explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

1683: Digital Data

2016-05-23T20:51:03Z

Eno: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 1683
| date = May 20, 2016
| title = Digital Data
| image = digital_data.png
| titletext = â€&oelig;If you can read this, congratulationsâ€”the archive youâ€™re you're using still knows about the mouseover textâ€!
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Initial draft.}}

{{w|Digital information}} has the potential to be copied such that the copy is 100% identical to the original. While physical media themselves (such as books, or hard drives) and information stored by analog means may degrade as the universe continues, digital information as expressed by specific values, such as combinations of binary zeros and ones, does not decay over time and can be copied indefinitely with no changes.

However, in this comic, [[Randall]] points out that while digital information itself doesn't need to degrade, things that are on the Internet are often degraded through copying when the copy is not a 1:1 copy or changes are deliberately introduced. In addition, as technology advances the method to save or call the information changes and the medium to view it changes, occasionally causing misinterpreted information. (This is also demonstrated with the title text.) As the frames continue, they gain the appearance of images which have been screenshotted repeatedly, with a resulting loss of quality due to compression of the original resolution and {{w|JPEG}} {{w|compression artifact|artifacting}}. (The JPEG format is intended for representing photorealistic grayscale or color images; when misused for line drawings, such as comic strips, any compression artifacts become particularly noticeable, as the background is normally of completely uniform color.) In the last frame, this is taken to an extreme, as the frame appears to have been very sloppily screenshotted off of at least two different smartphones (not the same device that uses the bottom frame in the third panel as the top border in panel four), and the final image is covered both with a watermark from an unregistered screenshot program, as well as references to at least two different web site, {{w|9GAG}} (bottom right image) and {{w|tumblr}} in the web address bottom left.

"9gag" is a humor website{{Citation needed}} often accused of rehosting other sites' funny content without attribution and adding their own watermark to the image or video.



The title text contains seemingly garbage characters, which typically result from data being interpreted according to a {{w|character encoding}} different from the one used to encode it. In this case, the characters are the result of encoding the string <tt>“If you can read this, congratulations—the archive you’re you're using still knows about the mouseover text”!</tt> using {{w|UTF-8}} (which represents non-{{w|ASCII}} {{w|Unicode}} characters as multibyte sequences) and then interpreting the resulting bytes as the still commonly used {{w|Windows-1252}} encoding (which uses only one byte per character, but utilizes the non-ASCII codepoints for a limited selection of extra letters and symbols such as "â" or "€"). This shows that degradation of digital data through conversions isn't restricted to images. Furthermore, as screen navigation moves away from the mouse toward touch, voice recognition, and modes still to be implemented, mouseover text will itself become archaic.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball and a White Hat are walking, Cueball holds both hands in front of him palms up.]
:Cueball: The great thing about digital data is that it never degrades.

:[They walk on in the next panel which shows jpeg compression artifacts, as if it is a screen shot of the actual image.]
:Cueball: Hard drives fail, of course, but their bits can be copied forever without loss.

:[They continue walking in the third panel which is now clearly pixelated, the white is slightly discolored, and it contains part of the interface of some program, probably supposed to be a screen shot from a smartphone. At the bottom there are three blue buttons and one gray. the first is a blue "<" indicating back in a browser. Then a grayed out ">" that is not active. And then three more standard buttons in blue to the right of those two. The interface matches that of an iPhone running Safari in iOS 9 (or other versions with the same Safari UI (probably iOS 7-9)]
:Cueball: Film degrades, paint cracks, but a copy of a century-old data file is identical to the original.

:[Still walking, now Cueball holds out both arms to the sides, and finally White Hat replies. This panel is heavily pixelated and discolored and has a distorted aspect ratio. It contains a clear watermark (although difficult to read all letters in the end of the first word), even more 'frame' elements, and text above the image at the bottom (where the last letter is obscured by the frame of the image). There is also an internet address at the bottom left, but it is not readable except for the .com ending. In this panel it is clear that it is a screen shot from a smart phone. The frame around the image obscure the very top of Cueball's text and the half of the last letter in White Hat's reply.]
:Cueball: If humanity has a permanent record, we are the first generation in it.
:White Hat: Amazing

