explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:2946: 1.2 Kilofives

2024-06-15T05:16:39Z

172.70.90.138:

Challenge: Come up with a way like this to say the comic number #2946. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 03:00, 15 June 2024 (UTC)
:How about 4.91 hectosixes? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.190|172.69.33.190]] 04:19, 15 June 2024 (UTC)
:A kibitwo, four decascore, four score, and eighteen. Two octooctotwentythrees, and two. A gross-score, three score, and 6. [[User:Jordan Brown|Jordan Brown]] ([[User talk:Jordan Brown|talk]]) 05:00, 15 June 2024 (UTC)
Interestingly, four score and seven is exactly how you say 87 in French (quatre-vingt sept) and Basque (laurogeita zazpi). Both count on base 20. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.138|172.70.90.138]] 05:16, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Talk:2822: *@gmail.com

2023-09-01T10:38:08Z

172.70.90.138:

Why not send to *@*.*? [[Special:Contributions/172.69.247.45|172.69.247.45]] 03:08, 31 August 2023 (UTC)
:Either *@* suffices (if not just a *), or (because of non-standard wildcard parsing) it would reach neither ''<whatever@mydomain.me.uk>'' nor ''<something@business.com.au>''... But it'd depend upon how you invoke the query of the relevent MXRecords. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.22|172.71.178.22]] 03:18, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Based on the caption of the comic, I believe the real joke is that many GMail recipients of the original mass email would incorrectly use the "Reply-All" functionality of their email client and thereby further bomb the gmail server with a much larger volume of emails. [[User:Ianrbibtitlht|Ianrbibtitlht]] ([[User talk:Ianrbibtitlht|talk]]) 03:21, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

:That's certainly part of it, but getting millions of emails is far more annoying than the typical few. [[User:DownGoer|DownGoer]] ([[User talk:DownGoer|talk]]) 04:44, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

I have a setup to shorten mail notifications and "XKCD: *.gmail.com" totally looks like something it could output as the sender name, so for a moment I got very confused why the latest comic was suddenly sent from a GMail address and with no subject. [[User:Fabian42|Fabian42]] ([[User talk:Fabian42|talk]]) 05:51, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Add to this the unfortunate tendency to promote Top-Posting (I'm looking at you, Outlook Express, but the various successors and competitors over the last three decades need not have followed that most unconventional convention too!) and 'email chains' of nested replies so easily build up in volumes that never would if each sender were encouraged to actually read through the prior chain of messaging (perhaps realise their contribution was unnecessary, given what someone already else said two iterations ago!) and judiciously prune out the historic ">>>>..."ed contributions that they aren't replying to.<br />It also lets you mid-post (respond to a paragraph/point immediately after that embedded paragraph/point, to skip and excising later points intelligently) and stops it from becoming a hige hidden upside-down tree of ''everything'' in that message's history. (Which can also be a different problem... Something might have been said early on that might be best not to repeat to a later "copied in" contributor, for security or even politeness reasons, but now it's there to be discovered.)<br />But, instead, the modern solution is to hide these top-post tree-roots behind client-side "collapsed"-content and keep forwarding all historic context ''unless'' someone takes time to scroll down-down-down from their "Yeah, I agree" simple response and snip the "..."-worthy stuff out (as well as many, many repetitions of "Please don't print this email out if you don't have to", "This email is intended only for the stated recipients", "The views of this sender do not necessarily reflect the views of his company", etc, often adding up and combining into .sig additions much larger than their respective senders' contributions). Plus an often confusing attempt to "threadify" multiple received messages, which (done right) would actually do better than the retention of a full and unexpurgated reply tree within Every. Single. Individual. Email!<br />...can you tell that I've been annoyed about this for pretty much almost thirty years? And it really hasn't been made any better over the last decade or so. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.153|172.71.178.153]] 12:16, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Inevitably someone would reply all with "Me too" to *@aol.com [[User:Rtanenbaum|Rtanenbaum]] ([[User talk:Rtanenbaum|talk]]) 13:15, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

