Great Liver and Kidney Remedy" and "Trash's Magnetic Ointment". So, a question - there's no by-line. Is there any way to figure out who wrote this? I assume maybe multiple people, like and editorial board? [[User:DanB|DanB]] ([[User talk:DanB|talk]]) 13:36, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Regarding the link to the actual page of the paper, the article immediately after it talks about a discussion over the tariffs on whiskey, beer, and tobacco covering the differences of opinion within the Democrat and Republican parties and protectionism vs free trade and producers vs consumers concluding that the tax is good because it could be used to pay down the national debt and finance national education initiatives. Despite burgeoning taxes the speculated benefits never arrived. We deceive ourselves if we believe that the discussions we have today were never debated before. The debate is eternal and the promised goods are never delivered. [[User:Rtanenbaum|Rtanenbaum]] ([[User talk:Rtanenbaum|talk]]) 21:15, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

I think this comic is referencing how so many people are commenting on how unprecedented Trump’s presidency has been, how it’ll be the sort of think future students will read about in history classes, and overall how dramatic it is, like you’d find unbelievable, even in a movie. This comic is commenting on how people in the moment often think that way, yet Trump’ll likely be a footnote in 200 years too. [[User:PotatoGod|PotatoGod]] ([[User talk:PotatoGod|talk]]) 19:24, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

:I need to comment, but I'll do my best to temper it a bit. I think it's a stretch to think this is saying anything about Trump. It seems like this comic is just a reflection on how difficult it is to ever have a complete and thorough account of everything that happens in the history of our world. The best we can hope for is a summary of the general facts, but that will always omit important details - as it says, history is BIG! In summary, can we not make every comic about Trump, please? [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 20:43, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

There is an erroneous period at the end of the first line of the last paragraph: "...the present. period may...". I added the period to the transcript, but I'm not sure if the local policy is to include "[sic]" in the transcript, to note that in an "errors" section, etc. I'd invite someone who knows the policy to edit the page accordingly. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.69.46|172.69.69.46]] 20:50, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

Seems to me like most of the major events in history classes (at least the events I can remember the year of) happened on even years: 1066, 1492, 1776, 1812, ...
[[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.251|162.158.79.251]] 23:29, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

;Second lesson
I think, there is a second lesson in this strip: We tend to massively overestimate the importance of current events, and Americans specifically tend to overestimate the importance of their presidents. Today, Garfield is just <s>a cartoon character</s> one of many presidents, in 100 years Kennedy will also be seen as just one of even more presidents, and one day, even 9/11 will be only something that happened sometime in the distant past.

In other words: Not only is history bigger than we think, we also tend to exaggerate the importance of current events. --[[Special:Contributions/141.101.77.170|141.101.77.170]] 12:51, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

;Conkling vs Garfield

:For example, it cites the defeat of Roscoe Conkling as a serious event that would fade in importance when compared to Garfield's assassination. Conkling was a senator in Garfield's party who resigned in protest of Garfield's policies, then failed to achieve re-election; contrary to the writer's belief, both these events have faded into roughly the same level of obscurity.

I'm going to disagree that Conkling's defeat & Garfield's assassination as events at the same level of obscurity. First off, Garfield is at least mentioned on lists of U.S. presidents and lists of presidents who were assassinated. I believe I've got a placemat with Garfield's name, face, and dates in my kitchen at this very moment.

Meanwhile, Conkling's name is not widely known at all even in the U.S. and his re-election defeat is not even mentioned in the top-line summary of his Wikipedia article (it's way down in the detail section of the article, but doesn't make the article summary). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscoe_Conkling

I don't know how you objectively measure the prominence of one historical character or event over another, but just for example Garfield's wikipedia article is about 4X as long as Conkling's. And mentions the assassination in the very first sentence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield

1976: Friendly Questions

2018-04-04T14:43:38Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 1976
| date = April 4, 2018
| title = Friendly Questions
| image = friendly_questions.png
| titletext = Just tell me everything you're thinking about in order from most important to last, and then we'll be friends and we can eat apples together.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a BOT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:Cueball: Hey!
:Hairy: Oh, hi!

