explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:3093: Drafting

2025-05-27T13:57:27Z

172.71.178.157:

;Site issues
Anyone else getting lots of "site is experiencing difficulties" errors [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 15:28, 23 May 2025 (UTC)
:Yes. It must be drafting behind another, more powerful rocket-themed web page and was experiencing some of that "99% inefficiency." [[Special:Contributions/172.68.26.136|172.68.26.136]] 15:56, 23 May 2025 (UTC)
: " getting lots of "site is experiencing difficulties" errors " Yes. --[[User:PRR|PRR]] ([[User talk:PRR|talk]]) 16:22, 23 May 2025 (UTC)
:Yes. From the experience of another forum I'm in, it's probably a sudden uptick on (possibly AI-feeding?) site-scraping. On that site, the number of viewers suddenly increased from a few hundred people online, maximum, at any given time, to tens of thousands. The owner of the site put an additional "are you human" check in the way (after about a week of it), and it fell back to less than a hundred simultaneous connections (not that far off the actual observable user-traffic, with a couple of handfuls of Guest lurkers at any given time, rather than the pre-slowdown peaks of three or four times the provably genuine users).
:That site didn't have Cloudflare, unlike here, and didn't use that as a solution. I would have ''hoped'' that this would have mitigated it here, though. Possibly, however, things could have already been hundreds of times worse without it as it is, hard to know for sure.
:And though my reasoning of the cause is just a guess, I'm sure others have noticed that the amount of 503/Connection Issue responses we're getting has substantially reduced the spam-level numbers of "goes nowhere, does nothing" new accounts that this site tends to get (its other anti-spam protections having long since prevented most of those from doing anything, while still seemingly allowing genuine users to interact). Hard to fully qualify that as a positive, but I suspect that genuinely driven 'honest editors' are more likely to persevere and get past the current bottlenecks, so it might (in certain, rather limited, terms) ''improve'' the editing experience. (The other site started to be ''really'' hammered (to then prompt calls for its subsequent changes) on 11/May, which seems to me to coincide very closely with the drop in new spam-style account names on here, which seems to corroborate it being the same global issue causing both sites problems.)
:Not that I wouldn't appreciate less of the 503s/etc. It definitely is a direct annoyance. Which I can't see being solved any time soon (if Cloudflare doesn't blanket add to its proxying protections, itself). [[Special:Contributions/172.68.229.49|172.68.229.49]] 16:34, 23 May 2025 (UTC)
::Also here. Had to reload the page three times before I could begin writing. And will likely have to reload or try again several times before this is posted --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 19:06, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

Suggestion to move the comments regarding the site difficulties down to the bottom of the page under the topic '''"Temporary Site Difficulties Coincidental to This Page"'''. Once they are over there is Zero reason for them to remain, and should be removed to avoid confusion. [[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]]) 16:35, 25 May 2025 (UTC)
:Really, there are better places even right now. Like where the more abbreviated mention is under Community Portal.
:But, while I'm here, might as well say that it's not like anything practical can be done about it. Even if we had a more active sysadmin, the job of regulating what is effectively (if not intended to be) a mild-DDoS attack is best handled between the server and the connections.. That's a job that the proxy-host needs to deal with, and I don't think CF is completely up to speed with something that's not just our problem.
:Though it's only ''slightly'' annoying, IMO. Should you get a connection error, my advice is to take two or three deep breaths before hitting the Refresh/Retry/whatever. It doesn't help to mash the reload button to add to the number of pokes and prods the server is getting. And responsiveness still seems to work well enough to give any initially refused pages up on the second or ''maybe'' third attempt. I sometimes got far worse performance when in a low mobile-Wifi reception area. ;) [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.164|172.69.79.164]] 20:01, 25 May 2025 (UTC)

----

The efficiency loss is presuamably because the exhaust from the lead rocket is pushing back on the following rocket. It's also really hot, so the follower may be destroyed. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 15:27, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

Added notes on difference between friction and expellant propulsion [[Special:Contributions/172.69.212.151|172.69.212.151]] 16:14, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

Just a comment about drafting and cycle-sport. It might be used in peletons and certain velodrome events (i.e. not "pursuit" ones). But in my own part of the sport, time-trialling, it is actually ''not allowed'' (excepting in team time-trials), as competitors that have just been passed by a faster rider are not supposed to hang on (figuratively, of course) to their wheel. Nor should you try to catch your minute-man just so that you can stick behind them. Also, the rules on the amount of traffic allowed on the roads during an event, as well as being a direct safety aspect on the busiest of roads, are meant to remove any excessive advantage from passing traffic (especially lorries) pushing/pulling the competitors along. This doesn't mean that the occasional ride won't get some assistance. A fast tractor may be too slow for a fast rider to stay behind, who would really need to pass it when safe to do so, but could be going just fast enough for a slower one to benefit (but at the risk of being spotted doing so and the issue addressed appropriately). But competitor-on-competitor co-pacing (or accompanied riding of any other unofficial kind) is ''definitely a no-no''. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.229.49|172.68.229.49]] 16:34, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

This comic made me think of this video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yuMcAS_wRRQ [[Special:Contributions/172.69.212.145|172.69.212.145]] 17:45, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

The exhaust of the lead rocket might increase the density of the gas around the following rocket, thus affecting the efficiency of the following rocket's engine. (Giving the effect of being at a lower altitude if in atmospheric flight.) Rockets generally are less efficient in higher density atmosphere, and are designed for a particular density.
If the following rocket was close enough, it might alter the efficiency of the lead rocket by increasing density near the lead rockets engine, or by providing something similar to ground effect for the lead rocket. (The extent of such effects would also depend on any atmosphere.) [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.19|108.162.245.19]] 19:12, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

Since rockets often travel at supersonic speeds, it seems like the costs and benefits of drafting might be altered, compared to land vehicles drafting at subsonic speeds. (Would both rockets have shock waves in front, would the shockwave from the trailing rocket interact with the first rocket, ...) Seems like it would be worth mentioning, but I couldn't find much about supersonic slipstreaming. Since I am not a rocket scientist, I wouldn't hazard a guess what might happen. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.41.115|162.158.41.115]] 19:35, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

I am aware that bicycle races exist and except for occasional articles about cheating (the most interesting method was extracting one's red blood cells, storing up quite a lot, and putting them back in right before the race) don't care. Geese. Drafting is why I see a vee of geese where the leader peels back and becomes a follower accompanied by a bunch of geese that are just a flock. I think that fighter planes can use drafting. I've noticed the effect when a semi blows past me.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.222.202|172.71.222.202]] 06:26, 24 May 2025 (UTC)
: That's not even close to the most interesting method of cheating in cycling - [https://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2017/8/1/16069440/cycling-cheating-stories-tour-de-france-motors-itching-power-gang-attacks cork between the teeth], anyone?[[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.157|172.71.178.157]] 13:57, 27 May 2025 (UTC)

Ironically, Elon Musk has just announced that when the Starship hot-stages from the Super Heavy (meaning one rocket closely following another, both with engines firing, much like the picture), some of the vent ports at the top of the Super Heavy will be blocked so that the thrust from Starship will come out directionally and push the Super Heavy in a predictable direction... thus increasing its efficiency! [[User:Cphoenix|Cphoenix]] ([[User talk:Cphoenix|talk]]) 06:43, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

Also people seem to be ignoring a comically enormous flaw with this method (no matter how well the exhaust of the leading rocket would provide a slipstream -- or obstacle -- for the trailing rocket): it requires TWO rockets. For example, let's assume drafting works perfectly with cars and such, to the point that the trailing car uses no fuel at all, which would be an incredible efficiency increase. It is not a reasonable idea to suggest improving your car efficiency like that by buying a second (bigger) car and having it somehow drive in front of yours, since it would cost you the second car and the fuel for the second car. With cars, it isn't unreasonable to expect maybe a second vehicle will be going the same path and create that slipstream for you, but rockets aren't as widespread, so at most this would only be applicable (with dubious results as the other commenters point out) if mission planners grouped various launches together at the same time so the launch of one mission would benefit from the launch of another mission (with the starting launch always having to pay the full price for their launch). {{unsigned ip|162.158.122.196|07:07, 24 May 2025}}
:If 'rocket drafting' worked like vehicle drafting, but the {{w|Tsiolkovsky rocket equation|Rocket Equation}} ''also'' applied, then conceivably (especially if you get towards 100% efficiency for the dragged vehicle) you'd be able to deliver a whole lot more mass (either unspent fuel or extra cargo with less fuel) to the point at which the guide-rocket has to peel off. It might be considered similar to adding extra disposable lower-stages to the rearwards rocket, instead of giving it a forwards one, but without the need for ''those'' stages to effectively have the payload capacity to carry a (significantly) passive assisted rocket on ''their'' nose.
:(In fact, because a drafting vehicle can smooth the turbulent drag behind the lead vehicle, improving ''both'' their effective efficiencies, if tucked in just right behind the right kind of vehicle, sending two rockets up in tandem would (with such mythical 'drafting' in operation) potentially get both loads up further (and/or with more liftable mass) than either alone. So be sending a rocket up to LEO and trailing it with one that you want to go to GEO, the conceipt would be that you can do the both better. Or just get two up to LEO/GEO/wherever but with less fuel than two missions. And, indeed, we see that the front rocket is probably a 2+2b configuration, and the rear one is probably just a 2-stage (give or take any 'orbital bus' stage, within each faring), so the expectations may be that a normally insufficient unboosted lower rocket is achieving an orbit (or even eventually escape from Earth to lunar/inter-planatery transfer) that normally it would ''absolutely'' require its own additional boosters/third-stages+ for.)
:Of course, rocket drafting as paridied here is bunkum (not helpful, and probably counterproductive). At best, the following rocket could be used to nudge (physically, or by bringing in its supersonic shockwave in close enough behind the lead to lend impetous to the front rocket's rearward thrust) and act as an additional 'loose booster' to add to the initial rocket's eventual travel. But the engineering, and coordination, behind that is very much less ...useful... than just designing the first rocket configuration to have ''extra'' extra boosters (like the Energia base stage, rather than the reduced Energia-M version, say), or creating extra stages for the stack (effectively like converting a Saturn-IB into a Saturn-V, though that did involve far more change than pushing a new Stage-1 onto the bottom of the original two). [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.226|141.101.98.226]] 09:53, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

When cyclists start having afterburner set up, the same problem will occur on TourDeFrance. --[[Special:Contributions/172.71.122.252|172.71.122.252]] 15:32, 24 May 2025 (UTC)
:When geese get afterburners, will hunters bring home pre-cooked birds? Obligatory note to hunters: Some geese are legally protected in some countries. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.167.88|172.71.167.88]] 18:43, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

Biggest advantage: You can toast marshmallows on the way up as well as down. [[User:Lordpishky|Lordpishky]] ([[User talk:Lordpishky|talk]]) 17:19, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

Only cycling and geese have been mentioned in regards to real-world drafting, but it is immensely important to most forms of auto racing. Drafting is the reason you see packs of 20 or so cars driving nose to tail during NASCAR oval track races. For more: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70s1Zycr_x0 Drag & Drafting | NASCAR Science of Speed (National Science Foundation News)] [[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]]) 16:35, 25 May 2025 (UTC)

Rocket Scientist here.
Believe it or not, self drafting is employed in the form if aerospikes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag-reducing_aerospike
Also, drafting and self collision is a major concern during first stage separation. {{w|172.68.44.180|01:27, 26 May 2025}}

I think the key inefficiency here is that the lead rocket doesn't have a slipstream per se as it's blasting hot gas out behind it. So whereas on a highway the air behind a truck is moving slower compared to the air around the truck (relative to velocity of following vehicle), with a rocket the gas behind the rocket is being propelled backwards by the combustion inside the rocket. So while you don't have as much atmospheric resistance (5% gain), you are competing with exhaust fumes resistance (99% loss). The stuff about it being dangerous or whatever is interesting but beside the point imho. Randall doesn't care about the fact that it's impractical, this is the guy who once proposed a jet pack using machine guns, after all. I would recommend focusing the explanation on the drag forces involved. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.214.66|172.70.214.66]] 22:17, 26 May 2025 (UTC)
: Yes and no. To my mind, the joke is that ''normally'' it's unadvised because of the danger of collision (and sometimes counter-productive aerodynamic effects), but in this case it's because the stream of hot gas means (a) it's not going to work, and (b) it will likely destroy your rocket.[[Special:Contributions/172.68.229.40|172.68.229.40]] 09:43, 27 May 2025 (UTC)

3079: Air Fact

2025-04-22T08:56:19Z

172.71.178.157: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 3079
| date = April 21, 2025
| title = Air Fact
| image = air_fact_2x.png
| imagesize = 250x394px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = 'Wow, that must be why you swallow so many of them per year!' 'No, that's spiders. You swallow WAY more ants.'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a MICROSCOPIC ANT. Don't remove this notice too soon.}}
Microbiologist [[Megan]] tells [[Cueball]] that every cubic meter of air contains thousands of microscopic ants. This is a tall tale. Adult workers in some species of the genus {{w|Carebara|Carebara}}, the [https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/341603-smallest-ant-species smallest known ants], can be 0.8 millimeters long, just below the 1.0 mm upper bound of [https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/497-the-microscopic-scale what some consider "microscopic"]. It is therefore possible for an air sample to contain microscopic ants. However, given the subterranean, cryptic habitats typical of ''Carebara'' species, it is highly unlikely that these ants would appear in ''any'', never mind ''every'', air sample. Initially incredulous, Cueball accepts Megan's fib as a fact, because he doesn't have any easy way to assess what samples of air contain.

Air contains many microscopic particles, including minerals, plastics, combustion products, salt, water, pollen, spores, bacteria, fungi, and viruses. There are indeed {{w|aeroplankton|microorganisms floating in the air}}, and getting air samples that will allow these microorganisms to be identified and quantified is indeed hard. [https://www.btpm.org/health-wellness/2018-05-23/allergy-season-is-back-but-how-do-we-know-whats-in-the-air Methods, with specialized collecting devices, exist] that take (one hopes) known volumes of air and deposit the particles contained in that air onto sticky surfaces which are then viewed under the microscope, or onto culture media which are then incubated. The methods are time-consuming and dependent on specialized knowledge (e.g., the identification of pollen grains or spores by surface features under the microscope), and are subject to numerous biases. For example, "sticky surface" methods will likely miss bacteria, and fail to identify 'nondescript' objects, whereas culture-based methods will not detect anything that will not grow on the selected medium. The joke is that microbiologists are tempted to make up stories about what's in the air, because most people lack the data or skills to fact-check the stories.

Micro particle concentration in air varies considerably; 100 to 100,000 bacteria per cubic meter, and 100 to 1000 fungal spores per cubic meter are typical. In the comic, Megan could have sampled a 100 cubic centimeter (0.1 liter) space of air and found 1 microbe (e.g., a bacterium, a mold spore, a protozoan cyst) in it. If she assumed that this was a representative sample, Megan could extrapolate from this datum to say that there are 10,000 microbes (rather than ants) for every 1 cubic meter (1,000,000 cubic centimeters or 1000 liters). [[Randall]] has made numerous [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Extrapolation comics about dubious extrapolations], but in this case, Megan's number is [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515362/ within the range of microbial counts] that have been made in various indoor and outdoor environments.

The title text refers to the commonly believed myth that [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-66319172 people swallow 8 spiders a year in their sleep]. Though oft quoted, [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-people-swallow-8-spiders-a-year-while-they-sleep1/ it has no basis in fact], and was actually [https://www.snopes.com/lisa-birgit-holst/ made up] to see if people would repeat the rumor without checking the original source. Bona fide ants, microscopic or otherwise, would be no more likely to enter a human's mouth than spiders, whereas Megan's microscopic ants would mostly wind up in the lungs, not the stomach, where (one hopes) the immune system would take care of them.

==Transcript==
:[Megan, with her palm out, is talking to Cueball.]
:Megan: Did you know that every cubic meter of air contains over 10,000 microscopic ants?
:Cueball: Wow, really?
:Cueball: I had no idea.

:[Caption below the panel:]
:The fact that taking air samples is hard presents microbiologists with a constant temptation.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Biology]]
[[Category:Ants]]
[[Category:Spiders]]

3079: Air Fact

2025-04-22T08:55:21Z

172.71.178.157: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 3079
| date = April 21, 2025
| title = Air Fact
| image = air_fact_2x.png
| imagesize = 250x394px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = 'Wow, that must be why you swallow so many of them per year!' 'No, that's spiders. You swallow WAY more ants.'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a MICROSCOPIC ANT. Don't remove this notice too soon.}}
Microbiologist [[Megan]] tells [[Cueball]] that every cubic meter of air contains thousands of microscopic ants. This is a tall tale. Adult workers in some species of the genus {{w|Carebara|Carebara}}, the [https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/341603-smallest-ant-species smallest known ants], can be 0.8 millimeters long, just below the 1.0 mm upper bound of [https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/497-the-microscopic-scale what some consider "microscopic"]. It is therefore possible for an air sample to contain microscopic ants. However, given the subterranean, cryptic habitats typical of ''Carebara'' species, it is highly unlikely that these ants would appear in ''any'', never mind ''every'', air sample. Initially incredulous, Cueball accepts Megan's fib as a fact, because he doesn't have any easy way to assess what samples of air contain.

Air contains many microscopic particles, including minerals, plastics, combustion products, salt, water, pollen, spores, bacteria, fungi, and viruses. There are indeed {{w|aeroplankton|microorganisms floating in the air}}, and getting air samples that will allow these microorganisms to be identified and quantified is indeed hard. [https://www.btpm.org/health-wellness/2018-05-23/allergy-season-is-back-but-how-do-we-know-whats-in-the-air Methods, with specialized collecting devices, exist] that take (one hopes) known volumes of air and deposit the particles contained in that air onto sticky surfaces which are then viewed under the microscope, or onto culture media which are then incubated. The methods are time-consuming and dependent on specialized knowledge (e.g., the identification of pollen grains or spores by surface features under the microscope), and are subject to numerous biases. For example, "sticky surface" methods will likely miss bacteria, and fail to identify 'nondescript' objects, whereas culture-based methods will not detect anything that will not grow on the selected medium. The joke is that microbiologists are tempted to make up stories about what's in the air, because most people lack the data or skills to fact-check the stories.

Micro particle concentration in air varies considerably; 100 to 100,000 bacteria per cubic meter, and 100 to 1000 fungal spores per cubic meter are typical. In the comic, Megan could have sampled a 100 cubic centimeter (0.1 liter) space of air and found 1 microbe (e.g., a bacterium, a mold spore, a protozoan cyst) in it. If she assumed that this was a representative sample, Megan could extrapolate from this datum to say that there are 10,000 microbes (rather than ants) for every 1 cubic meter (1,000,000 cubic centimeters or 1000 liters). [[Randall]] has made numerous [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Extrapolation comics about dubious extrapolations], but in this case, Megan's number is [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4515362/ within the range of microbial counts] that have been made in various indoor and outdoor environments.

The title text refers to the commonly believed myth that [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-66319172 people swallow 8 spiders a year in their sleep]. Though oft quoted, [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-people-swallow-8-spiders-a-year-while-they-sleep1/ it has no basis in fact], and was actually [https://www.snopes.com/lisa-birgit-holst/ made up] to see if people would repeat the rumor without checking the original source. Bona fide ants, microscopic or otherwise, would be no more likely to enter a human's mouth than spiders, whereas Megan's "ants" (microbes) would wind up in the lungs, not the stomach, where (one hopes) the immune system would take care of them.

==Transcript==
:[Megan, with her palm out, is talking to Cueball.]
:Megan: Did you know that every cubic meter of air contains over 10,000 microscopic ants?
:Cueball: Wow, really?
:Cueball: I had no idea.

:[Caption below the panel:]
:The fact that taking air samples is hard presents microbiologists with a constant temptation.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Biology]]
[[Category:Ants]]
[[Category:Spiders]]

Talk:3079: Air Fact

2025-04-22T08:53:05Z

172.71.178.157:

average person eats 3 spiders a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted” [[Special:Contributions/172.68.7.184|172.68.7.184]] 15:19, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
:🔥🔥🔥🔥 [[User:Broseph|Broseph]] ([[User talk:Broseph|talk]]) 15:26, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
:{{citation_needed}}[[Special:Contributions/172.68.174.138|172.68.174.138]] 15:52, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
:This is one of those factoids like "Over 5% of the population has an above average number of fingers."[[Special:Contributions/172.68.245.136|172.68.245.136]] 16:16, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
::That factoid sounds true. Assuming there are more people who have fewer than ten fingers than those who have extra fingers (some people have whole hands missing, but extra digits to my knowledge normally only come in ones and twos), then the average is slightly less than ten, and the ten-fingered vast majority of people have an above-average number of fingers, certainly more than 5% of the population. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.164|141.101.98.164]] 19:10, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
:::I have more than the average number of legs (for a human), as I famously insisted once in my mathematics class. And still do. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.94|162.158.74.94]] 22:34, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
:I don't really get the way the title text is written. Why is "so many ants" assumed to be a small number, like the number of spiders? [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 17:47, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
::If the factoid in the comic were true, the fact that the average person has a tidal volume of about half a litre, and takes between 12-20 breaths per minute means that they breathe in and out about 10 cubic metres per day. That’s over 100,000 ants. The fact that you are talking about “per year” implies that the rate is a reasonable number per year, not over 36 million. It’s like comparing the speed of continents to the speed of a car. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.0.190|172.68.0.190]] 20:03, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
::Because that's part of the joke. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.241.123|172.71.241.123]] 08:49, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

The term "microscopic ants" supposedly refers to viruses and other microorganisms, not actual tiny ants. The actual concentration of airborne germs is pretty much in that ballpark, so it's not about sampling bias, it's about framing. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.103.36|162.158.103.36]] 17:00, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
:There isn't even such a thing as a "microscopic ant". The smallest ant species is 0.8mm long. That's tiny, but easily visible without aid. And if there were 10,000 of them in a cubic meter of air, you'd notice. It would be like walking through a thick swarm of gnats. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 17:47, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
Speaking for myself, I don't understand what would be difficult about taking air samples. Currently the article claims it's sampling bias, but why should that be anymore difficult with air than with e.g. soil?[[Special:Contributions/172.69.67.22|172.69.67.22]] 18:14, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
: Tried to address this ... [[Special:Contributions/172.71.146.123|172.71.146.123]] 19:23, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
: It's difficult to take an exact volume of air and analyze it's content. The less you care about how close to exact volume you took, the easier it is. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 05:07, 22 April 2025 (UTC)
:There's nothing difficult about taking air samples - I do it myself about every 3-5 seconds. More, when exercising. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.157|172.71.178.157]] 08:53, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Microscopic wasps, on the other hand: surprisingly commonplace. Many species are too small to be seen with the naked eye, and if Megan took her samples near hedgerows in summer, there could have been some microscopic wasps in every sample cubic metre. Probably a few orders of magnitude less than 10,000. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.219|141.101.98.219]] 19:25, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
:"Many species are too small to be seen with the naked eye" - Wikipedia claims that [[wikipedia:Fairyfly|fairy wasps]] are the smallest flying insect at 0.15mm, which is large enough to see if you get close enough. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.26.39|172.68.26.39]] 22:55, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

I don't see any evidence Megan is referring to microbes as microscopic ants. As a microbiologist, if she meant a bacterium, etc. it seems like she would have just said so, especially since the ants claim is made again in the title text. She's preying on Cueball's gullibility and unfamiliarity with the subject for her own amusement, to convince him the air is overrun with literal microscopic ants which don't exist and wouldn't be in the air if they did. Likewise the paragraph about extrapolation errors seems unnecessary as well. She's not making a sampling error - she's just making the whole thing up. Just my take. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.17.211|172.69.17.211]] 22:06, 21 April 2025 (UTC)Pat

This comic is dumb and makes no sense. {{unsigned ip|172.70.230.37|01:34, 22 April 2025}}
:Did you write 'comic' when you meant 'comment'?[[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.157|172.71.178.157]] 08:53, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Talk:what if? articles

2025-03-29T17:00:38Z

172.71.178.157: /* Striking a match on Titan - additional */

{{TOC}}Note: I moved over the discussion page from my [[User talk:FaviFake|talk page]], which is where the merger of the two what if? indexes was initially coordinated and organized. Most of the topics below were originally created on [[User talk:FaviFake]]. Thanks! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 09:21, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

----
==Introduction to coordinate the merger==
Hey! This is intended to be a space to coordinate the merging of the two tables. I see that [[User:1234231587678]] and [[User:Apollo11]] have been helping us create the two tables! I'm messaging you to coordinate a little bit. Since we're the 3 most active editors, let's coordinate!

My idea for the table was the following: there would be one single sortable table instead of two, and the information density would be very high. There were the columns I had in mind:

* N

* Date (the date YYYY-MM-DD, and then includes week after prev. article)

* Thumbnail

* Title (hyperlinked)

* Reader's question

* Randall's answer

* Book - in something like this format: '''WI?2, n. 40''' (BOOK1,2,3, nr. ARTICLE NUMBER), which is easily sortable by book - for unnumbered, use the assumed number with an asterisk like this: 69* - this column would also be color coded, by book - this would also contain the title in the book if different - empty when not in any book

* YT (the date YYYY-MM-DD, and then a hyperlinked link with the YT title. if the title is the same, don't repeat it) empty when not on YT

----

I realise my mistake was listing the things we had to do together with the huge task, merging the tables! So what happened is you both contributed, but each of you contribued to a different table. In an attempt to solve this, i have created my own table, which is ready to receive the two additional columns!

'''I believe this third table (available at [[User:FaviFake]]) is the best option for us to work on the index together, so that once it has the 2 additional columns and contains all the articles, we can put it on the blog page and delete the [[What If? chapters]] table. What do you think?'''

I have also made other adjustments:

*Made the Date column nowrap, so the date doesn't wrap around, and made the first column (N) centered and '''bold'''

*Turned each Reader's question cell italic, and added quotation marks to the start and end of each cell. Ex: HOW OLD? becomes ''"HOW OLD?"''

* In the Randall's answer column, split the rows into one per question. For example, if there are 5 bullet points in 1 cell, split the "Reader's question" and the "Randall's answer" columns into 5 rows for that particular Article so that each question has its own mini-row.

*Added file link to all rows so you can just click to go straight to the upload file page.

