explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:3038: Uncanceled Units

2025-01-16T23:34:01Z

Stardragon:

DUDE I'M STILL IN SCHOOL RN, WHAT?
(also, the joke is that energy is power*time, so kWh is kJ/s... in an hour [[User:CalibansCreations|'''Caliban''']] ([[User talk:CalibansCreations|talk]]) 13:27, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

I guess not every comic can be a winner. Talking about an appliance using a certain amount of kWH per day is clear and normal. Power gets billed by the kWh, not the Joule. While technically not wrong, wanting "cancel" a sub-part of the commonly-used energy unit kWh and leaving it in deliberately-obscured units most people are less familiar with is the sort of insanity I'd more expect from White Hat than Cueball. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.35.171|172.70.35.171]] 13:39, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
:Maybe that is a meta-joke? To frame kWh/day as something crazy by giving that line to whitehat --[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 13:52, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
:There's a difference between instantaneous power draw, and the total "volume"(/area, really) of power over time. Though a fridge is "always on", it is still only irregularly at full-draw. But, to the power company (or to the gas company, who will generally give a kWh measure of 'energy taken from the network'), they don't (generally) care whether you used twice as many kW over half the time or half as many over twice the time, within any given total billing period, even if it affects what you think. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.163.46|172.70.163.46]] 14:39, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
::Using joule as if it was an everyday unit of energy would be weird but I don't agree that watt is crazy. It's a normal unit of energy consumption that does mean something to people, e.g. 1000W microwave, 100W (incandescent) light bulb. Don't get me wrong kWh/day is also useful to translate it to your energy bill, but I do feel slightly uncomfortable every time I see that time divided by time :-) [[User:Mtcv|Mtcv]] ([[User talk:Mtcv|talk]]) 14:40, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
:I don't think the complaint is that it's unclear, it's that Cueball/Randall instinctively wants units simplified - as they would be in a science context rather than a useful-for-normal-people's-everyday-needs context. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.238.183|108.162.238.183]] 02:40, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
:Yes, it is normal, but to people who know what it means it hurts to look at. kWh are a measure of energy that is technically SI-friendly and at a useful scale, but from an scientific perspective there isn't a great reason (to my knowledge) other than convention to not just use megajoules (1 kWh is 3.6 MJ). That on its own bothers me, and probably Randal based on a lot of his other comics. The added complaint here is that by making them per/day it is back to a measure of power (which kW measure) [[User:Stardragon|Stardragon]] ([[User talk:Stardragon|talk]]) 23:34, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

This is especially funny with US units. My car needs about 5l/100km, or 0.05mm². Now I am wondering how many ft^(-2) my car does... --[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 13:49, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
: You make a good point about the units (at least in one instance). Shouldn't the reduced units for fuel economy be inverse area? Effectively, it is a measure of the distance the vehicle could travel while consuming a column of fuel with a specific height and specific top (or bottom) surface area. Or, The better the fuel economy, the less the surface area that is necessary to move a specific distance. [[User:SammyChips|SammyChips]] ([[User talk:SammyChips|talk]]) 20:41, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
::It depends on what the original unit is. In my country (Germany) we measure it in volume/distance, which would reduce to area. North American convention is in distance/volume which would reduce to inverse area. Good thing about distance/volume is that "high number = good". However I think outside of escaping from a nuclear disaster or in a zombie apocalypse it isn't a really helpful thing to know. Because how often do you know "I got x amount of fuel. Wonder how far I can get." But you will likely be in the situation where you quickly want to see "How much fuel do I need to get to place x which is y distance from here". --[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 21:57, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
::: how often do you know "I got x amount of fuel. Wonder how far I can get." Quite often, because the question I'm really asking is whether I can get where I'm going with some margin built in before I need to refuel my car. When I do refuel or recharge the car, I'll go to 100% of capacity. I just want to know whether I have to do that now or if I can wait and do it later because later would be more convenient. The only time I want the number the other way is when I'm buying a car and want to make it as efficient as possible. Once I have it, the amount of fuel I need isn't going to change.[[User:Yttrium|Yttrium]] ([[User talk:Yttrium|talk]]) 09:02, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
::::Mhh... probably a question of what one is used to. If I need to go 400 km, and I know my car uses 5l/100km, I just multiply 4*5 to see that I need 20l, and will know if what I have is enough or not. But I guess with mpg you can do a just as easy calc: If my car gets 50mpg (roughly 5l/100km) and I have 5 gallons (roughly 20l), I can go 50*5=250 miles, which is roughly 400km. My nitpick is: My car, and I think all cars I ever drove just shows me a dial from empty to full. Knowing how much "full" is, I can estimate how much gas I have, while my GPS will tell me a pretty exact number of km I need to go. So if I am fuelling up on a monday morning (where gas tends to be more expensive in my area than on other times), or fuel up right before I get my next salary, I might just put in as much as I need right now. But yes, maybe/probably it is mostly a thing about habits and what you are used to. And might be more of an European issue, since fuel is basically free in North America in comparison. So I guess everyone just fuels up fully all the time, but has to be cautious to reach the next gas station when travelling through the more sparely-populated areas...--[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 10:19, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
:: More usefully imagined as the front (or back) end of a horizontal column (or, twisting as it may, a pipeline) that traverses the journey made by the vehicle. As if (instantaneous variations excepted) you consume precisely the fuel that your vehicle passes 'through/around'. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.76.92|141.101.76.92]] 20:45, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
::: Yeah. Maybe we should express fuel consumption in terms of the speed fuel needs to be drawn through a standard fuel line. [[User:SammyChips|SammyChips]] ([[User talk:SammyChips|talk]]) 21:01, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

fridge [[Special:Contributions/172.70.126.147|172.70.126.147]] 14:22, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

The late [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._C._MacKay Sir David MacKay] wrote an excellent book, [http://www.withouthotair.com/ Sustainable Energy – without the hot air] (which is available free online).
On [http://www.withouthotair.com/c2/page_24.shtml this page] he talks about the units he uses in the book: kWh for energy ("one unit") and kWh/day for power - becuase it's simple for lay-people to understand - how many units does this appliance use per day.
It's a good book if any of you are interested in sustainable energy (although it was written in 2008, so some bits might be out of date by now) {{unsigned ip|172.70.85.33|14:33, 15 January 2025}}

If anyone's curious, I found an online gallons per square foot calculator: https://www.omnicalculator.com/construction/gallons-per-square-foot [[Special:Contributions/172.71.223.6|172.71.223.6]] 15:54, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

The answer to Cueball's question is likely NO in the US and YES in the UK, due not just to gallon size but also fridge size (a model like that is a particularly large fridge, when I bought one 10 years ago going for the smallest available I had to modify my cabinet above the fridge as there wasn't one less than 6'8"- the fridge hole was 6' previous).[[User:Seebert|Seebert]] ([[User talk:Seebert|talk]]) 16:02, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

I disagree with this comic, and I think the final paragraph in the explanation about Hubble's constant best explains why. [[User:Beanie|Beanie]] [[User talk:Beanie|talk]] 15:57, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
:It doesn't make any sense to 'disagree' with an observation.[[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.245|141.101.98.245]] 09:36, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Technically, kWh should be written as kW⋅h or kW h, because it literally means "kilowatts multiplied by one hour", not "kilowatts per hour" as many people assume. However, almost nobody writes it correctly. (kW/h is sometimes also seen, but egregiously incorrect.) Also, particularly now that electric vehicles are becoming more popular, people often get confused between kW and kW h. The car can charge at a peak or average rate expressed in kW, but energy billed by a charging service provider is expressed in kWh. People frequently either add or remove the "h" incorrectly because they don't understand the difference. In some places like India, a kilowatt-hour is simply referred to as a "unit" to avoid confusion. In my opinion, it was an enormous mistake to use kWh when we could be using mJ instead, which I think is probably something close to the point Randall may have been trying to make. Anyway, I wasn't sure if there was a place for any of this random trivia in the article itself, but feel free to use it. [[User:Equites|Equites]] ([[User talk:Equites|talk]]) 17:11, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
: No!. TF?. ms is meter times seconds, m/s is meter per second. There is NOTHING wrong with kWh, it literally means kW times hours, and CANNOT mean anything else. kW per hour would be kW/h.. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.160.34|172.71.160.34]] 12:41, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
:: Technically, the SI would have you write m s for meter-seconds and ms for milliseconds. Thus, similarly, it should be kW h for kilowatt-hours, not kWh. It is unambiguous either way, but the standard is the standard. But that is a totally bizarre thing to get hung up on. Also, Equites's suggestion to use millijoules instead was maybe not well thought-out. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.15.234|172.68.15.234]] 17:45, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Relevant XKCD… I mean relevant YouTube video: "Cursed units" 1 and 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkfIXUjkYqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg7xe8MkJHs [[User:Fabian42|Fabian42]] ([[User talk:Fabian42|talk]]) 17:31, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