:[Cueball looks down at a sticky note in his hand]

:[The sticky note reads: Normal Human Conversation | 1. Ask them about themselves]

:Cueball: How many...apples...have you eaten?
:Hairy: ...Like, in my life?
:Cueball: Yes.
:Hairy: ...
:Cueball: ...I should go.
:Hairy: OK.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Social interactions]]

1976: Friendly Questions

2018-04-04T14:42:38Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

599: Apocalypse

2018-03-24T23:37:21Z

172.68.150.52: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 599
| date = June 19, 2009
| title = Apocalypse
| image = apocalypse.png
| titletext = I wonder if I still have time to go shoot a short film with Kevin Bacon.
}}

== Explanation ==
This comic begins with the beginning of the {{w|Apocalypse}}, hence the title. It is depicted, properly, with a very dystopian color picture with several yellow burning {{w|meteors}} striking down from the blood red sky, towards a black, red, orange and yellow ground. The way the panels are drawn below makes a transition from this dark image to a normal comic, with the first normal panel being superimposed on the dark image.

In this image [[Beret Guy]] shouts out '''The apocalypse!''' And then he continues to explain what this will mean: ''The skies burn, the seas turn to blood, and the dead walk the earth!''

All three sentences are attributed to the apocalypse, but it seems that the first one about the sky burning, actually comes from a translation of one of {{w|Nostradamus}} predictions, which has among other been used to "{{w|Nostradamus_in_popular_culture#September_11.2C_2001|predict 9/11}}". In {{w|Revelation 16}} from the bible about the {{w|Seven bowls}}, which are a set of seven plagues of God's wrath poured over the wicked towards the Apocalypse, the {{w|Seven_bowls#Second_Bowl|second bowl}} describes that ''{{w|Revelation_16#Structure|The Sea Turns to Blood}}''. The {{w|Universal resurrection|resurrection of the dead}} is from the biblical version of the Apocalypse, the {{w|Last Judgment}}.

After Beret Guy has announced this, he runs into [[Cueball]] who has heard part of this, but he is only interested in the last part and asks to check if he understood correctly that the dead will walk the earth. When this is confirmed Cueball becomes very busy.

He runs to his office and quickly writes a scientific math paper, then runs as fast as he can to the math department and get his colleagues to sign it. Then he runs to a cemetery where the dead are rising, finds the one he searched for, and asks the resurrected {{w|zombie}} if he is Erdős. When confirmed that he is indeed Erdős, Cueball asks him to sign the math paper.

{{w|Paul Erdős}} (26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician who (according to Wikipedia) published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. His grave is in the Kozma Street Cemetery in Budapest.

There is an in-joke developed among mathematicians called the {{w|Erdős number}} (similar to a Bacon number for film actors, referenced in the title text, see below). By definition, Erdős has an Erdős number of 0. Everyone who has co-written a mathematical paper with Erdős has an Erdős number of 1. Everyone who collaborated with them (but not Erdős himself) is assigned an Erdős number of 2. In general, if ''k'' is the minimal Erdős number of all the people you've written papers with, your Erdős number is ''k'' + 1. The Erdős number is the length of the shortest "chain" from you to Erdős.

Thanks to collaboration between mathematicians and other researchers, many people in science and medical research now have Erdős numbers. Not everyone has an Erdős number, though; people without any chain linking them to Erdős have an undefined Erdős number. For example, most people who are not mathematicians or scientists do not have Erdős numbers. Nor do mathematicians and scientists whose publications were written by themselves only with no collaborators.

By this trick Cueball thinks that he and his colleagues will now all have a an Erdős number of 1. The joke is that he would be using his last few hours in this life to write a math paper just to improve his and his friends' Erdős numbers.

There are, however, many problems with his idea, even assuming the dead will walk the earth on that day. First of all, just having your name on a piece of paper with Erdős's signature does nothing for your Erdős number. It needs to be a {{w|Scientific_literature#Scientific_article|scientifically valid paper}}, published in a {{w|peer reviewed}} {{w|scientific journal}}. And given that the apocalypse is happening, there seems no time, chance or reason to publish any more math papers.

Even if there were time, it would not count for much to have someone sign a math paper they haven't even read, let alone had anything to do with the actual writing and research. The same would be true for the other five mathematicians who signed it. But of course many papers have coauthors who did not do much more than work in the same department as the person who actually wrote the paper (a sad but true fact). Presumably Cueball's friends assume that nobody will investigate whether they, or Erdős, truly participated in the writing and research of Cueball's paper.

Furthermore, even if it did count, they will not be able to take the paper with them into the afterlife, and thus since no one would have had time to read the paper, no one would know they had an Erdős number of 1. In the afterlife they could all say that they had such a number, but then again everyone else with such an interest could do the same, since no one could prove otherwise. Of course if you end up in the same part ({{w|Heaven}} or {{w|Hell}}) of the {{w|afterlife}} as Erdős he could confirm or deny the claim, but that would probably not help Cueball and his friends, since he could tell the truth about their paper. (Erdős was known for using an idiosyncratic set of slang terms, in which he described people who had stopped doing mathematics as having "died", whereas people who had died had "left".)