*<s>'''Downgrade''': titles aren't hyperlinked</s> - {{Done}} Update: I manually hyperlinked all of them!
'''
*'''Downgrade''': the last ~100 articles are missing. I'll try to add them the day after tomorrow! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 17:06, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

:Regarding the additional 2 columns: I've been thinking a lot about how we should do them. I see 4 options:

:*'''Option 1: Separate Tables''' - separate tables for the YouTube video information and book information, and link articles across tables using the "N" column (or another unique identifier like the title). Advantages: Keeps sorting straightforward in each table. Maintains the integrity of your original table while allowing for sorting by videos and books in their respective tables. Flexible for adding future metadata. Disadvantages: Requires users to cross-reference between tables, which can be inconvenient.

:*'''Option 2: Expand Rows with Sub-Rows''' - How it works: For each article, add one or two additional sub-rows (One for YouTube video information (e.g., YT video number, link, title, thumbnail), and one for book information (e.g., book number, article number, title, color-coded cell). Advantages: Keeps all information together, visually grouped by article. Makes it easy to see all data without leaving the main table. Disadvantages: Sub-rows might disrupt column sorting. Could make the table visually cluttered for articles with both video and book.

:*'''Option 3: Additional Columns''' - new columns for: (FIRST COLUMN) YouTube video number, link, title, and thumbnail, and, (SECOND COLUMN) Book name, article number, title, and color-coding. Advantages: Sorting by videos or books is easy. Keeps all information in a single row. Disadvantages: The table becomes much wider, which can reduce readability on smaller screens. Many empty cells for articles without video or book.

:I've also thought about using a template. What do you think of the idea of a creating a template like these:

{{Done}} UPDATE: i did create the templates! See the top of [[User:FaviFake]]! <s>

<nowiki>{{yt|YTNUMBER (1, 2, 3, etc)|YTLINK|VIDEOTITLE (optional)}}</nowiki>

:It would be used in the column that we still need to create. It would also colour the cell in '''red'''. I was also thinking of doing a similar thing for the What If? books:

<nowiki>{{bk|WHICH-BOOK|CHAPTER-NUMBER|CHAPTER-TITLE (if different)}}</nowiki>

:For example, it would look like this (This one would also colour the cell based on the book, e.g., green for WI?1, yellow for WI?2, blue for WI10th ed.):

<nowiki>{{book|2|69|Jellyfish}}</nowiki>

What If? 2, chapter '''69: Jellyfish'''

:Would someone be able to create something like this? I know nothing about templates, and i doubt I'll be able to ask chatgpt to do everything for me correctly. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 10:28, 18 January 2025 (UTC)<s>
</s>
==1234231587678==
::I saw your message, and this would be a good idea to coordinate. Maybe also add the missing "Peptides" that was accidentally released on the blog, as index 153 (i think) or have two articles with the same index number, just putting "current" for the current article. --[[User:1234231587678|1234231587678]] ([[User talk:1234231587678|talk]]) 20:47, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

::Also I think the "0w later" or "1w later" on the comics looks a bit odd, maybe remove them entirely? The dates are already present. --[[User:1234231587678|1234231587678]] ([[User talk:1234231587678|talk]]) 20:49, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

:::Thanks for replying! I LOVE the idea of inserting the Peptides article directly in the index. It would technically make it a little less official, but I'm all for it. It looks and feels like a proper article.

:::I also fully agree with you regarding the '''1w later''' line! I do like the idea of seeing the frequency right from the index, but it's too much right now. My idea is to remove the "1w later" part, but leave it in for the articles that aren't released a week after the previous one. For example, this would keep the '''2w later''' and '''0w later''' lines for the articles that have them, but declutter the date cells of the "normal" ones. What do you think?

:::I can't do it right now, but it should be easy. We can also delay it until all articles are on the table, so we only have to do it once. Btw, I hope to get all the articles on the table by the day after tomorrow or the day after that. Meanwhile, you or other editors can add the 2 columns (Book and YT)! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 22:14, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

I currently don't have the books, so can't help with that, but I've added a few YT videos. Also the book template seems to be buggy (and/or a WIP), so I removed it from the 1st article. ALSO, the YT template display {5}th instead of 5th; weird. --[[User:1234231587678|1234231587678]] ([[User talk:1234231587678|talk]]) 15:13, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

:Thank you so much! I fixed the YT template, let me know if there are any other issues. Also, you '''can''' help with books, even if you don't have them! All you need to do is look at the page [[What If? chapters]], which catalogues every chapter of every book. The <s>[[Template:book]]</s> i was trying to create is broken because I gave up trying to make it work (1h and 20min of my life wasted). Anyways, we now have 4 different templates, one for each book (the fourth is a placeholder!): [[Template:book1]], [[Template:book2]], [[Template:book3]], [[Template:book4]]. There are instructions on hot to use them on their page. Please continue adding the videos and the books if you can! This is exactly what we need! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 15:18, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

==Apollo11==
This a big page so I’m not sure I’m in the right spot (also typing one handed so sorry for mistakes). I like the table on you page, however I did notice it’s missing which book it’s in and the YouTube channel. I love how the one I edited was formatted, I think if you added that table to your existing table it’d be perfect. I would also add a page number for the books. [[User:Apollo11|Apollo11]] ([[User talk:Apollo11|talk]]) 16:34, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Ok just saw the three options. I’d go with either 1 or 3. 1 would look the best and probably be easiest to find what you’re looking for as long as your have links to the other tables very clear. What I would do is have a table with title, and where to find the article (blog, book 1, book 2, YouTube). Then have a 4 tables, one for each, where you can go more in depth about each article, date, explanation, jokes, things like that. Option 3 would be the simplest, and if that’s what you wanna do, I’d have the simplest things on the left and the more complicated things on the right. So the date and title would be in the left and the e explanation would be far to the right. You’ve probably been thinking about this a lot longer than me so I’m probably missing something, so please tell me if I’m wrong abo it anything. Also if my comment is in the wrong spot feel free to move me to the right conversation. I’d love to help in anyway!! Just give me directions and I’ll do by best!! [[User:Apollo11|Apollo11]] ([[User talk:Apollo11|talk]]) 16:58, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

: Thanks so much for your interest! I thought about it a lot today, and i landed on 1, huge, information-laden table. I think having 3 or 4 tables would be too confusing and too hard to navigate. Plus, i think i found a good way to avoid making the table too wide. I added a few articles to showcase it. I don't have a lot of time to do all of them. Regarding the page number, I used the chapter number since it's easier for people who don't own the books.

: > I’d love to help in anyway!! Just give me directions and I’ll do by best!!
: Love it! You can do everything that's listed at the top of [[User:FaviFake]], but the first one might be more annoying to do on a phone (I'm not sure where you're editing from, actually). If you don't understand something on that page, please do let me know. I promise i'll answer quicker next time. ;) --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 20:03, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

:: Looks great!! I’ll get on it sometime early next week!! (Ftr I’m usually on a phone but sometimes I’ll go over to a computer for bigger projects, like added links and full researched paragraphs) [[User:Apollo11|Apollo11]] ([[User talk:Apollo11|talk]]) 20:56, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

::: Amazing! I hope I'll have added all the missing articles by the day after tomorrow. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 21:30, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

==Adding the book-exclusive articles==
I noticed that there’s not a column for if the article is in the blog. I also don't think some of the ones in the book that aren’t on the blog are in there. Please correct me if I’m wrong. [[User:Apollo11|Apollo11]] ([[User talk:Apollo11|talk]]) 18:17, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

:Yeah, I’ve noticed that some of the What If? Chapters aren’t in the table. I think that we should add them in too '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 18:42, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

::Thank you all for pointing it out! And again sorry it took me so long, I'm not good at prioritising. (but at least today i did something! I fixed both the YouTube template, there are new instructions on [[User:FaviFake]], and the book templates when used in merged cells. Anyways!)
::I had forgotten the other table also contained the book-exclusive questions! Of course we should add them! We need to think about this before doing anything though. I have so many questions!

*In what order do we put them? Unfortunately, the chapter of the book are mixed between non-excusive and exclusive.
*Do we need all the columns?
N Date Thumbnail Title Reader's question Randall's answer Books YouTube
**What happens to the unnecessary columns? We could merge them, but I'm not sure whether the sorting will work if we merge them.
*Should we change the columns, so that the '''blog number''' column is more similar to the '''Book''' and '''YouTube''' columns? Or are blog articles more important because they fill all the cells, while book-exclusives don't have all the same info?
*Is there ANY way you can think of to make the insertion of these articles into the existing index seamless? I'm usually on the side of one big index instead of many little indexes, but I'm having a hard time figuring this out. One of the main reasons I wanted to do this project was so that people wouldn't need to move between 2 different tables to see all articles.

::One way could be to just add all book-exclusive articles, each in their own row, in a big dump on the release date of the book. Even tho it would technically be in chronological order, i don't really like the idea. Please send all your thought! There must me something I'm not thinking of, or something I've been thinking wrong about! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 18:10, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

----

::* What order do we put them in
:: I would do it in the same order as the other table, blog articles first in chronological, what if chapters in chapter order. I believe the YouTube channel is all old questions, but if he posts a new one, then put that below the books.
::* change blog columns
::I think you should move the blog date and number to after randalls answer, similar to the books, and for the date for book exclusives maybe jus the book release date? Or NA.
::* unessery colums
:: Example?
::* Seamless integration
::Just stick them on the bottom, the exact same way you’d put another blog article on the bottom.
::I think that covers it all? [[User:Apollo11|Apollo11]] ([[User talk:Apollo11|talk]]) 19:15, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

:::Sticking the chapters at the end was the same idea I had, and I think that we can just put (What If? Exclusive) inside the date part of the table. '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 19:22, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

::::Thanks for replying so quickly! I don't have time right now to read everything but I can already tell that this is much easier than I thought it would be. I'll answer tomorrow. Before i start overthinking everything: What would you put inside the columns thumbnail, Question, and Answer? Just empty? I'm trying to think of something useful.
::::Also, what do you think of merging the N (blog) column and the Date columns, just like we do with the YouTube column? Would there be any downsides?
:::: I hope I'm not preventing it edits by not adding the articles quickly, in the meantime you can help by adding YT videos, now that the template works! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 21:31, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

::::: I think that the YT videos are all added? At least the blog ones and not the What If? exclusive ones. Or maybe Restricted Mode on my home wifi is blocking some. But I think that it’s all done? Tried my best anyways '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 03:52, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

::::::This is great news, thanks! I didn't know there were YouTube videos on book-exclusive articles! I'll get started, this is my plan:
::::::*The book articles are positioned like the old [[What If? chapters]] table.
::::::*New column setup:
Thumbnail Title Reader's question Randall's answer '''Blog (this contains both N and Date)''' Books YouTube
::::::*The sometimes-unnecessary columns are left empty.
::::::*The '''Blog''' column is more similar to the '''Book''' and '''YouTube''' columns: it has a template and colors the cell light blue.

::::::I feel great about this! We're getting near the finish line. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 15:36, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

:::::::I think that I added all the What If? And What If? 2 chapters to the table for the ones that were copied from the blog '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 23:48, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

::::::::Love it! I hope i'll be able to add some of the missing articles today, but i might not be able to do them all (or any at all). --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 18:01, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

::::::::{{Done}} I did it! You can now add the missing YT videos :) {{unsigned|FaviFake|20:49, 24 January 2025 (UTC)}}

:::::::::Doing it now! '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 21:24, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::based on the 20 videos that I can see on the YT channel, ALL YT VIDEOS HAVE BEEN ADDED! '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 21:39, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::::We actually did it! Now all that's left are the explanations, which i'm sure people will prefer doing over merging 2 wikipedia tables. There's just one small problem: I searched for "Featured in What If?," and instead of 69 results, i got 67. This means two of the articles that are both in the book and in the blog haven't been added. Do you think you could figure out which ones? I also checked the other book and the YouTube videos, and they're all there, it's just the first book. Again, thank you so much for all your work, it would've likely taken weeks to get to this point without your efforts! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 11:21, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

ok, i’ll poke around and see if i can find them. also, I GOT WHAT IF? 10TH ANNIVERSARY! i can add the bonus chapter that is at the end-it’s basically “what if we tried more power” when blasting away at the moon with lasers. '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 21:22, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

:Congrats on the book! I didn't buy it because i have the original, it's great that someone here owns it. Can you describe in a little more detail the last chapter? I don't understand a few things: does the second YouTube video say exactly the same thing as the blog article? Why are there two videos about 1 article? Or is the second YT video only about the Bonus Chapter in the book, which goes even further than the blog article? Is that bonus chapter not in any other book or blog? Thanks! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 11:13, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
:Also, is the chapter only called Bonus Chapter, or does it also have other names? --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 18:15, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

==Sorting "Chapter xx.."==
Hi... An alternative to the way you are lead-zeroing the text cell's numeric suffix, for sorting purposes, which is what I think {{diff|363528|this is all about}}, would be to do so something like:
... || data-sort-value={{{1}}} | Chapter {{{1}}} || ...
Should be able to deal with any numeric value, while still rendering it simply as "Chapelter 1"/"Chapter 10"/"Chapter 100"/ etc, but adding ''data-sort-type="number"'' to the header cell might even be able to sort not-quite-numbers, should a future book ever do chapters like "... 7, 7a, 9, 10, 11, 12, 12b, 14, ...".
 Perhaps even ''data-sort-value=<booknumber>.<chapternumber>'' would be useful. Though you'd have to use the sufficient-leading-zeroes method, again, and could start at 1.0000001 ''just'' in case there's ever a million (but not more than 10mil-1) chapters in a future bookbut would probably be useful to sort all book-contained items, across all books but not interleaved.
 I'll let you consider if/what you find it more useful. And perhaps check if I've given you the right table markup options by going and checking the Help:Sorting Tables/whatever pages. ;) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.107|141.101.99.107]] 00:01, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

:I agree that the current method isn't great, and I'm very glad to see there's another, better way. Unfortunately, I don't really understand most of what you said. BUT! You seem very experienced and I don't have a lot of time, so it would be perfect if you could edit directly the templates/table/cells/whatever needs to be changed. The best option is to remove the leading zeroes and still make the sorting work, for the blog, books, and YT templates. If you (or someone else) could do that, it'd be wonderful. Please feel free to try it yourself if you want! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 11:13, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

== weird table bugs ==

hey favifake, i found two bugs that i don’t really know how to fix in the table: one of them is in regard to the what if 2 template, whenever it has a “S2” or a “W1” “chapter” it gives an error. the second bug can be found on the laser pointer row-i added the what if? 10th anniversary template, but the yt template doesn’t “fit” (for lack of a better word) with the table. could you dig into these and try to figure out what has gone wrong? thanks! '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 00:55, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

:Hey 42! I saw what you were trying to do, i think i fixed it now? I removed the '''book3''' template from the original '''Laser Pointer''' row because all original articles are technically in the 10th Ann. book. (i added "exclusively on" to the '''book3''' template to make it clearer). Regarding the other S1 bug, i don't know why but it seems fixed now?? I saw the error just a few hours ago and now it works. I have no idea what happened. Let me know if it reappears or something. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 11:13, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

----

:Without going in and trying it myself, is this because of the "trying to zero-pad a number" thing (as given a possible alternative, above), because it can't test if <usually number, in this case text> is greater/less than <static number>?
:Quick-fix (not doing anything else new) would need the test enclosed with an isthisanumber? test (if so, do zero-padding testing, etc; if not, maybe don't try).
:Exactly how S2/W1 sorts (or doesn't) using the sorting data (bare number only!) and/or the forced data type as number (to do its best for what numeric data it is presented, despite occasional non-numeric interloping characters), would need testing.
:Or I misunderstand. But, ''if'' I don't, maybe this is useful additional pointer to a solution/acceptance of the problem. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.123|172.71.178.123]] 01:21, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

::IP user, I answered above. :) --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 11:13, 26 January 2025 (UTC)
== Interesting streamlined 'table furniture', but... ==

...I'm wondering about the current (slight) usage differences between:
style="text-align:center" | {{{1}}}
and:
style="white-space:nowrap" |
Do you need to add the Param1 to the nowrap/remove if from the text-alignment?

And what if someone wanted no-wrap+centre at the same time? There maybe ''are'' ways to combine <code><nowiki>{{ac|<foo>}}</nowiki></code> and <code><nowiki>{{nw}}</nowiki></code>, but it seems non-trivial to to do. (Unless you make a <code><nowiki>{{nwac}}</nowiki></code>, but then where do you end?) I'm wondering if you should try it without the |-character.

Let's see if that ''could'' work:
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto"
|+ Test
|-
! Foo !! Bar !! Baz
|-
| Normal text of a normal style || style="text-align:center" style="white-space:nowrap" | This is as if using variations <code><nowiki>{{ac|<foo>}}</nowiki></code> and <code><nowiki>{{nw}}</nowiki></code> as rendered without the pipe-character or inconsistent parameter, which is tricky to demonstrate with the actual templates.|| More normal text of a normal style
|-
| Normal text of a normal style || style="text-align:center" | style="white-space:nowrap" | This is how <code><nowiki>{{ac|{{nw}} <foo>}}</nowiki></code> might look || More normal text of a normal style
|-
| Normal text of a normal style || {{ac|{{nw}} This is how <code><nowiki>{{ac|{{nw}} <foo>}}</nowiki></code> ''does'' look, using the current state of the templates.
----
<s>''NB. Why is it in bold? Is that a normal feature of a style of text-align:center?''</s>}}
| More normal text of a normal style
|-
| Normal text of a normal style || style="white-space:nowrap" | style="text-align:center" | This is how <code><nowiki>{{nw}} {{ac|<foo>}}</nowiki></code> might look || More normal text of a normal style
|-
| Normal text of a normal style || {{nw}} {{ac|This is how <code><nowiki>{{nw}} {{ac|<foo>}}</nowiki></code> ''does'' look, using the current state of the templates.}}
----
<s>''Also goes bold, I notice!''</s>
| More normal text of a normal style
|}

So, yes, it looks like it might be better to just remove the pipe (or pipe-and-param) and rely on the table-writer to just put in the relevent bare style-giving {{}} (or {{}}s) before the pipe. (I must look into why there's unexpected boldness. I don't know if that comes from the way you templated it or as an associated function of the aligh-center style. But it doesn't appear when I do it 'raw'.) Anyway, food for thought, over to you. It looks like I ''could'' edit your templates, but that might be rude, and would of course instantly break whatever it is you're currently using them (singly) for. That's the ''What If?'' table, I suppose? Anyway, you can both 'fix' how they work and adjust how they are invoked, rather than leaving me to guess about the latter. ;) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.49|162.158.74.49]] 19:04, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
:PS: Yes, I have just checked, and, yes you've added (apparently ''after'' I saw and copied the original {{template|ac}} for my own testing and emulating purposes!) the bolding to the aligh-centering template. That part of the mystery is solved! :P [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.49|162.158.74.49]] 19:10, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
:PPS: I know what happened. I copied the (slightly '''formatted''') 'plaintext' as it appeared in the template. If I'd have edited it and copied the wikisource then I'd have grabbed the <nowiki>'''formatted''</nowiki> as you already had it by the time I passed by. Don't mind me, it was just something that made me wonder. Probably moreso than the thing that I was ''actually'' trying to prod and poke and solve! IOW: Ignore me. On this bit, at least! [[Special:Contributions/172.68.205.151|172.68.205.151]] 19:32, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

::I love how interested you are about this! Honestly i'm not really sure what exactly it is you're asking, but you seem very smart so do whatever you want! My only request is that the {{:ac}} thing keeps working as expected, so i don't have to change the table again. I had forgotten about the {{:nw}} thing, you can delete it or change it or do anything else, I don't use it anymore. Feel free to add to the documentation that these are just for 1 table and might break everything if used anywhere else. Or, if they already work everywhere, great! I remember I created them expecting the entire page to be destroyed when used, and being pleasantly surprised when they worked. So yeah go wild! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 21:19, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
:::I'm not going to make any change without taking time to check your tables and making sure the appropriate change doesn't inflict damage on your attempts to curate the tables you're probably using it for.
:::But, in short, I understand that you're streamlining the (often longwinded) style="" statements, an admirble task. In the structure of "| cell || another cell || etc", you're doing something to save from having to do cumbersome "| cell || style="this-style: that; that-style: that; the-other-style: the.other" | another cell || etc", all of which makes editing 'difficult'. (I tend to do such things in Notepad, or whatever separate text editor I have, which lets me add temporary whitespace and use with no-wrap on the markup while I'm working on it, rather than in this textbox editor.)
::: But the single-pipe that formats the cell isn't a ''great'' difficulty to maintain (indeed, it is useful to line up). As such I'd suggest "| cell || <nowiki>{{??}}</nowiki> | another cell || etc" would be as good. i.e. leave the pipe (intended for the table-cell) out of the template. For the no-wrap version, that's easy enough. Though I do understand that you want to put bold-format about the cell contents, so that's why you give it as a param and explicitly bold the Param1 as you pass it back out.
::: Maybe the solution to ''that'' is to also add (to the style, along with the text-align:center) the "font-weight: bold" doublet. Then "... || <format(s), as templates and/or raw> | Cell Text || ..." doesn't ''need'' to 'enclose' the Cell Text in any way.
::: But making the change from something that expects to transclude the range of the template "... || format | Cell Text || ..." to "... || format | Cell Text || ..." obviously requires that each and every table-cell item that uses "... || <nowiki>{{template|Cell Text}}</nowiki> || ..." to be converted to "... || <nowiki>{{template}}</nowiki> | Cell Text || ...", or... it'll definitely not work as it was originally set.
::: Anyway, that's just my own vision of how you can do what you seem to have wanted to, without introducing more complications. As the cell-formatting gladly accepts multiple statements of the form style="..." (it adds <code>style="..." style="..." style="..."</code> together, much as <code>style="...; ...; ..."</code> does), an editor now has complete freedom to compound the two format-templates you created. And any additional ones that might be useful. Such ones to usefully colour cell backgrounds as red/yellow/green (for use on the various Confusion Tables), something that I sometimes take a couple of goes to do... not least because I habitually spell 'color' as 'colour'..! ;)
::: ...but that's just to explain so that (should you/anybody else wish to follow my own instincts on the matter), you have some decent idea of what I'm getting at. There are probably other ways of doing it. Templates can be made to detect and extract pipes, so that "... || <nowiki>{{template1|{{templete2|Cell Text}}}}</nowiki> || ..." ''or'' "... || <nowiki>{{template2|{{templete1|Cell Text}}}}</nowiki> || ..." would equally produce "... || templateOneOrTwoFormat templateTwoOrOneFormat | Cell Text || ...", but that would take a degree of of unwieldy parameter-processing functions (that I'd have to work out, probably would involve some subst-function, but might depend upon what's available in the installed mediawiki version). I just think you could avoid all that trouble! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.118|162.158.74.118]] 22:51, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

:::Forgot to say, that for what you want to use it for, there's ''another'' way:
{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto"
|+ Example 2
|-
! Number (Centered) !! Foo !! Bar (Centered) !! Baz
|-
! 1
| Normal text of a normal style
! Some text of whatever size (centered)
| More normal text of a normal style
|-
! 2
| Normal text of a normal style
! Some text of whatever size (also centered, though not so obviously so)
| More normal text of a normal style
|}
:::... This is only possible by newlining each new cell, in the example (you can't do "! cell || cell !! cell || cell", you have to line-break it as you change from "!"-/"|"-starting cell-groups), but it isn't really so great a loss to do so.
:::The "wikitable" class gives these 'header cells' a different background too, but (if you really don't like that) it that can be adjusted in various other ways (including with scope="col", I think), or you can leave the wikitable class off (it centres and bolds, but doesn't give cell-borders) and re-add the whole-table bordering style that this now leaves out. But you really don't want me listing ''every'' idea I had, just this one was the other (template-free) option to enforcing centre-aligning bold text on ''certain'' cells. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.119|162.158.74.119]] 23:09, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

::::Huh, I was actually thinking of doing the opposite of what you're suggesting: include even more pipes inside the template so the editor is cleaner and easier to use. (UPDATE: this probably worse than the other option you gave at the end, see below). So instead of this:

|-
<nowiki>| {{ac|4}} || </nowiki>

::::You would just use this:

|-
<nowiki>{{ac|4}}</nowiki>

::::And it would contain all the pipes needed. I guess then we would have to update the documentation to point out that this template's use case is extremely narrow. Also, if you want to see how it is currently used, the table is on my user page! That's the only place where it's used

::::Since you seem very interested in templates, What do you think of the idea of a creating a template like these:

<nowiki>{{yt|YTNUMBER (1, 2, 3, etc)|YTLINK|VIDEOTITLE (optional)}}</nowiki>

::::It would be used in the column that we still need to create. It would also colour the cell in '''red'''. I was also thinking of doing a similar thing for the What If? books:

<nowiki>{{bk|WHICH-BOOK|CHAPTER-NUMBER|CHAPTER-TITLE (if different)}}</nowiki>

::::For example, it would look like this: (This one would also colour the cell based on the book, e.g., green for WI?1, yellow for WI?2, blue for WI10th ed.)

<nowiki>{{book|2|69|Jellyfish}}</nowiki>

What If? 2, chapter '''69: Jellyfish'''

::::Would you be able to create something like this? I know nothing about templates, and i doubt I'll be able to ask chatgpt to do everything for me correctly. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 07:16, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

:::::> Forgot to say, that for what you want to use it for, there's ''another'' way:
:::::Oh, i think i had forgotten to read this part!! This seems very interesting! I should try that, since it seems much simpler. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 10:10, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

:::::'''Update:''' {{Done}} I applied your suggestion, now the numbers are in their own row:
|-
!1
| The rest of the table
--[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 10:33, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

== What If Chapters ==
Hey FaviFake, there are some What If? Chapters that aren’t included in the blog. Are we going to add them to the table? '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 17:41, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

:Great timing! You sent me this message while i was in the process of replying to the question. I'm not good at prioritising, I should've definitely responded before doing other edits. Check out my <s>list of questions for y'all</s> reply above! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 18:10, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

== YouTube template ==
Hey FaviFake, on the <code><nowiki>{{yt}}</nowiki></code> template, you asked for help on fixing the code of the template. What help do you need to “improve” it? I’m willing to help now that I’m not sick, as I was last week. '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 18:35, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

:Thank you! Glad to hear you're healthy. That message was mostly a joke, but it is in fact barely held together. (Try modifying the hyperlink that's displayed when a title isn't provided, somehow what you add gets duplicated??) If you have the time and know how to make it more reliable and easily editable in the future, please do! I am honstly scared to touch it fearing it might explode.