: Highly relevant, in fact. The first video referred to the kilowatt-hour as "cursed", which became a highly polarizing issue in the comments, something that was addressed at the beginning of part 2. Assuming these responses weren't cherry-picked, I get the impression that there are a lot of people on both sides of this. It seems like the same kind of thing we're seeing in this very comment section. [[User:ISaveXKCDpapers|ISaveXKCDpapers]] ([[User talk:ISaveXKCDpapers|talk]]) 18:10, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

I always wonder why people here prefer liter/m^2 for the amount of rain. Where the same number as mm is way easier to imagine. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.99|172.68.50.99]] 18:14, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
: At first, I was wondering if you would have rather had it in microliters/mm^2, but you meant the column height of the rain, like inches are used in the US. Along the line of L/m^2, something like mL/cm^2 might be nice considering the density of water, although the value also would be different by a factor. [[User:SammyChips|SammyChips]] ([[User talk:SammyChips|talk]]) 20:51, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
: That's the neat thing about the metric system, they are trivially simple to convert. 1l/m² is exactly 1mm. The fact that the meteorology uses the former just stems from the fact that that's how they measure it. The catch the rain on an area of 1m² into a beaker that contains some volume which is measured in liters. What annoys me though, is that noone seems to be talking about how terribly inefficient the fridge in the comic is. Mine only needs a tenth of the one that Whitehat tries to sell, and that's not even particularly good. --21:21, 15 January 2025 (UTC)
:: UK measurements, once it gets to weather reports/forecasts, tend to be in millimetres (or centimetres, where more for the layperson who don't need mm-resulution; or occasionally recast as 'old money' inches, with ''really'' bad rain events summarised in relation to whole feet), which is implicitly the depth to which ''any'' area would be filled (in a case where large catchment + funnelling valley situation is concerned, suffering from the run-off, might be ''reported'' as "equivalent to ''N'' feet of rain", down where the bad effects get concentrated, but this is not a meteorological measure as such).
:: Not sure I've ever seen volume/area as an end-result figure (might be relevent as an intermediate for measurement/calculation, especially when discussing the funelling effects of the given local geography), but of course it's trivially relatable.
:: Density of water would only figure in from replacing litres with kilogrammes (litres are 1/1000th of metres³ and any m² is 10,000 times the cm² (or millilitre), so a factor of 10 between L/m² and mL/cm²; divide L to mL by 1000, times m² to cm² by 10,000, => 10x) but I always find it useful to know that three 2L bottles of pop are (very close to, going by the nominal water content alone) 6kg... makes me feel better about lugging the weekly shopping home, where these might be the single most significant part of the weight. More usefully than cross-converting into length-cubed measure. ;) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.69|141.101.98.69]] 21:42, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

Isn't the point that KwH/day can be simplified to Watts (an average perhaps, but still) {{unsigned ip|162.158.41.72|21:24, 15 January 2025}}
: Yes, the joke seems pretty clearly about watts or kilowatts, not megajoules. Using megajoules doesn't result in any units being canceled; the denominator remains "/day". [[User:BatmanAoD|BatmanAoD]] ([[User talk:BatmanAoD|talk]]) 23:52, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

If the argument for kWh/day is that it's easy for the consumer to understand how it will affect their electricity bill – then kWh/month would be the right choice, because I doubt anyone receives an electricity bill every day. But the salesman prefers 3 kWh/day because it sounds like a smaller number than 90 kWh/month. And of course, if electricity bills were written in joules instead of illogical watt-hours, then MJ/month would be the easiest for the consumer. {{unsigned ip|162.158.134.90|22:31, 15 January 2025}}
:Per-month is tricky. You seem to assume month=30 days, when it can be 28-31 and is only 30 days a third of the time. Per quarter(-year) is a bit more consistent, less fractionally variant ''and'' closer to most utility bill frequencies as well, if you're looking for something not as eye-wateringly frightening as an annual estimate (which 'only' varies every 4.1237... years, on average). [[Special:Contributions/172.70.163.47|172.70.163.47]] 00:21, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
:: "''Per-month is tricky. You seem to assume month=30 days, when it can be 28-31...''" My electric bill for December 2024 is 33 days. The company closes the book when it is convenient, not per some calendar. --[[User:PRR|PRR]] ([[User talk:PRR|talk]]) 05:22, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
:::Which is why electric consumption per month is even more tricky. --[[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 06:33, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
:::It's still per some calendar. Just a calendar of the electric company, that you're not privy to.[[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.245|141.101.98.245]] 09:36, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
::It's an average. We're not talking specifically about February. You could multiply by 365.24/12 and get 91.31 kWh/month on average – but there's only one significant figure in 3 kWh/day. White Hat doesn't say 3.000 kWh/day. You have to round 91.31 to 90 to avoid false precision.
::The stated average is an estimate based on assumptions about how much you'll fill the fridge, how often you'll open the door, how long you'll leave the door open, the room temperature in your kitchen, how much surrounding cabinets will restrict air flow across the condenser, et cetera. The combined uncertainties make it meaningless to state a highly precise power consumption. The length of the month is just one of many sources of variation. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.90|162.158.134.90]] 10:40, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
:::Ahem... "multiply by 365.24'''25'''/12". As anyone with a fridge at least 125-years-old would appreciate... ;) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.178|141.101.98.178]] 12:23, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

I suspect this comic is inspired by the much more common pet peeve of incorrect/nonsensical units, frequently encountered in similar contexts. I'm so used to hearing kWh mistakenly written simply as kW, that I initially misread and assumed that's what the comic is about. That's a particularly common example, where you'll hear battery capacities listed in kW, or instantaneous power described in watt-hours. [[User:PotatoGod|PotatoGod]] ([[User talk:PotatoGod|talk]]) 09:53, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
:{{w|Calorie#Chemistry and physics|Calories}} vs. {{w|Calorie#Nutrition|calories}}, also... ;) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.178|141.101.98.178]] 12:23, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

It could be worse.. I keep seeing TVs marked in kWh per 1000 hours... That is just insanity pure and simple.. It is in fact Watts!!![[Special:Contributions/172.71.160.34|172.71.160.34]] 12:38, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
:This is even some kind of a "standard", officially. See first image in here: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_4484
:Also, world power consumption is almost exclusively represented in TWh per year, because TW is obviously not a thing. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.6|172.68.50.6]] 13:42, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Can I be the obnoxious arse that points out that a 125W fridge will NOT be pulling 3kWh (or 3 units?) per day? Fridges run a compressor which makes the cold happen (via science and magic) and when there's enough cold in the box, it'll click off until cold is lacking. The durations will depend on ambient temperature, however observing my (oldish) fridge, it seems to run for about fifty seconds every four or five minutes.
[[Special:Contributions/141.101.69.92|141.101.69.92]] 18:45, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
:Fridge is actually heating device: it heats up your kitchen by pumping the heat from inside to outside. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 22:32, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

There is actually a good reason to differentiate between Wh/h (energy over time) and W (power): Non-constant consumption. If the fridge consumes 3kWh/d, its compressor will be rated in the 300-400W nominal range (the thermostatic controller will cycle the compressor on and off; for a modern fridge-freezer combination, a typical duty cycle would be in the 25-30% range). The unit nameplate will say "400W" because that's the rated power the electrical installation will have to be designed for (how many of these fridges can you put on a 20A breaker etc.). This is only determined by the physical properties of the compressor motor. The energy consumption additionally depends on insulation, internal space of the cabinet etc. etc. and only makes sense as a time average (due to the intermittent operation of the compressor). Not sure about US rules, but here in Europe, there's a standard energy class label for fridges which specifies kWh/a as a primary means of comparison. (Averaging over a year has the advantage that you can test against a standardized profile of ambient temperature change between summer and winter).
[[User:Ogehrke|Ogehrke]] ([[User talk:Ogehrke|talk]]) 21:28, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

