explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

2314: Carcinization

2022-05-11T18:29:30Z

PouncySilverkitten:

{{comic
| number = 2314
| date = June 1, 2020
| title = Carcinization
| image = carcinization.png
| titletext = Nature abhors a vacuum and also anything that's not a crab.
}}

==Explanation==
As [[Megan]] is telling [[Cueball]], separate species of animals have evolved into "crab-like" forms at different times. Naturalists who noticed the tendency gave it the name {{w|Carcinisation|carcinization}}.

It is a specific form of {{w|convergent evolution}}, where differing families of animals (in this case, nominally across the {{w|crustacea}}) develop a tendency towards developing a 'crab' bodyplan to a greater degree than their origins would suggest. A similar process has created several varieties of {{w|river dolphin}} with similar adaptations to their environments, despite being 'stranded' offshoots of different forerunner pelagic species.

"True crabs" ({{w|Brachyura}}) form just a small subset of the Crustacea subphylum, and the Cancer genus is a subset of that, yet there appears to be something about the bodyplan and even resulting behaviour that has meant a number of species have arisen from alternate areas of the family tree that are now trivially indistinguishable without extensive study.

Carl Linnaeus even initially included all Crustacea under the 'Cancer' genus (using the Latin name for crabs), and his taxonomic classification has been heavily refined as further knowledge has come to light, in order to reveal this phenomenon.

Apparently this principle is much stronger in the webcomic than in real life, as shortly after being told this, Megan notices that Cueball (not a crustacean!) has himself turned into a crab. This isn't really evolution as we know it (outside {{w|Gameplay of Pokémon#Pokémon evolution|Pokémon evolution}} at least), which refers to changes (usually gradual changes, but not always) in a species across generations caused by random mutations. The organisms individually never change{{Citation needed}}, they are merely different from their ancestors, and the organisms with changes that make them more fit for their environment are the ones who are more likely to survive long enough to pass down those changes. What happens to Cueball is more like a transformation, but it could still be called 'carcinization', since he becomes crab-like. The comic strip might be an allusion to Franz Kafka's short story ''{{w|The Metamorphosis}}'' (another word used to describe life-forms that dramatically transform themselves, like caterpillars turning into butterflies), which starts with the main character suddenly waking up and finding that he has transformed into a giant bug.

Cueball's sudden transformation is perhaps explained by the title text, that "Nature abhors a vacuum and anything that's not a crab". The text is a reference to Aristotle's {{w|Horror_vacui_(physics)|Horror vacui}}, a statement about how empty space tends to be immediately refilled by surrounding things, so vacuums seem to be impossible to maintain. As does "not being a crab", it seems.

Strictly speaking, we don't know for certain that Cueball actually transformed; it could be that he has ducked out of sight and left a crab in his place (or noticed a crab conveniently nearby) to play a prank on Megan.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball and Megan are walking next to each other towards the left with Megan looking back at Cueball.]
:Megan: Have you heard of "carcinization"?
:Megan: The tendency of nature to evolve things into crabs.
:Cueball: Oh?

:[They continue to walk, both of them looking forward.]
:Megan: Yeah, the basic "crab" design has evolved separately a number of times.
:Cueball: Evolution just loves making crabs, I guess!

:[Narrower panel with only Megan seen walking on while lifting both her arms slightly to each side.]
:Megan: Apparently!

:[Two smaller beat panels are drawn between the previous and next normal sized panels. The first is a bit lower than the top of the normal panels, and is partly lying in over the other small panel, which is below and to the right of the first. The top panel shows Megan continuing to walk along. The second shows Megan stopping and turning to look back.]

:[Megan has turned completely and is looking down at a small crab scuttling along on the ground where Cueball was before.]
:Megan: Oh no

==Trivia==
In January 2020, less than half a year before this comic was released, the Dinosaur Comic also released a [http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3547 comic about Carcinization]. This web comic is on [[Randall|Randall's]] list of [[Design_of_xkcd.com#Comics_I_enjoy|Comics I enjoy]] and was also used in [[145: Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics]]. Another popular webcomic, Questionable Content, had a [https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=4276 crab-themed comic] the day before this comic was released.

Just a month after the release of this comic, "carcinization" was the [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Word_of_the_day/Archive/2020/July#3 Word of the Day] in Wiktionary.

This comic was also the inspiration for [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6010 SCP-6010], a story about all animal life turning into crabs, set in the SCP Foundation setting. SCP 6010 mentions life turning into crabs o June 1st 2019, the release date for this comic.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Animals]]
[[Category:Biology]]
[[Category:Physics]]

1979: History

2022-05-11T18:29:14Z

PouncySilverkitten:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

{{comic discussion}}

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

1845: State Word Map

2022-05-11T18:28:53Z

PouncySilverkitten:

{{comic
| number = 1845
| date = June 2, 2017
| title = State Word Map
| image = state_word_map.png
| titletext = The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN.
}}

==Explanation==

This is another of the many comics where [[Randall]] used a map of the United States for his joke (see below for examples).