I don't see any implication in the comic of "attempting to expand the resulting lists within the mail body of the above email"; I just read it as the user typing that literally, like someone might write "I'm looping in sales@" instead of "I'm looping in the Sales Team" - they're not expecting the client to do anything magic with the body of their e-mail, just explaining what they've typed into the To / CC box. - [[User:IMSoP|IMSoP]] ([[User talk:IMSoP|talk]]) 14:14, 31 August 2023 (UTC)
:Looked to me like invoking some scripting language. e.g. "loop <address> in (*@outlook.com, *@yahoo.com) do add_address(_To_,<address>)", or somesuch according to required syntax, but I also didn't know whether this script fragment was supposed to be parsed/expanded/invoked/exec()ed within the To: or Body: fields.
:I suppose "looping in" could well be a synonym for "copying in" (perhaps implicitly ''not'' "Cc:ing in", but adding to To: field), but I've not been aware of that precise terminology so that's probably why I too defaulted to thinking it's some sort of macro command being invoked at some level (despite there being few such mechanisms established to do so).
:But, if you're more sure/correct than the prior editors apparently were, go ahead and edit it... [[Special:Contributions/141.101.68.99|141.101.68.99]] 16:36, 31 August 2023 (UTC)
::Right, [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loop_in#English to loop in] is a common bit of jargon for "include in communication", related to [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in_the_loop in the loop]. "I'm looping in Jane and John" would be a common phrasing in business e-mails. I'll edit that into the explanation. - [[User:IMSoP|IMSoP]] ([[User talk:IMSoP|talk]]) 09:51, 1 September 2023 (UTC)
:::'Common business phrasings' always make me twitch. I still can't take "touch base" seriously, after all these years. I suspect there are some people out there busy inventing the contexts for new verbed nouns and adjectival verbs just to sound sillier. (They're the ones who invented both "podiumed" and "medal(l)ed" for sports contexts, too.) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.138|172.70.90.138]] 10:38, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

On another note, a notable real-life incident involving this was [https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nhs-email-reply-all-down in the UK National Health Service], involving a distribution list of 1.2 million users! - [[User:IMSoP|IMSoP]] ([[User talk:IMSoP|talk]]) 14:14, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

A relatively famous Perl programmer had a legal, deliverable email address of <code>*@qz.to</code>, and has retained the * for his current email. I have an auto-reply bot at <code>fred&barney@stonehenge.com</code> as a demonstration to anyone that it's a legal address but often rejected by stupid regexen. [[User:RandalSchwartz|RandalSchwartz]] ([[User talk:RandalSchwartz|talk]]) 23:28, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Talk:2818: Circuit Symbols

2023-08-25T17:46:54Z

172.70.90.138:

The direct link to the comic is getting a 404 error. But it appears at the xkcd.com home page. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 01:31, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
:The link is working now. [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 02:33, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Randall is symbolizing sheep with a coil because ... wool takes a helical shape. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wool#/media/File:Royal_Winter_Fair_Wool.jpg. [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 02:33, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

The title text is probably a reference to the classic novella "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (a common classroom reading in the US). In this novella, a young Puritan woman "sins" by having a child out of wedlock. She is punished by having to wear the letter A (for adultery). [[User:Comsmomf|Comsmomf]] ([[User talk:Comsmomf|talk]]) 02:54, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Can someone with more wiki-foo than me please put the actual images for the symbols in a new first column? [[User:Blackbearnh|Blackbearnh]] ([[User talk:Blackbearnh|talk]]) 03:01, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

:The easy way to do this might be with the [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpriteSheet SpriteSheet extension], but maybe that's more trouble than it's worth. Any admin thoughts about installing it? [[User:JohnHawkinson|JohnHawkinson]] ([[User talk:JohnHawkinson|talk]]) 02:22, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

I tried, unsuccessfully, to learn if there were "Scarlet Letters" that represented other sins ['A' is mentioned to be for 'Adultery', Maybe 'O' for Onanism?] [[User:These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For|These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For]] ([[User talk:These Are Not The Comments You Are Looking For|talk]]) 03:41, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
:From what I understand, ‘BJ’ had its fair share of supporters. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.247|172.70.210.247]] 04:47, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

What exactly does "the opposite of capacitors" mean in this context? I'm not that familiar with EE, but from my limited understanding of inductors this is an incorrect and confusing statement. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.126.79|172.70.126.79]] 08:07, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

:They are the conjugate complex (so the sentence is kind of half-true), if you consider complex impedances. Sebastian --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.110.169|172.68.110.169]] 08:56, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