The explanation incorrectly states that fuel efficiency in the metric system is measured in km/l. It's not. It's measured in l/km, so it reduces to area, not 1/area.[[Special:Contributions/172.71.182.77|172.71.182.77]] 22:40, 16 January 2025 (UTC)
:I recall seeing a book in my youth about "understanding units" that included great things like viscosity and explanations for why E=mc² cancels units properly. But they got to gasoline consumption, and used the analogy that the "area" represented here is the equivalent of the area of an adjacent trough of gas that would have to be scooped up by your car to keep it running. Very interesting way of illustrating unit cancellation. [[User:RandalSchwartz|RandalSchwartz]] ([[User talk:RandalSchwartz|talk]]) 23:05, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Talk:3015: D&D Combinatorics

2024-11-24T23:14:13Z

Stardragon: /* Polyhedral Dice */

The bot originally created this page as “D Combinatorics”. I renamed it to the correct title and tried to get as many of the references as possible (including a few redirects). [[User:JBYoshi|JBYoshi]] ([[User talk:JBYoshi|talk]]) 00:54, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

:The title in the Atom feed (which I'm assuming the bot consumes) is "D Combinatorics". I'm guessing something in Randall's pipeline didn't like the ampersand. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.160|162.158.154.160]] 01:41, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

::Yup, if you look at [https://xkcd.com/3015/info.0.json 3015's JSON] you see that <code>title</code> and <code>safe_title</code> differ, and if you look at the HTML page source you'll see '''3''' different things: <code><title>xkcd: D Combinatorics</title></code>, <code><meta property="og:title" content="D&amp;D Combinatorics"></code>, and <code><div id="ctitle">D&D Combinatorics</div></code>! So probably what happened is Randall entered D&D but was supposed to enter D&amp;D, and the openGraph tags adder code, having to be HTML-aware, decoded & normalized D&D as HTML would, but the other parts of the pipeline just ate it for some reason.

:By raw combinatorics: 71 + 52 + 34 + 20 + 10 + 4 + 1 ways to get each of 16 - 22 respectively, for a total of 192, out of 4(6^3) = 864 total. 192/864 simplifies to exactly 2/9. I have no idea how Randall found this; if anyone has an idea, please let me know. [[User:Kaisheng21|Kaisheng21]] ([[User talk:Kaisheng21|talk]]) 01:33, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
::I used some simple python code to loop over every dice and confirm and it's 2/9 [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.111|162.158.158.111]] 12:11, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

It seems like we edited the transcript at the same time. The odds of rolling 16 or higher in this situation seem to be 2/9? [[User:Darkmatterisntsquirrels|Darkmatterisntsquirrels]] ([[User talk:Darkmatterisntsquirrels|talk]]) 01:29, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

: There are 864 possible rolls (6 * 6 * 6 * 4). If you enumerate all of the rolls you will find that 192 are 16 or higher. 192/864 = 2/9, the value from the explanation. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.139|172.68.54.139]] 01:41, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

I added a table of outcomes to clarify how it works out to 2/9, anyone know how to make it pretty? -- Laurence Cheers

A much simpler approach: Roll two six sided dice and sum the result. You are successful if the result is 5 or 9. That happens 8 times out of 36. 8/36 = 2/9. (Or successful if the sum is 4 or 6, or 2 or 7, or 2,3,4 or 11, or several other combinations.) [[Special:Contributions/172.68.54.139|172.68.54.139]] 01:41, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
:Clever, but dice rolls in D&D involving summing all the dice, applying modifiers, if any, and then comparing to one or more threshold values. Your method makes it very difficult to apply modifiers. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.41.8|162.158.41.8]] 02:49, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
::I think you misunderstand the problem here. This is not skill, no modifiers apply, it's purely probability [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.111|162.158.158.111]] 12:11, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Minor quibble, arrows aren't fired (unless they're flaming or self-propelled, perhaps), they are shot. (Shotguns are fired of course.) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.41.73|162.158.41.73]] 02:52, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
:Arrows are "loosed", even more accurately. At least to avoid the confusion from how so many things may be shot, or ''a'' shot. (Many different nouns, from a physical measure of liquer/coffee/vaccine to a projectile, or an even abstract fundemental of chance; and, as verb, projectiles perhps may be shot, then so may their targets.) [[Special:Contributions/172.68.205.178|172.68.205.178]] 14:32, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Rolling 22 or lower on percentile dice (or, equivalently, 79 or higher) is close enough, and easier to come up with. (Give or take whether 00 is treated as 100 or zero.) Or directly represent the action: roll a d10. If it's 1-5, you lose. If it's 6-10, roll again; if it's 1-5 you lose, 6-9 you win, 10 roll again. (Modify slightly if you want to distinguish the case of grabbing *two* cursed arrows.) [[User:Jordan Brown|Jordan Brown]] ([[User talk:Jordan Brown|talk]]) 03:26, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

== Alternative exact solution for getting this probability using dice ==

Roll: 1d8, 2d6, 1d4 succeed on 19 or higher.

== Alternative way to calculate the probability of drawing two non-cursed arrows ==

I couldn’t remember the formula for binomial coefficients (“n choose k”), but there’s an easy way to calculate that the probability of drawing no cursed arrows is 2/9 without that formula. You just need to multiply the probabilities that each of the arrows drawn is not cursed. Since only two arrows are drawn, you only have to multiply two numbers.

The probability that the first arrow is not cursed is 5/10 – there are 5 non-cursed arrows and 5 cursed arrows out of 10 total. After taking out one non-cursed arrow, there are 4 non-cursed arrows and 5 cursed arrows out of 9 total, so the probability that the second arrow is not cursed is 4/9. Multiplying the two probabilities, the probability of drawing two non-cursed arrows is (4*5)/(10*9) = 20/90 = 2/9.

I was considering writing this observation in the Explanation section of the page, but I’m not if it belongs there. This solution avoids using formulas from combinatorics, so it might not be connected enough to the comic.—[[User:Roryokane|Roryokane]] ([[User talk:Roryokane|talk]]) 06:02, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

== My simple-minded approach ==

• Roll d10 once for your first arrow: if 1 to 5, the arrow is cursed, otherwise not;

• Roll d10 again for your second arrow: same rules, but repeat until you have a different number from the first one (so d10 is in fact only a d9 this time)

• I won't calculate probabilities – these are your arrows, live with it ;-)
[[Special:Contributions/172.69.109.51|172.69.109.51]] 07:33, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
:That has the benefit (over 3d6+1d4) of telling you which arrow(s) (if either) was cursed. [[User:RegularSizedGuy|RegularSizedGuy]] ([[User talk:RegularSizedGuy|talk]]) 07:52, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
:If you don't like re-rolls, you can make d9 out of 2d3. Nine possibilities, so just assign one of them (perhaps by rolling them one at a time) to be the more significant digit. Don't have a d3 handy? Use d6 and modulo off the extra! (1=1, 2=2, 3=3, 4=1, 5=2, 6=3) [[Special:Contributions/172.68.150.91|172.68.150.91]] 05:59, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

== The physical difficulties of an M-of-N locking system ==
There seems to be doubt that a "N locks and M keys to unlock them" system could be easily accomplished. I think it could be trivial, with strategically interlocking locked-restraints. A chain formed of bike-locks can give a larger locked loop that can be unlocked by just unlocking any ''single'' one of the constituent locks, leaving the other locked loops to not matter (or you could also try the {{w|Borromean rings}} system, whereby it is again secure against itself, until just one ring is opened up to reveal that the rest now ''aren't even locked at all''...). With almost arbitrary ability to cross-link (or, if you will, repeated/alternating-reflected Borromean triplet connections), you can extend the requirements to more than one unlocking being required (by looping chain elements to mre than just the 'adjacent' loops, sideways onto a parallel meta-loop or up/down the chain, all you might do is allow some slack (could be sufficient to get a thing held directly closed by the taut loop-of-loops, but not enough if the passage of the loop through a hasp/sneck actually prevents the otherwise free movement of the final slide-to-unlock action to occur), but a second (or third, or fourth) unlocking can be required to open-end the whole metaloop of locks. At the top end, M=N solutions are also trivial (e.g. two keys, two locks popularly of safety deposit boxes or [[2677: Two Key System|other things]]). Which is not to say that a specific M-of-N puzzle (where 1<M<N) might not need a ''little'' bit of thought to actually design and implement, but there's no obvious reason why all such combinations shouldn't be nicely doable. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.165|172.69.79.165]] 14:56, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
:Can we first confirm that the M-of-N Encryption was what Randall was referencing in the first place? [[Special:Contributions/172.71.154.140|172.71.154.140]] 03:17, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
::No, first confirm that this is what the explanation treats as what Randall was referencing. As it was, "complicated lock mechanics" and/or "magic" were suggested as the only ways of doing this, when this (or what we thought this was) just needs a little thought and N bike-locks suitably entangled. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.58.45|172.70.58.45]] 13:17, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
:I'm glad someone else chimed in on this, because it is definitely ''not'' difficult to require unlocking of multiple discrete locks! I can't even figure out why one might think it would be?
:[[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 15:55, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