:Buuut, to be fair there is one template that i desperately needed help with, and that is [[:Template:book]]. I wasted a ton of time to try to get it to change the cell background, and it never worked, so i decided to create [[Template:book1]], [[Template:book2]], [[Template:book3]], [[Template:book4]], and these do work beaytifully, but are harder to edit in bulk. (I still have profound hatred towards [[Template:book]]...). If you actually manage to do what i wanted (which i'm not sure is even clear after the all the mess i've made... ask me if you can't figure it out!), I would be very grateful. PS. I'm not sure if i should warn you, given my very low ability to create templates, but it's definitely not easy, imo.

:I'm not sure how skilled you are at template editing, so if you want, you can absolutely continue uploading the What If? thumbnails like you did a few days ago! I just added [[User:FaviFake|a new batch of articles]] (about 60) thanks to some annoyingly complex jailbreaking of Google's NotebookLM. The new table of course includes the quick 100px link to upload a file. Again, thanks for reaching out! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 19:04, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

::The YT link appears to be going to <nowiki>[[whatever the name of the YouTube video is called]]</nowiki> and not acting as a [youtube.com filler thingy] linking to a YouTube video. I’m going to hit the books on template writing and try to see if I can do anything about it. Cheers! '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 03:11, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

:::Oh great, that's broken too. I didn't even realise it. Thanks!--[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 04:57, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

:Partly because you've removed the bit about how to better sort the book-column elements, but are using the same trick in the youtube-column, and partly because it's easier (more on that in a moment), I've just modified the {{template|yt}} to give it the sort value (of article number) directly. Have not removed the expression test to make "6th video ..." into "06th video ...", for sorting purposes, but I feel confident that you ''can'' do that (and remove the comment about making it give "006th video ...", in future, should that become necessary) if you now so wish.

:For the books, I was thinking that if, instead of <code>="<nowiki>{{{1|0}}}</nowiki>"</code>, you could maybe use <code>="<nowiki>{{#expr:10000+{{{1|0}}}}}</nowiki>"</code> for ''What If?'' (in {{template|book1}}) and <code>="<nowiki>{{#expr:20000+{{{1|0}}}}}</nowiki>"</code> for ''What If? 2'' (in {{template|book2}}), to let it sort by book ''and then'' chapter within book...

:For ''What If? 10th Anniversary Edition'' ({{template|book3}}), I was thinking if you could make the added-to number 11000. Though anything from above 10000+<last chapter number> and below 20000-<last chapter number> would do (and 15000 would work), it leaves room to make any appearance of the 15th anniversary, 20th anniversary, 42nd anniversary, ..., 95th anniversary be able to use the mnemonic offsets of 11500+, 12000+, 14200+, ..., 19500+.. ;) Obviously, it would need revamping if there becomes a centenary edition of Book 1 (or any version of it ever gets ''so many'' "bonus chapters" that it breaks out of its own sequence into the next extant anniversary edition. But you'd need to start adding 100 newly-numbered chapters ''per year'' to do that, so probably not likely. But, right now, the sorting on the "Exclusive to ''What If? 10th Anniversary Edition''" line sorts ''before'' the "NNth chapter of ''What If?''" lines. The above should fix that...

:And the format can be used for other (future?) books and their (possible) reissues: For ''What If? '''N''''', reissued '''YY''' years after the original, that's the number "NYY00", to which you add the chapter number. Fairly futureproofed, but if Randall ''ever'' publishes anything that makes you need to make the offset "NNYYY000" (e.g. for the quarter-of-a-millenium reissue of ''What If? 15'', having a total of 512 chapters being 15250000+[1..512]) then I reckon the requisite changes will be easy enough to handle as and when, swapping in the expanded offset. And... hey... if they're still being written, ''and'' published, then I can only hope I'm still around to be able to add that edition to my bookshelf!

:You could even redo the {{template|book}} idea (parameters of ...|book=#|chapter=#|optional:edition=#?|...) to only ever need to maintain the one source with ''all'' this flexibility. You've already got experience (by the 1st/2nd/3rd/Nth code) with what's needed to translate Book Number(+Edition Number, if applicable) into unique background colour codes.

:The big problem, though, is still the non-numeric chapter 'numbers' in ''WI?2''. I have two (or three) different thoughts about that.

:*For only the numeric bits (currently, in the test for less-than-10, etc; in the above for within the <code>data-sort-value="..."</code>) you might want to switch <code><nowiki>{{{1|0}}}</nowiki></code> with <code><nowiki>{{#if:{{#ifexpr:{{{1|0}}}}}|99|{{{1|0}}}}}{{{1|0}}}</nowiki></code>... This should test the param1 value for being a valid value (or missing, when you already make it zero... though not sure for what circumstance you should consider it validly missing) and using it if it is so, or else using the value "99" (or you could have "0", or "0.5", or whatever floats your boat). Then at least you'd get ''a'' value (that doesn't cause errors), though it probably wouldn't be sorted very precisely (though appear just after/before all other chapters of the book).

:*The other idea is to use <code><nowiki>{{{effectiveChapter|{{{1|0}}}}}}</nowiki></code>, then you can append a parameter of <code>...|effectiveChapter=11.5}}</code> to a non-numeric one sitting between actual chapters 11 and 12 (I haven't checked if that's an actual example, but imagine it is...). Also, for multiple items on page-chapter, you could even have =11.51, =11.52, =11.53, etc, to retain order within the book and ''upon the page''... (You could also give effectiveChapter as "NYYCC(.optional)" format, direct, for ''all'' what if? Numbers, YYearly-editions and CChapters (with possibly sub-positions), come to that, but I don't see that as any simpler a solution as building it in.)

:*The third option would be to use (for hidden sorting-only purpose, mostly) a value of P(.optionalDecimal) either as another numeric parameter or a named one, with P as ''page number'', not chapter number. But, given how hardback vs. paperback (or just another imprint, not necessarily even a Anniversary redo, but I've got the UK edition with an additional UK foreword) ''might'' effect page numbers and/or where end-of-pages interupts any given chapter internals, it's possible that this is not consistent enough. But food for thought, maybe. Only needs to be definitively done once (or thoroughly checked and shuffled along as nevessary if redone to include other changes that require consistency).

:Any of that make sense? Hopefully I've at least given you enough examples to ponder, where not immediately obvious. I'd ''really'' rather not change all your hard work just for the sake of a minor cosmetic change with a possibly major set of retouches, which is one of the reasons why I thought I'd do just the basic Youtube 'sort assisting' bit and let those of you who have already had so much 'fun' (tweaking the table formats) decide if and how you make full use of it. Assuming it isn't (differently) broken, for whatever reason may crop up, it shouldn't be a problem if you do nothing at all more with it (either in the {{template|yt}} or {{template|book#}}s). [[Special:Contributions/172.71.241.26|172.71.241.26]] 14:38, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

*Thank you so much! Would you mind if I moved your message to [[Talk:What If? chapters]], to group everything regarding the index in one place?  Anyways:
*I did the thing on the yt and {{template|blog}} one and it works!

For the books, I was thinking that if, instead of <code>="<nowiki>{{{1|0}}}</nowiki>"</code>, you could maybe use <code>="<nowiki>{{#expr:10000+{{{1|0}}}}}</nowiki>"</code> for ''What If?'' (in {{template|book1}}) and <code>="<nowiki>{{#expr:20000+{{{1|0}}}}}</nowiki>"</code> for ''What If? 2'' (in {{template|book2}}), to let it sort by book ''and then'' chapter within book...
*Done! Thanks! For ({{template|book3}}) i used 30000 to have the chapter in chronological order.

You could even redo the {{template|book}} idea
*Sorry but I'm not touching that... ''thing'' anymore. That template traumatized me (jk! if you want to try fixing it i'd be very happy)

For only the numeric bits (currently, in the test for less-than-10, etc; in the above for within the <code>data-sort-value="..."</code>) you might want to switch <code><nowiki>{{{1|0}}}</nowiki></code> with <code><nowiki>{{#if:{{#ifexpr:{{{1|0}}}}}|99|{{{1|0}}}}}{{{1|0}}}</nowiki></code>... This should test the param1 value for being a valid value (or missing, when you already make it zero... though not sure for what circumstance you should consider it validly missing)
*I'm not sure why that's needed (and also how to actually implement it). What happens if the value is invalid? it seems to work. Or is it required for the other improvements you suggested?

The other idea is...
The third option would be...
*Yeah this seems pretty hard to solve easily (which is why i'd love it if you did it!). I guess it'll stay slightly broken until it becomes a bigger issue. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 16:54, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

::It seems like you just forgot to escape pipe characters in the [[Template:book|book template]] in the table within the switch statement, so it just interpreted the non-formatting statements to be a case grouped with the next 'actual' case [[User:Firestar233|guess who]] ([[User talk:Firestar233|if you desire conversing]] | [[Special:Contributions/Firestar233|what i have done]]) 07:23, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
::BTW I fixed the book template. It should now appear the same as the other templates, and even work with the youtube template [[User:Firestar233|guess who]] ([[User talk:Firestar233|if you desire conversing]] | [[Special:Contributions/Firestar233|what i have done]]) 09:13, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

:::OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! IT ACTUALLY WORKS! What! How! Why!
:::Thanks so much for fixing the template! I can't describe how glad I am to see it working as (and even better than) I wanted. My life is finally complete. I have switched to using your template in the index.
:::The reason there was a YT link in one of the {{template|book}} documentation examples is because I was going insane and likely pasted it there by accident. From what I can tell, you seem to have set up {{template|book}} so well that {{template|book}} accepts a YouTube link as input, while the {{template|yt}} template it's based on doesn't if used by itself (requires only the ID). I love this! Since we're gonna have many YT videos to add, it's great to have a much simpler option which doesn't require extracting the ID of the video. Is there a way you could maybe incorporate this improvement into {{template|yt}} itself? Or maybe you're 10 steps ahead of me and you've already done it (which wouldn't surprise me given the amount of wizardry you used on these bad boys!), and I just didn't notice. Please let me know! And again, thank you so much!!! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 17:56, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
:::Also, since you've already rendered 4 templates useless thanks to your improvements, why not also add {{template|yt}} to the list of pages to delete, by incorporating it into {{template|book}}? This, unlike {{template|book}}, is absolutely not needed, and I also have no idea if it's as easy as a simple copy-and-paste, or if it requires more work. If it's the latter, please don't do it if you don't want to! I'm just throwing ideas around! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 18:04, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

That IP, here. I (think) I fixed the sorting ''and'' error-fallback issues. I think (without trying to roll back to how you had it) you 'broke the sort' by putting in line-feeds (maybe double-ones), that messed up the table/cell handling. Then you broke the handling by commenting out too much (you needed to "< ! - -" and "- - >", without spaces, without crossing the quotes and |ing boundaries in data-sort-value="..." style="..." and the 'release', by pipe symbol, to cell-contents).
 Recommented for it to work normally, first without the new 'sort assistance' and then with again. Had a look at the error-catcher (went down a blind alley, at first) and made it an explicit "catch all other inputs" for the errororing display, which I formatted in a more obvious manner ''and'' forced to sort to the start. (Well, almost the start. It puts empty cells with no sorting 'ahead' of even the -999 value I made it give any error-caught cells.)
 If it were me, I'd be happy to have {{template|yt}} entirely separate from the {{template|book}} handling. It is mnemonically confusing and adds needless (and possibly error-prone) "if we have far too many params for Book template, feed it all into the Youtube template". Unless you're folding the ''whole'' Youtube template into the body of the Book one (even more work to maintain/debug), it's just adding complication for both server and editors who feel forced to use it. The beauty of the monolithic Book template is that (otherwise identical) "Book N, chapter C, optional new title T" information is trivially similar between different Ns. But it's not my project.
 I'll have a dig about in maybe how to have a table sort "valueless" cells (in reality the empty value of cell absolutely without anything in it) beyond the sort-valued ones. The 'easiest' means I could imagine is to accept <nowiki>{{book|0}}</nowiki>, needing no further params, to create a <code>data-sort-value="999999" |''<blank>''</code> cell-definition, and have every book-column cell without a book-reference explicitly use that (ditto for <nowiki>{{yt|0}}</nowiki> to have the same pre-trap to it). But seems wasteful. A template <nowiki>{{empty}}, or even something like {{e}},</nowiki> (without checking if either of those are free names) could also just give us this behaviour straight off, of course. It's potentially a lot of fuss to make consistent and flexible enough, either way.
 But what I already did probably also needs to be checked for more edge-conditions... I may still have to tweak things when I have a better chance of catching errors (very difficult, on a tablet), and quicker. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.196|172.70.162.196]] 21:32, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
:I also think that the book template shouldn't be used for the videos, on the basis that youtube is not a book.
:for the default cell, it would probably take no arguments (i.e. just <nowiki>{{yt}}</nowiki>), and it would also probably be it's own template rather than implemented on each template. However, I have done some digging, and empty cells (cells with no sort value) are given a value of "-infinity", so they sort as the absolute minimum no matter what sort method is used (which means always at the top when sorting ascending). I have been looking to find a way to make a row always sort to the bottom regardless of sort order if the column that is sorted has an empty/valueless cell at that row, but if it exists, it is not documented.
:Interestingly, it is possible to sort by many columns at once by shift-clicking the second column after sorting the first column, and the rows will be sorted within the first sorting. it might be useful for sorting by chapter within each book [[User:Firestar233|guess who]] ([[User talk:Firestar233|if you desire conversing]] | [[Special:Contributions/Firestar233|what i have done]]) 06:51, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
::Yes, a book (or youtube) template could default to whatever seems suitable as sort-value without params, but it might be more obvious if explicitly book(/video) zero. Or caught by <nowiki>{{book|nobook=yet}}</nowiki>, or whatever. I'm trying to think what looks least confusing to future editors (those expanding/editing the table, and/or template(s)), but conflicted about what to anticipate.
::I had indeed been looking to see if the -infinity thing could be overriden by a column header defined <code>blank-sort-value="999999"</code> sort of thing. If nothing else, you'd expect there to be a perceived need to sort a range of cells so that explicit negative and explicit positive contents, either by actual cell value or data-sort-value, to sit either side of blank cells... Not ''all'' the time, as sorting to show blanks ''separate'' from filled rows with actual zeroes is also useful, but it seems to useful not to have been suggested as a configurable change.
::The booknumber*A_LARGE_NUMBER offset to the chapter number is probably one of the most useful ways to sort by (primarily) book, then chapter, as it takes just one click. (I believe clicking the secondary and then clicking the primary does the same job as clicking the primary and shift-clicking the primary.) I see so little use to doing a primary sort by chapter (with or without secondary sorting by books, or any other column's detail), to interleave all chapter 1s and so on, that having a "book #" column and a "chapter(/page) #" column (two cells in sequence easily created by the book template, and could also handle the double-blank needed by book=none implementation, if we went that route) would be just complicating matters in an unnecessary manner. (As opposed to how we've complicated matters in a 'necessary' one!)
::Good catch on bringing the BOOK+CHAPTER sort value out of the #switch, BTW, as I was debating how much of the switch-statement I could treat as generic and not need repeating. (My original idea for the 10th Anniversary version of Book 1 to be effectively "Book1.1" made me still want to option of overriding the N*10000 as being 3=>11000 instead of =>30000, but that could ''still'' be implemented by a bit of "(if N=3, 1.1, else N) times 10000" pre-logic, ''or'' by handling <nowiki>{{book|1.10|...}} instead of {{book|3|...}}</nowiki>. Anyway, not important, either way.)
::...all this is why I left Favi (and you/others) get on with the original restructuring effort without jumping in (despite having two of the three books, and having seen all the youtubes). I had plenty of ideas of what to do, but did not want to restructure anything from what seemed to be a happy little project with its own momentum and targets. I finally gave in when I noticed an impasse being hit, with errors and confusion, to which I since ''hope'' I have provided a net reduction in both. Though it's only the first of these about which I'm fairly confident. ;) Anyway, perhaps I'm sliding back to my position on the sidelines, now... [[Special:Contributions/172.70.91.245|172.70.91.245]] 11:20, 30 January 2025 (UTC)
:::These comments are great and extremely detailed, thank you! Thanks to your efforts I was able to retire these templates: book1, book2, book3, book4, and yt, so now we only have the huge {{template|book}} template and {{template|blog}}. I kinda agree with IP that it might not be future-proof, but I don't really see a reason to believe we'll add 2 more parameters to the book-specific columns. And even then, it's not that hard to update the template. But please do let me know if you can think of other issues with the current implementation! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 19:50, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

== tldr ==

hey favifake! i just came back from a 5 day yosemite trip, that’s why i have been awol for that time. could you please really quick give me a tldr of what has been going on in the past couple days? i see that we finished the index, but i’m just wondering if there’s anything else. thanks! '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 02:52, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
:Welcome back! We now only use the {{template|book}} and {{template|blog}} templates, all the others have been merged into {{template|book}} by the incredible [[User:Firestar233]], the templates are much more solid, they also added all the questions and almost all the what if? 2-exclusive chapters. So now we're only missing the questions from the first book and an explanation for the third's bonus chapter (which you own!). I don't have much time, but you can look at the history of the templates and the main what if chapters page, and also this talk section. There's also a to-do list above the index! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 18:32, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
::ok, great! i'll try to work on the chapter explainations once i find the time '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 21:04, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
:::Amazing! Thanks for your help. If you're interested, I've just added a simple (yet boring) task:
:::*''"Need to add the name(s) of the readers who asked each questions. It's easy! The instructions are in the ''[[What If? chapters#Editors|Editors section]]''!"''
:::If you have time, the names are missing for some book-exclusive articles and the blog articles. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 10:59, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

== Table for smaller screens ==
Do we think we should list out who asked each question in the table? [[User:Firestar233|guess who]] ([[User talk:Firestar233|if you desire conversing]] | [[Special:Contributions/Firestar233|what i have done]]) 03:09, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

:If so (and I'm not sure it's necessary), please not as an extra column. Already it's squeezing what's there down, something chronic. At least on my current screen, right now.
:*The thumbnail column can't get smaller (unless we use smaller/downscaled thukbnails, of course, but there's a limit to that)
:*The title column (of the first non-hdader is "Relatacistic(Newline)Baseball".
:*The "Reader's(Newline)question" column goes "(quote)What would(Newline)happen if you(Newline)(...etc)".
:*The "Randall's answer" column is positively spacious (no doubt forced to be so by the "Too short!" infoboxes), letting it read "The ball would create plasma and(Newline)reach home plate by about 70(Newline)(...etc)".
:*The three columns for Blog/Book/Vid couldn't be narrower and make sense.
:If the questioner is to be asked, set it after the question (same cell, maybe horizontal rule).
:In fact, what do you think of the following layout modification?
{| class="sortable wikitable"
!Title
!Question / Answer
!Blog
!Books
!YouTube
|-
|'''{{what if|1|Relativistic Baseball}}'''
[[File:Relativistic Baseball.png|100px]]
|''"What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?"''
<div align="right">Ellen McManis</div>
----
The ball would create plasma and reach home plate by about 70 nanoseconds. The result would be some kind of nuclear explosion, destroying everything about a mile from the field. A ruling of "{{w|hit by pitch}}" could be interpreted in this situation.
|{{blog|1|2012|07|10}}
|{{book|1|2}}
|{{book|5|2024|02|06|3EI08o-IGYk|What if you threw a baseball at nearly light speed?}}
|-
|'''{{what if|2|SAT Guessing}}'''
[[File:SAT Guessing.png|100px]]
|''"What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?"''
<div align="right">Rob Balder</div>
----
No one would get a perfect score. The odds of guessing correctly on every question would be less than the odds of every ex-living president at that time and the main cast of [[:Category:Firefly|Firefly]] getting struck by lightning on the same day.
|{{blog|2|2012|07|10|7d early}}
|{{book|1|66}}
|
|}
:Saves trouble of having emphatically unsortable columns, this way, being mere continuations of the cell contents we ''do'' want to sort. Assuming we don't decide we want to sort by "Firstname(s) Lastname" (or "Lastname, Firstname(s)"), as well as by sorting by "What would..." / "What if..." / "How much..." / "Is there..."ness, etc. But that's another step with another answer to it. (e.g. a "By" column with data-sort-value="Lastname, Firstname(s)" defined but ''no visible content''... It'll be as minimally thin as "By" and the sort-glyph allows, only minimally squeezing the other columns. ...if that's more desirous than merely 'data-sort-value'ing the Question(/Name)/Answer field by name (whatever format), and finding little real reason to sort the "How"s from the "What"s from the "Is"s. But that's something that deserves more thought!)
:But what I ''do'' highly suggest (at least add the "Who" after the "Question", same cell, and looks nice with right-align; on top of that, cell-mergering like this, ''probably'' with the horizontal rule markup in the Q&A divide) looks good to me.
:"Relativistic Baseball"(noNewline!) and "(quote)What would happen if you tried to hit a   (Newline, etc...)" is how the example table pans out in Preview, which is an improvement for readability.
:I won't pre-emptimptively assume you're ok with this plan, but (if it seems the idea is liked/not disliked), when I have the time to do it I could blitz this (or any other consensus change of similar radicality, that gets proposed instead) later on (at least 12 hours from now, maybe a full day...). I'll do what I can to fill (or visibly format, if already there) such authors as I'm not left totally stumped about for whatever nazcent reason. Sound good to y'all? ;) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.190|141.101.98.190]] 05:00, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

::Thanks for your suggestions! These are my thoughts:
Do we think we should list out who asked each question in the table?
::Yes! I thought about doing this after you commented each reader after the question, but didn't have the time. The ay you went about adding them makes it very easy to create a "find-and-replace" to do it for all cells at once.This is how I'd do it:
:: <nowiki>''"Question?"''</nowiki>
:: <nowiki><div align="right">—Rob Balder</div></nowiki>

In fact, what do you think of the following layout modification?
[...] cell-mergering like this, ''probably'' with the horizontal rule markup in the Q&A divide) looks good to me.
::I don't really like it and I don't think it's needed, mainly because it only looks good on a small screen. Meanwhile, on a normal-sized desk monitor, it makes the table '''almost twice as tall''' on my end. I don't think we should optimise for smaller screens and disregard other users with a larger screen real estate. If you find any other way to improve the table on both screen sizes, please do let us know!
(e.g. a "By" column with data-sort-value="Lastname, Firstname(s)" defined but ''no visible content''... It'll be as minimally thin as "By" and the sort-glyph allows, only minimally squeezing the other columns.
::I don't really like this idea, seems confusing for the end user (why is there an empty column?), doesn't add so much value, and needs to be maintained. If someone wants to sort by reader alphabetically, they'll likely find a way to isolate the '''<code><nowiki><div align="right">—Rob Balder</div></nowiki></code>''' part.
But what I ''do'' highly suggest (at least add the "Who" after the "Question", same cell, and looks nice with right-align [...]
::Love that! See above.
::--[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 09:01, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

::I formatted them! All the ones that were added as comments in the table are now visible. I also added this to-do, mainly for blog posts:
::*Need to add the name(s) of the readers who asked each questions. It's easy! The instructions are in the ''[[What If? chapters#Editors|Editors section]]''!
::--[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 10:57, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
:::Regarding "...on a normal-sized desk monitor, it makes the table '''almost twice as tall''' on my end." my display (non-desktop) has ultra-wide aspect ratio (when landscape; I rarely use portrait for browsing because then web-pages are scaled to unreadable levels).
:::With side-by-side Q and A columns, the "Too small" warning box dictates the minimum width of the Answer column, making the Question column even more narrow (when you take the minimum width of the thumbnail out of the horizontal space, then the title and the three "occurance" columns fight for what remains) than it might otherwise need to be. (If/when we remove ''all'' these hints to edit longer answer-'summaries', the table will doubtless realign its contents to a more equitable share of width between columns.)
:::Most often, this still results in (non-short) "Answer" columns being longer than they need to be, and forcing the whole row to be vertically wasteful. An opposite case (such as replicated below) does it with the Question having to have excessive linefeeds, being less readable (needs scrolling to read it all) and leaving a vast desert of blankness in the cell to its immediate right.
:::Isolating just the Q and A columns (to remove other confounding factors, for most displays except maybe phones-in-portrait - which is already an abominable mode and I find most websites look ''far'' more unreadable in ultra-tall-portrait orientation, so I generally avoid doing that on my tablet) and manually adding the line-breaks I see, you get:
{| class="sortable wikitable"
|"When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. During this lovely dinner I was forced to liberate a small portion of wind and was relieved that I managed to do so very discretely. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced."
|This... isn’t actually a question, but thank you for sharing!
|}
:::Integrating the row into the above-suggested format of table, we get (showing just that single combined Q+A cell, minus any "by"-line), the following:
{| class="sortable wikitable"
|"When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. During this lovely dinner I was forced to liberate a small portion of wind and was relieved that I managed to do so very discretely. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced."
----
This... isn’t actually a question, but thank you for sharing!
|}
:::Yes, the non-Q&A cells (which I've left out, just there) are still comparatively empty (especially as "Relativistic Baseball" isn't forced into two lines, and even the final three columns don't need quite as many linefeeds between them ...you could probably narrow them further by forcing some linebreaks back into them, giving even more width to Q+A column), but they're actually often ''less'' empty because they aren't as artifically tall as a function of =max(height(question),height(answer)), instead being =height(wider(question+answer)). The conversion to not force a short question to inhabit a desolately empty cell as long as narrowly squashed answer, ''and'' a short answer to be as long as an even more narrowly squashed question, seems to be more wasteful of space than to give combined Q&A far more width and let it be ''exactly'' as long as it needs to be for both to fill it (being the crux of the row, the rest being 'annotations' to the paragraphed question/answer interplay).
:::Though I'm not next to my own desktop display, right now, I can tell you that the space-wasting I'm showing is notable (though not quite so egregious) there, too, and I had already thought to try out (at least for a Preview) a Q+A column.
:::I wasn't, at that time, even thinking of thumbnail+title columns merging (which would help even more), but I'm sorely tempted now. Whether or not Q+A merging is accepted by the wider set of editors. Merging title+thumbnail ''could'' trivially let the Q-column expand maybe to double its current width, depending upon the other dynamics involved in apportioning rendered width and height. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.9|172.70.90.9]] 13:00, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