:Watermark: Screenshotpro 2
:Watermark: ~Unregistered~

:Top border: Verizon LTE '''4:45 PM'''
:Bottom text [slightly cut off]: 9GAG
:Internet address at the bottom [nearly unintelligible]: [ama].tumblr.com

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Self-reference]]

Talk:1676: Full-Width Justification

2016-05-04T06:32:23Z

Eno:

I added the emoji snake. Is emoji snake the same as a Unicode snake would be? [[User:Azule|Azule]] ([[User talk:Azule|talk]]) 05:46, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Could the title text also be a reference to the snake in umwelt? [[User:Azule|Azule]] ([[User talk:Azule|talk]]) 05:46, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Amazon is notorious for being bad at this. Here's a somewhat related [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzdugwr4Fgk Computerphile video]. [[User:Eno|Eno]] ([[User talk:Eno|talk]]) 06:32, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

1676: Full-Width Justification

2016-05-04T06:29:26Z

Eno: /* Explanation */ this is not limited to narrow spaces, happens in any multiline bit of text

{{comic
| number = 1676
| date = May 4, 2016
| title = Full-Width Justification
| image = full_width_justification.png
| titletext = Gonna start bugging the Unicode consortium to add snake segment characters that can be combined into an arbitrary-length non-breaking snake.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|hasty & impatient placeholder. Still an early draft; needs citations, fact-checking, and it also needs the Wikipedia links to be fixed.}}
The comic refers to an irritating problem in laying out text to fit from edge to edge, the problem of {{w|justification}}. Sometimes, as before a long word like "[[:wikt:deindustrialization|deindustrialization]]," there's no universal good way to make the typography work. It is a difficult problem to make text look good and be easily legible especially in a narrow space, with the biggest issue being how to handle words that are too long or too short to fit nicely.

The comic shows several solutions to this problem, some realistic and others less so, but each unsatisfying. "Giving up" is ugly, leaving a line break which doesn't fit with the rest; hyphenating is visually confusing and hard to read ("deindus-" looks like an independent, unfamiliar word, pronounced "deign-duss"); stretching is unnatural, probably hard to code or render, unfamiliar and quite ugly; adding "filler" words, a radical solution, makes the writing worse (in the case of the example, making the tone too informal); and adding a meaningless snake image, just long enough to fill the extra space, is a novel (and quite bizarre) solution which probably wouldn't actually be used by a serious typographer.

The title text suggests that in order to facilitate this last method of "solving" the problem, the {{w|Unicode consortium}}, the organization in charge of the common text standard {{w|Unicode}}, should add "snake-building characters", similar to the ones already available for constructing boxes [add note about that here?], allowing variable-length snakes to be used as filling. This suggestion is quite ridiculous; the Unicode consortium is very specific about which characters are added [citation needed], and always require a good reason before adding a character or set of characters to the standard. Thus, while humourous, Randall's suggestion would likely be rejected.

Note that in Arabic, it is common to stretch the lines connecting letters as a relatively elegant and satisfying resolution to this problem. This trick is called "{{w|kashida}}" (كشيدة) and is explained and illustrated [http://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creative-arabic-calligraphy-kashida-tajim-and-tashkil--cms-23240 here].

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript}}

Strategies for full-width justification

[Below this headline is a column of boxes, each showing a different "strategy" which is annotated beside it.]

Giving up

Letter spacing

Hyphenation

Stretching

Filler

Snakes

==Trivia==
The full text (with alternate changes) reads:

''...their famous paper on the relationship between [crap like]/[ 🐍 ] deindustrialization and the growth of ecological...''

{{comic discussion}}

1676: Full-Width Justification

2016-05-04T06:21:58Z

Eno: /* Explanation */ fix Wikipedia links

{{comic
| number = 1676
| date = May 4, 2016
| title = Full-Width Justification
| image = full_width_justification.png
| titletext = Gonna start bugging the Unicode consortium to add snake segment characters that can be combined into an arbitrary-length non-breaking snake.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|hasty & impatient placeholder. Still an early draft; needs citations, fact-checking, and it also needs the Wikipedia links to be fixed.}}
The comic refers to an irritating problem in laying out text in narrow spaces, as in newspaper columns or some web pages: the problem of {{w|justification}}. Sometimes, as before a long word like "[[:wikt:deindustrialization|deindustrialization]]," there's no universal good way to make the typography work. It is a difficult problem to make text look good and be easily legible in a narrow space, with the biggest issue being how to handle words that are too long or too short to fit nicely.