==Polyhedral Dice==
"other polyhedral dice, with the number of faces denoted by dX (e.g., d10 is a 10-sided die, with numbers from 1 to 10 on it)." - the d10 may be a poor choice as exemplar here; Back in the last century, when I was playing D&D, d10 were typically (and uniquely) numbered 0-9, not 1-10. This may no longer be the case, and I may be showing my age, but if it is still the norm, the d8 or d20 might be a better choice of example. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.210.6|172.68.210.6]] 02:40, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
:Typically, I've only seen 0-9 d10s, as part of a "d100" dice pair, with one reading 0-9 & the other reading 0⁰-9⁰... Single d10, mostly seem to come in 1-10? Maybe it depends which reseller one shops at...
:[[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 15:49, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
::They are usually numbered 0-9, but the 0 represents 10, since writing 10 would require that face to have a different font size. It is still a d10, since the die has ten sides, and still cannot roll at 0. The d100 variant does the same thing with 100, but for the added reason that the 00 face actually does mean 0 when the other die rolls a 1-9. This is the convention, so a die that actually writes 10 on it instead of 0 will be rare. [[User:Stardragon|Stardragon]] ([[User talk:Stardragon|talk]]) 23:14, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

== You've all been nerd-sniped. ==

[[User:CalibansCreations|'''Caliban''']] ([[User talk:CalibansCreations|talk]]) 10:53, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

== Combinatorics degree? ==
Does such a degree really exist? --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.130.37|162.158.130.37]] 17:19, 24 November 2024 (UTC)
:There are degrees for all kinds of things. A quick search reveals a number of "Combinatorics" or "Combinatorics and <Foo>" (e.g. "Optimisation") degrees. Some of them are marked as Masters degrees, and I haven't dug into the others to see if there are any 'pure' undergraduate ones (apart from anything else, I know there are crucial differences between the structures and scopes of UK and US 'degree courses' to consider, in particular), but there seems to be representation on both sides of the Atlantic (and elsewhere, e.g. Oceana).
:At the very least, it could be a selected specialised segment of an even wider mathematical degree course, or a cross-disciplinary one (like my own, which was part under Physics and part under Computing, but could have included a Stats-based element). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.49|162.158.74.49]] 19:07, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Talk:2030: Voting Software

2024-03-27T00:32:04Z

Stardragon:

This comic is eerily relevant again these days!
[[Special:Contributions/172.69.190.72|172.69.190.72]] 14:22, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

Well the 'airplanes' part of this comic has aged really damn poorly :(

:I mean, from what I've heard the problems are more with quality control at Boeing than the engineering itself [[User:Stardragon|Stardragon]] ([[User talk:Stardragon|talk]]) 00:32, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I think this comic is referencing [https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1026603800365330432 this twitter thread] and the controversy behind it.
[[Special:Contributions/172.69.190.4|172.69.190.4]] 17:59, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
: The [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/experts-criticize-west-virginias-plan-for-smartphone-voting/ Experts criticize West Virginia’s plan for smartphone voting] article on ArsTechnica has more information (as much as possible when the company in question does not provide any details (note that it is about overseas voting). --[[User:JakubNarebski|JakubNarebski]] ([[User talk:JakubNarebski|talk]]) 19:44, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Is he saying it's weird that we're so sophisticated in other areas of computer science but so far behind in voting technology, or is he making fun of the idea that electronic voting is somehow inherently unsafe?--[[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.106|108.162.216.106]] 18:10, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
: No i think he is saying computer science is a mess and we should not trust it with voting(he is not making fun of the idea of it being unsafe, he is pressing on the point of it being unsafe[saying that all experts agree on that])18:18, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

: I think he's commenting on how in most fields, the experts are very sure that they do their job well, and all the angles have been tried and tested, but in computer science the experts are more certain than anyone that there is ''absolutely no way'' for a person to actually build a complex software system with no flaws or vulnerabilities, even if they controlled every aspect of the system. in practice of course they control very little of the system and understand even less of it. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.34.88|172.68.34.88]] 18:22, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

: He's saying that software development is a terribly buggy process, most likely because the majority of software out there can have bugs without very dire real-world consequences (unlike aircraft or elevators).

::Not to mention the fact that there are incredibly smart people with great interest in undoing the work that software developers do, whereas that isn't at all the case with airplanes or elevators. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.214|108.162.219.214]] 18:29, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

:: Plus there's the general issue that the public as a whole takes the view that "Computers are majykal" (misspelling deliberate) and therefore somehow automatically safe & infallible, despite experts trying very hard to disillusion people about...pretty much all of that. Compare that to the common assumptions about aircraft and elevators--people need the safety verified, instead of assuming it like they do with computers. [[User:Werhdnt|Werhdnt]] ([[User talk:Werhdnt|talk]]) 19:08, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

:::There's a logical fallacy here. To compare airplaneS and elevatorS to a voting system program is comparing plural to singular. There would be significant opportunity to break/modify a single instance of those objects, although without the relative anonymity of electronic access involved. Once a computer system is infiltrated, the break-in can be replicated to all instances of that program relatively instantaneously, assuming communication pathways are available.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.75.130|162.158.75.130]] 19:12, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

::::No logical fallacy; there have been ''multiple'' attempts to get people to accept a voting system program, and the 'done by a computer=infallible' problem is '''''not''''' unique to voting programs. Mr. Babbage was being confused by people who were thinking it was possible to get the correct answers from a computer despite putting the wrong data in back in the 1860s (at least!), and the computer at the time was not much more than a fancy calculator. [[User:Werhdnt|Werhdnt]] ([[User talk:Werhdnt|talk]]) 20:23, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

A blockchain node doesn't technically need to be connected to the internet in order to function. It needs to have some method for receiving messages from other nodes on the blockchain network, and most blockchain nodes do indeed get these messages via the internet, but some magic beans nodes (for example) get updates about new blocks and new transactions from the Blockstream satellite. An internet connection is therefore not intrinsically necessary for a blockchain to work, it's just the most convenient way to do it.

:::: The blockstream satellite is an internet, just a different media. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.59.24|172.68.59.24]] 14:41, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Do you think that this comic had anything to do with the debacle in Johnson County, KS last night? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.231|162.158.62.231]] 19:30, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

The comic ignores the fact that modern airplanes are heavily utilizing software of all kinds. A software failure in an aircraft could easily be fatal (and have been so various times in history already, while the consequences of a voting software working incorrect are ''relatively'' harmless), and still airplanes remain safe, as the comic recognizes. --[[User:YMS|YMS]] ([[User talk:YMS|talk]]) 21:05, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

:Airplanes are not connected to internet and reasonably well protected from people putting their USB devices in their control system. Also, they are NOT build by lowest bid contractor. There ARE people now capable of building offline voting machine which would be reasonable secure. They are working in banks and stock exchanges and at those companies providing switches for internet backbone, are extremely well paid and wouldn't ever promise they will get the machine finished in single year. Noone asks THEM to make the voting machines. Voting over internet? With consumer-grade devices? Impossible. (I'm also working in IT, although not on mentioned high-security systems.) -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 22:24, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