:::Ok, for reference: The desktop machine has the following line-feeds for the above example, as ''currently'' shown in the Thumbnail|Title|Question|Answer|... format:
{| class="sortable wikitable"
|"When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. During this lovely dinner I was forced to liberate a small portion of wind and was relieved that I managed to do so very discretely. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced."
|This... isn’t actually a question, but thank you for sharing!(Single line!)
|}
:::Testing the above-suggested format of table, we get:
{| class="sortable wikitable"
|"When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. During this lovely dinner I was forced to liberate a small portion of wind and was relieved that I managed to do so very discretely. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced."
----
This... isn’t actually a question, but thank you for sharing!
|}
:::Again, produces shorter (and more readable?) rows. In this particularly extreme example, at least. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.49|162.158.74.49]] 14:25, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
::::Thanks for your answer, these are my thoughts:
the "Too small" warning box dictates the minimum width of the Answer column, making the Question column even more narrow [...] than it might otherwise need to be
::::*I hadn't thought of that, but still: if the issue is mainly caused by these notices, it's very easy to replace them with something else that doesn't force the column to be too wide.
I generally avoid doing that on my tablet
::::*Oh, you're still the same IP as before! Hey there! My point ''wasn't'' that your idea wouldn't benefit small-sized screens like tablets (because it does, as you proved!), but that we should mainly focus on desktop users, which is how most readers that aren't on their phones will use the index. I don't like the idea of making the experience worse for everyone except tablet users (and phone users, but i can't imagine someone browsing such a huge index on their phones, so i don't think we should consider them). I'd love it you could improve the experience for both types of devices!
"When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen
::::*I think that's a bad example because the question is 4x the normal question length and there is no answer. I don't think we'd want to optimise the index so that that specific article looks better but most other articles don't.
::::*I think the perfect example of how it will one day look is article 2, with the question being slightly shorter than the answer, and that difference being balanced by the name of the reader who asked the question:
{| class="sortable wikitable"
!class="unsortable"|Thumbnail
!Title
!Reader's question
!class="unsortable"|Randall's answer
!Blog
!Books
!YouTube
|-
|[[File:SAT Guessing.png|100px]]
|'''{{what if|2|SAT Guessing}}'''
|''"What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?"''
<div align="right">—This is a name</div>
|No one would get a perfect score. The odds of guessing correctly on every question would be less than the odds of every ex-living president at that time and the main cast of [[:Category:Firefly|Firefly]] getting struck by lightning on the same day.
|{{blog|2|2012|07|10|7d early}}
|{{book|1|66}}
|{{book|16|2024|09|24|0EytSWiKrFg|What if example?}}
|}
::::*This specific example, which is how most articles do/will look hopefully, is '''~45% shorter''' than [[#Question askers|your example]] and thus wastes much less space on my screen size.
the final three columns don't need quite as many linefeeds between them ...you could probably narrow them further by forcing some linebreaks back into them [...]
::::*If they need linebreaks, doesn't that mean that their column would be the most narrow one? I thought mediawiki balanced the table pretty well.
thumbnail+title columns merging (which would help even more), but I'm sorely tempted now
::::*But I think this idea has the same problem, looking too tall on desktops and beautiful on a tablet. I wouldn't want to ruin the UX of desktop users to favour tablet users, but i'd love a way to improve both!
::::*Also, I'd like to one day make the thumbnail bigger, because currently it's too small in my opinion. But if i increased its size right now, it would force every row to be even taller, which would waste space on desktop (and, of course, save space on small screens, or at least not make that big of a difference). --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 17:04, 2 February 2025 (UTC)
::::Is there a "mobile" version/url for this site? because there might be a way to make the table try to display a different layout if it's on the mobile url/version or if the screen is too small, but that would require putting complicated expressions in every row and in the header columns. [[User:Firestar233|guess who]] ([[User talk:Firestar233|if you desire conversing]] | [[Special:Contributions/Firestar233|what i have done]]) 20:53, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
:::::Yeah I had thought of doing a similar thing, maybe have two pages with different coding and use complex transclusions to keep the content the same? But I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that. But you're the wiki-editing wizard here. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 17:50, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

== adding what if? 10th ann ==

as most of you know, the what if? 10th anniversary edition is basically an updated version of what if?, compete with red annotations and a bonus chapter that i need to get around to explaining. since it has all the original what if? chapters, should we add a red 10th anniversary box under each green what if? box? '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 16:12, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

:Yeah I realized it was just small annotations after i created the template and now I've changed the 10th ann. one to say ''Featured '''exclusively''' on the 3rd ed. etc.'' Not sure if that's enough, could also be much longer since it's only used on 1 row, but we definitely shouldn't add the template to every other article, (would break the style= html tag). Someone should still mention that articles on the first book are all available on the 3rd (and add more info) on both '''[[what if? (blog)]]''' and '''[[What If? 10th Anniversary Edition]]'''.
:Don't worry too much about explaining it, it can just be a couple of sentences. People can watch the video if they want details. Thanks for your work!{{unsigned|FaviFake|09:57, 3 February 2025 (UTC)}} 

:The fact that the 10th Anniversary ed ("book3", in original nomenclature) was basically a bonus-chapter version of the original ("book1"), was behind my suggestion that book|3 should sort-value itself as between book|1 articles and the completely new book|2, but there are severl ways of doing it (including maybe using something akin to {{w|Template:Diagonal split header}} for book|1 (assumed to also be book|3) rendering. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.38.96|162.158.38.96]] 21:08, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

::That's interesting, I didn't know that existed! I wonder if there's a less repetitive and/or space-efficient way of expressing the same message ("this is on both"), but idk. (look, I remembered to sign this time!) --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 17:43, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

::another question: should i be updating the explanations to be accurate as of 2024? many of the red annotations contain corrections or updates. '''[[User:42.book.addict|42.book.addict]][[User talk:42.book.addict|Talk to me!]]''' 16:08, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

That's interesting! I like the idea of adding them, but I can't seem to find a nice way to add them:
*We could add them to the existing explanation, but that would be weird because half of the blog articles, which are public on the site, don't have these additions.
*We could add them to the book column, but it'd likely get too big, and we would need to figure out a way to make the template do that.
*We could create a duplicate row of every red-annotated article, even if they're on the blog, but that would be confusing and might clutter the index.
*We could create a new column, but we already have too many.
*Also, we'd need to figure out how to add them. Do we want to make the text red like in the book? Should we use a new/old template for that?
--[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 17:43, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

== By what measure is anything "too short". ==

I am very close to just removing all the <code><nowiki>{{notice|Too short}}</nowiki></code> additions, on the basis that this seems to be a purely subjective measure. The only reason I haven't is because they'll probably just be added back in again (with no more reasoning than before). But, if anyone wants more information, everyone already knows where they can find the ''full'' text (or narrated video) that gives it, while a summary is a summary. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.49|172.70.85.49]] 20:28, 19 March 2025 (UTC)
:The reason I add them is because I'd like people browsing the index to be able to glance at a question and read its summary. I try to check the original article to see if there are any important things we missed and point them out. But if, after reading through an article, you find that our summary is clear and '''fully answers''' the question, you can remove it. I started adding these because some early summaries were way too short, just 5-10 words, and mostly didn't answer the question. For example, if an answer is "We would all die", that doesn't answer the question, but "The radiation from the nuclear bomb would be so pervasive that we would all die in 2 years" does.

:Of course people can just read all ~250 articles, but if someone just wants the answer quickly, we offer that. Please feel free to remove them from answers that are already complete, but not all of them.--[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 16:48, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

::Reviewing the current first five "Too short" complaints, IMO you cannot get much more fully answered without expanding the "summary" to basically going through the article's in-depth explanation and copying/paraphrasing it. Which seems to me to miss the point.
::Parallel requests for rewording/better phrasing I can understand (if I thought that any change I made in that direction was going to stand when it got "made longer", I might even try to help out in that direction), but I'm still none the wiser why they are too short.
::Answering a question of "How long/heavy/bright/fast is <foo>?" shouldn't need more than a simple "it is <measurement>, given <caveat>", in most cases. Maybe a couple of those if there's different caveats, or add why it would end the world if you even ''had'' such a <foo>. "Could I/we/humanity <bar>?" probably doesn't need much more than "[Yes/No], but <unexpected thing...>" And I'm not sure if it's still there, because I'm not going to recheck it all, but at one point I noted at least one short-question/short-answer that had a longer 'summary' than the answer given.
::I like words. I need to expend effort to not use more of them, myself, and am quite pleased if I ''can'' satisfactorily say what I'm trying to say in a succint manner. (i.e. not like this...) But I'm still none the wiser what (lower) thresholds there are in this situation. I'm going to consider if I can help, here, but not right this moment. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.241.122|172.71.241.122]] 20:29, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

:::Oooh you're the same IP! I didn't recognise you.
Reviewing the current first five "Too short" complaints, IMO you cannot get much more fully answered without expanding the "summary" to basically going through the article's in-depth explanation and copying/paraphrasing it. Which seems to me to miss the point.
:::Sounds good. If the explanation is satisfactory and mentions everything except things like the methodology used and minor "sub-answers", feel free to remove the notices!

"How long/heavy/bright/fast is <foo>?" shouldn't need more than a simple "it is <measurement>, given <caveat>", in most cases. Maybe a couple of those if there's different caveats, or add why it would end the world if you even had such a <foo>.
:::Agreed!

"Could I/we/humanity <bar>?" probably doesn't need much more than "[Yes/No], but <unexpected thing...>"
:::Agree, but usually the entire article revolves around that unexpected thing, so i think we should summarise that too. Agin, feel free to remove the ones you're sure can't be made any longer in a useful way At the start, I added a lot and didn't have time to go read the article for each one! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 15:56, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

== Alternate universe What-Ifs ==

Should we make the explanation for Alternate universe What-Ifs a separate page? Explaining every section in this article might be too long, and if the other explanations are anything to go by, an explanation that fits would be considered too short. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.174.147|172.68.174.147]] 06:09, 21 March 2025 (UTC)
:I think we should definitely explain it, but maybe it's better if we keep it in the table? Why'd you want to split into another page?
:Also, the short-answer articles aren't too short. If you look at [https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/What_If%3F_chapters#:~:text=Short Answer Section II Short%20Answer%20Section%20II], for example, it explanations are very short, and rightfully so. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 15:49, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

== What about Good Question? ==

There does appear to be a *fourth* "What If?" thing Randall has done that is seemingly only documented at [[New York Times: Good Question]]; the New York Times's [https://www.nytimes.com/column/good-question-randall-munroe-xkcd Good Question], which does appear to maybe have some chapter reposts (i.e. Cosmic Road Trip/"How Long Is the Drive to the Edge of the Universe?"). My question is, is this worth documenting on this page in specific? [[User:Adrmcr|Adrmcr]] ([[User talk:Adrmcr|talk]]) 18:36, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

:Oh, right, I had forgotten about that page! I like the idea of doing something with it, it's currently almost impossible to find. To give it more visibility, I think we could move its contents here. I'm not sure if we should add them to the existing table or put them in a new section, maybe at the bottom. I could see something like this working:

{| class="sortable wikitable"
! rowspan="2" scope="col" class="unsortable" | Thumbnail
! rowspan="2" scope="col" data-sort-type=text| Title
! rowspan="2" scope="col" data-sort-type=text| question
! rowspan="2" scope="col" class="unsortable" | Randall's answer
! colspan="3"| Article available in... <noinclude></noinclude> ''(click to sort)'' <noinclude></noinclude>
|-
! scope="col" data-sort-type=number | Blog
! scope="col" data-sort-type=number | Books
! scope="col" data-sort-type=number | YouTube
|-
| rowspan="7" |
| rowspan="7" |'''Good Question'''
|[https://www.nytimes.com/column/good-question-randall-munroe-xkcd ''"How Long Is the Drive to the Edge of the Universe?"'']
<div align="right">—Randall Munroe</div>
|Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras sagittis lacus sit amet porta vulputate.
|1st "[https://www.nytimes.com/column/good-question-randall-munroe-xkcd Good Question]" NYT article, on 2012‑07‑10
|
|
|-
|[https://www.nytimes.com/column/good-question-randall-munroe-xkcd ''"Shark or Orca: Which Should You Fear More?"'']
<div align="right">—Randall Munroe</div>
|rutrum eros id, tincidunt neque. Integer hendrerit magna ac nibh fringilla,
|2nd "[https://www.nytimes.com/column/good-question-randall-munroe-xkcd Good Question]" NYT article, on 2012‑07‑10
|
|
|-
|[https://www.nytimes.com/column/good-question-randall-munroe-xkcd ''" How Many Languages Could a Child Speak?"'']
<div align="right">—Randall Munroe</div>
|non venenatis lacus hendrerit. Pellentesque ullamcorper dolor eget nunc gravida, nec euismod risus efficitur.
|3rd "[https://www.nytimes.com/column/good-question-randall-munroe-xkcd Good Question]" NYT article, on 2012‑07‑10
|
|
|}

:The old page could become a redirect to the new section/NYT table. --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 08:49, 22 March 2025 (UTC)
::Anyone? --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 16:56, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

== Striking a match on Titan - additional ==

Depends on how you read it, but try to strike a safety match ''on'' Titan probably would do nothing at all (just like if you tried to strike it on a bit of Earth rock, here on the surface of Earth), as it needs the chemicals in the striking-strip to (in small amounts) combine with the oxidiser in the match-head coating to spark up and ''then'' prompt the relatively slower-burning process that leads to the atmosphere-fed burning of the 'stick'.

This means that striker+match reaction will also work in most situations (including underwater and in vacuum), though of course may then fail to get significant amount of post-striking ignition to continue. As non-safety/strike-anywhere ones will, given the friction (hmmm... would you get good friction off of the ice-boulders of Titan?).

But coating your matchheads with wax (or manufactured with a suitable coating) is advisable for 'survival kit' matches, to prevent infusion of water to 'dampen the squib'. Would be interesting to know to what degree the anoxic atmosphere of Titan might seep in and similarly suppress the various types of ready-to-react compounds, before even the lack of free oxygen ends the intended flare-up. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.26.37|172.71.26.37]] 10:19, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

:Uhh, what article are you talking about? This info could be useful to add in the index! --[[User:FaviFake|FaviFake]] ([[User talk:FaviFake|talk]]) 15:06, 29 March 2025 (UTC)
::Easily searchable (or made visible as per my recent change), it's not the only "match" or "Titan" reference, but there aren't so many of either that you need to check much further than the first appearance of either, probably.
::But, as you ask, it's in the Book 2 "Short Answers #3" collection (the penultimate one of that grouping). And, now that I've reached home, I can also tell you that it's pp.141-142 in the UK hardback edition (whether or not that's identical/near to your own copy's appearance of it).
::However, no ''more'' info needs to be added, IMO. I changed the prior edit (not sure who/which IP did it, without checking, but their edit popped it up on my own radar as worthy of minor refinement) to just say that it's oxidiser, not just "oxygen" (there's oxygen in the "stick" and any other "head"-coatings applied) but basically incidental to the initial ignition when it's the oxidiser component that primarily contributes to that. And, to my mild and gratifying surprise, now find that this is pretty much exactly what the Short Answer says (except in 'Merkin form of "oxidizer"), in the form of a summary which ''our'' summary pretty much matches[[[559: No Pun Intended|''NPI!'']]] in all useful ways.
::I added the stuff here, about the Safety Match detail, as a bonus bit of info for anyone who cares to scan down here to know this additional thing that I happen to know (but not necessarily explain well?)... Randall does not go that far into the details in his book-answer (he does divert into a footnote about KClO3 being used in airliner oxygen masks, but that's beyond the scope of adding here, and he totally avoids the safety/strike-anywhere distinctions). Adding the above to the Explanation Table would be overkill, and misrepresent Randall's original format to no real benefit (except maybe some curious pyromaniacs, on Earth or elsewhere) [[Special:Contributions/172.69.195.179|172.69.195.179]] 16:58, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

Talk:3066: Cosmic Distance Calibration

2025-03-22T10:11:09Z

172.71.178.157: You really are the centre of the universe.

yay. [[User:DollarStoreBa'al|DollarStoreBa'al]] ([[User talk:DollarStoreBa'al|talk]]) 16:31, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

What makes such labels as real objects absurd is not the required size, but the required orientation to be readable from a single point in the universe - earth. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.154.9|172.71.154.9]] 19:26, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

:All facing towards us AND all the right way up! That's geographically unlikely. ;-) Robert Carnegie rja.carnegie@gmail.com [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.157|172.71.178.157]] 10:11, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

A straightforward application of the Anthropic principle. [[Special:Contributions/104.23.187.189|104.23.187.189]] 19:35, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure I get the title text... [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.162|162.158.62.162]] 20:04, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

I like this part of the linked article: ''But cosmologists get only one universe to observe.'' -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 20:09, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

I think that the crosshairs in question are markers to indicate which star is being labeled, not anything to do with video games. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.137.59|162.158.137.59]] 23:46, 21 March 2025 (UTC)
:That's my suspicion as well: just markers like the labels, not diffraction spikes or anything like that. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 03:41, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

The crosshairs are all the same size because new red giant stars are all the same brightness. They are "TRGB" or "Tip of the Red Giant Branch" standard candles. Every star in that phase of evolution is exactly the same absolute brightness, so we can tell how far away it is by measuring the observed luminosity. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.212.132|162.158.212.132]] 00:35, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

[[2035: Dark Matter Candidates]] also hypothesizes that astronomical labels are physically there, the orbit paths in this case. Should it be added? [[User:Intara|Intara]] ([[User talk:Intara|talk]]) 00:43, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

OH MY GOD! Why are there two blue boxes saying we need to complete 58 explanations? I would suggest that just one would be less distracting/disruptive. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.2.70|172.68.2.70]] 03:19, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

Regarding the crosshairs: TBH, I don't think the comic refers to diffraction patterns/spikes. I think it simply refers to literal crosshairs, as in "some stars are marked with crosshairs in this image and the astronomers think those crosshairs are some kind of real, physical phenomena". See the comic itself for an example of such a crosshair (the zoomed star has one!). --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.7.138|172.68.7.138]] 05:39, 22 March 2025 (UTC)
: After noticing that other comments in this discussion page mentioned the same as I did, I took the liberty to update the text. --[[Special:Contributions/172.68.12.34|172.68.12.34]] 05:48, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

Talk:3064: Lungfish

2025-03-20T10:08:48Z

172.71.178.157:

Huh, first time I've seen a comic the literal minute it was posted. Weird seeing a completely empty explainxkcd page. [[User:Beanie|Beanie]] [[User talk:Beanie|talk]] 16:10, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Got the basics of a transcript going. --[[User:DollarStoreBa'al|DollarStoreBa'al]] ([[User talk:DollarStoreBa'al|talk]]) 16:21, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

People often talk about DNA being the program that builds life, but it seems to me more as if its the static-data used by the program that builds life [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.236|172.70.90.236]] 16:24, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
:Agreed. I'd say RNA sequences seem more like the program that builds life, to me?
:[[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 15:02, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

::{{w|Von Neumann architecture}} makes clear distinction between program and data. Biological organism don't. Sure, by [[3056: RNA]] it would seem DNA being mostly static data makes more sense, but the distinction is just not clear. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 02:47, 19 March 2025 (UTC)
:::In one of my own constructed (virtually emulated) programming environments, I ensured that there was no differentiation between opcodes, parameters ''or'' data. Any particular quarter-byte/half-nibble that the program pointer pointed at could be read as a valid instruction. The requisite parameters to that code was what immediately followed, being pointers (''anywhere'' in the array of quarter-bytes, inclusive of over the current opcode or its parameters), to the data that the operation operated upon.
:::(A useful debugging method (assuming you were trying to hand-craft something that worked just right, without (overly) corrupting its own code), or just entertainment (using deliberately bad code, or even starting with just random noise and seeing whether some consistent abstract form emerged from successive iterations), was to give bits that got prodded as instruction a red hue, bits that was prodded as param would gain green and bits accessed as data got the blue colour component. Which would mix into a useful matrix of all eight '3-bit colours', from black (never used) to white (fulfilled all three roles). Or, with a 'colour-decay' process (e.g. 24-bit colour, prodding gives the given colour channel the value 255, each n-ticks all the non-zero colour-bytes are decremented by one), a dynamic ongoing process could be observed. Though not ''necessarily'' understood, admitedly!)
:::It was not lost on me that D(/R)NA is also essentially quarter-byte per base-pair (though, of course, it actually does most of its more obvious work grouped in codons, i.e. 6-bit before you add in other biological complexities), nor that I was indeed folding this 'toy' environment into some of my slightly less serious attempts at 'genetic programming' (additive reproduction/recombination really had to be externally mediated to make it 'useful', along the lines of the more advanced forms of Darwinian Poetry in all respects but the fitness-evaluation). I really should revisit this whole project, now that you remind me. I can probably do more with it than I was able to 30 years ago. As well as learning a few more biology/coding tips and tricks, in passing, since then. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.43.240|172.69.43.240]] 12:08, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Anyone know how to add categories? If so, I can handle those. --[[User:DollarStoreBa'al|DollarStoreBa'al]] ([[User talk:DollarStoreBa'al|talk]]) 16:25, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

I was thinking of creating the category Genetics as a subcategory to biology, if it hasn't already been done. --[[User:DollarStoreBa'al|DollarStoreBa'al]] ([[User talk:DollarStoreBa'al|talk]]) 16:29, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi chat, we got a new undiscovered xkcd page to talk about: [[Dot]]. Any info would be helpful. [[User:CalibansCreations|'''Caliban''']] ([[User talk:CalibansCreations|talk]]) 16:52, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
:It's a flashing dot.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.157|172.71.178.157]] 10:08, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

"a common issue when coding" or it could be just editing a doc, a picture, a video, etc.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.151.21|172.71.151.21]] 17:09, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
: I DON'T KNOW HOW TO CODE, OKAY??? {{unsigned|DollarStoreBa'al|17:10, 17 March 2025 (UTC)}}

Somewhat related, is is quite common for someone to have filenames like "Thesis (final)", "Thesis (really final)", "Thesis (really really final)" (instead of "Thesis" it might be "Presentation"). I have just checked the RCS log of my MSc Thesis: the 2.16 version was the final, but then there were the 3.1 and 3.2, which were the correction of two typos. [[User:Rps|Rps]] ([[User talk:Rps|talk]]) 18:48, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
:Using words like "Final" is optimism. So is "Newest". Version numbers and dates are the correct way to name things. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 02:47, 19 March 2025 (UTC)
::But remember, then, that you're only freely allowed to fork off new branches when you get to certain version numbers and can properly [[2956: Number Line Branch|justify changing the version digits]]. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.195.179|172.69.195.179]] 11:16, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Anybody else notice that the science in this one is completely incorrect? I added a note, but I'm curious why the comic doesn't instead mention something like Trichomonas or rice/cotton/bread wheat, which actually *do* feature widespread gene duplication [[User:tofudragon7]]
:I think the incorrectness of the science is the basis of the joke [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.39|172.70.206.39]] 14:10, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

''"append "Copy of" to the start of the filename"'' Append comes after. I think the word we want is "'''prepend'''". Not as familliar as append, but Google reports wide and serious usage. A further note: MS's hack ruins the idea of alphabetized filenames, all the "Copy of" in one place. --[[User:PRR|PRR]] ([[User talk:PRR|talk]]) 21:24, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
: I think the word we actually want is 'add', since 'prepend to the start' would be tautological.[[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.4|141.101.99.4]] 10:30, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
:: The older and still probably more common meaning of "append" is just "attach", with no particular implication of where (e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/append#English). The narrower sense of "add at the end", and the back-formation "prepend" for "add at the beginning", are relatively recent, and mostly computing jargon. Apparently, there's also occasional use of "postpend" as the complement of "prepend", but I don't think I've ever come across it in the wild.
:: So, either "append to the start" or "prepend" is fine, I think.
:: Or go for maximum redundancy: "prepend a prefix to the start before the existing text" :P - [[User:IMSoP|IMSoP]] ([[User talk:IMSoP|talk]]) 15:29, 18 March 2025 (UTC)
::: 'add to the start' is still better from a Plain English/Thing Explainer perspective, though.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.241.51|172.71.241.51]] 16:17, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Anecdotes: I've got both "5etools (3).json (16)" & "5etools (9).json" on my phone ''right now.'' [[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 15:07, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

April fool's comic is coming soon and I simply can't wait. [[User:DollarStoreBa'al|DollarStoreBa'al]] ([[User talk:DollarStoreBa'al|talk]]) 19:16, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

It may be a coincidence, but just recently genetically modified wolly mice were born, and now Randal writes a comic about genetic manipulation. Is there a connection between these two? [[User:F beer|F beer]] ([[User talk:F beer|talk]]) 07:51, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

887: Future Timeline

2025-03-05T12:35:06Z

172.71.178.157: Undo revision 367905 by 172.71.215.37 (talk) Meaningless

{{comic
| number = 887
| date = April 18, 2011
| title = Future Timeline
| before = [[#Explanation|↓ Skip to explanation ↓]]
| image = future timeline.png
| titletext = Not shown: the approximately 30,000 identical, vaguely hysterical articles titled "WHITE PEOPLE IN [THE US/BRITAIN] TO BECOME MINORITY BY [YEAR]!", which came up for basically any year I put in.
}}

{{TOC}}==Explanation==
This comic uses the same strategy as comic [[715: Numbers]], in which [[Randall]] uses Google to search for phrases and then charts the results. This one is charted as a timeline, whereas 715 was charted as line graphs.
It is a list of things predicted or announced by anyone at any time (the ones you see on Google search using "by the year..." or similar statements).

"2101 - War Was Beginning" is a reference to the opening narration of video game ''Zero Wing''; the same narration is famous for the internet meme "{{w|All your base are belong to us}}". As there are not any other out and out references in the comic, and the rest are actually results that you can find using Randall's methods, "War Was Beginning" was probably the only thing he got when he googled 2101 as well.

Certain events in this comic, e.g., "Social Security stops running surplus", are repeated multiple times. Also, certain bizarre events, like "Apocalypse occurs", or "Flying cars reach market", happen before rather plausible things, like "'Big one' hits California". Certain events, like "Japan is a robot-only country" or "Gillette introduces 14-blade razor" may be related to the recurring theme [[605: Extrapolating]].

According to [https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1144.pdf some official projections], (non Hispanic) {{w|White people}} will no longer be the majority in the United States by 2045 due to low birth rates and high rates of immigration. The title text is Randall's statement that, for both the US and Great Britain, there are so many sources that mention this, for any year he cared to search for and many using more far more doubtful sources (if any), that he decided that it was not worth flooding the chart with all these spurious repetitions, even though he did include other less prolific recurring themes.

This comic has similar features to [[1413: Suddenly Popular]], [[1093: Forget]], and [[891: Movie Ages]].