That the whole comic is about the Erdős number, and not just Erdős signature, is made clear in the title text which refers to a similar (and less esoteric) meme called "{{w|Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon}}", or simply Bacon numbers. This time, the chain's center is actor {{w|Kevin Bacon}}, and the links are formed by two people appearing in the same movie. Unlike Erdős, Kevin Bacon is not dead, so those of you wishing to get a Bacon number of 1 still have a chance.

In the title text Cueball thus wonders if there is still time for him to run on an make a short film with Kevin Bacon, now he has used so much time on improving his Erdős number. Again, if the film hasn't been shown to the public it would not count for anything...

One of the mathematical scribbles appearing in panel 5 shows the square root of 163, which may be a reference to {{w|Ramanujan's constant}}.

[[403: Convincing Pickup Line]] has a parody of the Erdős collaboration graph.

Zombies are a [[:Category:Zombies|recurring theme]] in xkcd, particularly zombie scientists, which has also occurred both before with {{w|Richard Feynman}} in [[397: Unscientific]] and after with {{w|Marie Curie}} in [[896: Marie Curie]].

==Transcript==
:[The first panel is very large and shows a dark scene with one large meteor in front and four smaller in the background showering the darkened earth. They are all five black with yellow fire around them and a fire trail behind them, and all are flying from the top left corner and down towards right. The sky at the top is pitch black, but then the sky turns blood red under dark clouds. Two large mountain peaks, one almost pyramid shaped, are shown to the left and to the right there are two smaller peaks towards the distant horizon. The mountains and the ground around them are mainly black, but with red, orange and yellow streaks spread all over the black area beneath the mountain peaks, maybe indicating fire or lava, or reflections in water or blood. At the bottom right corner a normal white panel is superimposed on this apocalyptic image.]

:[The smaller panel at the bottom of the first is halfway over the first panel, haflway below, and only to the right of the middle of the first panel. Beret Guy is running towards left, with his arms raised in the air.]
:Beret Guy: The apocalypse! The skies burn, the seas turn to blood, and the dead walk the earth!

:[From here a normal sequence of panels in three rows begin beneath the second panel. This leaves a gap between the apocalyptic panel and the first row of regular panels, on the left side where the 2nd panel did not reach over. In this panel Beret Guy (coming from the right) finds Cueball.]
:Cueball: The dead what?
:Beret Guy: Walk the earth!

:[Cueball running right in a thin panel.]
:Cueball: I have to go.

:[Cueball sitting on a chair at a table scribbling vigorously and nosily with a pen on a paper. Mathematical symbols appear above Cueball's head, including a summation from i=0 to n, a logarithm of n and the square root of a number.]
:<big>∑</big>ni=0ik1/i log(n)
:√163
:''Scribble''
:''Scribble''

:[Cueball running right again, in a thin panel, pen and paper in hand.]

:[Cueball opening door with label:]
:Math Dept
:Cueball: The dead return!
:Cueball: Everyone, quick, get your names on here!

:[Cueball stand on the left side of a table looking left over his shoulder. Five people are lining up to sign the paper lying on the right side of the table. The first who signs with a pen is Blondie, then in line follows Megan, a Cueball-like guy, Ponytail and another Cueball-like guy who stand with one hand to his chin looking right, away from the other.]
:Blondie: At last!
:Guy looking right: I hope there's time!

:[Cueball running right in yet a thin panel, with pen and the paper flowing behind him.]

:[Cueball walks right with the paper and pen in his hand as he arrives at at a cemetery as revealed by an old worn sign. Scary sounds appear off-panel right.]
:Sign: Cemetery
:Rising dead (off-panel): ''Hurrghhh''

:[Cueball, still going right, arrives at a grave, pen in hand and the other hand almost outside the panel, but with a corner of the paper just visible. The grave has a large gravestone to the right and in front of it there is a Cueball-like guy rising up from the ground using his arms to push up on the base of the stone and the small pile of earth towards Cueball. The guy looks very worn, with dirt on his head and scratches on his cheek.]

:[Cueball bends a little down and offers pen and paper to the raised dead man who looks up at him when he is addressed.]
:Cueball: Paul Erdős?
:Erdős: Yes?
:Cueball: We need you to sign this.

==Trivia==
*This version of [[Blondie]] seems to be employed at a mathematical department on a university. It could thus also be [[Miss Lenhart]], but there is no proof that she is a teacher...