::Note that she is talking to aircraft designers, not to software engineers working on fly-by-wire systems (back when I took software engineering you got an answer similar to the one about voting machines when discussing fly-by-wire). I took this more as the aircraft designers glossing over the problems caused by software engineering. A voting system which uses paper ballots, with perhaps computer systems used for some stages of counting would be a reasonable analogy to the redundant systems used in aircraft. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.106.228|162.158.106.228]] 23:08, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Seems to me that the last panel references the E.T for Atari Desert Burial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial), perhaps to draw some analogy as to the potential quality or likelihood of success of a Block-chain solution as compared to the ill-fated video game. Anyone think that's worth explaining? [[User:Da_NKP|Da_NKP]] 10:15, 8 August 2018 (UTC) Da_NKP

What motive is there to "mine DemocracyCoin"? Who evaluates this blockchain? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.150.100|162.158.150.100]] 22:27, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
:That's simple, ideally it would be a private blockchain, and the evaluators would just be every voting computer in existence (They'd all be active for a similar fairly short time period). Presumably the evaluations would be ongoing during the voting process, then could be stopped once voting was complete. The last few votes of the night may not wind up being evaluated. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.225|162.158.74.225]]
::"The last few votes of the night may not wind up being evaluated" Thats horrifying. That alone should prove how terrible of an idea this is. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.181|162.158.154.181]] 17:14, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
:::The current system regularly throws away millions of votes because every step in the process has a strict deadline, and that's before outside processes interfere.[[User:Sailorleo|Sailorleo]] ([[User talk:Sailorleo|talk]]) 15:55, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be possible to run said blockchain on one's personal computer, instead of running on a voting machine? and you could compile open source software yourself to perform the voting. That sounds like a solid enough way to keep security fine to me, but if I'm missing something, please tell me. [[User:Gjgfuj|TheSandromatic]] ([[User talk:Gjgfuj|talk]]) 03:25, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
:The bigger challenge in a voting system isn't making sure someone doesn't modify the record, it's making sure that each person only votes once and only for themselves -- think about past internet voting campaigns: Justin Bieber wasn't sent to North Korea by *changed* votes, but rather by flooding the system with *bogus* votes. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.132.47|172.68.132.47]] 06:26, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
::To be a bit clearer, magic beans (for example), doesn't and can't enforce that wallets correspond one-to-one with people -- multiple people can share a wallet (if they all know the private key), and one person can have multiple wallets. If you want to guarantee one-to-one correspondence, you have to validate identities and issue unique, signed keys at some prior point. Leaving aside whether or not it's possible to do this part securely and without error (and how big of a target the root signing key would be), you then have millions of people doing their own key management, just like you do with magic beans. When magic beans wallets are stolen en masse by key compromises (which does happen), only the wallet owners (who were ostensibly using poor security practices which allowed the compromise) suffer, so the harm is limited. If voting system keys were stolen en masse, but the votes still counted, society as a whole would likely suffer. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.132.47|172.68.132.47]] 07:03, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

I think a problem that lies within voting machines is that a single flaw can and will be exploited along all machines.
You wouldn't enter a plane if one plane crashing means that all other planes will crash too.

I am not American and not so inside American politics and its system, but I think there right now is (or just was) some kind of vote in Ohio? Randalls other comic about voting machines, ([[463]])references Ohio directly as well. Even if not, that comic should definitely be referenced here. If no one else does I will in a few hours when I come home from work. [[User:Lupo|Lupo]] ([[User talk:Lupo|talk]]) 08:11, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
:There was a special election for Ohio's 12th Congressional District on Tuesday to fill in a vacant spot in the US House of Representatives, yes. I hadn't heard anything specifically about any issues with Ohio's voting machines, though I do somewhat vaguely remember Randall making a comic that expressed horror at the fact that a voting machine needed anti-virus software in the first place. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.63.154|162.158.63.154]] 12:58, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

I guess this may be of interest for reasons why not to have electroni voting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.13|162.158.154.13]]

Wait, so I'm not into this *at all*, but a bunch of you seem to be, so:
paper ballot voting works because we can assume the humans we choose to count oue votes to be trustworthy. Imagine that as the digital voting device, we use a cheapo Chinaphone. We remove any parts needed for wireless connection, and all USB ports and AUX ports (which are the only ports on such a device) are filled with hot glue (so, destroyed). Some of them are designed in an awkward way where you have to take the backside off in order to access the SD card, which normally is disadvantageous, but now it means that you can use a sort of sturdy phone cover with a physical lock to make the SD card inaccessible to anyone not owning the key. The key is with the trustworthy human that would otherwise hold the key for the box the paper votes go in. You could glue or screw the charger to it, so it was always full and you couldn't put a USB stick into that port without breaking the actual thing - and the trustworthy voting office humans would notice that. If it saves all votes on some SD card, the humans we trust to work for the voting can take the SD cards out, and bring them to a central computer that also has no wireless parts, and some trustworthy humans watching the SD ports. That central computer saves all the votes and counts them.
If you doctor with paper votes, then you'd have to destroy them or there'd be evidence against you. Destroying them is not safe to do.
If something seems fishy, then paper votes can be recounted.
If you have a voting machine that only a trustworthy person has access to, then that means that this trustworthy person has to build every part of the machine from the smallest transistor on and also has to guard the machine the whole time. Because otherwise you could manipulate the machine in a way to count the votes wrong, but show correct results when you test it. Since this is completely unpractical in the end you'd have to count by hand anyway.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.91.251|162.158.91.251]] 12:53, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
:Or just use paper ballots. They have been a perfectly adequate solution for centuries, and will continue to do so forever (and no, the paper usage for voting is not really significant, compared to the paper usage overall). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.202.64|162.158.202.64]] 20:00, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
If also we delete any and all software and firmware on the phones and central computer, and replace it by a piece of software that can literally only show you a multiple choice screen with names of candidates and save what you clicked, that sounds quite safe.
Carrying the SD cards to the central computer would still take time, but we're carrying much smaller things so it might speed up somewhat (less stuff to haul around), and the voting can be done nearly as fast as the central computer can read in the SD cards.
No strange SD cards go into the central machine since they're carried by the same trustworthy human that counts the paper votes.

Yet another issue that paper ballot voting gives us that electronic voting can hardly support is "deniability" of votes: after the fact, you cannot claim to have voted for anyone in particular, so you cannot be bribed or coerced to vote for a given party. This is a very essential and often overlooked property of any voting system.

What things will go wrong? Zillions, I'm sure. But what zillions? I'm curious!
A modern processor can't run without it's own software layer. If you want to transfer the data - even if only from an SD card to a local hard drive - then you'd need about seven layers, from which many have sublayers. The lowest level, which is the hardware level, consists on another plethora of levels. If just one transistor is modified by an attacker - or the layout of the transistors or a part of the CPU or a part of the hdd-controller or a part of the SD card controller or... many other things. Then this could lead to the attacker modifying the result of the vote.
There are thousands of attack points that start before the voting machine reaches it's target. Then there are attacking vectors that target the SD-card even before there's any voting data on it. (There are SD-card viruses that survive formatting and those aren't even on a hardware level) If you want a decently safe voting machine that costs less than a billion $ to make, then you should use a purely mechanical design. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.90.90|162.158.90.90]] 10:22, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

You could all reference Brazil for how an electronic voting system works. It changed in the late 90s after a major country-wide voting fraud scandal that revealed that most of the vote counters in the whole country were unreliable, partisan, bribed or all three; to the point any recount would bring a vastly different result. The Brazilian public lost all faith in the paper ballots and the Federal Electoral Tribunal had to implement an electronic voting system to reacquire voter trust in the voting system.