==The predictions==

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Year
! Prediction
! Further Details
! Outcome
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2012
| World population
| Ever since the advent of modern medicine and the more efficient agricultural processes developed since the Industrial Revolution, the human population had been growing at an unprecedented rate. This has caused some people to {{w|Human overpopulation|worry about overpopulation}}, which would cause a scarcity of resources and overcrowding, and propose various solutions, most of which involve some form of eugenics. 7 billion is a landmark number because it is a multiple of 1 billion.
| Close; Earth reached 7 billion in late 2011.
|-
| Flying cars
| For decades, flying cars have been a staple of futuristic sci-fi and technological predictions. So far very few of these predictions, which to tend to hover around 5–10 years from whatever the current date is, have come true.
| Too early; a flying car designed for consumer use was [https://www.suasnews.com/2021/04/announcing-aska-the-electric-take-off-and-landing-flying-car-for-consumers first demonstrated in July 2021] , but has yet to go into production. You could argue that helicopters count as flying cars, but these are not affordable{{citation needed}} and hence not widely used by the general public.
|-
| Canada cuts greenhouse emissions
| Currently, the Earth is experiencing an unprecedented period of warming we call global warming, caused in part by greenhouse emissions, which are gases that help trap heat in the atmosphere. Countries have repeatedly gotten together and promised to stop emitting greenhouse gases, but so far they have failed to meet their targets.
| False. Canada withdrew from the Kyoto treaty in late 2011, and its emissions in 2012 were 18% ''above'' 1990 levels (though its population had grown 26% and its GDP had grown 67% in that period).
|-
| Apocalypse occurs
| The end of a cycle of the Mayan calendar on December 22, 2012 has been used in popular culture as a basis for predicting the end of the world. Amongst other things, this included the film '2012'. Some people took this rather more seriously, and actually believed that the world would end on this date.
| False.{{Citation needed}}
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2013
| National debt paid off
| For years, the subject of national debt (in the USA) has been a political point of contention. While both parties theoretically support reducing the debt or paying it off entirely, Democrats are more willing to spend to pull the country out of recessions in the economy and Republicans to cut taxes. The last time that spending did not exceed revenue begin under Clinton, a Democrat, and ended after George W. Bush, a Republican, said that this amounted to taxpayers being "overcharged" and taxes were lowered, followed by the Great Recession. Clinton at one point proposed [https://money.cnn.com/1999/06/28/economy/clinton/ paying off the debt by 2015].
| False.
|-
| Microchipping all Americans
| Microchips are small computer chips, typically embedded in pets in case they get lost, that contain information about the pet. Some, more paranoid, people worry about the government microchipping everyone in an effort to monitor their activities.
| False, although voluntary RFID implants do exist.
|-
| Homelessness ended in MA
| In 2008, the Commission To End Homelessness in Massachusetts, under Governor Deval Patrick, proposed a plan to all but eliminate homelessness over the next five years (hence the 2013 end-date on the comic).
| False.
|-
| Health care reform law repealed
| A health care reform law, popularly known as Obamacare, was signed into law in 2010. Ever since, many Republicans have tried (in vain) to repeal it, disliking the idea that government should provide and require healthcare. However, President [[Joe Biden]] has stated to restore Obamacare.
| Too early; almost repealed in 2017.
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2014
| US leaves Afghanistan
| After the {{w|September 11 attacks|terrorist attack}} on the {{w|World Trade Center (1973–2001)|World Trade Center}} (WTC) in New York on September 11, 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan, due to the Taliban allegedly hosting al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization behind the attacks. The war has gone on since then, with the public growing increasingly tired of it. Public support then favoured a withdrawal, but for military and logistical reasons, the government could not simply move all the US troops in Afghanistan to their home. Therefore, the government promised to eventually withdraw all troops, initially planned to do so by the end of 2014.
| Too early; the remaining US troops [https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/afghanistan-afghan-troops-struggle-to-replace-americans-at-key-bagram-air-base-2480356 left Afghanistan in June 2021.]
|-
| GNU/Linux dominant OS
| An operating system, or OS, is the software that forms the structure in which applications on you computer function. Some typical OSs include Mac OS X, Windows 10, and Linux. The first two of those three are commercial products, sold as a copy by a company. The last is an open-source OS, one that anyone can download and modify free. Typically, open-source software is used by a small number of socially conscious people.
| False, although Linux-based Android dominated phones since 2011.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2015
| New Horizon reaches Pluto
| The New Horizon spacecraft is a U.S. space mission designed to go to Pluto and take photographs, collect samples, etc.
| True. [https://pluto.jhuapl.edu It reached Pluto on July 14, 2015].
|-
| Healthcare law causes hyperinflation
| The National Inflation Association warned that the [https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/healthcare-bill-to-cause-us-hyperinflation-by-2015-88711032.html healthcare bill would cause U.S. hyperinflation by 2015.]
| False.
|-
| Millennium development goals achieved
| {{w|Millennium Development Goals}}
| False.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2016
| Baby boomers begin turning 65
| {{w|Baby boomers}} are individuals conceived in the years following World War Two, roughly defined as those born from 1946-1959. This isn't so much a prediction as basic math; if you were born in 1946, you turned 65 in 2011.
| True.
|-
| Android takes 38%/45% of market share
| {{w|Android (operating system)|Android}} is a popular operating system for smartphones and tablets, created by Google. Market share is the percentage of all devices that use the product, in this case the Android operating system. These entries together are humorous because they cannot both happen at the same time.
| Too late; passed these marks in 2010. {{w|Android OS}}'s [https://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp market share was already 84.4% as of the third quarter of 2014,] showing that both estimates were overly conservative.
|-
| Windows phone overtakes iOS
| {{w|iOS}} is the operating system used by Apple iPhones. At the time of the comic, Apple's mobile OS is much more popular than Microsoft's. The article Randall found predicts that the tables will turn. However, Windows Phone was discontinued in 2017, with support for the last version (Windows Phone 10) ending on December 10, 2019.
| False.
|-
| rowspan="5"| 2017
| China completes lunar mission
| The {{w|Chinese space program}} has plans for extraterrestrial exploration, including a manned mission to the moon.
| Too early. The first sample-return mission was completed in November 2020.
|-
| Social Security stops running surplus
| The first of many predictions about the United States {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}} trust fund program, all predicting its decline due to a variety of factors.
| Too early. Occurred in 2021.
|-
| US budget balanced
| The {{w|United States federal budget}} outlines how much the US government spends on what in a given fiscal year. The budget is not required to be balanced, and so often more money is spent than is earned in revenue, causing the national debt to rise.
| False. Still pretty negative.
|-
| Newspapers become obsolete and die out
| The increasing popularity of social media and online news has caused a steady decline in the popularity of print media.
| False. Though newspapers (especially printed ones) are in decline, they are certainly not obsolete as of 2017, or 2022, for that matter.
|-
| Cosmetic surgery doubles
| {{w|Cosmetic Surgery}}
| False. According to the ASPS (American Society of Plastic Surgeons), 1.6 million cosmetic surgeries were performed in 2011, while 1.8 million were performed in 2017, an increase of only 0.2 million.
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2018
| Social Security stops running surplus
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}} again.
| Still too early.
|-
| Jesus returns to Earth
| A number of Christians have attempted to predict the return of Christ (a.k.a. the {{w|second coming}} or the rapture) using clues from The Bible, even though the Bible and other religious texts says that "no man can know the date" and that it would be within the lifetime of some who witnessed Jesus's first appearance. Several predicted dates have come and gone.
| False.
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2019
| Social Security stops running surplus
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}} again.
| Still too early.
|-
| Every baby has genes mapped at birth
| {{w|Gene Mapping}}
| False.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2020
| Solar power becomes cheaper than fossil fuels
| Scientists estimate that more than half of the {{w|fossil fuels}} in existence have already been found and that fossil fuel production will begin to decline due to the scarcity, causing prices to increase. At the same time, improvements in {{w|Solar Power|solar technology}} are causing the prices for solar energy to steadily decrease.
| True, though only in {{w|Cost of electricity by source#Recent_global_studies|certain cases}}.
|-
| Keyboards and mice become obsolete
| {{w|Computer input device|Computer input devices}} are beginning to adopt other inputs, such as trackpads, voice commands, touch screens, and eye tracking. While touch screens in particular are gaining widespread use with the rise of smartphones and tablets, as of 2022 desktop computers that use mice are still fairly common. And while voice-to-text has greatly improved, it still doesn't have the accuracy to replace typing. None of the other text inputs are as fast as a keyboard, and none are suitable for writing program code.
| False. While touchscreen devices ''are'' increasingly common, desktop computers are still very much in use. Mice continue to be used alongside touchscreens and trackpads, and keyboards remain the dominant method of writing on computers.
|-
| New Tappan Zee bridge constructed
| A {{w|Tappan_Zee_Bridge#Replacement_bridge|replacement bridge}} was announced in 2008.
| Too late; completed in 2017.
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2021
| US debt reaches 97% of GDP
| {{w|US Debt}}
| Too late; reached in 2011.
|-
| US unemployment falls to 2.8%
| {{w|Unemployment in the United States}}
| False: because of the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment has actually ''increased''.
|-
| Restored caliphate unifies Middle East
| A {{w|caliphate}} is a form of {{w|Islam|Islamic}} theocracy, centred around a Caliph, or successor to the prophet {{w|Muhammad}}. This prediction foreshadows the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which attempted but failed to create a caliphate in the Levant.
| False.
|-
| Lake Mead evaporates
| Formed by the {{w|Hoover Dam}} on the {{w|Colorado River}}, {{w|Lake Mead}} is the largest reservoir in the United States (measured by maximum capacity). It hasn't reached its capacity since 1983, due to drought and increased demand for water. This is linked to {{w|global warming}}.
| False, although water levels continue to fall.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2022
| Kilimanjaro snow-free
| At 5,895 metres, {{w|Kilimanjaro}} is the highest mountain in {{w|Africa}}, and the highest free-standing mountain in the world. Around 85% of its ice cover disappeared between 1912 and 2011, and it continues to recede.
| False.
|-
| HTML 5 finished
| The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) began work on {{w|HTML 5}} in 2004.
| Too late; 5.0 specification released in 2014, but incremental updates continue.
|-
| Newspapers become obsolete and die out
| This is the second time this prediction has appeared.
| False.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2023
| Jesus returns to Earth (again)
| Again.
| False.
|-
| US debt passes 100% of GDP
| This references the common fear that {{w|US Debt}} will exceed GDP, possibly causing {{w|Economic bubble|economic turmoil}}.
| Too late; reached in 2012.
|-
| All unprotected ancient forests gone from Pacific Northwest
| Likely due to a combination of wildfire and {{w|deforestation}}.
| False.
|-
| rowspan="5"| 2024
| Atlantis begins to reappear
| {{w|Atlantis}} is the name of a fictional/hypothetical island, which is supposed to have been lost beneath the sea. It's not clear why ''rising'' sea level would make it reappear.
| False.
|-
| Orangutans extinct in wild
| {{w|Orangutan|Orangutans}} are a species of great ape, currently classed as an {{w|endangered species}}, and found only in the {{w|Rainforest|rainforests}} of {{w|Borneo}} and {{w|Sumatra}}.
| False.
|-
| China lands men and women on the moon
| The {{w|Chinese space program}} has plans for extraterrestrial exploration, including a manned mission to the moon.
| False; the Chinese government planned a manned mission to the moon for the 2030s.
|-
| NASA sets up permanent moon base
| There has been a lot of hype recently about finally returning to the moon, vis-a-vis Orion.
| Too early; the {{w|Artemis program}} plans to put the {{w|Lunar Gateway}} in orbit around the moon, which will be flown up in [https://www.nasa.gov/gateway-frequently-asked-questions four launches over the course of six years, beginning "no earlier than 2025"]
|-
| Female professionals pass males in pay
| This prediction is an erroneous extrapolation from the current (at the time this comic was made) rate at which female incomes were catching up to male incomes.
| False.
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2025
| World population reaches 8 billion
| Given current rates, it seems unlikely it will take this long to hit 8 billion, but advances in birth control options and especially their availability in developing nations may slow the current rate considerably.
| Too late. This number was reached in late 2022, although it may have been reached later as some countries overcount their population.
|-
| Two billion people face water shortages
| https://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/28-01-2008/103693-water_crisis-0/
|
|-
| 62 MPG cars introduced
| 62 miles per gallon, ~3.8 L/100km. 62 MPG is a very good mileage rate at today's standard, even though [https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=5231050&page=1 some cars can be driven carefully so as to attain over 100 MPG].
|
|-
| US power fades
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-us-power-will-fade-by-2025/
| Hard to know what the precise metric for this would be.
|-
| rowspan="5"| 2026
| Atlantis emerges completely
| {{w|Atlantis}} is the name of a fictional/hypothetical island, which is supposed to have been lost beneath the sea. It seems that it has taken 2 years for it to emerge completely.
|
|-
| Rock Bands die out
| https://bestbands.wordpress.com/2009/01/25/rock-bands-to-die-out-by-2026/
|
|-
| US debt paid off
| [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/business/27view.html It’s 2026, and the Debt Is Due.]
|
|-
| Car accidents cease
| Presumably, cars will be fully automated and able to pilot themselves at this point and will have fail-safes that prevent collisions currently attributed to user error. Car accidents will always be possible, however, due to mechanical and electrical failures.
|
|-
| West coast falls into ocean
| Most likely due to {{w|San_Andreas_Fault#The_next_.22Big_One.22|a significant seismic event}}.
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2027
| Japan introduces new fastest Maglev train
| Japan's railway systems are famous for their "bullet trains", or {{w|Shinkansen}}. The Chūō Shinkansen is planned to be opened in this year.
|
|-
| Lyndon Larouche-planned Mars colony is established
| https://totse.mattfast1.com/en/technology/space_astronomy_nasa/moonmars.html
|
|-
| Social Security stops running surplus
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}} again.
|
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2028
| Tobacco outlawed
| Tobacco products (cigarettes and chewing tobacco) have become more and more taboo in modern culture, with most public places and private businesses forbidding their use indoors and near places children congregate.
|
|-
| 40% of coral reefs gone
| Many factors have been attributed to the decline of {{w|Coral_reef#Threats|coral reefs}}, including mining, over fishing, and rising ocean tempteratures.
|
|-
| US debt paid off
| {{w|US Debt}}
|
|-
| Social Security stops running surplus
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}} again
|
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2029
| Social Security trust fund exhausted
| The next stage of the collapse of {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}}. After years of deficits deplete the trust fund, the program will only be able to pay out as much in benefits as it takes in each year.
|
|-
| Computers pass the Turing test
| It is no coincidence that 2029 is the timeline for Terminator Movies.
| Some computer programs already clear the Turing Test about 30% of the time.
|-
| Aging reversed
| [https://www.zdnet.com/article/manhattan-beach-project-to-reverse-aging-by-2029/ Manhattan Beach Project to reverse aging by 2029]
|
|-
| Wikipedia reaches 30 million articles
|
| As of July 2024, Wikipedia has over [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#Grand_Total 63.2 million total articles], if all languages are included. The source being cited may have meant the English language Wikipedia, which has only {{w|Special:Statistics|6.8 million articles}}.
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2030
| Half of Amazon rain forest lost to logging
| WWF press release - [https://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/climate-change-speeds-up-amazon-s-destruction-says-wwf Climate Change Speeds Up Amazon’s Destruction] referring to a report on the [https://assets.panda.org/downloads/amazonas_eng_04_12b_web.pdf Amazon's vicious cycles].
|
|-
| Cancer deaths double from 2008 levels
| From the [https://www.cancer.org/myacs/newengland/global-cancer-burden-to-double-by-2030 Global Cancer Burden to Nearly Double by 2030] article about the article from page 37 of [https://www.cancer.org/research/cancerfactsfigures/globalcancerfactsfigures/global-facts-figures-2nd-ed Global Cancer Facts & Figures 2nd edition].
|
|-
| Arctic ice-free in summer
| https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091015-arctic-ice-free-gone-video-ap.html
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2031
| Computers controlled by thought
| https://www.gizmag.com/future-mobile-technology/17554/
| As of 2017, this is {{w|Brain–computer interface|already possible}}, but still not used in any mass available devices as of 2024.
|-
| Realtors replaced by technology
| https://agbeat.com/editorials/will-realtors-be-replaced-by-technology-by-the-year-2031/
|
|-
| Social Security trust fund exhausted
| https://crfb.org/blogs/cbo-95-percent-confident-social-security-trust-fund-runs-out-25-years
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2032
| "Big One" hits San Francisco
| {{w|San Franscisco}} is located on the {{w|San Andreas Fault}}, which is predicted to produce a magnitude 7+ earthquake in the 'near future'. This event is referred to as {{w|San_Andreas_Fault#The_next_.22Big_One.22|"The Big One"}}.
|
|-
| US elects first married lesbian President
| https://4chandata.org/g/In-what-major-ways-do-you-think-the-world-of-2032-will-be-different-from-that-of-today-a20155
|
|-
| Entire world converted to Christianity
| https://www.goddiscussion.com/38920/christian-domininionsts-to-take-over-the-world-by-2032/
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2033
| Kilimanjaro ice disappears
| https://www.reuters.com/article/2009/11/02/idUSL2210825
|
|-
| India becomes superpower
| https://www.facebook.com/pages/India-A-SuperPower-by-2033/151177191568098
|
|-
| Europe reaches Mars
| [https://www.spacedaily.com/news/esa-general-03zb.html Specifically, a manned European mission]. ESA's {{w|Mars Express}} probe landed in 2003.
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2034
| US diabetes cases double, treatment costs triple
| [https://www.reuters.com/article/2009/11/27/us-diabetes-usa-costs-idUSTRE5AQ0C220091127 U.S. diabetes cases to double, costs triple by 2034]
|
|-
| US builds autonomous robot army
| The concept of robots built for military service is another common element of science fiction stories. [https://www.aos-inc.com/index.php/medialias/press-releases?id=112 Unmanned Systems] article, about the [https://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA522247 2009-2034 Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap] publication ([https://www.amazon.com/2009-Unmanned-Integrated-Aircraft-Technologies-ebook/dp/B0047743A0 details at Amazon]).
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2035
| 80% of America's energy comes from renewable sources
| From fact sheet on Obama's [https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/25/fact-sheet-state-union-president-obamas-plan-win-future State of the Union.]
|
|-
| Himalayan glaciers down 80% in size
| From an IPCC report on [https://web.archive.org/web/20100116132657/https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch10s10-6-2.html The Himalayan glaciers] that has been analysed in quite some depth. See for example detailed article on an [https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2010/02/anatomy-of-ipccs-himalayan-glacier-year-2035-mess/ anatomy of IPCC’s mistake].
|
|-
| Arctic sea lane opens
| [https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/730ef8fe-27e1-11e0-8abc-00144feab49a.html#axzz3OBgEHYNY Arctic sea lane could open by 2035]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2036
| 80% of US has access to high-speed rail
| [https://www.wnyc.org/story/284946-obama-80-percent-of-americans-should-have-access-to-high-speed-rail-by-2036/ Obama: 80 Percent of Americans Should Have Access to High Speed Rail By 2036]
|
|-
| Asteroid Apophis misses/hits Earth
| 99942 Apophis is a near-Earth asteroid that caused a brief period of concern in December 2004 because initial observations indicated a probability of up to 2.7% that it would hit Earth on April 13, 2029.
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2037
| Arctic ice-free in September
| {{w|Arctic sea ice decline}}
|
|-
| Social Security trust fund exhausted
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}}
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2038
| 32-bit timestamps roll over, causing Y2K-level chaos
| On 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038, the value of time_t rolls over, that is it will return to zero. time_t is a computing standard measurement of time; it is a count of the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970. time_t is used by most computer systems to store date and time information. It is recommended that new software should convert to a 64 bit time_t; indeed, most operating systems designed to run on 64-bit hardware already use signed 64-bit time_t integers. This would give an epoch of 15:30:08 UTC on 4 December 292,277,026,596 (292 billion years away). Of course, legacy systems may not be upgradable so action taken now should prevent this becoming a problem closer to 2038...
|
|-
| "Big One" hits California
| [https://www.presstelegram.com/technology/20080414/the-big-one-likely-to-hit-by-2038 `The big one' likely to hit by 2038]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2039
| US population hits 400 Million
| [https://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2008/us400million.aspx U.S. Population Projected to Hit 400 Million in 2039]
|
|-
| Severe heat waves become commonplace
| [https://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/july/extreme-heat-study-070810.html Heat waves and extremely high temperatures could be commonplace in the U.S. by 2039, Stanford study finds]
|
|-
| Scientology becomes majority religion in US
| [https://home.snafu.de/tilman/2039.html Essay: Scientology in the year 2039]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2040
| Arctic summers ice-free
| [https://www.livescience.com/9419-arctic-summer-ice-free-2040.html Arctic Summer Could be Ice-Free by 2040]
|
|-
| Nanotechnology makes humans immortal
| [https://www.computerworld.com/article/2528330/app-development/nanotech-could-make-humans-immortal-by-2040--futurist-says.html Nanotech could make humans immortal by 2040, futurist says]
|
|-
| 2041
| Social Security trust fund exhausted
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}}
|
|-
| 2043
| World population passes 9 Billion
| {{w|Population growth}}
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2044
| Mankind genetically engineered to be happy
| Premise of the movie [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1363468/ Zenith] - further details are in the [https://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/esearch/e3i25130cd57f1590bda4527c098ac85b01 film review for Zenith.]
|
|-
| Childhood obesity reaches 100%
| [https://www.ivanhoe.com/channels/p_channelstory.cfm?storyid=11414 100-Percent Childhood Obesity Predicted by 2044]
|
|-
| 2045
| Humans and machines merge
| {{w|Ray Kurzweil}} predicts of a 'singularity' which will lead to a race of super intelligent beings.
|
|-
| 2046
| World's natural resources depleted
| [https://raphaelvanlaer.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/peak-uncertainty-when-will-we-run-out-of-fossil-fuels/ Peak uncertainty, when will we run out of fossil fuels?]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2047
| World ruled by banks and corporations
| [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Schlock-2047-RM-Krakoff-ebook/dp/B0039IT37Q Future Schlock - the story of a world turned upside down in 2047]
|
|-
| Tobacco industry fails
| [https://www.news.wisc.edu/16857 Experts: Big Tobacco dead by 2047, possibly sooner]
|
|-
| US begins using autonomous attack drones
| [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/22/us-air-force-drones-pilots-afghanistan US Air Force prepares drones to end era of fighter pilots]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2048
| Salt-water fish extinct from overfishing
| WWF report on [https://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/blue_planet/problems/problems_fishing/ unsustainable fishing.]
|
|-
| Unisex bathing suits cover body from shoulder to ankle
| [https://future.wikia.com/wiki/RyansWorld:_Bathing_Suits_of_the_Future RyansWorld: Bathing Suits of the Future]
|
|-
| Entire US population overweight
| [https://web.archive.org/web/20090321075605/https://thestatsblog.wordpress.com/2008/07/29/scientists-say-thin-people-face-extinction-in-united-states-everyone-will-be-overweight-by-2048-%E2%80%93-and-less-smart Scientists Say Thin People Face Extinction in United States: Everyone Will Be Overweight by 2048 – And Less Smart (archive)]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2049
| $1,000 computer exceeds computational ability of humanity
| [https://www.americanbar.org/content/newsletter/publications/technology_e_report_home/2007_may_technotes.html TechNotes: Trends in Technology]
|
|-
| Singularity occurs
| [https://www.prismdecision.com/the-singularity-is-near The Singularity Is Near]
|
|-
| Fishing industry collapses
| This tends to happen when your food-stock is extinct{{citation needed}} - see WWF report on [https://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/blue_planet/problems/problems_fishing/ unsustainable fishing.]
|
|-
| rowspan="5"| 2050
| 80% of Earth's population lives in urban centers
| [https://infochangeindia.org/population/books-a-reports/80-of-world-population-will-soon-be-in-urban-areas.html 80% of world population will soon be in urban areas]
|
|-
| China controls space
| [https://books.google.com/books?id=op851Uf99LQC&dq=China+controls+space+2050&source=gbs_navlinks_s Space Science & Technology in China: A Roadmap to 2050]
|
|-
| Sex with robots possible
| [https://www.livescience.com/1951-forecast-sex-marriage-robots-2050.html Forecast: Sex and Marriage with Robots by 2050]
|
|-
| Cars banned from European cities
| [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/8411336/EU-to-ban-cars-from-cities-by-2050.html EU to ban cars from cities by 2050]
|
|-
| One million species extinct from climate change
| [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0107_040107_extinction.html By 2050 Warming to Doom Million Species, Study Says]
|
|-
| 2051
| Atmosphere escapes into space
| [https://www.thehulltruth.com/boating-outdoor-photos/255705-have-you-ever-seen-fallstreak-hole.html Conspiracy theory] relating to {{w|Fallstreak hole}} or hole punch clouds.
|
|-
| 2052
| Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security spending exceed total US revenue
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}}
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2053
| US budget balanced
| [https://crfb.org/blogs/omb-releases-long-term-projections-fy2015-budget-proposal OMB releases long-term projections for the FY2015 budget proposal]
|
|-
| Majority of Americans in prison
| [https://articles.philly.com/1992-06-14/news/26032105_1_prison-officials-prison-time-prison-commissioners 'Beyond Bricks And Bars' As Jails Overflow, The Lock-'em-up Credo Is Drawing Unlikely Criticism - From Prison Officials Themselves]
|
|-
| Cars driven by dogs
|
| This has [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWAK0J8Uhzk already occurred] in 2012! However, it is not as widespread as the prediction may be implying.
|-
| 2054
| Hunger becomes unimaginable global problem
| [https://www.albionmonitor.com/0403a/earth2054.html Hunger Could Be 'Unimaginable' Global Problem By 2054]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2055
| Atmospheric CO2 doubled
| [https://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/flash_intro.php Carbon Mitigation Initiative: Stabilization Wedges]
|
|-
| Oil runs out
| [https://raphaelvanlaer.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/peak-uncertainty-when-will-we-run-out-of-fossil-fuels/ Peak uncertainty, when will we run out of fossil fuels?]
|
|-
| Copper, tin, lead, gold, and nickel all exhausted
| [https://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/environment/5-valuable-metals-that-could-vanish-by-2055 5 Valuable Metals That Could Vanish by 2055]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2056
| RFID-tagged driverless cars
| [https://www.zdnet.com/article/rfid-tagged-driverless-cars-on-roads-by-2056/ RFID-tagged driverless cars on roads by 2056]
|
|-
| Robots given same rights as humans
| [https://www.cc.gatech.edu/news/robots-given-same-rights-humans-2056 Robots Given Same Rights As Humans By 2056]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2057
| 150 Japanese settlers on Mars
| [https://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9011051292/will-japan-colonize-mars Will Japan colonize Mars?]
|
|-
| Colorado River runs dry
| [https://news.agu.org/press-release/colorado-river-reservoirs-could-bottom-out-from-warming-business-as-usual/ Colorado River Reservoirs Could Bottom Out From Warming]
|
|-
| 2058
| Smoking ends in New Zealand
| [https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10698966 Smoking to die out in NZ by 2058]
|
|-
| 2059
| Humans have domesticated robots
| [https://diehardempiricist.blogspot.co.nz/2012/05/6-may-2011-virtual-necking-demography.html Virtual necking, demography, and robots]
|
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2060
| Human race lives in peace
| [https://www.arasfoundation.org/vision.html ARAS vision/mission]
|
|-
| Extreme droughts across much of Earth
| [https://wdas.cosmosmagazine.com/news/extreme-drought-across-most-earth-30-years/ Extreme drought across most of Earth by 2060]
|
|-
| Global temperature rise reaches 4 °C
| {{w|Avoiding dangerous climate change}}
|
|-
| Oil runs out again
| [https://business.financialpost.com/2011/04/01/oil-may-run-out-by-2060-hsbc/?__lsa=98a7-5c61 Oil may run out by 2060: HSBC]
|
|-
| 2061
| Halley's comet returns
| Halley's comet returns to the inner solar system (the vicinity of earth and the sun) every 75.3 years. The last time it was near earth was in 1985-1986. When it next returns, its closest approach to the sun will occur on [https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi 28 July 2061.]
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2062
| Uganda hosts World Cup
| [https://shillingscents.blogspot.co.nz/2010/07/uganda-to-host-world-cup-in-2062.html Uganda to host world cup in 2062]
|
|-
| The Jetsons
| {{w|The Jetsons}} was an animated science fiction sitcom that first aired in 1962. The show was set in the year 2062.
|
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2063
| First human clones reach adulthood
| [https://au.ign.com/articles/2004/04/28/the-fall-last-days-of-gaia-diary-2 The Fall - Last Days of Gaia Diary #2]
|
|-
| Population of Moon reaches 100,000
| Reading Eagle newspaper article from July 17, 1963 - [https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1955&dat=19630717&id=PhgrAAAAIBAJ&sjid=B50FAAAAIBAJ&pg=4055,6599008 Moon Population of 100,000 Is Predicted for 2063] and [https://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2008/3/14/air-force-predictions-for-2063-1963.html Air Force Predictions for 2063 (1963)]
|
|-
| Population of Mars reaches 10,000
| [https://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2008/3/14/air-force-predictions-for-2063-1963.html Air Force Predictions for 2063 (1963)]
|
|-
| Spacecraft exceed speed of light
| Physics as currently understood states that it is impossible to exceed the speed of light. A monumental shift in our physics would have had to have occurred for this to come true. This is a reference to the 8th Star Trek feature Film: "Star Trek: First Contact" where Zefram Cochrane performs the first human Warp Flight on April 5, 2063.
|
|-
| 2064
| Clean Air Act finishes reducing haze in national parks to natural levels
| [https://www.cleanhouston.org/air/features/hazyfuture.htm State plan guarantees a hazy future for Texas’ wilderness areas]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2065
| Last coral reefs die out
| From an [https://www.edgeofexistence.org/coral_reef_conservation/coral_reef_video.php article about a video called Reefs on the Edge] set in 2065 where a 15-year-old girl tells her grandfather's stories of coral reefs, and their demise.
|
|-
| Chernobyl cleanup complete
| [https://rt.com/politics/chernobyl-clean-in-55-years-time/ Chernobyl clean in 55 years time?]
|
|-
| 2066
| Cyprus achieves its goal
| This is from some [https://www.cyprus-forum.com/cyprus33608-110.html#p665612 forum posts on the decendants of Cypriots] that lends support to the autonomy of Cyprus from Greek or Turkey.
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2067
| Americans live in domed cities and watch 3D TV
| The article at [https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/ncm/index.php/2013/11/15/artifact-of-the-month-slide-rule-1916/ Artifact of the Month: Slide rule, 1916] includes information from the International Slide Rule Museum that "in 1967, Keuffel & Esser Co. commissioned a study of the future, predicting that Americans in 2067 would live in domed cities and watch 3D television."
|
|-
| Redheads go extinct
| [https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/redhead-extinction.htm Are redheads going extinct?]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2068
| Ozone hole over Antarctic finishes recovering
| [https://www.theozonehole.com/recovery.htm NASA Study Finds Clock Ticking Slower On Ozone Hole Recovery]
|
|-
| Lord Jesus rules the Earth from Throne in Jerusalem.
| [https://myth-one.com/chapter_8.htm The Resurrections -- What Really Happens]
|
|-
| Entire world population gay due to chemicals in the water
| [https://thedailybanter.com/2013/01/alex-jones-the-government-is-trying-to-make-more-gay-people/ Alex Jones talks about chemicals that make people gay]
|
|-
| 2069
| Public masturbation legalized
| [https://uncyclopedia.com/wiki/UnNews:It's_still_not_okay_to_Pull_Your_Penis_out_in_Public It's still not okay to Pull Your Penis out in Public]
|
|-
| rowspan="3"| 2070
| World population peaks
| [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1108-global-population-to-peak-in-2070.html Global population to peak in 2070]
|
|-
| City-scale flooding disasters
| [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/3317033/City-scale-flooding-disasters-predicted-by-2070.html City-scale flooding disasters predicted by 2070]
|
|-
| 60% of world's energy comes from renewable sources
| [https://www.ssisolarenergy.com/solar-alternative-energy/ What Is Alternative Energy All About?]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2071
| Europe's temperatures rise by 3 °C
| [https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/climate-energy/climate-change-adaptation/adaptation-tools/project-catalog/peseta-projection-of-economic-impacts-of-climate Projection of Economic impacts of climate change in Sectors of the European Union based on bottom-up Analysis]
|
|-
| World summer temperatures rise by 5 °C
| [https://www.climateadaptation.eu/denmark/climate-change/ See "Air temperature changes in the 21st century"]
|
|-
| 2072
| US retirement age is set to 75
| [https://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/articles/2012/06/11/how-high-will-the-retirement-age-go Up to 70-80 years]
|
|-
| 2073
| Oceans do not rise one foot
| [https://www.skepticalscience.com/sea-level-rise-predictions.htm More like 2 feet]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2074
| Number of 100-year-olds reaches one million
| [https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-8848188.html UK to have 1 million centenarians by 2074]
|
|-
| Supertyphoons hit Japan
| [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/09/08/national/super-typhoons-in-store-as-seas-warm/ Super typhoons in store as seas warm]
|
|-
| 2075
| US retirement age set to 69
| [https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2010/1112/Retirement-age-at-69-Deficit-plan-hits-Social-Security Retirement age at 69? Deficit plan hits Social Security]
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2076
| Average scientific paper has more than 24 authors
| [https://doclib.uhasselt.be/dspace/bitstream/1942/871/1/yitzhaki373.PDF Multiple Authorship in Biochemistry and Other Fields] (PDF)
|
|-
| Social Security trust fund exhausted
| {{w|Social Security (United States)|Social Security}}
|
|-
| 2078
| Newspapers become obsolete and die out
| The same prediction was made for 2017 and 2022. Even when most prognosticators agree that something will happen, there can still be much disagreement about ''when'' it will happen.
|
|-
| rowspan="4"| 2079
| US debt reaches 716% of GDP
| {{w|US Debt}}
|
|-
| Lodgepole pines disappear from Northwest
| [https://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2011/feb/climate-change-causing-demise-lodgepole-pine-western-north-america Climate change causing demise of lodgepole pine in western North America]
|
|-
| Floods commonplace
| [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090108101627.htm Floods To Become Commonplace By 2080]
|
|-
| Religion marginalized
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11347073
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2080
| Federal spending reaches 70% of GDP
| [https://crfb.org/sites/default/files/our_debt_problems_are_far_from_solved_updated_2.pdf Our debt problems are far from solved] (PDF)
|
|-
| UK population doubles
| [https://forums.canadiancontent.net/international-politics/69603-britains-population-hit-110-million.html Britain's population to hit 110 million]
|
|-
| 2082
| World population declines to one billion
| [https://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html Population: The Elephant in the Room]
|
|-
| 2084
| Robot policemen introduced
| [https://www.thetechherald.com/articles/Robotic-cops-set-to-stamp-out-crime-by-2084 Robotic cops set to stamp out crime by 2084]
|
|-
| 2085
| US deficit reaches 62% of GDP
| [https://moneybob.com/2010/06/28/paul-krugman-throws-in-towel-says-were-headed-for-another-depression/ Paul Krugman Throws In Towel, Says We’re Headed For Another Depression]
|
|-
| 2088
| Japan becomes all-robot country
| [https://www.theretributioners.tv/erics-blog/2009/11/25/-japan-to-become-all-robot-country-by-2088.html Japan To Become All Robot Country By 2088]
|
|-
| 2089
| World halts fossil fuel use
| {{w|Fossil Fuels}}
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| 2090
| Global warming hits 7 °C
| [https://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/models-warn-of-7c-dangerous-climate-change-by-2090.html Models warn of 7C dangerous climate change by 2090]. Climate change, especially global warming, is a [[:Category:Climate change|recurring theme]] in xkcd.
|
|-
| Global warming hits 4 °C
| Summarized [https://www.global-warming-forecasts.com/2090-climate-change-global-warming-2090.php here]. In reference to Andy Bowers, “Analysis: Scientists say global warming could affect California's drinking water supply,” NPR All Things Considered, June 22, 2001
|
|-
| rowspan="11"| 2100
| Global warming around 5-7 °C
| [https://grist.org/article/bau-fd/ Hadley Center study warns of ‘catastrophic’ 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path]
|
|-
| Sea levels have risen by a meter or more
| {{w|Future sea level}}
|
|-
| Joshua trees nearly extinct
| [https://news.discovery.com/earth/joshua-trees-climate-change-110325.htm Joshua Trees Nearly Wiped Out by 2100?]
|
|-
| Earth's climate resembles that of the Cretaceous
| [https://www.pnas.org/content/107/2/576 Atmospheric CO2 concentrations during ancient greenhouse climates were similar to those predicted for A.D. 2100]
|
|-
| Germany tropical
| [https://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/climate-change-predictions-a-tropical-germany-by-2100-a-463378.html Climate Change Predictions: A Tropical Germany by 2100?]
|
|-
| Emperor penguins extinct
| [https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7851276.stm Emperor penguins face extinction]
|
|-
| Arctic permafrost thaws
| [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surface-permafrost-could/ Surface Permafrost Could Disappear by 2100]
|
|-
| Rising seas flood coastal cities
| [https://uanews.org/story/rising-seas-will-affect-major-us-coastal-cities-2100 Rising Seas Will Affect Major U.S. Coastal Cities by 2100]
|
|-
| Rain forests mostly gone due to climatic shifts
| [https://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/08/06/890970/-Massive-Loss-of-Rainforest-Species-by-2100-eKos-Earthship-Friday Massive Loss of Rainforest Species by 2100]
|
|-
| All coral reefs gone
| [https://planetsave.com/2010/10/15/coral-reefs-gone-by-2100/ Coral Reefs Gone by 2100?]
|
|-
| Gillette introduces 14-bladed razor
| Each iteration of the Gillette line of safety razors has one more blade than the previous one. MadTV has also [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FAP8o5ZEo0 parodied] this. Over five years before MadTV did so, the Australian comedy group the D-Generation parodied the first two-bladed razor as the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YleuLyCUx28 Gillette 3000] with 16 blades.
|
|-
| 2101
| WAR WAS BEGINNING
| References {{w|Zero Wing}}, a 1989 Japanese computer game set in 2101, famous for poorly translated English and the source for "{{w|All your base are belong to us}}". See [[286: All Your Base]]
|
|}