{{Comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Beret Guy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Blondie]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Multiple Cueballs]]
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]
[[Category:Math]]
[[Category:Zombies]]

599: Apocalypse

2018-03-24T23:35:05Z

172.68.150.52: cleanup

{{comic
| number = 599
| date = June 19, 2009
| title = Apocalypse
| image = apocalypse.png
| titletext = I wonder if I still have time to go shoot a short film with Kevin Bacon.
}}

== Explanation ==
This comic begins with the beginning of the {{w|Apocalypse}}, hence the title. It is depicted, properly, with a very dystopian color picture with several yellow burning {{w|meteors}} striking down from the blood red sky, towards a black, red, orange and yellow ground. The way the panels are drawn below makes a transition from this dark image to a normal comic, with the first normal panel being superimposed on the dark image.

In this image [[Beret Guy]] shouts out '''The apocalypse!''' And then he continues to explain what this will mean: ''The skies burn, the seas turn to blood, and the dead walk the earth!''

All three sentences are attributed to the apocalypse, but it seems that the first one about the sky burning, actually comes from a translation of one of {{w|Nostradamus}} predictions, which has among other been used to "{{w|Nostradamus_in_popular_culture#September_11.2C_2001|predict 9/11}}". In {{w|Revelation 16}} from the bible about the {{w|Seven bowls}}, which are a set of seven plagues of God's wrath poured over the wicked towards the Apocalypse, the {{w|Seven_bowls#Second_Bowl|second bowl}} describes that ''{{w|Revelation_16#Structure|The Sea Turns to Blood}}''. The {{w|Universal resurrection|resurrection of the dead}} is from the biblical version of the Apocalypse, the {{w|Last Judgment}}.

After Beret Guy has announced this, he runs into [[Cueball]] who has heard part of this, but he is only interested in the last part and asks to check if he understood correctly that the dead will walk the earth. When this is confirmed Cueball becomes very busy.

He runs to his office and quickly writes a scientific math paper, then runs as fast as he can to the math department and get his colleagues to sign it. Then he runs to a cemetery where the dead are rising, finds the one he searched for, and asks the resurrected {{w|zombie}} if he is Erdős. When confirmed that he is indeed Erdős, Cueball asks him to sign the math paper.

{{w|Paul Erdős}} (26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician who (according to Wikipedia) published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. His grave is in the Kozma Street Cemetery in Budapest.

There is an in-joke developed among mathematicians called the {{w|Erdős number}} (similar to a Bacon number for film actors, referenced in the title text, see below). By definition, Erdős has an Erdős number of 0. Everyone who has co-written a mathematical paper with Erdős has an Erdős number of 1. Everyone who collaborated with them (but not Erdős himself) is assigned an Erdős number of 2. In general, if ''k'' is the minimal Erdős number of all the people you've written papers with, your Erdős number is ''k'' + 1. The Erdős number is the length of the shortest "chain" from you to Erdős.

Thanks to collaboration between mathematicians and other researchers, many people in science and medical research now have Erdős numbers. Not everyone has an Erdős number, though; people without any chain linking them to Erdős have an undefined Erdős number. For example, most people who are not mathematicians or scientists do not have Erdős numbers. Nor do mathematicians and scientists whose publications were written by themselves only with no collaborators.

By this trick Cueball thinks that he and his colleagues will now all have a an Erdős number of 1. The joke is that he would be using his last few hours in this life to write a math paper just to improve his and his friends' Erdős numbers.

There are, however, many problems with his idea, even assuming the dead will walk the earth on that day. First of all, just having your name on a piece of paper with Erdős's signature does nothing for your Erdős number. It needs to be a {{w|Scientific_literature#Scientific_article|scientifically valid paper}}, published in a {{w|peer reviewed}} {{w|scientific journal}}. And given that the apocalypse is happening, there seems no time, chance or reason to publish any more math papers.

Even if there were time, it would not count for much to have someone sign a math paper they haven't even read, let alone had anything to do with the actual writing and research. The same would be true for the other five mathematicians who signed it. But of course many papers have coauthors who did not do much more than work in the same department as the person who actually wrote the paper (a sad but true fact). Presumably Cueball's friends assume that nobody will investigate whether they, or Erdős, truly participated in the writing and research of Cueball's paper.

Furthermore, even if it did count, they will not be able to take the paper with them into the afterlife, and thus since no one would have had time to read the paper, no one would know they had an Erdős number of 1. In the afterlife they could all say that they had such a number, but then again everyone else with such an interest could do the same, since no one could prove otherwise. Of course if you end up in the same part ({{w|Heaven}} or {{w|Hell}}) of the {{w|afterlife}} as Erdős he could confirm or deny the claim, but that would probably not help Cueball and his friends, since he could tell the truth about their paper. (Erdős was known for using an idiosyncratic set of slang terms, in which he described people who had stopped doing mathematics as having "died", whereas people who had died had "left".)