Twenty years later the public in general still trust the system more than the paper ballot but the losing side in presidential elections always cry afoul about the machines being tampered with (Even though the political parties that complained about fraud for losing the presidential election ended up winning the majority of the seats in both congress and senate, as well as state governships. But, you see, for those elections the system is foolproof, even though they're all done at the same time in the same voting machines.)
: Please sign your comments. The issue is a reduction of points of failure. In a paper ballot system, you have tens of thousands of humans being observed by each other and representatives of interested parties and judges doing the counting. A single malicious person would have to go to incredible effort to hide their miscountings, and then would only be able to change a hundred votes or so. In an electronic voting system, all it takes is one person to do an SD card swap and boom: tens of thousands of votes are changed. One person can change the code on the central counting system that reads the SD cards, and boom: millions of votes are changed. The fact that so much effort would be needed to change the result in a paper ballot system is a security feature. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.231|162.158.62.231]] 12:00, 11 August 2018 (UTC)
::And anyway, you're describing more or less [https://app.chicagoelections.com/documents/Judge-Handbook/EJ_Handbook_P2018_ch7.pdf what already happens] in an election. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.58.11|172.68.58.11]] 13:54, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

When paper votes need to be re-counted, it's easy: a vote is valid if there is a croos marking at exactly one candidate row. It's possible to implement this in software: store each "paper" as a separate file, and sing it with the voter's private key! Oh, wait, on real paper you don't add your signature because the vote is meant to be anonymous? Tough luck, as long as electronic votes are secret votes, there will be no way to make them re-countable reliably. {{unsigned ip|141.101.76.82}}

Talk:2283: Exa-Exabyte

2024-03-04T19:28:40Z

Stardragon: Comment

Is this the first non-coronavirus related comic after eight in a row? -- brad
:My personal suspicion is that this one came out so late in the day because Randall was trying to think up another coronavirus-related comic so as not to break his streak :) [[Special:Contributions/108.162.242.5|108.162.242.5]] 20:05, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
::We sure this is not covid-19 related? A comic revolving around how hard biology is doesn't seem to me like a definite chain breaker for a biology related topic. Though I'll admit its a bit of a stretch [[Special:Contributions/172.69.198.58|172.69.198.58]] 21:14, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
:::I'm pretty sure the comic is SARS-CoV-2 related. The virus genome can be found all over the internet lately, it is even used for spamming. [[User:Condor70|Condor70]] ([[User talk:Condor70|talk]]) 21:32, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
::::Did someone already modified SARS-CoV-2 to be able to infect computers as well? -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 23:35, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::Hm, not that I can find... This looks like a job for xkcd readers! Somebody get right on this, please. [[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 06:12, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::I also immediately thought of COVID19 when he started on biology. Of course is can be dabated if this comic has nothing to do with the vira, but it is still about how much life there is and big numbers. And he amount of vira in the world is a big number... Hard to imagine, just like exponential growth is hard for humans to understand. I'd say that if the next comic on Monday is again clearly on COVID19 then the strak did not end here, just took a detour around some aspect of biology related to the problems at hand. --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 16:54, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::::(...a job for xkcd readers...) I have a different idea: Rewrite the {{w|EICAR test file}} as an equivalently functional (R|D)NA package. Nothing can go wrong! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.92.98|162.158.92.98]] 19:35, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::::The funny thing about the exa-exabyte calculation is that it vastly underestimates the actual information entropy of DNA. For example, it doesn't take into account [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics epigenetic modifications] (e.g. histone acetylation and DNA methylation) in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote eukaryotes]. Interestingly, one reason why biologists can't get cloning to work is because simply copying the genome leaves behind epigenetic modifications (the "epigenome") that are critical to proper development and normally passed down through inheritance. In addition, most of the human genome doesn't even code for proteins (which is what people usually think of in terms of the information DNA encodes). Some of the genome encodes RNAs like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piwi-interacting_RNA piwi-interacting RNA], which function in RNA silencing and epigenetic effects and probably other things biologists don't even know about yet. Even weirder are [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposable_element transposons], which are mobile DNA sequences that jump around in the genome and can cause mutations and such. Biology is full of feedback loops, so stuff like epigenetic modification will affect the 3D structure of DNA, which can affect gene expression, which can affect epigenetic modification, and it's turtles all the way down. This is the messy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistocyte schistocyte] you get when evolution programs an organism's code. Simply counting DNA bases only hints at the true complexity of biology. BTW, HCoV-19 (human coronavirus 2019, another name for SARS-CoV-2 that I prefer because it avoids confusion with the 2003 SARS pandemic) happens to use RNA instead of DNA for its genome, for some reason. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ --[[User:In vivo veritas|In vivo veritas]] ([[User talk:In vivo veritas|talk]]) 05:15, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

So, is she counting all of humanity as one string of DNA data, or does each human count separately, or each cell in a human's body, or what?
[[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.215|162.158.74.215]] 21:48, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
: According to the NYT article, it was calculating "number of cells contained in each organism and multiplied that by the amount of DNA contained in each cell". [[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.161|172.69.33.161]] 22:46, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
:: So, very small part of it would be each human cell counted separately. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 23:35, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
:::Good lord, that's got to be 92% or more redundant data; somebody teach these folk about the wonders of compression & differential versioning databases. ;S [[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 06:15, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

'This is a comic about the difficulty of picturing or understanding large numbers. As mentioned in the comic, an exabyte is 10^18 bytes, while an "exa-exabyte" -- not a real word but one that makes sense if you apply the principles of metric prefixes' One of the principles of metric prefixes (which can be found in the linked page) is 'Prefixes may not be used in combination.' So "exa-exa" does not make sense in the metric world. It only makes "sense" in the messed up world were you lbf/lbm has the value 1 instead of g.[[Special:Contributions/172.68.65.138|172.68.65.138]] 01:54, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
:I've heard the term "gigakilogram(me)" used before. Probably due to the kilo being the base SI unit, rather than the prefixless gram/gramme. Just makes that Fermiation of derived compound units easier to work with, like the Newtons arising from a 'Gkg'x'Mm'/'das'² calculation being (?check?... 9+6-(2*1)=13, IIRC) of the final order of ~10TN. That said, I'd rather have liked to have seen the units instead being double-prefixed as "Terayotta-", because it sounds like a funny version of "terracotta". Or, as yotta- is essentially teratera-, go one stage further and use terateratera-... (Or picoyottayotta-?) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.92.98|162.158.92.98]] 19:58, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Most the data is redundant though. Compressed, and it definitely should be, it would take only about 2% as much space to store. [[User:Mikemk|Mikemk]] ([[User talk:Mikemk|talk]]) 05:32, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
:Glad somebody else already noted that.
:'''I think this should be noted in the explanation.'''
:[[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 06:18, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
:Good point -- 10000000000000000000000000000000000000 bytes is obviously much more than 200000000000000000000000000000000000 bytes. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.91.101|162.158.91.101]] 11:39, 23 March 2020 (UTC)

It is worth mentioning that Randall is also mocking the education system for its lack of ability of explaining complex stuff to pupils. The teacher here is supposed to be able to provide different analogies from real life so that there is a chance of getting a feeling of the magnitude of the underlying number. Instead, she just repeats the explanation in the same mathematical terms as the original concept. That clearly doesn't help. Even worse, it prompts another student to attempt to explain it in even simpler terms but miss the point completely. The irony here is that incorrect but easy to understand explanation is accepted and not the correct one. Here it's also possible to mention similarities regarding climate change information not getting through to the general public but that would be a stretch. Also, what's the whole point of understanding these numbers if they are just a funny statistical fact? -- [[User:SomethingLike|SomethingLike]] ([[User talk:SomethingLike|talk]]) 06:15, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

"if(`Can you picture 36?`){return `Picture a number with 36 digits.`;}
[[Special:Contributions/172.68.154.70|172.68.154.70]] 09:25, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
[[Special:Contributions/172.68.154.70|172.68.154.70]] 09:30, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Suppose there are 4e37 base pairs. There are four possible bases, although the pair has to match, so each pair still only encodes two bits, for a total of 8e37 bits, or 1e37 bytes. --[[Special:Contributions/162.158.38.66|162.158.38.66]] 11:07, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

If every human that has ever lived had a life span equal to the age of the universe, and every second of every day of their lives they created a one gigabyte storage device, there would still not be enough storage space to store 10 exa-exabytes. [[User:HisHighestMinion|HisHighestMinion]] ([[User talk:HisHighestMinion|talk]]) 22:07, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

By my calculations, if each of those 10 exa-exabytes is represented by 1 molecule of water... Then we are talking about a body of water the size of the {{w|Wachusett Reservoir}}. --[[User:Divad27182|Divad27182]] ([[User talk:Divad27182|talk]]) 00:29, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

Or almost exactly the amount of molecules of ammonia in the atmosphere.
:Or when stored on potential future 10 TB microSD cards, all necessary microSD cards together would require about the same volume as earth.