==Transcript==

:<big>'''THE FUTURE'''</big>
:'''According to Google search results'''
:Events for each year determined by the first page of Google search results for the phrases:
:"By <year>" "In year"
:"By the year <year>" "In the year <year>"
:"Will * by the year <year>" "Will * in the year <year>"
:"In <year>, * will" "By <year>, * will"
:
:;2012
::World population reaches 7 billion
::Flying cars reach market
::Canada cuts greenhouse emissions to 6% below 1990 levels as per Kyoto
::Apocalypse occurs
:;2013
::National debt paid off through President Clinton's plans
::Microchipping of all Americans begins
::Homelessness ended in Massachusetts
::Health care reform law repealed
:;2014
::US leaves Afghanistan
::GNU/Linux becomes dominant OS
:;2015
::New Horizons reaches Pluto
::Health care law causes hyperinflation
::192 UN member nations achieve millennium development goals:
::*Extreme poverty and hunger eradicated
::*Universal primary education implemented
::*Women empowered, gender equality reached
::*Environmental stability ensured
:;2016
::Baby boomers begin turning 65
::Android takes 38% of the smartphone market
::Android takes 45% of the smartphone market
::Windows Phone overtakes iOS in smartphones
:;2017
::China completes unmanned Lunar sample-return mission
::Social Security stops running surplus
::US budget balanced
::Newspapers become obsolete and die out
::Cosmetic surgery doubles
:;2018
::Social Security stops running surplus
::Jesus returns to Earth
:;2019
::Social Security stops running surplus
::Every baby has genes mapped at birth
:;2020
::Solar power becomes cheaper than fossil fuels
::Keyboards and mice become obsolete
::New Tappan Zee bridge constructed
:;2021
::US debt reaches 97% of GDP
::US unemployment falls to 2.8%
::Restored caliphate unifies Middle East
::Lake Mead evaporates
:;2022
::Kilimanjaro snow-free
::HTML 5 finished
::Newspapers become obsolete and die out
:;2023
::Jesus returns to Earth (again)
::US debt passes 100% of GDP
::All unprotected ancient forests gone from Pacific Northwest
:;2024
::Atlantis begins to reappear
::Orangutans extinct in wild
::China lands men and women on the moon
::NASA sets up permanent moon base
::Female professionals pass males in pay
:;2025
::World population reaches 8 billion
::Two billion people face water shortages
::62 MPG cars introduced
::US power fades
:;2026
::Atlantis emerges completely
::Rock Bands die out
::US debt paid off
::Car accidents cease
::West coast falls into ocean
:;2027
::Japan introduces new fastest maglev train
::Lyndon Larouche-planned Mars colony established
::Social Security stops running surplus
:;2028
::Tobacco outlawed
::40% of coral reefs gone
::US debt paid off
::Social Security stops running surplus
:;2029
::Social Security trust fund exhausted
::Computers pass the Turing Test
::Aging reversed
::Wikipedia reaches 30 million articles
:;2030
::Half of Amazon rain forest lost to logging
::Cancer deaths double from 2008 levels
::Arctic ice-free in summer
:;2031
::Computers controlled by thought
::Realtors replaced by technology
::Social Security trust fund exhausted
:;2032
::"Big One" hits San Francisco
::US elects first married lesbian president
::Entire world converted to Christianity
:;2033
::Kilimanjaro ice disappears
::India becomes superpower
::Europe reaches Mars
:;2034
::US diabetes cases double, treatment costs triple
::US builds autonomous robot army
:;2035
::80% of America's energy comes from renewable sources
::Himalayan glaciers down 80% in size
::Arctic sea lane opens
:;2036
::80% of US has access to high-speed rail
::Asteroid Apophis hits/misses Earth
:;2037
::Arctic ice-free in September
::Social Security trust fund exhausted
:;2038
::32-bit timestamps role over, causing Y2K-level chaos
::"Big One" hits California
:;2039
::US population hits 400 million
::Severe heat waves become commonplace
::Scientology becomes majority religion in US
:;2040
::Arctic summers ice-free
::Nanotechnology makes humans immortal
:;2041
::Social Security trust fund exhausted
:;2042
:;2043
::World population passes 9 billion
:;2044
::Mankind genetically engineered to be happy
::Childhood obesity reaches 100%
:;2045
::Humans and machines merge
:;2046
::World's natural resources depleted
:;2047
::World ruled by banks and corporations
::Tobacco industry fails
::US begins using autonomous attack drones
:;2048
::Salt-water fish extinct from overfishing
::Unisex bathing suits cover body from shoulder to ankle
::Entire US population overweight
:;2049
::$1.000 computer exceeds computational ability of humanity
::Singularity occurs
::Fishing industry collapses
:;2050
::80% of Earth's population lives in urban centers
::China controls space
::Sex with robots possible
::Cars banned from European cities
::One million species extinct from climate change
:;2051
::Atmosphere escapes into space
:;2052
::Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security spending exceed total US revenue
:;2053
::US budget balanced
::Majority of Americans in prison
::Cars driven by dogs
:;2054
::Hunger becomes unimaginable global problem
:;2055
::Atmospheric CO2 doubled
::Oil runs out
::Copper, tin, lead, gold, and nickel all exhausted
:;2056
::RFID-tagged driverless cars
::Robots given same rights as humans
:;2057
::150 Japanese settlers on Mars
::Colorado River runs dry
:;2058
::Smoking ends in New Zealand
:;2059
::Humans have domesticated robots
:;2060
::Human race lives in peace
::Extreme droughts across much of Earth
::Global temperature rise reaches 4°C
::Oil runs out again
:;2061
::Halley's comet returns
:;2062
::Uganda hosts World Cup
::The Jetsons
:;2063
::First human clones reach adulthood
::Population of Moon reaches 100,000
::Population of Mars reaches 10,000
::Spacecraft exceed speed of light
:;2064
::Clean Air Act finishes reducing haze in national parks to natural levels
:;2065
::Last coral reefs die out
::Chernobyl cleanup complete
:;2066
::Cyprus achieves its goal
:;2067
::Americans live in domed cities and watch 3D TV
::Redheads go extinct
:;2068
::Ozone hole over Antarctic finishes recovering
::Lord Jesus rules the Earth from Throne in Jerusalem.
::Entire world population gay due to chemicals in the water
:;2069
::Public masturbation legalized
:;2070
::World population peaks
::City-scale flooding disasters
::60% of world's energy comes from renewable sources
:;2071
::Europe's temperatures rise by 3°C
::World summer temperatures rise by 5°C
:;2072
::US retirement age is set to 75
:;2073
::Oceans do not rise one foot
:;2074
::Number of 100-year-olds reaches one million
::Supertyphoons hit Japan
:;2075
::US retirement age set to 69
:;2076
::Average scientific paper has more than 24 authors
::Social Security trust fund exhausted
:;2077
:;2078
::Newspapers become obsolete and die out
:;2079
::US debt reaches 716% of GDP
::Lodgepole pines disappear from Northwest
::Floods commonplace
::Religion marginalized
:;2080
::Federal spending reaches 70% of GDP
::UK population doubles
:;2081
:;2082
::World population declines to one billion
:;2083
:;2084
::Robot policemen introduced
:;2085
::US deficit reaches 62% of GDP
:;2086
:;2087
:;2088
::Japan becomes all-robot country
:;2089
::World halts fossil fuel use
:;2090
::Global warming hits 7°C
::Global warming hits 4°C
:;2091
:;2092
:;2093
:;2094
:;2095
:;2096
:;2097
:;2098
:;2099
:;2100
::Global warming around 5-7°C
::Sea levels have risen by a meter or more
::Joshua trees nearly extinct
::Earth's climate resembles that of the Cretaceous
::Germany tropical
::Emperor penguins extinct
::Arctic permafrost thaws
::Rising seas flood coastal cities
::Rain forests mostly gone due to climatic shifts
::All coral reefs gone
::Gillette introduces 14-bladed razor
:;2101
::WAR WAS BEGINNING

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Large drawings]]
[[Category:Timelines]]
[[Category:Google Search]]
[[Category:Earthquakes]]
[[Category:Climate change]]
[[Category:Singularity]]
[[Category:Renewable energy]]
[[Category:Smartphones]]
[[Category:Wikipedia]]

3045: AlphaMove

2025-02-18T07:48:47Z

172.71.178.157: /* Explanation */ Not unlikely, but the differences (different games, vastly different proficiencies) make me want to hedge your bets (and stopped me mentioning it, long ago). If he'd called it AlphaChess, *that* would have convinced me of direct parody.

{{comic
| number = 3045
| date = January 31, 2025
| title = AlphaMove
| image = alphamove_2x.png
| imagesize = 500x526px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = It struggles a little with complex positions, like when there are an even number of moves and it has to round down, but when run against itself it's capable of finding some novelties. At one point I saw six knights on the board at once; Stockfish rarely exceeds four.
}}

==Explanation==
This comic shows a new {{w|chess engine}}, presumably created by [[Randall]], which takes a list of all legal moves (in {{w|Algebraic notation (chess)|algebraic notation}}) in alphabetical order and chooses the median. The name may also be intended to invoke {{w|AlphaGo}}, the first computer program to beat a professional human Go player.

A playable implementation of this game can be found here: [https://enn-nafnlaus.github.io/AlphaMove/alphamove.html AlphaMove].

Algebraic notation begins with a symbol for which piece is being moved, which is always the first letter of the piece name, with the exception of knights (N) and pawns (nothing). This is then followed by the square that the piece is being moved to. For example, 'Rc4' would indicate a move that moved a rook to c4. Other symbols include a lowercase x before the destination, indicating that the move is a capture; a plus sign (+) after the destination, indicating that the move places the opposing king in check; and a hash sign (#) after the destination, indicating that the move places the opposing king in checkmate, thus winning the game. There are also O-O and O-O-O notations, which indicate that a player is castling kingside or queenside, respectively.

In practice, this algorithm runs into a few issues. As seen in the comic, the algorithm rarely moves bishops and rooks due to their relative lack of moves in the early game, and their tendency to inhabit the edges of any list when they do have sortable moves. Among basic moves, only pawns destined to move in the first two files of a board can ever sort higher than bishops, and nothing other than another rook can be closer to the far end than a rook. The algorithm favors knight and king moves, with entries starting with the most alphabetically middling "K" and "N" list entries, and (to a lesser extent) pawns destined to move up the right side of the board, the "h"-file pawn generally having the greatest statistical chance. Castling moves would also occur near the middle of the list, as they are denoted with letter 'O' characters as O-O or O-O-O. The shortcomings of AlphaMove are instantly apparent from looking at the game board presented in the comic; roughly ten moves into the game, White has lost three pawns, captured nothing, and advanced their king into the open rather than developing any pieces, while Black (presumably being played by a 'stronger' conventional chess engine) has taken control of the center with a knight and two pawns, developed a bishop, and advanced their queen to f2.

The ''actual'' middle of the list might vary away from the usual alphabetic median if the moves (and the pieces removed by the opponent) are heavily biased to a particular subset of player-pieces. It is conceivable that an opponent could identify the AlphaMove strategy as being used, and then use their foreknowledge of the algorithm's 'developing game' to strategically make (normally non-optimal) moves designed explicitly to force the algorithm down their own choice of path, such as targeting undefended rooks and queens (either capturing them with impunity, or just strategically restricting their movements by moving into contact with them in a way that would normally be a suicidal sacrifice), in order to make certain other pieces take moves more advantageous to the opponent. However, given the established failings of uncritically sticking to the algorithmic plan, it is probably ''vastly'' more effort to precisely engineer a given game-state than to merely play properly and respond with half-decent responses to the overwhelmingly sub-optimal series of moves generated by AlphaMove. For example, setting Stockfish (Black) against AlphaMove (White) results in the following fifteen-move victory for black:
# f3 e5
# e4 Bc5
# d4 Bxd4
# f4 d5
# g4 Qh4+
# Ke2 Qf2+
# Kd3 dxe4+
# Kxe4 Nf6+
# Kd3 e4+
# Kc4 Be6+
# Kb5 a6+
# Ka5 Bc3+
# Ka4 b5+
# Ka3 Qc5+
# b4 Qxb4#
On the other hand, a person playing black who knew that white was using AlphaMove could win in five moves (possibly fewer):
# f3 e5
# e4 Qf6
# d4 Qxf3
# dxe5 Bc5
# g4 Qf2#
However, chess tournaments do not award more points for quicker victories, and playing like this would be risky. If White initially uses AlphaMove and Black goes for the five-move checkmate, White could capture Black's undefended queen on move three, revealing the AlphaMove emulation to just be a ruse to get Black to expose a queen. White would then be in a winning position after 4. Nxf3, 4.Qxf3, or 4. gxf3, so opting for the fifteen-move mate would likely be safer. Indeed, playing Stockfish against itself after 4. Nxf3 yields the following 29-move win for white:
# f3 e5
# e4 Qf6
# d4 Qxf3
# Nxf3 exd4
# Bc4 b5
# Bd5 c6
# Bb3 c5
# Bd5 Nc6
# Ng5 Nh6
# Qh5 Kd8
# Nxf7+ Nxf7
# Qxf7 Bb7
# Bf4 c4
# O-O Bc5
# Qxg7 Rf8
# Na3 Rxf4
# Rxf4 a6
# Rf7 d3+
# Kh1 Ne7
# Bxb7+ Rc8
# Rxe7 Bxe7
# Qg8+ Bf8
# Qxf8+ Kc7
# Qxc8+ Kb6
# Qxd7 d2
# Qc6+ Ka7
# Bc8 d1=Q+
# Rxd1 c3
# Qxb7#
Thus, the AlphaMove ruse, where White pretends to use AlphaMove in order to trick Black into hanging the black queen, can be advantageous for White if Black falls for it. However, even after 1. f3 e5 2. e4, White has a weakened kingside early in the game and has not been the most productive at allowing for future development, so Black should focus on development (e.g., 2. … Nc6 or 2. … Bc5) and use the advantage that Black already has instead of risking falling into a trap. (Of course, the AlphaMove ruse would only have any chance of working if the opponent reads xkcd, which is another reason to not try it.)

Even if AlphaMove ever found one or more of its potential moves to be one that happens to result in checkmate, it has no reason to do anything other than choose its "mid-list move", as described, and the chances are high that such a mate would never be invoked. Along those lines, Qa4+ is a relatively safe move to create a short-term check, to put immediate pressure upon the Black king, and potentially a longer term inconvenience with 'only' a predictable response preventing it from developing into a mate. But it is not in the right list position to attempt, never mind whether it would then be correctly followed up.

This engine may be named for and inspired by the real chess engine {{w|AlphaZero}}, or {{w|AlphaGo}} which plays a different game but has a more similar name. Another real name, mentioned in the title text, is {{w|Stockfish (chess)|Stockfish}}, a widely used (and powerful) chess engine.