Similar in spirit to [[1138: Heatmap]], this comic pokes fun at many maps that attempt to use data to discern unique characteristics about various sub-regions, in this case {{w|U.S. state|American states}}. This map may have been inspired by [https://twitter.com/GoogleTrends/status/869624196921303040 this map] posted on Twitter by Google Trends the day before the comic was posted. Many web companies use maps like this in viral marketing, but the methodology behind them is pretty weak. The random noise in the data will mean that there will be variations between states even if there is no underlying pattern - and this can be further boosted by statistical tricks. A common one is to show the "most characteristic" or "most distinctive" term for each state. For instance, [http://www.businessinsider.com/most-common-causes-of-death-in-each-state-2014-6?IR=T the most common cause of death is heart disease or cancer] in every US state, but this makes for a boring map. Looking at the [https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2015/14_0395.htm most distinctive cause of death] produces a more interesting map, but it highlights very minor trends - Lousiana is marked as having syphilis as its most distinctive cause of death, even though [https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/stateprofiles/pdf/louisiana_profile.pdf only 15 Louisianans in every 100,000 have the disease] and there were only 22 syphilis deaths in the state over a whole decade. These maps can give a misleading impression of huge variation between states that doesn't really exist.

This map does not include real data, but says (when read left to right/west to east):
:You can make these maps say whatever you want by adjusting the methodology. Half of the time you're just amplifying random noise because the underlying data doesn't vary that much from one state to another. But whatever. Nobody checks this stuff. Just pick whatever normalization lets you make fun of Florida.

The primary joke is that the likelihood of these being the words used most often by the inhabitants of each state is low, rather than accurately representing the most used words Randall has just done exactly what he says he can do (make fun of Florida by putting whatever he wants). He also has not obtained the data from anywhere, just 'Something Something'.

The joke about Florida is that the most used word in Florida is "Florida", which would make people in Florida very self-centered.

The comic continues to make fun of Florida in the title text by saying that Florida searches for ''sex porn'' instead of ''porn'', which is not needed since porn means images and film of people having sex. This is also probably a reference to PornHub's [https://www.pornhub.com/insights/united-states-top-searches data-farming] exercises, where they have periodically released the most frequently searched term by state.

{{w|Florida}} is often the butt of many jokes, including the {{w|Florida Man}} meme and many mocking jibes regarding its {{w|2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida|messy electoral history}}. For more information on why Florida itself seems eager to play into this stereotype, check out the {{tvtropes|OnlyInFlorida|"Only in Florida" phenomenon}}

Randall previously used a map of the United States as the basis for his comics in [[1767: US State Names]], [[1653: United States Map]], [[1509: Scenery Cheat Sheet]] and in [[1079: United Shapes]].

==Transcript==
:[Caption above the map, with sub caption:]
:<big>Most-Used Word in Each State</big>
:Based on Something Something Search Data

:[Beneath the captions are a colorful map of the United States of America. Each state has one color, but the colors do not change from state to state, but rather between rows of states. The top "row" is purple, the second row is gray-blue, but only goes half across. Where it stops a pink row of states begins. Beneath this runs a yellow row, except it does not take California with it, since it belongs to the next purple line beneath this yellow line. Finally the two states not in the contiguous states as well as the southern states from Texas to Florida are again pink. Inside each state is written one, and only one word (or for small states the word is outside and if needed a line indicates which state it belongs to). The words size depends on the size of the state and the word. If it can fit inside the state it will be written in a font large enough to fill the entire state if possible (in one case a hyphen is used). So a short word, like "lets" in huge Texas becomes huge, but a word like "noise" which has been fitted inside small Massachusetts becomes small.]

:[Here are the 50 words written in lines resembling the colors on the map (from left to right). Purple, gray-blue, pink, yellow, purple and pink:]
:You can make these maps say whatever you want
:by adjusting the methodology.
:Half the time you're just amplifying random noise.
:Because the underlying data doesn't vary that much from one state to another.
:But whatever. Nobody checks this stuff. Just pick
:whatever normal-ization lets you make fun of Florida.

==Trivia==
* In [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/archive/0/04/20170602113432%21state_word_map.png the original version of this comic] the border line dividing {{w|New Hampshire}} and {{w|Maine}} was missing, although both states had distinct words attributed to them ("you" for NH and "want" for ME). The error was later corrected by Randall to the current version.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:US maps]]
[[Category:Charts]]