It might be interesting to try and picture this number in terms of video bandwidth. HDMI requires about 128 Gbit/s for 8K video at 120 fps with 10-bit HDR <ref>[[wikipedia:HDMI#Refresh frequency limits for HDR10 video]]</ref>. That translates to 16 GB/s. 1036 bytes would therefore translate to 6.25x1026 seconds or 2x1019 years or 20,000,000 trillion years (or about 4.4 billion times the age of the earth<ref>[[wikipedia:Age of the Earth]]</ref>) of 8K 120 Hz HDR video. Or enough so that the entire population of the Earth (7.7 billion people<ref>[[wikipedia:World population]]</ref>) could all watch separate streams at this resolution for 2.5 billion years. Still mind-bogglingly huge, but maybe something approaching comprehensibility? [[User:Shamino|Shamino]] ([[User talk:Shamino|talk]]) 03:28, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
:But that 128 gigabit per second figure is for ''uncompressed'' video, which doesn't occur in home usage. Whether by streaming, BluRay, or even imported straight from a camera head, all the video handled after export from "RAW" format is compressed, even if losslessly. The transport formats most commonly used with HDMI are compressed too, though not much. Streaming services in particular use a ''lot'' of compression (not even lossless); it could be ''much'' better compression for the same visual quality, if hardware x265 codec support were more common. A .ts stream is compressed... The list goes on. Figures given for video data rates are massively overstated in an ongoing campaign to misrepresent symptoms of error correction losses & multiple-access delays as stemming from fictitiously large payload size instead. Most users never come near the "max speeds" of any of their various connections for more than a few minutes a day, yet ISPs & hardware makers would rather upsell "faster top speed" connections than offer sane top speeds & warranty a minimum data rate. Massively overstating throughput by substituting theoretical lab peak calculations is a long standing practice spanning almost all digital industries & those absurd data rates purported from one end of the video industry to another are no exception.
:[[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 20:24, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm going to call shenanigans on this "apples can't be exponents" in the explanation, that's inaccurate. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.188|108.162.216.188]] 16:06, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
:🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏^🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏🍏 = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 apples. Obviously the "apples can't be exponents" statement is disproven with trivial ease. Just one problem: They're those nasty green Granny Smith apples, & those ''don't count''. While they can be exponents they can't possibly be considered rational.
:''Also, I'm very disappointed that it's been three days & no one has made a joke about the number of "base pears".''
:[[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 05:18, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
:: Granny Smiths are not nasty; they're ''pie apples''. I love apple pie. Granted, that's not a scientific judgement; pie is irrational. --[[User:Pi one|Pi one]] ([[User talk:Pi one|talk]]) 16:39, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
:::Granny Smith are ''definitely'' pie apples. (Insert ''Family Guy'' - s18e01 - ''Yacht Rocky'' reference [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJfBuh6zzSc here].) Based on [https://explainxkcd.com/388 xkcd.com/388] Randall might disagree with us... but I'm prepared to apple fight him to the sauce over this one.
:::[[User:ProphetZarquon|ProphetZarquon]] ([[User talk:ProphetZarquon|talk]]) 20:16, 17 April 2020 (UTC)
You can picture 10^18 as a cube a million on a side

MATHHACKED2829: Shouldn’t it be a giga-quettabyte if you’re a nerd? [[Special:Contributions/172.71.254.94|172.71.254.94]] 18:42, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Somebody might have mentioned this, but I ran some numbers and a pile of 10^36 apples would have a radius of just over 0.2 AU and a mass of about 88,000 solar masses. And then it would be a black hole probably, but I'm not an expert [[User:Stardragon|Stardragon]] ([[User talk:Stardragon|talk]]) 19:28, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

2627

2022-06-01T18:49:46Z

Stardragon: Undo revision 285250 by Davidy22 dreams of having gay sex with Vandalbane (talk)

#REDIRECT [[2627: Types of Scopes]]

Talk:768: 1996

2022-04-08T00:20:55Z

Stardragon: comment

The only problem with the N-Spire series is that you have to boot it up. Another problem (ok, the nspires are riddled with problems) is that they are still terribly underpowered compared to the modern mobile device. The last is that they are still objects of mass blunt-force trauma, meaning they are still unwieldy bricks, you now have to wait for 2 minutes while your calculator boots up (''!!''), it's still a low resolution screen, and the processor is still clocked somewhere under 500 MHz.
:Hey, I like the nspire, it does calculus and 3d graphing (even without the case model you can do definite calculus), displays up to 12 digits (which is plenty for most purposes), can be interfaced directly to some scientific instruments (more if you can find the software), can do lots of linear algebra, spreadsheets, companion software for easy download of apps if you can find them, can do way more with graphs than I even know how to ask it for, a filesystem for storing projects if you are that organized or need to refute back to things, and some models even have a touchscreen. It also has tons of constants and functions preloaded, copy/paste functionality, and can do unit conversions. I think it might even be able to do dimensional analysis, but I'm not certain. The battery on a first-gen nspire cx can last for days, and it only takes a couple of seconds to boot up, not two minutes. Plus, despite the fact that it is the premiere calculator for ti (and has been around for years) I've not encountered a lot of places where it is banned on tests, although that might be just me. Also, it doesn't need to have a fast processor, most, if not all, of what it is intended for is quite easy for a computer, it's not like you're running a 3d game [[User:Stardragon|Stardragon]] ([[User talk:Stardragon|talk]]) 00:20, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

Now, if T.I. made an android app that offered the entirety of their graphing and CAS functionality they could easily charge $70 and everyone I know (I go to an engineering university) would buy it with no regrets.

--[[User:Lcarsos|lcarsos]]_a ([[User talk:Lcarsos|talk]]) 23:04, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

They'll never do that - profs (not to mention high school teachers) would freak out! If that's not yet the only reason dedicated-hardware graphing calculators still exist, it soon will be. {{unsigned ip|24.218.167.129}}
:Why? Why they would freak out? [[Special:Contributions/173.245.48.107|173.245.48.107]] 22:18, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
::I can think of a couple reasons: I can't imagine many teachers or professors allowing students to use their smartphones in an exam scenario. (Honest sir, I'm only using my calculator app!). A large proportion of profs I've dealt with tend to be creatures of habit, with a certain resistance to change. Rightly or wrongly they know the existing calculators work, so why change. --[[User:Pudder|Pudder]] ([[User talk:Pudder|talk]]) 09:53, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
:::Wait. Are you telling me I can get a college degree for the price of a calculator case and someone to fit a phone in it?
::On 'allowable calculators', I went into exams ({{w|General Certificate of Secondary Education|GCSE}}s) in the UK with a {{w|Casio FX-702P}}. I always showed the teacher/invigilator that it had no programs pre-stored in it (not that they'd have known if I'd written P0 to display the 'fact' that I hadn't any programs currently stored).
::TI didn't seem to be as big a name over here, at the time (or not yet won the equivalent contest to the VHS/Betamax Wars, in which our family allegience was firmly allied with the technically superior {{w|Video 2000}} format!) and, though still low-powered when compared to the {{w|BBC Micro|BBC Acorn}} computer (as ubiquitous in schools as budgets allowed, i.e. one of them for a Primary School moved between classes on a trolley, while the Secondary School had maybe a half-dozen in one room, shared between 30+ kids at a time), it was a true miracle in the pocket.
::But that was when having a digital watch with a 'driving game' on it (oversized buttons for left and right lane-switching, and LCD elements to simplistically show the road ahead and any 'cars' you had to avoid driving into at ever increasing refresh rates!) was the easiest way to become popular with the class. Never had one myself. Or the calculator watch, that someone else had. I think I had one that showed the temperature, but that was never as impressive as it might have seemed when I first got it from {{w|Argos (retailer)|Argos}}... Oh, crazy days! [[Special:Contributions/172.70.162.77|172.70.162.77]] 00:09, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

[[User:Weatherlawyer| I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait]] ([[User talk:Weatherlawyer|talk]]) 21:22, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

:TI has, in fact, already made a [http://education.ti.com/en-GB/aus-nz/nspire-family/ipad TI-Nspire iPad app] (but there's nothing official for Android). --[[User:Qwach|Qwach]] ([[User talk:Qwach|talk]]) 19:21, 31 August 2013 (UTC)
:: If we're talking about apps, then Maxima for Android is all you need. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.212.196|108.162.212.196]] 23:45, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