On this board, Black can win the game instantly with ...Bb4{{w|Checkmate|#}}. Rather than do anything to defend against this, White just moves an unrelated piece, almost certainly losing immediately afterward. Randall has also chosen a setup where the king is placed in a position where it cannot make any legal moves, thus removing it from the list of pieces that can perform any moves. Almost certainly this was a choice, both to make the list without king moves and also to make it pretty easy to see how one more move would be checkmate.

The title of the comic is a play on words. As the name of the chess engine, it refers to the strategy of choosing moves based on alphabetical ordering, while in popular usage, an "alpha move" is an action that would assert dominance over someone else. This makes it an ironic name for the chess engine; rather than asserting dominance, it loses quickly.

The title text mentions games with "six knights", which implies that two pawns have been promoted to knights. Pawns can promote to bishop, knight, queen or rook, so the middle of this list is tied between knight and queen. It is rare that a pawn is promoted to a knight; in most situations a queen would be preferred. The exceptions (perhaps where promoting to queen would cause either an immediate stalemate from what was a winnable position, or let the king survive on a square that's a knight's move away from the newly-promoted queen) are common in contrived chess puzzles but rare in actual gameplay. Promotion to rook or bishop would be even rarer, as these pieces have fewer move possibilities than a queen without the alternative moves of the knight. It would probably be due to a 'forced' promotion, in lieu of moving a more vital piece currently perfectly positioned for the endgame, and the player concerned should be perfectly aware of they must or must not promote to, ahead of time. However, when AlphaMove plays itself, the pawns tend to preferentially move up (and down) the right-hand side of the board, and may meet each other in double-files, or more, ''possibly'' with the opportunity to cross over to capture an opponent. If the alphabetical balance of moves becomes such that multiple right-hand files of pawns are dodging past each other, it is not unrealistic that multiple pawns would reach the respective back ranks and 'choose' to promote to knights.

Chess is a [[:Category:Chess|recurring theme]] on xkcd, with another recent example being [[3036: Chess Zoo]].

==Transcript==
:[A standard chessboard is shown with Black at the top. The boards "black squares" are light gray. Black (which is drawn as dark gray) has made moves resulting in Qf2, Nd4, e4, a5, Bc5, e5 and Ne7 while other black pieces are in starting positions. White has made moves resulting in c4, f4, h4, Kc3, Ne2 and three white pawns are removed from the board while other white pieces including a- and b-pawns are in starting positions. Two squares associated with white's move Ne2 are highlighted in yellow, it has moved there from its starting position g1.]

:[To the right of the chess board is a vertical list of possible moves listed in alphabetical order. The text is in light gray, except the move Ne2 in the middle which is black and highlighted in yellow. Two light gray double arrows with a line at the end of each arrow head goes from the top to just above the yellow move, and from just below this to the bottom. A short but thick black arrow points in between the space between the two gray arrows pointing at the yellow move.]
:a3
:a4
:b3
:b4
:Bd2
:Bd3
:Be2
:Be3
:Bg2
:Bh3
:f5
:fxe5
:h5
:Na3
:Nd2
: '''Ne2'''
:Nf3
:Nh3
:Qa4+
:Qb3
:Qc2
:Qd2
:Qd3
:Qe1
:Qe2
:Qf3
:Qg4
:Qh5
:Qxd4
:Rh2
:Rh3

:[Caption below the panel:]
:My new AlphaMove chess engine, which sorts the list of legal moves alphabetically and picks the middle one, was quickly defeated by stronger engines.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Comics with lowercase text]]
[[Category:Chess]]

Talk:2922: Pub Trivia

2024-04-22T11:14:01Z

172.71.178.157:

I expect that the BTS question is a reference to the traditional Korean system of counting a person's age in units of Sal which started at 1 and incremented on the first day of the year. Since this system was abandoned on official documents in 2023, but is still in use in some contexts, the question of whether every member of BTS had a "birthday" on the first day of the year is ambiguous. [[User:Philhower|Philhower]] ([[User talk:Philhower|talk]]) 14:13, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

question 5, planets exist outside the solar system, adding to the ambiguity. [[User:Philhower|Philhower]] ([[User talk:Philhower|talk]]) 14:15, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
:One of the requirements in the definition of a planet is that it orbits the Sun, so no there are no planets outside the Solar system. [[User:Tharkon|Tharkon]] ([[User talk:Tharkon|talk]]) 17:50, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

::{{w|NASA}} disagrees. [https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/ Exoplanet Archive] shows 5612 confirmed planets. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 20:55, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
::: The IAU is the body that defines such things - and they do say that planets have to orbit the Sun...things that orbit other stars are properly called "exo-planets". But still - do we include dwarf planets? Rogue planets? It's definitely a crazy-vague question. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.219|172.70.211.219]] 21:05, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
:::: the IAU is one body that claims the authority to define such things, but their authority is not recognized by any of the things they are claiming the right to name. (Except for a very small part of earth, mostly made of humans) [[Special:Contributions/172.69.58.203|172.69.58.203]] 00:10, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
::::That seems ridiculous, "If it isn't one of ours it don't count"? That'd be like saying "They're only 'cars' if they use North American roads, in other countries using THEIR roads you have to call them exo-cars!". LOL! And every future/space-based fiction calls them planets, just makes more sense not to be so arbitrarily exclusionary. Ours isn't the only sun, we shouldn't pretend it has some aspect that makes it count more than others - outside of that it's the one with us. [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 06:09, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
::::: Correction, the IAU definition explicitly states that it is only about planets within the solar system and has no comment about exoplanets one way or the other. Presumably, to leave some flexibility on all the weird edge cases that are bound to come up with exoplanets. https://www.iau.org/static/resolutions/Resolution_GA26-5-6.pdf [[Special:Contributions/172.68.195.213|172.68.195.213]] 07:55, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
::::Gas giants should be excluded too - they're not planets - just wannabe stars.[[Special:Contributions/172.70.163.31|172.70.163.31]] 08:34, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

: I think the correct answer is 0: before the solar system formed there were no planets. So, originally, there would have been none. If exo-planets count, going back to the beginning of time gives the same answer: when the universe came into existence during the big bang there were no stars, let alone planets orbiting them. Even religion agrees: in the beginning God created the earth and the heavens, but the sun came later, so technically earth was not a planet since it didn't orbit anything.--[[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.49|162.158.62.49]] 22:23, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

As for question 9, please see the note about the history of Austrailia's capitals at: [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_national_capitals#Oceania]]. and the page regarding countries with multiple capitals [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_multiple_capitals]] [[User:Philhower|Philhower]] ([[User talk:Philhower|talk]]) 14:24, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
: See Also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_capital_cities List of Australian capital cities] - As an Australian, I believe many would also consider the major city in their state/territory to be a capital city, although not the capital of Australia.

About the alt text, London is certainly in Europe. The question itself is malformed because "Europe (or 'the EU')" is not self-consistent: there is a lot of European countries that are not part of the EU. [[User:RedGolpe|RedGolpe]] ([[User talk:RedGolpe|talk]]) 14:32, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
:The "Greater London" answer is also tricksy, as the "ceremonial county" of GL {{w|London boroughs|may not include}} the additional area of the City Of London (though it does include the City Of Westminster, which is sometimes the trick answer to certain trick questions that a quizmaster might attempt to pull). The ''administrative'' Greater London is the ceremonial one ''plus'' CoL, however... [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.19|172.70.162.19]] 15:04, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
::I would argue London is not in Europe because there is no clear definition for Europe as a geographic area, it really doesn't have an eastern border that is not arbitrary, so the only clearly defined thing Europe can refer to is the EU. [[User:Tharkon|Tharkon]] ([[User talk:Tharkon|talk]]) 17:50, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
:::London, France is both in Europe and the EU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London,_France [[Special:Contributions/172.70.163.49|172.70.163.49]] 18:00, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
:::While the eastern border of Europe is not clearly defined I am not aware that there is any definition of (geographic) Europe that excludes the islands (and subsequently London) --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.202.135|162.158.202.135]] 21:24, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
::::There's "mainland Europe", excluding islands. Or at least any of several possibly island archipeligos and/or island nationstates. e.g. Mont-Saint-Michel might not be (exluded, that is, due to being French and having a (tide-dependant) ground access), Jersey would be (British Crown Territory island), Malta probably (island state), Sicily would depend on your thinking (it being Italian, and much larger than the strait that makes it an island offshoot). Most of Scandinavia might be interestingly included (with Denmark) or excluded (with Iceland), according to context. Even Gibraltar might or might not be, depending upon upon the thinking (or lack of it) behind the use of the term. (But, fiddling around the edges aside, (the English) London is not in "mainland Europe" and hasn't been for maybe a full 10kY before it became "London" in any useful sense.) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.163.49|172.70.163.49]] 23:44, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
::::: The phrase "continental Europe" is also used, and might be implied by a British person saying "I travelled around Europe last year". [[Special:Contributions/172.69.195.54|172.69.195.54]] 15:01, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
::::: The (semi-)apocryphal headline "Fog In Channel, Continent Cut Off" is perhaps indicative of the {{w|Continental Europe#Great Britain and Ireland}} British collective mindset (of which I must therefore be a component, albeit not at that end of the spectrum). [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.71|172.71.242.71]] 15:39, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
:::I'd say The European Council has at least as good (or bad, depending which way you look at it) a claim to be 'Europe' as the EU does, and London (through the UK) is in that (for now, anyway).[[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.55|172.71.242.55]] 09:07, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benxi Benxi Lake] is actually considered to be the smallest lake in the world. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.135.205|172.70.135.205]]
:{{cn}}[[Special:Contributions/172.70.86.176|172.70.86.176]] 14:40, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I never realized how challenging it is to edit pages when they've just been posted. Makes me long for something like Google docs.[[Special:Contributions/172.68.3.43|172.68.3.43]] 14:39, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

People, who are born on 29th February don't have a birthday in years which are not leap years. However, 2024, when this comic was published is a leap year. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.95.9|162.158.95.9]] 14:40, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

"5. How many planets were there originally?" This could also refer even back to the start of the universe, when there were (likely) just 0 planets. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.86.101|162.158.86.101]] 14:43, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I anticiated a lot of Edit Conflicts, but not actually quite so many as to not to be able to resolve my edits with everyone else's. This is the bare-bones that I was putting in (until finding multiple attempts tried to be added consecutively...
{{cot}}
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Question !! Problem !! Possible answer(s)
|-
| Which member of BTS has a birthday this year?
| Every living person has a birthday this year (being a leap-year, this includes those born on 29/Feb).
|
|-
| How many sides does a platonic solid have?
| There are five (or [[2781: The Six Platonic Solids|six]]) platonic solids, each with a different number of sides.
| 4, 6, 8, 12 or 20
|-
| What is the smallest lake in the world?
| The distinction between a small lake and a pond, pool or puddle (for example) is difficult to define.
|
|-
| Which Steven Spielberg movie features more shark attacks? Jaws (1875) or Lincoln (2012)
| Not a problem, as Lincoln has very few shark attacks.{{Citation needed}} The problem is that barely anyone will ''not'' be able to correctly answer this.
|
|-
| How many planets were there originally?
| Contextually vague. At what time and within what volume of space, and what is the scope of 'planet' defined here?
|
|-
| What NFL player has scored the most points outside of a game?
| Outside of (NFL) games, individuals may accumulate points in any number of ways (e.g. Scrabble)
|
|-
| The Wright brothers built the first airplane. Who built the last one?
| Until no further planes are built, individuals/teams/companies continue to build (to completion) ever more examples, changing the answer possibly moment to moment.
|
|-
| Is every even number greater than 2 the sum of two primes?
| This is a {{w|Goldbach's conjecture|currently unanswered question}}.
|
|-
| Not counting Canberra, what city is the capital of Australia?
| Canberra is ''the'' capital of Australia, a fairly well known 'obscure' fact. Each Australian territory also has their own state capital, so there is not one other ''single'' example.
|
|-
| Who played the drums?
| Lack of context. With which group? For which song? For which (re-)recording? At which event?
|
|-
| Where is London located? (a) The British Isles (b) Great Britain and Northern Ireland (c) The UK (d) Europe (or 'the EU') (e) Greater London
| Almost all of these are correct (though London is geographically in Europe but no longer in the EU).
|}

This is apparently deliberate (at least on behalf of the organisers), perhaps to upset or otherwise impede groups of overconfident quizzers who would otherwise dominate any genuinely good quiz.
{{cob}}
...make use of it however you wish, anybody who has the time not to keep chasing all the simultaneous edits. (The above is a bit behind 'perfection', and lacks many of the integrations, wikilinks and adjustments I had made. I backspaced out of the edit I had finally reached, before remembering to take a full copy into my paste-buffer!) [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.115|172.70.90.115]] 14:53, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I thought the answer to #2 could be 1, because as 3D solids they only have one surface. I would guess the player with the most points outside of a game is the one who's played idlers (like Cookie Clicker) the longest — though I suppose those could be considered "inside of a game" as well. Also, I played the drums. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.254.143|172.70.254.143]] 15:33, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
:The answer to #2 is '2 - the in-side and the out-side'.[[Special:Contributions/172.69.43.242|172.69.43.242]] 15:46, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Considering the platonic solids explanation lists all the correct answers, could someone include a list of all the members of BTS and their respective birthdays? Bing copilot suggests the following:

1. **Jin (Kim Seok-jin)**:
- Birthday: **December 4, 1992**

2. **Suga (Min Yoon-gi)**:
- Birthday: **March 9, 1993**

3. **J-Hope (Jung Hoseok)**:
- Birthday: **February 18, 1994**

4. **RM (Kim Nam-joon)**:
- Birthday: **September 12, 1994**

5. **Jimin (Park Ji-min)**:
- Birthday: **October 13, 1995**

6. **V (Kim Tae-Hyung)**:
- V's birthday is **December 30**, but the year is not mentioned in the provided information.

7. **Jungkook (Jeon Jungkook)**:
- Jungkook's birthday is **September 1**, but the year is not mentioned in the provided information.
[[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.19|172.70.162.19]] 15:48, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

: I'm not opposed to adding BTS birthdays, but I think it should be done by someone more knowledgeable about the band than me. Birthdays can be a surprisingly nuanced subject.[[User:Comatoran|Comatoran]] ([[User talk:Comatoran|talk]]) 15:59, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
:Wikipedia says {{w|V_(singer)|'95}} and {{w|Jungkook|'97}} respectively[[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.37|172.70.162.37]] 16:04, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

London is both a City (London) and a City within a City (The City of London) and an Area (Greater London)
There are also many more places named London than the one that is the Capital of the UK .. Serbia, France, Canada (Which is larger and the one in the UK), 10 in the USA, and one on Kiribati 17:56, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
:Are you saying London, Ontario, Canada is BIGGER than the more famous London, England??? That's a country capital! Is that seriously true? I'm Canadian, I don't know London, ON as being THAT big... [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[7User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 05:52, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
::It's very unlikely to be larger in population terms than the (common!) wider definition of the main UK London, as that would make it larger than any other city in Canada by a large margin. In terms of area, London ON is very likely to be larger than the City of London (which is surprisingly small). More widely, the definition of what actually is a "city" is more complex than it appears to be at first glance; administrative areas (what official statistics are collected for) are often quite different from where the bulk of people are. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.25|162.158.74.25]] 07:20, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
:::Some wikipedia figures, for reference:
:::*{{w|London, Ontario}} = 168.76 sq mi, Population 422,324
:::*{{w|City of London}}, subset of Capital of UK = 1.12 sq mi, Population 8,618
:::*{{w|London}}, administrative/etc capital of UK = 606.96 sq mi, Population 8,799,800
:::*{{w|London, Belgrade}} = a 'neighbourhood' (<1 sq mi?), Population unknown
:::*{{w|London, France}} = 'a small agricultural village'
:::*...
:::*{{w|List of minor planets: 8001–9000#837|8837 London}} = 1.5 mi diameter (~28s q mi, ~14 cu mi?), Population... some of the {{w|Clangers}}?
:::I skipped a few of the others (e.g. the various US ones: cities, townships, communities)... [[Special:Contributions/162.158.230.46|162.158.230.46]] 18:10, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm surprised there were no phishing-type questions (i.e. "what are the last four digits of your social security number", "what are the three numbers on the back of your debit card", etc).22:33, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

The only correct answer(s) to "who played the drums" would be "the drummer", or "twelve drummers", but I would accept Phil Collins, Alex Van Halen, or Ringo Starr for half a point each [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.100|108.162.241.100]] 02:40, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
: "Who played the drums" is Keith Moon; in this cryptic clue, "Who" is the name of the band, and "played the drums" indicates the drummer; hence the answer is Keith Moon, the drummer of The Who. [[User:Sabik|Sabik]] ([[User talk:Sabik|talk]]) 04:29, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
:Clearly the correct answer is 'Animal'.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.176|172.71.178.176]] 08:45, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

I asked my Mom these questions & she said the answer to #7 so flatly: ''Boeing ''
[[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 02:44, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

On the Capital of Australia: Melbourne hosted parliament before Canberra was built, and Jervis Bay was part of the ACT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jervis_Bay_Territory

Are there people outside of the USA that are surprised to learn that Washington D.C. is the capital of the USA, rather than New York, Los Angeles, Chicago etc. due to its relatively small population? ("only" ~670000 in 2024) [[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]]) 06:50, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I came here all prepared to say that the Title Text should have Ontario, Canada as a (likewise correct) answer, but I see somebody already put that into the table, LOL! I feel like the "More Reasonable" version of the planet question should NOT mention Pluto, it should be the question IMPLIED in the comic whose answer is 9 (such as "How many planets were originally in our Solar System", but without the ambiguity of "originally". Basically a question whose answer is 9, pushing people to include Pluto, while allowing people the mistake of saying the current answer of 8, but mentioning Pluto would ruin that/the question). [[User:NiceGuy1|NiceGuy1]] ([[User talk:NiceGuy1|talk]]) 05:52, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

There could also be a person Named "London" who is located somewhere, perhaps in the same bar (or not) -- [[Special:Contributions/172.70.46.71|172.70.46.71]] 12:13, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_%28name%29 [[Special:Contributions/172.70.42.31|172.70.42.31]] 16:27, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

I thought I knew the minimum size of a lake by definition, at least in the US, but I just found different authorities asserting 1, 10, and 20 acres as the distinction between a lake and a pond. Two non-metric distinctions are that a lake has an aphotic (dark) zone, or a lake is fed and drained by a river, but they don't help here. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.43.53|172.70.43.53]] 16:22, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

For the love of god can we stop saying that Pluto was "demoted" to a dwarf planet? It didn't have its category changed, it had its category defined (for the first time!). It was a founding member of a newly named category. And it's not like planets are better than dwarf planets, they're just different. (I'm going to die on this hill, ain't I?)
[[Special:Contributions/172.68.34.16|172.68.34.16]] 01:35, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
:Yes, you probably are. When it happened, many people, including astronomers, considered it a downgrade. There's some prestige in being a planet -- the Sun and the planets are considered the most significant objects in the Solar System. The qualifier suggests that it's less important than the "real" planets, and was kicked out of the planet club for being deficient in some way. Maybe we need a campaign from dwarf humans to remind everyone that they're just smaller, but they have no less dignity. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 23:41, 21 April 2024 (UTC)
:I'll cheerfully die there with you. But I'll also point out while I'm doing so that if it's a 'dwarf ''planet''', then clearly it is still a planet. I mean, people would look at you funny if you tried to claim that a dwarf elephant wasn't an elephant. And perhaps more pertinently, a dwarf star is still a star. So the answer to 'how many planets are in our solar system?' is 'at least 16 that we know of - depends how far down you count. Unless you discount the gas giants, in which case you need to subtract four. Or maybe two. Wait - how many are we on now again?'[[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.157|172.71.178.157]] 11:14, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

For the planet question there's also Theia, which is theorized to have been a planet prior to smashing into proto Earth and forming the moon and modern larger Earth. So there used to be at least nine planets by the current definition in our solar system.
[[Special:Contributions/162.158.155.20|162.158.155.20]] 03:50, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

For question #8, it's not that mathematicians were idling around. A lot of partial results were made, see Wiki. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.160.33|172.71.160.33]] 08:22, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I was confused by this question at first. The answer is "no." It is disproved by example. 21+3=24 21 is not a prime. 24 is even. {{unsigned ip|162.158.154.65|19:38, 21 April 2024
:24 is the sum of many pairs of numbers. Amongst those pairs (as with any even number >2) may be one ore more pairs of primes (even 2, if you count 1 as a prime - though generally one doesn't). 24 is (just looking at the odd numbers >1) 21+3, 19+5 (both primes!), 17+7 (both primes), 15+9 (no), 13+11 (both primes) and then of course the reverses of these (if you count those). So 24 is the sum of two primes (three, or six, times). 4 is just the sum of 2+2, 6 is only 3+3, 8 is only 5+3... And every even number checked from there on up ''can'' be expressed as the sum of two primes (at least once). But is there ever a point at which there is an even number that is not?
:With 3, 5 and 7 being primes, then you can definitely say that if N is an even number that has (or even relies upon) a solution with 3, then N+2 and N+4 are, which would be answerable by the same sum but with 5 or 7 instead. Plus N+8 (3->11), N+10 (3>13). And maybe you can fill in the N+6 and N+8 by the ''other'' prime used being also a suitable twin prime that you can swap out for the P±2 partner. But only if it's the right prime of any given pair, and not all primes are twins, so there's a lot more to consider about whether any given advancement up the even-numnber ladder can be answered by a suitable pair of primes.
: e.g. 15440=7717+7723 (one possible solution). 15442 therefore needs +2 to that. But 7717 and 7723 ar adjacent primes that areen't two apart (so you can't just add two to 7717 and have 7723 + 7723) and the next adjacent primes are 7703 and 7727 (not two apart, and not obviously useful to go 7717->7703, either). So there must be another solution (theoretically, but also proven by having been checked). By doing ''quite a bit'' of to-and-fro (if that's how we're doing it), we can finally announce that 15442=7649+7793 (but I also found 7523+7919, 7541+7901, 7559+7883 and 7589+7853, before I stopped the search). So It works up to 15442.
:15444? Well, neither 7649 or 7793 have a +2 prime-partner. But 7589 is followed by 7591 (as a new partner to 7853). And 7559 is followed by 7561, so 7561+7883 would also be an answer. There will (probably) be many others.
:But will there ''always'' be many others? Or even just the one? I'm sure someone has been counting how many unique (bidirectional) solutions each number has, and probably there are some that ''only just'' get the requisite single pair of primes that sum to it. Could it ever not even manage that? Those actually familiar with the efforts to prove the conjecture would know, rather than a fool like me coming fresh to the problem. (Relatively, that is... I already knew about it, but I've never tried to wade into the actual theory until right now, and this random example I set up to 'explain' this, just now.) [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.175|172.71.242.175]] 21:01, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

*About Q2: the "number of sides" may be "the average number of sides" of a Platonic solid, which is 10, despite having no Platonic decahedron
*About Q10: with a correct list of answers, it ''may'' be kept as-is with having to select the drummer(s).
[[Special:Contributions/162.158.78.38|162.158.78.38]] 10:47, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Talk:259: Clichéd Exchanges

2024-03-12T02:40:50Z

172.71.178.157:

Is this correction satisfactory? Can I remove the tag? [[User:ImVeryAngryItsNotButter|ImVeryAngryItsNotButter]] ([[User talk:ImVeryAngryItsNotButter|talk]]) 00:54, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
:I removed it, because it looks good to me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.219|108.162.250.219]] 13:32, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

I thought the cliche being referred to was "wrecked 'em? I hardly knew 'em!" (a double entendre on "rectum" ) http://ask.metafilter.com/122210/JokeFilter-What-is-the-origin-of-the-joke-with-the-punchline-rectum-damn-near-killed-him [[Special:Contributions/66.202.132.250|66.202.132.250]] 14:25, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
:In my experience it's a general "<tagword>, I hardly knew(/know) her(/him)", where the tagword is an -er/-im word and can (by sheer force of will, often groan-worthy) be taken as a double-entendre spawn. e.g. "Which cathedral is that in the picture?" "Chester." "Chester? I hardly know 'er!" (The worse the better, arguably, but that example's probably too flat.)
:Your form follows alongside of that. But this cliché is the mismatched follow-up, only sparked off (albeit by deliberate disassociation) by the "O RLY?" cliché as feed-line. [[Special:Contributions/178.98.31.27|178.98.31.27]] 10:30, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

The double entendre in this case is O RLY ~ orally? [[User:Undee|Undee]] ([[User talk:Undee|talk]]) 11:24, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

I never thought of it as a double entendre- I thought it was a play on words of Irish names,(as evidenced by the ommision of the first letter in some words) i.e. O'reilly. In this case, it would be "O'reilly? I 'ardly know 'er!" {{unsigned ip|108.162.221.243}}

The fact that this is a collaborative wiki doesn't not mean you should put in every ludicrous and idiosyncratic interpretation that has special meaning to you and clearly has nothing to do with what Randall, or people in the rest of the world, understood the comic to be. O RLY is not a reference to an Irish name, or a Hebrew name, or anything at all other than the eminently popular O RLY meme. Period. Leave your personal nonsense out of this wiki. {{unsigned ip|108.162.214.143}}

Since I am another that first thought of the Irish name and not a meme I have never heard of perhaps you should be the one to keep your personal nonsense out of this wiki. I have read most of the explains on this site and you are the first that I have seen that has targeted any single person for an attack like this. Also learn to sign wiki comments [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.231|162.158.62.231]] 12:47, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean no-one else has. I hadn't come across the subject meme, but I didn't assume that it was an appalling misspelling of O'Reilly. In addition, the person you're defending also hasn't learnt how to sign off Wiki-article comments, so it might be helpful if you were slightly less inconsistent with which parts of an argument you use. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.231|162.158.62.231]] 19:01, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

I'm having trouble viewing this article. Redirect from 259 works, but direct URL gives out "No input file specified.". 15:52, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