The comic shows several solutions to this problem, some realistic and others less so, but each unsatisfying. "Giving up" is ugly, leaving a line break which doesn't fit with the rest; hyphenating is visually confusing and hard to read ("deindus-" looks like an independent, unfamiliar word, pronounced "deign-duss"); stretching is unnatural, probably hard to code or render, unfamiliar and quite ugly; adding "filler" words, a radical solution, makes the writing worse (in the case of the example, making the tone too informal); and adding a meaningless snake image, just long enough to fill the extra space, is a novel (and quite bizarre) solution which probably wouldn't actually be used by a serious typographer.

The title text suggests that in order to facilitate this last method of "solving" the problem, the {{w|Unicode consortium}}, the organization in charge of the common text standard {{w|Unicode}}, should add "snake-building characters", similar to the ones already available for constructing boxes [add note about that here?], allowing variable-length snakes to be used as filling. This suggestion is quite ridiculous; the Unicode consortium is very specific about which characters are added [citation needed], and always require a good reason before adding a character or set of characters to the standard. Thus, while humourous, Randall's suggestion would likely be rejected.

Note that in Arabic, it is common to stretch the lines connecting letters as a relatively elegant and satisfying resolution to this problem. This trick is called "{{w|kashida}}" (كشيدة) and is explained and illustrated [http://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creative-arabic-calligraphy-kashida-tajim-and-tashkil--cms-23240 here].

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript}}

Strategies for full-width justification

[Below this headline is a column of boxes, each showing a different "strategy" which is annotated beside it.]

Giving up

Letter spacing

Hyphenation

Stretching

Filler

Snakes

==Trivia==
The full text (with alternate changes) reads:

''...their famous paper on the relationship between [crap like]/[ 🐍 ] deindustrialization and the growth of ecological...''

{{comic discussion}}

1665: City Talk Pages

2016-04-08T16:15:30Z

Eno: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 1665
| date = April 8, 2016
| title = City Talk Pages
| image = city talk pages.png
| titletext = "I don't think the Lakeshore Air Crash Museum really belongs under 'Tourist Attractions.' It's not a museum--it's just an area near the Lake Festival Laser Show where a lot of planes have crashed.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|First cut, please help with explanation}}

The comic makes fun about Wikipedia-talkpages. In the Wikipedia every page has also an discussion-page called talk-page in the English Wikipedia. In this case the comic talks about the talk-page of a city. While topics some are quite normal for such a talk-page (the quality of the images) others are not (too many murders in the city).

The topics show a common problem of wikipedia-talk-pages: People think that the talk-page is for talking about the ''object'', but it is for talking about the ''article''.

{{w|Voltaire}} was a French Enlightenment writer.

{{w|Zootopia}} is a 2016 Disney film.

{{w|Andrew Lloyd Webber}} was an English composer famous for writing The Phantom Of The Opera. Meanwhile, {{w|Frank Lloyd Wright}}, who has a somewhat similar name, was an American architect, who designed more than 1,000 structures.

==Transcript==

:I love reading the Wikipedia talk pages for articles on individual cites
:Contents [hide]
:# Origin of city's name?
:## Idea for a better name
:## Not how Wikipedia works
:# Too much promotion of the lake festival
:# Should we mention the murders?
:## Not that notable
:## All cites have murders
:# Quote verification: even if voltaire did visit (unlikely) why would he get so angry about our restaurants?
:# Discuss: new picture
:## Current one looks awfully bleak
:## Gray sky
:## What about this
:## Also bleak
:## Maybe this place just looks that why
:## Found a better picture, more colorful
:## That's a shot from Disney's ''Zootopia''
:# "Mining disasters" section too long
:## Not really Wikipedia's fault
:## Why is this town so bad at mining?
:# Infobox picture: I just realized you can see a murder happening in the background
:## This city is terrible
:## Photoshopped out murder
:## Can someone just take a better picture
:## Okay, uploaded a new picture
:## Wait, never mind, I just noticed there's a murder in this one, too
:# 1982 secession still in effect?
:# I think the murderer is reverting my edits
:# Why does this article take ''ANY'' position on correct condom use, let alone such a weird and ambiguous one?
:# Train station "designed by Andrew Lloyd Weber"?
:## They probably mean Frank Lloyd Wright
:## I thought so tool but it's apparently not a mistake
:## Didn't know he did architecture
:## Roof collapse