That the whole comic is about the Erdős number, and not just Erdős signature, is made clear in the title text which refers to a similar (and less esoteric) meme called "{{w|Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon}}", or simply Bacon numbers. This time, the chain's center is actor {{w|Kevin Bacon}}, and the links are formed by two people appearing in the same movie. Unlike Erdős, Kevin Bacon is not dead, so those of you wishing to get a Bacon number of 1 still have a chance.

In the title text Cueball thus wonders if there is still time for him to run on an make a short film with Kevin Bacon, now he has used so much time on improving his Erdős number. Again, if the film hasn't been shown to the public it would not count for anything...

One of the mathematical scribbles appearing in panel 5 shows the square root of 163, which may be a reference to {{w|Ramanujan's constant}}.

[[403: Convincing Pickup Line]] has a parody of the Erdős collaboration graph.

Zombies are a [[:Category:Zombies|recurring theme]] in xkcd, particularly zombie scientists, which has also occurred both before with {{w|Richard Feynman}} in [[397: Unscientific]] and after with {{w|Marie Curie}} in [[896: Marie Curie]].

==Transcript==
:[The first panel is very large and shows a dark scene with one large meteor in front and four smaller in the background showering the darkened earth. They are all five black with yellow fire around them and a fire trail behind them, and all are flying from the top left corner and down towards right. The sky at the top is pitch black, but then the sky turns blood red under dark clouds. Two large mountain peaks, one almost pyramid shaped, are shown to the left and to the right there are two smaller peaks towards the distant horizon. The mountains and the ground around them are mainly black, but with red, orange and yellow streaks spread all over the black area beneath the mountain peaks, maybe indicating fire or lava, or reflections in water or blood. At the bottom right corner a normal white panel is superimposed on this apocalyptic image.]

:[The smaller panel at the bottom of the first is halfway over the first panel, haflway below, and only to the right of the middle of the first panel. Beret Guy is running towards left, with his arms raised in the air.]
:Beret Guy: The Apocalypse! The skies burn, the seas turn to blood, and the dead walk the earth!

:[From here a normal sequence of panles in three rows begin beneath the second panel. This leaves a gap between the apocalyptic panel and the third row of panel, on the left side where the 2nd panel did not reach over. In this panel Beret Guy (coming from the right) finds Cueball.]
:Cueball: The dead what?
:Beret Guy: Walk the earth!

:[Cueball running right in a thin panel.]
:Cueball: I have to go.

:[Cueball sitting on a chair at a table scribbling vigorously and nosily with a pen on a paper. Mathematical symbols appear above Cueball's head, including a summation from i=0 to n, a logarithm of n and the square root of a number.]
:<big>∑</big>ni=0ik1/i log(n)
:√163
:''Scribble''
:''Scribble''

:[Cueball running right again, in a thin panel, pen and paper in hand.]

:[Cueball opening door with label:]
:Math Dept
:Cueball: The dead return!
:Cueball: Everyone, quick, get your names on here!

:[Cueball stand on the left side of a table looking left over his shoulder. Five people are lining up to sign the paper lying on the right side of the table. The first who signs with a pen is Blondie, then in line follows Megan, a Cueball-like guy, Ponytail and another Cueball-like guy who stand with one hand to his chin looking right, away from the other.]
:Blondie: At last!
:Guy looking right: I hope there's time!

:[Cueball running right in yet a thin panel, with pen and the paper flowing behind him.]

:[Cueball walks right with the paper and pen in his hand as he arrives at at a cemetery as revealed by an old worn sign. Scary sounds appear off-panel right.]
:Sign: Cemetery
:Rising dead (off-panel): ''Hurrghhh''

:[Cueball, still going right, arrives at a grave, pen in hand and the other hand almost outside the panel, but with a corner of the paper just visible. The grave has a large gravestone to the right and in front of it there is a Cueball-like guy rising up from the ground using his arms to push up on the base of the stone and the small pile of earth towards Cueball. The guy looks very worn, with dirt on his head and scratches on his cheek.]

:[Cueball bends a little down and offers pen and paper to the raised dead man who looks up at him when he is addressed.]
:Cueball: Paul Erdős?
:Erdős: Yes?
:Cueball: We need you to sign this.

==Trivia==
*This version of [[Blondie]] seems to be employed at a mathematical department on a university. It could thus also be [[Miss Lenhart]], but there is no proof that she is a teacher...

{{Comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Beret Guy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Blondie]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Multiple Cueballs]]
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]
[[Category:Math]]
[[Category:Zombies]]