As of March 11, 2024, an issue occurs with the title text and after the word "with" it displays "clich$eacute;s." Possibly, an error with the code displaying the acute above the e. Is this a bug on my end (chrome) or is it an issue with the comic itself, and should I add it to the trivia? {{unsigned ip|204.113.154.25}} 18:57, 11 March 2024 (UTC)
:Indeed, checking myself (on several browsers, just in case it ''was'' differently served according to the agent requesting), I found that it was because it was <code>title="It&#39;s like they say, you gotta fight fire with clich&amp;eacute;s."</code>. What should have been <code>&eacute;</code>, to give an "é", was doubly-escaped to "ampersand the ampersand". (Incidentally, googling "xkcd 259" gives the result's page/link title (for the xkcd match, but not explainxkcd) as "Clichd", so clearly Google just decided to junk the funny characted in the title-tag of the page/whatever it uses.)
:I suppose we ought to check if other (previously properly given) title texts with simple ampersanding have ''also'' become double-ampersanded. This might reveal an improper export/transfer from one system to another (like you used to see with things like jobsite reaggregators, "Salary: &amp;amp;pound;30,000 p/a", often ironicly for positions like website roles...). But I suspect that it's entirely unintentional and unwanted. And is quite easy to fix, if that's what happened, so maybe Randall just needs a nudge to de-escape (by one level) any affected things in his backend database. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.194.182|172.69.194.182]] 02:16, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
:...checked around. Disappointingly, nothing that has the same 'accidentally re-encodable" structure. Of the ones with (non-apostrophe, non-quote) 'extended characters', I've only seen them appearing straight. Like [[2606: Weird Unicode Math Symbols]] having its way-off-ASCII character as literal, totally unencoded! Maybe someone else can find another similar treatment, though. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.157|172.71.178.157]] 02:40, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Talk:2880: Sheet Bend

2024-02-18T19:40:11Z

172.71.178.157:

Why is this called a "sheet" bend? [[User:SystemParadox|SystemParadox]] ([[User talk:SystemParadox|talk]]) 21:17, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
:I don't know the full answer but it's a sailing thing: the 'sheet' is the rope you pull in or let out to control the position of the sail. I guess bend describes the category of knot. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.48|172.70.90.48]] 21:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
::NO NO NO. The sheet is the sail. [[User:JohnB|JohnB]] ([[User talk:JohnB|talk]]) 21:36, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
:::: '''never''' has a sail been called a sheet by a sailor. It is a rope, attached to a sail. It has a ''very'' precise and specific meaning. {{unsigned ip|172.69.58.200|16:18, 18 February 2024}}
:::It is the rope - {{w|Sheet (sailing)}}. "In sailing, a sheet is a line (rope, cable or chain) used to control the movable corner(s) (clews) of a sail." [[Special:Contributions/172.71.242.5|172.71.242.5]] 21:56, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
::::Huh. Dueling Wikipedia articles. The Sheet_bend article has a definition section that says the term "sheet bend" derives from its use bending ropes to sails (sheets). But the Sheet_(sailing) article says a sheet is a line used to control the movable corner(s) of a sail. [[User:JohnB|JohnB]] ([[User talk:JohnB|talk]]) 23:08, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
:::::A sail is never, and was never, properly called a "sheet", since at least the 13th century. The Wikipedia explanation of the name is misleading. According to https://www.etymonline.com/word/sheet, it's "shortened from Old English sceatline "sheet-line," from sceata "lower part of sail," originally "piece of cloth," from same Proto-Germanic source as sheet (n.1)." [[User:Jlearman|Jlearman]] ([[User talk:Jlearman|talk]]) 17:44, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
:::::: When I took a sailing class as a kid they used the word “sheet”, I think it was the lines connected to the sails used for adjusting them? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.82|108.162.245.82]] 19:46, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
* Sheet is used to adjust/trim a sail and a halyard is used to raise/lower sails. Sheet '''only''' refers to a rope, ''not'' the sail. Standing rigging are the ropes which supports masts including shrouds and stays. Running rigging adjusts the position of sails and spars including halyards, braces, sheets and vangs. Sheets are used to control clews (movable corners of sails). {{unsigned ip|172.69.58.200|16:11, 18 February 2024}}
** A sheet bend joins two ropes. '''Not''' fabric to rope. The following comment, for example, is incorrect. {{unsigned ip|172.69.58.201|16:13, 18 February 2024}}
::The sheet bend is named for its ability to to secure a sail, or sheet. You fold over the corner of the sail and that's one of your "ropes". The sheet bend is generally used as a knot for tying a large, inflexible rope (or rope-like object) to a smaller, more flexible rope.[[Special:Contributions/172.69.70.22|172.69.70.22]] 22:30, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
::I would take the Ashley Book of Knots as authoritative. Sheet Bend is the first knot in the book, and is always (in modern terms) rope-to-rope, not to sail. It is one of the basic knots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ashley_Book_of_Knots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheet_bend
::{{unsigned|PRR|04:04, 13 January 2024}} 
:::But what dispute are you taking TABoK's authority on? Two things can have the same name in different contexts (or namespaces). And does Ashley use anything other than ropes exclusively in the whole book? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.170|108.162.241.170]] 14:42, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
:I added a link to the wikipedia entry, it explains the name. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 21:25, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
:Because it's a sheet way to connect cables?[[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.137|172.70.90.137]] 09:58, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Presumably the "different loads" title text is a pun between electrical load and mechanical stress on the knot? [[User:Jim-at-home|Jim-at-home]] ([[User talk:Jim-at-home|talk]]) 21:56, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

“silver being joined to silver and gold being joined to gold within the insulating white cable” is not the conventional way to join cables.
Unless you are joining one cable to itself (like a Möbius strip), you have ''two'' cables with insulation.
And usually you use non-cursed connectors, where you first remove the insulation at the end of the cable and then crimp or solder the conductors to metal parts of the connector; or solder the conductors and then add a different type of insulation for protection; or use screw terminals;...
Only with insulation displacement connectors you keep using all the insulation of the two cables.
And finally, conductors are usually copper ''or'' aluminum, and very rarely silver ''and'' gold. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.94.141|162.158.94.141]] 08:45, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
:I think the gold and silver is just color coded for the reader. Not that they are meant to indicate that the conductors are made from this material. Apart from that you comment sounds like you know what you are talking about. So please improve the explanation if you can. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 10:58, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

::: I changed it to gold- and silver-colored. It was obvious to me that it was the colours used in the comic that were being referenced, but fixed for the avoidance of doubt. The join being made within the one cable was clearly an error though. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.161|172.70.85.161]] 22:13, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

:: cables often have the signal parts copper-colored (described gold atm) and they are obviously copper, and the outer ground more the color of steel or something, not sure what metal it is, but it’s easy to solder like copper or silver is, not aluminum which is very hard to solder. usually gold and silver are used at the contacts of a connector, not inside a wire, i don’t know who would ever make that mistake. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.83|108.162.245.83]] 19:49, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
:::"''more the color of steel or something, not sure what metal it is, but it’s easy to solder like copper or silver''" Traditionally tinned copper. Tinned not just for identification, or easier soldering, but because early rubber insulation actively rotted copper and tinning slowed the damage. Many sorts of damage, why much copper today is silvery. [[User:PRR|PRR]] ([[User talk:PRR|talk]]) 04:16, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
::: Not wishing to spoil it, but the series finale of {{w|Cabin Pressure (radio series)|a certain radio comedy}} reveals... ah well, that's the spoiler (in the article, if you read that far down... rather than just listen to it if you haven't heard about it already but now think you like the premise). [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.188|172.69.79.188]] 21:01, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Okay I looked at the wikipedia article and the knot depicted in the comic looks like a right handed one. I still don't know why it's called right handed, or why the left handed one is insecure.[[Special:Contributions/198.41.236.207|198.41.236.207]] 11:46, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
:It's not. Ropes and heavier ropes (called cables) are commonly made by twisting smaller ropes together, the twist direction (terminologically the 'lay' of the rope, (s-laid or z-laid)) is the main thing (that I know about) that can make chirality (handedness) of knots important to their strength. Electrical cables and wires aren't usually expected to have any tensile strength, and their tensile components aren't usually twisted in a way that would affect their strength. (Sorry for all the parentheticals.) [[Special:Contributions/108.162.241.130|108.162.241.130]] 14:56, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
::As I understand it (at least in knots that I'm familiar with), it's not chirality (like stereo isomers) but cis-/trans-ness (e.g. isomers which have active groups pointing in different directions across a double-bond).
::If the left cable came into the right's loops on on the bottom, dove under the two loops of the RH cable, over the conductor then under then over to have the loose end emerge where the offscreen-length currently comes in, then it'd be electrically the same but any tension would pull more off-axis and the knot could 'capsize' into an unwanted form (topologically similar, but with different relative loops.
::If you did that but ''also'' rethreaded the RH length to come up through the LH's loop (as now), but then passed over the top, down behind the two LH bits (free and loose end) to go back over the (lower) LH, under itself then over the (upper) LH, to dangle free, it would be a chiral inversion and (as you say) probably not greatly affected by the cable's own rotational symmetry.
::Re-rethread the LH loop as it was, and you'd get a chiral alternative to the first 'capsizable' change.
::Proper mathematically-inclined knot-theorists probably have better terms to use for both chiral and cis-trans transforms (as well as functional sub-mirroring such as the difference between reef and granny). There will already be terms known amongst practical knot-practioners such as sailors and other riggers, but (at least until "knot bibles" were written) they'll have been given homegrown/traditional terms that might not be particularly consistent with other knot-cultures. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.43.163|172.69.43.163]] 17:26, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
::^^^^ Addendum... Maybe [https://forum.igkt.net/index.php?topic=1551.0 this link I just found] is relevent, from a quick scan of it... Or maybe not. ~same IP/time as above .sig~

A note I nearly added in the bit about short-circuits (or, as I added, 'un'circuiting) is that the electrical behaviour of the knot is different according to which 'end' slips. If the left-side cable 'slips through' enough, then its gold and silver bits of sheath could contact (would short-circuit any current driven at that side). If the right-side cable slips out, it is in no danger of doing so for a right-driven current (it would just disconnect). That ignores the cross-talking that could occur (on one conducting line at a time, so may not matter if there's no external ground-return element, except as far as not being a proper connection any more), or ''both'' ends slipping (where one of the LHS sheaths ''might'' shuffle into a position to bridge the two RHS sheaths). But, as tied, the LHS silver (being bent in and out of the page around its crossing counterpart wire) seems unlikely to be pressed against both gold and silver, should it trivially untwine/slip through. Actual studies with actual knots might be useful. I thought I had a spare length of unterminated Cat5, nearby, but apparently (k)not... that, with some coloured permanent marker-pen marks made upon it, would probably have made a decent analogue for visual analysis of failure conditions. Maybe I'll de-plug an old cable (I've got a number of damaged USB cables I could chop, but their being thinner would change the scale and dynamics of the knot, meaning I might as well just use a scrap of twisted-pair internally-sheathed strands). – But I thought you'd like my mind's-eye analysis of the knot behaviour, before I get around to trying anything practical to this end. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.7|141.101.99.7]] 17:08, 13 January 2024 (UTC) (<- ex Cub-/Boy-/Venture-Scout, but never got any Knot ''Un''tying badge... that brief stint with escapology aside... ;) )

This comic contained material familiar to a hobby engineer that was cast critically and derogatorily (e.g. “sheety” bend) throughout the explanation. I edited a lot of it. I’ve seen this happen repeatedly in other explanations. I don’t edit most of them. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.150.155|172.71.150.155]] 18:41, 13 January 2024 (UTC) 

"this is a scenario commonly encountered by hobby engineers from the last millenium"
"commonly"? Can any hobbyist engineers from the last millennium attest? Also, this sounds ageist - is it ageist? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.86.166|172.70.86.166]] 21:56, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
:Well, I definitely did electrics/electronics pre-millenium. I'm not at all unhappy with the idea with the possibility of an occasional 'bodge job' connection having happened (e.g. tying a cable in a simple knot, in suitable cases, to add mechanical resistance to any further tendency for a cable to be tugged out of a grommit-hole and the core conducting wires being tugged out of whatever terminal/patch-block they need to be connected to - or, more likely, pulling the core copper strands beyond their tensile limits).
:Although (while I respected the ''idea'' of this being based upon a repair-bodge), I don't see this as a "this wire was damaged, this is how the two ends are reconnected", but rather as a deliberate cable termination method (like adding moulded plugs/etc) which could then be mated end-to-end with another similarly terminated cable. (Like using a gender-changer 'double-socket' between two phono-ended lengths of cable, or using a {{w|File:BNC Tee connector, with Ethernet cable connected-92166.jpg|BNC T-connector just to join two lengths of networking cable}} but without the need for the extra connector ''and'' adding intrinsic tensile resistance - though actually not as much as the BNC 'bayonet' version already does...)
:If I was writing this from scratch, I'd actually remove all the 'repair' aspect of it, TBH. It looks more like a deliberate patch-type cable (1x2core) manufactured to be directly and hermaphroditically compatible with any other such cable, tied together without the need for tools (screwdrivers, crimpers, punch-downs, etc) ''and'' untied as and when required (at least as easily as any similar rope-knot can be undone, which isn't always a given if mishandled and overtightened).
:I'd also be looking at various knots and working out which (if any) could support ''more'' than two contact-patches/sleavings per cable, for three-core or more-core connections between any two such cables. The geometry of the knots would define roughly where (and how long) the external contact-sleaves would need to be (presumably identical for both cables) such that they made appropriate connections between the two halves (cross-overs could be allowed, but that'd have to be down to the IEEE specifications of how to detect/interpret RX/TX assymetry at the end devices, etc). But then I'd also be writing a vastly more complicated alternate explanation. Perhaps just remove the bodge-job implications, someone? Clearly it's not an end-user bodge. Though it could be a manufacturer/industry bodge (such as using an 8P8C connector for essentially 6P4C purposes). [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.138|172.69.79.138]] 00:53, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
I use the reader app in inverted color mode, so I could not for the life of me figure out what all the discussion about silver and gold was about. Also, can I just comment on how the conductive sleeves are magically flexible? I wonder if they are braided. Even then, this would severely limit how tight the knot could be pulled. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.238|162.158.154.238]] 13:26, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
:I initially imagined either a particularly ductile 'foil' or, as you say, braided (like an STP cable's 'S' layer), though the failure modes of both (tearing or fraying) are potentially problematic. Perhaps a conductive polymer of similar mechanical flexibility to the non-conductive regular sheath. The attachment of respetive core to the outer seems to me the most intensive process.
:I once jury-rigged two cameras on a length of CAT5, using two pairs each for power/signal. One camera was around half way along the cable from where it was commonly terminated, but rather than than cutting the cable entirely and reconnecting the 'onwards' TPs (or threading a half-used full cable and a half-used part-length through the false ceilings/etc) I made a careful slit in the outer insulation (and shielding foil/braid, whatever it had), pulled the two chosen pairs out enough to get the necessary length of mid-cable free ends for my purposes and then snipped just those.
:It wouldn't need as much work to connect outer-conducting sheathing to an inner core. Possibly an into-insulation 'displacement' blade, but not sure how you'd guarantee the (single, and only) inner core contact, so slitting outer insulation, fishing for the chosen inner-core, piercing, twining and/or wrapping that conductive strand then reinsulating as necessary or shrink-wrapping with the 'conductive rubber' outer (preventing the slit from tearing too far open on bending). Twice, though you don't need to preserve the 'gold inner' up to or beyond the 'silver inner' tapping point.
:I would imagine (if this were a serious cable-end spec) there'd be careful balancing of robustness and flexibility of the [[2856: Materials Scientists|materials]] and construction methods in use. But handwaved away, in our 'reality'.... [[Special:Contributions/172.69.43.163|172.69.43.163]] 17:26, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
:...see {{w|Conductive elastomer}} (and some of that article's onward links) for a possible type of material to use. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.156|141.101.98.156]] 18:32, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

Y'know, I've read every XKCD comic. For some reason, this one makes me the most uncomfortable. I ''hate'' it. No idea why. [[User:Magicalus|Magicalus]] ([[User talk:Magicalus|talk]]) 04:46, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
;Knot category?
We've seen some recurring knot-themes, I was thinking. A quick check shows that it's not as overwhelming as I thought it was, but here's what I easily found anyway (possibly missed some, as I skimmed things).
*[[595: Android Girlfriend]] - averted, but knots are mentioned/could have been expected in the parodied scenario (probably not really so cattable).
*[[730: Circuit Diagram]] - drawn knot
*[[1572: xkcd Survey]] - mentioned as an option
*[[1762: Moving Boxes]] - written down (ambiguously)
*[[2738: Omniknot]] - full-fledged 'knotty comic'
*...this one, as above.
So it might just be the two 'proper knot-focused' comics, but (like 'birds' or 'real people' as categories) two or three others that should be considered relevant. Maybe wait until there's a third (it might take a year?), but placing the groundwork for it. Or maybe even being sufficient to prompt someone to act sooner, now that we can be sure that Knots is one of the many subjects Randall may dive into. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.131|141.101.99.131]] 18:52, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
:The android comic doesn't mention knots. It is only the explanation here that does. The circuit diagram may have a knot, but it is not labeled, and could be something else. Not like saying this is a comic about knots. Of course it has a relation to this comic, but the relation is more in the connector than in knots. The survey doesn't have knot mentioned in the actual comic. Knots are for sure mentioned in a word in Moving boxes, but the comic is not about knots. Which leaves only Omniknot and this one, and I think even three about knots would be too little for a category. So unless there are at least a couple more, it is way too soon to make a knot comic category. But would be fine to include a link between the two knot comics. I will do that! --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 07:43, 15 January 2024 (UTC)
::(You'll note that I expicitly pre-stated each of your 'objections', already. Not sure, then, why you thought I didn't realise any of it...) As I said, I had an impression that it was a well-used trope, here, but found it less so when I checked. But definitely not an unused one. So marked it here to avoid having to necessarily recheck everything once the next one arrived (or the one after that, etc, if still not conclusive). Although it's also possible I missed other good exameples, already... ;) [[Special:Contributions/172.69.195.229|172.69.195.229]] 17:21, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

2831: xkcd Phone Flip

2023-09-21T15:02:17Z

172.71.178.157: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 2831
| date = September 20, 2023
| title = xkcd Phone Flip
| image = xkcd_phone_flip_2x.png
| imagesize = 740x458px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = Theranos partnership: Sorry, we know, but we signed the contract back before all the stuff and the lawyers say we can't back out, so just try to keep your finger away from the bottom of the phone.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by THE BOT FORTOLD BY THE FORTUNETELLER PROPHECY - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. Ed: Changed 00000002 times.}}
This is the 9th in the ongoing [[:Category:xkcd Phones|xkcd Phone]] series in which Randall explains his new joke phone designs with many strange and useless features. It is a reference to the somewhat recent {{w|Galaxy Z}} series, but instead of folding in half, it folds into the more complex and much less usable shape of a typical {{w|paper fortune teller}}. The product's slogan suggests that this was not an intended feature, which would be incredibly difficult to create accidentally without causing the phone to become nonfunctional. It's therefore possible that this phone was designed by [[:Category:Beret Guy's Business|Beret Guy's company]], which has in the past [[1493: Meeting|trademarked seemingly normal phrases]] and [[1293: Job Interview|done impossible things with electronics]].

The name Phone Flip is a play on the term {{w|Flip Phone}}, which has refered to older cellphones with a {{w|Clamshell design|basic hinged construction}}, but {{w|Samsung}} has released a line of {{w|smartphones}} under the Galaxy Z range given the name 'Flip' (or 'Fold') which use a flexible display across the hinge. Randall's version takes this complexity up a notch with a currently impractical varifolded origami design.

From the top, left column first:

; Exfoliating Screen
: A term commonly found on lotions and facial products, "exfoliating" means removing dead skin cells from the surface of the skin, in order to improve its appearance. This could mean that it will exfoliate when pressed to the skin. However, this would probably require a mildly abrasive and/or adhesive screen texture or coating, which are usually not desirable qualities of a touchscreen.{{Citation needed}} A different reading is that the screen itself exfoliates, i.e. slowly disintegrates. Unless the phone is an organism able to regrow exfoliated surfaces, this will eventually lead to the screen's disappearance, not an improvement of its appearance.

; Orthotic shape for arch support
: {{w|Orthotics}} are devices used to reduce stress on the body. "Arch support" is a specific term referring to padded inserts designed to fit to the contour of a person's foot and provide support for the arch of the foot, a raised area between the ball in front and the heel in back. Fitting this space requires either a curved shape or one that's thicker in the center, which would make a phone less straightforward (pun not intended) to use. Additionally, the materials used in a phone are not suitable for orthotic usage and doing so anyway could worsen any issues and damage the phone from the stress of the person's weight upon it.

; Single Big Pixel
: Typical phone displays use many small {{w|pixels}}, each with relatively few display states. For instance, each pixel can show a uniform color. Some displays use smaller numbers of more complicated picture elements (e.g., each element could show a letter, like a {{w|split-flap display}}, or a {{w|nixie tube}}). To use one pixel means that element needs a different display state for every image the phone can show (like a {{w|carousel slide projector}} or {{w|gobo (lighting)|gobo}}).

; Ready to eat
: A typical sales pitch for {{w|convenience foods}} denoting that no time must be spent preparing the product for safe consumption, in contrast to other such meals where ingredients would need to be combined and/or cooked in some fashion. It is unknown how a phone could be produced in such a way as to be edible. The display might use {{w|sugar glass}}.

; Hypoimmunogenic
: Meaning less able to produce an immune response - so perhaps useful in that people do not want their phone to cause an immune response in their body, however cell phones typically cause no immune response, so this is not generally an issue. This is probably related to items that are marketed as hypoallergenic, less likely to cause an allergic reaction.

; Up to 50% more
: A play on the words "Up to 50% more <product>". Although considering that there is no mention of what product there could possibly be 50% more of (or 0% extra, as that is ''also'' less than or equal to 50%), this statement is useless. See [[870: Advertising]].

; Full-spectrum backlight optimized for plant growth
: {{w|Full-spectrum lights}} and backlights are typically used to increase {{w|color rendering}} accuracy, especially important in photography, art, and printing. It typically refers to the part of the spectrum people can see. Plants respond to some wavelengths outside our visual spectrum (e.g., UVA), and are less influenced by some portions of the visual spectrum (e.g. green, hence mostly reflecting such light). A backlight optimized for plant growth would not provide a very natural appearance to our eyes and typically appear pink. The screen backlight is unlikely to be used for growing plants.

; Long-lasting main sequence battery
: Perhaps referring to a "{{w|main sequence}}" star (Dwarf stars, like the {{w|sun}}, where main energy generation is hydrogen fusion). Such stars spend a long time in this phase of evolution. This might also explain SPF 15 and full-spectrum backlight. Stars do last a long time compared to most cell phone batteries.{{Citation needed}}

; Break Glass to Access Apps
: A play on how fire alarms and extinguishers are protected by glass casings in most places, although in this case it is not that helpful. Unusual things behind glass is also mentioned in [[1634: In Case of Emergency]].

Right hand column

; Buy one get one
: A play on typical retail sales advertised as "Buy one get one ____", where one buys one item at full price and gets another of that item either for free or at a reduced price. Since no discount has been mentioned, it would imply that you can get two at full price or perhaps simply that if you buy a phone, you receive the phone; this is expected upon almost all purchases and is {{w|Tautology (logic)|tautological}} in nature.

; Bending phone activates chemical flashlight
: This feature parallels a {{w|glow stick}}, which is also activated by bending the stick; this breaks an inner capsule causing chemicals to mix and produce light. However, doing this with a phone likely to cause physical or chemical damage and additionally only works once, which is not very useful for a phone flashlight that one typically uses as a tool throughout the phone's lifetime.

; SPF 15 Coating protects your face from websites
: Sun protection factor (SPF) is a rating used to compare the protection provided by sun screens. Some people find some web sites excessively bright, colorful or garish, making them hard to read, or causing eye strain. This extends that to imply that some sites are so bright that they might cause {{w|sunburn}}. In reality, some sites, browsers, or plugins provide a {{w|night mode}}, for those who have problems with excess brightness. (See also full spectrum, and main sequence battery.)
: Alternatively, SPF in this context might be a novel term for, for example, ''site'' protection factor, or ''socials'' protection factor, and be a method for protecting you from viewing potentially harmful content encountered on the internet.

; Iatrogenic construction
: 'Iatrogenic' means 'physician caused', and usually refers to illnesses which are caused or worsened by medical malpractice. This may imply that the phone was made ''by'' doctors, which may align with the statement given in the title text.

; All-vinyl data storage for maximum fidelity
: This is a reference to the hipster maxim that vinyl records provide high fidelity music. And while {{w|vinyl data}} storage does exist, it's profoundly outdated and was never widely adopted. The relevant formats had several issues, including (relevantly) wear issues that lead to fidelity problems after repeated reads.

; Locks in moisture
: Good for cosmetics perhaps, to combat 'dry skin' (which is really more to do with substances other than water), but generally bad for a cell phone, where ingress (let alone retention) of liquids tends not to help the electronics.

; National Weather Service partnership - phone is afraid of thunder
: Not a useful feature, as normal phones do not have emotions (yet).{{Citation needed}} How this fear manifests is also unexplained. It may turn off, or it may scream like the original xkcd phone did when in free fall. A number of the previous xkcd phone have had unexplained, inexplicable or incomprehensible partnerships.

; One-click ''ruina montium''
: ''{{w|Ruina montium}}'' ('mountain destroyer') was a now-lost mining technique used by the ancient Romans, thought to involve a form of hydrostatic drilling. It is not clear how this could be applied by a smartphone, let alone as a one-click operation.

; Free Refills
: Good for restaurant drinks, not typical for cell phones. Could mean no cost refueling (e.g., {{w|fuel cell}} power), or recharging or {{w|battery swapping}}.

The title text references the failed company {{w|Theranos}} that notably could not live up to its ambitious promise to diagnose many health issues from a single drop of blood. Due to legal agreements, and subsequent design choices already built in, the bottom of the phone ''will'' collect a drop of blood (unless you're particularly careful).

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:[A rectangular phone with a touch screen, a small dark camera section at the top of the screen, and a charging port at the bottom of the phone is shown on the right. Lines on the left side of the phone connect to feature descriptions.]
* Exfoliating screen
* Orthotic shape for arch support
* Single big pixel
* Ready to eat
* Hypoimmunogenic
* Up to 50% more
* Full-spectrum backlight optimized for plant growth
* Long-lasting main sequence battery
* Break glass to access apps

:[Two phones folded in the shape of a 'paper fortune teller' are stacked on top of each other on the right, also with feature lines.]
* Buy one get one
* Bending phone activates chemical flashlight
* SPF 15 coating protects your face from websites
* Iatrogenic construction
* All-vinyl data storage for maximum fidelity
* Locks in moisture
* National Weather Service partnership: phone is afraid of thunder
* One-click ''ruina montium''
* Free refills

:[Text below the phone:]
:Introducing
:'''The xkcd Phone Flip'''
:''We actually didn't mean for it to do this''™

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:xkcd Phones]]
[[Category:Comics sharing name|xkcd Phones]]