{{comic discussion}}

1647: Diacritics

2016-02-24T14:04:43Z

Eno: Undo revision 113270 by Pogogames2016 (talk)

{{comic
| number = 1647
| date = February 24, 2016
| title = Diacritics
| image = diacritics.png
| titletext = Using diacritics correctly is not my forté.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|First draft. Add more details on the use of diacritics.}}

A {{w|diacritic}} (or a diacritical mark) is a {{w|glyph}} added to a letter. The main use of diacritical marks in the {{w|latin script}} is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added, typically vowels.

[[Cueball]] is writing an e-mail (maybe for a job application) and notes in the mail that he attaches his {{w|résumé}}. The word ''résumé'' uses two e's with an {{w|acute accent}} so they look like this: é.

Cueball/[[Randall]] usually forgets to add these '''diacritics''' (hence the title of the comic). So when he occasionally remembers them, for instance when he types a word where he knows they should be included, then he makes up for all those he must have forgotten until now, and adds a whole bunch at once.

The first diacritic he uses is the normal acute accent for the e to make it an é which does belong in ''résumé''. But the second diacritic he uses is a {{w|Diaeresis (diacritic)|diaeresis}} (or umlaut) on the u making it into ü, which is not part of the word. (Although in French the ''u'' is pronounced like a {{w|Close_front_rounded_vowel|[y]}}, which is also the sound of a German or Turkish ''ü'').

He then goes all in on the last e which. similar to the first e, is supposed to have an acute accent. This e has a {{w|cedilla}} (which normally looks like ȩ), a {{w|Ring (diacritic)|ring}} (as in e̊ ), three acute accents, and is topped off by a {{w|breve}} (which normally looks like ĕ). In total, six diacritics are used on this e alone. Using more than one diacritic on one letter can happen, but usually only two ( for example ṏ). Using them in this fashion makes little sense.

To make sure everyone gets it, there are no less than three acute accents over the last full stop. This is not something that is ever used.

So for a word that is supposed to have two diacritics, Cueball uses eight, plus three for the full stop.

In the title text, [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/forte forte] has an acute diacritic over the e, where it does not belong proving Randall's point that it is not ''hís forte to ûsë dïäcrítìcs''. This may be a reference to [https://what-if.xkcd.com/145 What-If XKCD #145: ''Fire from moonlight''], in which note 9 reads "My résumé says étendue is my forté." (with the same error on "forte"). That spelling is probably a result of conflating the from-French word "forte" meaning "strong" and pronounced "fort" with the from-Italian word "forte" meaning "loudly" and pronounced "fortay"; trying to write the Italian one's pronunciation according to French spelling rules results in "forté".

==Transcript==
:[Cueball sitting in front of his lap top tying. The text above him is the one he is typing. The last e in resume has five diacritics above it and one below. The last "." has three "´" above it:]
:Cueball (typing): Attached please find my résümȩ̊́́́́̆.́́́

:[Caption below the frame:]
:I usually leave out diacritics when I type, so I make up for it by occasionally adding a whole bunch at once.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Language]]

1592: Overthinking

2015-10-31T10:34:25Z

Eno: /* Transcript */

{{comic
| number = 1592
| date = October 19, 2015
| title = Overthinking
| image = overthinking.png
| titletext = On the other hand, it took us embarrassingly long to clue in to the lung cancer/cigarette thing, so I guess the real lesson is "figuring out which ideas are true is hard."
}}

==Explanation==
In this comic, [[Cueball]] is telling [[White Hat]] about several recent scientific studies he read that appear to contradict the results of either prior studies whose results have stood for a long time or at least long-held misconceptions. The studies can be reviewed on-line via their {{w|Digital Object Identifier}} (DOI) in [[Randall|Randall's]] citations.