:Behaviorally the description makes sense, capacitors behave the same way regarding voltage vs. current as inductors behave regarding current vs. voltage and vice versa. Capacitors can "instantaneously" allow a spike in the current flowing through the circuit path that they are placed in, while the voltage across a capacitor can't change instantaneously and requires time to change incrementally (with a corresponding decline over time in the current flowing). Inductors "instantaneously" allow the voltage across their terminals to spike, but the current flowing through it can't change instantaneously and requires time to change incrementally (with a corresponding decline in the voltage across the inductor). Capacitors can act as a sort of "shock absorber" (no pun intended) or low-pass frequency filter for voltages, as inductors can for current. So they are very much considered complementary and the "essentially the opposite of capacitors" comment does pretty much make sense to EEs. But yes, it's not a particularly illuminating description without that background, and the description isn't really valid regarding their physical makeup or what makes them tick, just their role in a circuit. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.146.213|172.71.146.213]] 09:32, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

:Incapacitors [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.108|172.70.85.108]] 16:48, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

The "overpass" is troubling me, as a map fan. Dependant upon the conventions of any given map illustrator this could easily be more an ''underpass'' (main road being the || track, lesser track being the — that sneaks beneath it) or a 'green bridge' (road is the — and the bridge 'symbol' is the || with no actual route using the space between its edges) or a minor road intersection of an uncrossable dual carriageway (each || is a directional way, separated by central reservation, and a historic road/lane is given T-junction access to/from the adjacent direction of travel, but no local flyover to access the opposite continuation/direction, probably have to use other flyovers/turning points above and below this snapshot). Or it's just a regular major/minor crossroads (track-level horizontal/E-W, more main road vertically/N-S) and is entirely at-grade so not involving a bridge at all. But all very much will rely upon the publisher's/renderer's choice of map-symbolism. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.95|172.70.91.95]] 11:27, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

:What's your hope? That Randall will edit his comic? -- [[User:Dtgriscom|Dtgriscom]] ([[User talk:Dtgriscom|talk]]) 11:41, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
::No more than I wish he'd use IEC resistors rather than the US zigzags. Just highlighting that (in isolation) there's so easily an alternate inference, dependent upon what notation/symbology you're most exposed to. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.199|172.70.162.199]] 16:36, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
:I appreciated the map trivia, personally [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 15:18, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
::Cheers, though I can't help but think that I explained it badly. And without much reason to. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.199|172.70.162.199]] 16:36, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

:I added the joke about needing a citation-needed joke. Please remove if you don't feel it was needed after all.

:Where I live the distinction between underpass and overpass is more about whether the bridge is at grade, and excavation has been done for the other road to pass under (i.e. under the ground level) or the bridge is above grade and the road it crosses over is at grade. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.63.159|162.158.63.159]] 11:28, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
::From my perspective, you also need to consider flyovers (bridges rising above grade, usually more minor or singular carriageways compared to the at-grade main road with or without median-separated carriageways). If the main route rises over the minor (which remains at-grade, more or less) with clear over-ground construction, it's just a road-bridge. An underpass need not be subterrainean, and often can be an at-grade "original" route (typically pedestrian) beneath the embankmented new major road (or other route, e.g. rail) that was engineered across it, in the same subtle manner as a culvert. Or even what you'd now term the stretch of road "bridged" (or tunnelled) beneath the building of a cross-highway shopping centre, like some towns do in order to sustain an inner ringroad and a large footprint shopping centre.
::In general, if the 'over' road doesn't really notice the 'under' (it's still mostly the same grass verging, maybe briefly slightly higher crash-barriers on top of whatever embankment-guarding barriers already exist but no clear 'bridge' details) then I'd just name the underpass as such, as everything on that is definitely going to know that it is diving under the upper route
::It can be complicated. The {{w|File:No pedestrians (geograph 5985118).jpg|extended runway seen here}} is possibly at-grade overpass, w.r.t the whole airport "level" (equivalent to a by-pass embankment?), while the road looks sunken (as can be seen by how much the pedestrian side-portal need not be). It could be a runway on an overpass, though I'd say the road is an underpass (with a possible argument that it was always a cut'n'cover tunnel, or passing under ''really'' long bridge). [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.138|172.70.90.138]] 17:46, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

With a capacitor you can build a low-pass filter. It can be used in signal processing like audio devices to filter out noise. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.243.218|172.70.243.218]] 21:01, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

I think the Battery/Baettry/Batttttttttery joke is probably a reference to the oreo/oreoreo/etc meme that can be seen at https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/839/727/d7f.jpg . [[Special:Contributions/172.70.38.170|172.70.38.170]] 13:58, 23 August 2023 (UTC)Bumpf
:Feel free to add that to the page! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 20:44, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

The electricity in a wave pool citation needed is the first properly funny one I've seen in quite a while - I approve. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.135|172.70.85.135]] 16:49, 25 August 2023 (UTC)