In the first, Cueball mentions a study that showed that while water is good for you, you only need to drink when you are thirsty. This appears to be a reference to common misconceptions that we should drink a certain set quantity of water per day (oft-cited as eight cups - see [[715: Numbers]]) and may even be referencing the fact that drinking too much water (well more than the standard 8 cups, for most people) can lead to hyponatremia (lack of salt in the body).

Another recent study showed that prolonged sitting is not bad for you which contradicts the long-held belief that sitting at a desk all day is unhealthy and that standing or lying down are healthier. The study showed that the position is not particularly relevant if there is no physical activity in any of the positions.

Finally, Cueball references a study that pre-industrial humans have similar sleep patterns to our own, which would appear to contradict a belief that modern technology has disrupted our sleep patterns (which is likely tied to health concerns around our modern sleep habits).

Cueball's conclusion is that humanity may be over-thinking things in trying to find problems in the way we live our everyday lives. In the last panel, White Hat seems to be attempting to start an inquiry into what everyday modern phenomenon has caused us to over-think things. This is obviously a self-referencing example of the types of claims Cueball is debunking in the first three panels. Cueball responds by suggesting that humanity's over-thinking is likely not a recent phenomenon but probably dates back to the stone age. This could also be viewed as an argument that over-thinking is not all bad, the wheel would certainly be a good result of over-thinking.

In the title text, Cueball gives a counter-example to his own argument, suggesting that it took far longer for us to realize the negative health connotations of smoking than it should have. Suggesting instead it's not about overthinking or underthinking-it's just that people make mistakes and we don't know everything. That said, the link between cigarettes and lung cancer has been known for longer than most people realize, possibly coming as early as the 1940s.

===Links to studies referenced===
*Panel 1: [https://dx.doi.org/10.1097/JSM.0000000000000221 DOI:10.1097/JSM.0000000000000221]: [http://journals.lww.com/cjsportsmed/Fulltext/2015/07000/Statement_of_the_Third_International.2.aspx "Statement of the Third International Exercise-Associated Hyponatremia Consensus Development Conference, Carlsbad, California, 2015"], ''Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine'', July 2015, Retrieved 19-Oct-2015
*Panel 2: [https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyv191 DOI:10.1093/ije/dyv191]: [http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/10/09/ije.dyv191 "Associations of sitting behaviours with all-cause mortality over a 16-year follow-up: the Whitehall II study"], ''International Journal of Epidemiology'', 27-Aug-2015, Retrieved 19-Oct-2015
*Panel 3: [https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.09.046 DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2015.09.046]: [http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)01157-4 "Natural Sleep and Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-industrial Societies"], ''Current Biology'', 15-Oct-2015, Retrieved 19-Oct-2015

==Transcript==
:[Cueball and White Hat are walking together. The references are at the bottom of the three first panels.]
:Cueball: I found a study* that said water is good for you, but you should just drink it when you feel thirsty and not go overboard.
:White Hat: Uh huh?
:<nowiki>*</nowiki>DOI:10.1097/JSM.0000000000000221

:[More walking with Cueball lifting his hand in front of him.]
:Cueball: Another study* found that prolonged sitting isn't necessarily bad for you, as long as you're also getting exercise.
:White Hat: Okay...
:<nowiki>*</nowiki>DOI:10.1093/ije/dyv191

:[A border-less panel, but still walking.]
:Cueball: Now a study* claims that humans in pre-industrial societies stay up late and sleep 6 or 7 hours a night, just like most people today.
:White Hat: Huh.
:White Hat: So what you're saying is...
:<nowiki>*</nowiki>DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2015.09.046

:[Zoom out showing Cueball and White Hat walking in silhouette.]
:Cueball: Maybe we're overthinking it.
:White Hat: But what ''caused'' our modern epidemic of overthinking?! Plumbing? Or is it email?
:Cueball: Modern? I bet the wheel was invented by someone overthinking "pushing."

==Trivia==
*In the [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/archive/0/0d/20151019153329!overthinking.png original version] of the comic the three DOIs where shifted one panel, so the reference in the first panel belonged to the second panel, the second belonged to the third panel and the reference in the third panel belonged to the first. This was corrected within a few hours.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Science]]