This explanation misses an important point of the comic's punchline: back in the mid-'90s, you would spend lots of cash for something that, by today's standards, is underpowered. While the observation about the state of changing technology between then and now is valid, the punchline to the comic is that in the case of TI calculators, not only has the *technology* not moved forward, but the *price* hasn't changed either! Nobody would nowadays pay 3000 dollars for the 100MHz Pentium machine mentioned in the comic, but people still spend 100 dollars on a 10MHz calculator. Madness. This is why the characters stumble over the "Times sure have changed" sentiment because, in the TI case, nothing has changed at all. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.81.216|141.101.81.216]] 09:18, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

My TI-84 Plus is 95 x 63 pixels, rather than 96 x 64. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.246.209|108.162.246.209]] 02:21, 5 October 2014 (UTC)

Did you look under the battery holder? Perhaps a pixel broke loose and slipped under there. {{unsigned ip|199.27.133.123}}

The operating system hides the last row and column of pixels from you, particularly on the graph screen, giving the appearance that it's 95x63, but it really is 96x64. Also, the original version of this comic had the dimensions at 96x62, but Randall later fixed it to the correct 96x64.
[[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.216|108.162.237.216]] 20:33, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

It is worth noting that it takes exactly 768 bytes to store an image of the screen, and there are several 768 byte buffers used by the OS for saving the screen. I don't know the comic number is on purpose, but it's certainly quite appropriate. --[[Special:Contributions/73.176.149.27|73.176.149.27]] 03:16, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Talk:1505: Ontological Argument

2022-04-06T23:50:50Z

Stardragon: comment

Reminds me some kind of the [http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Babel_Fish#Philosophical_implications Babel Fish]... [[User:Elektrizikekswerk|Elektrizikekswerk]] ([[User talk:Elektrizikekswerk|talk]]) 06:54, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

:Isn't the greatest fallacy of ontological argument the fact that the set of entities may not be well-ordered by "greatest" or "goodness"? -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 11:17, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

::Step 1: Take S to be the set of such entities. Step 2: When I reach step 3, if S hasn't managed to find a well-ordering relation for itself....
::I can't think of what to say next.. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.242|108.162.221.242]] 22:59, 31 March 2015 (UTC)BK201

::That's a great point, and (IMHO) a truly serious problem in these attempts to "order" gods (maybe it stems from being tied down to monotheistic thinking?). But it's not really a "fallacy," properly speaking. Not all flaws in reasoning are fallacies... {{unsigned ip|108.162.210.39}}

::I think that (using this argument) the first flaw arises when defining the "set of entities". How can we define it and make sure that it is indeed a set? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.245|141.101.98.245]] 14:56, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

::I think the greatest fallacy is that they start with the conclusion that the fantasy that God exists isn't a fantasy, and then try to "reason" their way into finding support for that conclusion. IOW, claiming to apply reason while working in exactly the opposite way that true reasoning demands. I realize ontological arguments, as the explanation currently says, "seek to prove that God exists using only premises about the nature of existence and logical deductions from them. This is '''in contrast to arguments that are based on observations of the world'''". But you don't get to reject the logical scientific method (marshal the facts and '''THEN''' draw conclusions from them) and then claim you're being logical. - Equinox [[Special:Contributions/199.27.128.120|199.27.128.120]] 15:15, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

:::I'm not sure that checks out. While it's true that they are looking for proof of their belief rather than forming a belief, it's more like an experiment where you are looking for the cause of something you know about, at least from their perspective. It's a philosophical argument/thought experiment about religion, so they get away with some things that don't fly in science. No, the biggest flaw is the assumption that since we can conceive of it, it must exist. just because we can conceive of a perfect being, and it would be even greater if it existed, does not inherently mean it does. I can conceive of a world in which I do not exist, but that doesn't mean we are in that world, nor that such a world exists (ignoring anything to do with a multiverse). It's tautological at best, like saying, this thing would be true if it was true. it can also be thought of as "in order for a being to be perfect, it must exist, so such a being must exist so that it can be perfect," which is a little easier to wrap your head around. I'm not saying there is no god, to be clear, I'm just saying that the ontological argument is not acceptable proof of that god's existence. [[User:Stardragon|Stardragon]] ([[User talk:Stardragon|talk]]) 23:50, 6 April 2022 (UTC)

::I find some humor in that 'A god who could find a flaw in the ontological argument' could easily be accomplished by a being who met and/or exceeded the original premise of being 'that than which nothing greater can be conceived'. Some of the more obvious logical flaws are pointed out in this thread, and proving the thought process wrong doesn't really affect its overall truthiness in either direction. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.133|108.162.221.133]] 07:22, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Yay a potential large, all-encompassing argument about religion waiting to happen. Oh glory day. [[User:YourLifeisaLie|The Goyim speaks]] ([[User talk:YourLifeisaLie|talk]]) 13:37, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Any chance this is really about an omnipotence paradox? Can god create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it? Is he so powerful that he can find a flaw in any argument that proves he exists? {{unsigned ip|108.162.237.186}}

:I think it's analogous and worth mentioning. Added it. [[User:Djbrasier|Djbrasier]] ([[User talk:Djbrasier|talk]]) 15:30, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Why is the William Lane Craig section in there? If there are dozens of versions of the ontological argument on wikipedia, it makes sense to list the original (Anselm), the most famous critique of it (Dawkins), and then refer the reader to wikipedia for more information. The Craig variant is not explained here and seems cherry-picked out of the long list on wikipedia for no clear reason. [[User:Djbrasier|Djbrasier]] ([[User talk:Djbrasier|talk]]) 14:08, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

:The text I replaced claimed that ontological arguments for the existence of God are based on the idea that a God that exists is greater than a God that does not exist. I changed it to say that Anselm's version says that and there are other ontological arguments that don't say that. I used William Lane Craig as the clearest and easiest to understand example from the Wikipedia article for which that is not the case. That said, I like how people have edited it since better than what I wrote. [[User:Bugstomper|Bugstomper]] ([[User talk:Bugstomper|talk]]) 00:35, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Super ultra chocolate fudge cookies mega sundae (from here on refered to as "happy happy") is by definition the best ice cream imaginable, meaning we can't concieve of a better ice cream. but, if the happy happy exists solely in your mind as an idea, than surely you can concieve of a better happy happy, that is, the one that is sitting on a desk in front of you. Therefore, the happy happy must be the one that exists right in front of you. now, where's my ice cream?? [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.244|141.101.98.244]] 16:57, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

:Someone should put a happy happy on 141.101.98.244's desk when he isn't looking.[[Special:Contributions/199.27.128.185|199.27.128.185]] 00:27, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

"Ontological arguments, in general, are arguments that attempt to prove a point by involving a "higher reason" or purpose for the point. " These are teleological arguments, not ontological. {{unsigned|Atnorman}}

I noticed by pure coincidence that Megan and Cueball are posed exactly as they were in [[1315: Questions for God]]. Is that the only time they were posed like that while posing a theological question, or is this a broader pattern? I haven't found any others, offhand. Also noticed that the Ontological argument came up very subtly in [[1052: Every Major's Terrible]]. [[User:Jachra|Jachra]] ([[User talk:Jachra|talk]]) 21:31, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

: [[1052: Every Major's Terrible]] does not reference the ontological argument. X therefore X exists is not the argument.{{unsigned|Atnorman}}

Yeah but that's a strawman fallacy. I win.
I commit no fallacy, except the fallacy fallacy. [[User:YourLifeisaLie|The Goyim speaks]] ([[User talk:YourLifeisaLie|talk]]) 17:06, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

: Errm, isn't "Goyim" a plural and therefore wouldn't "speaks" but "speak"? {{unsigned|‎Gearoid}}

There are some ontological arguments that actually work, though. Like Rule 34. Well, in most cases at least; I'm pretty sure there are some examples that fail the rule, but I don't want to check. --[[Special:Contributions/198.41.243.5|198.41.243.5]] 07:34, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Is a philosopher who assembles words into ("concieves") statements or questions that are inherently meaningless but appear meaningful greater than one who makes only meaningful ones? [[Special:Contributions/173.245.53.81|173.245.53.81]] 07:54, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

: Mu. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.11.53|172.68.11.53]] 15:53, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Is it worth mentioning that an omnipresent God would, by definition, have eaten EVERY skateboard that was ever eaten, and even if that number is zero, would therefore be at worst tied for the world record?

Talk:2325: Endorheic Basin

2022-03-07T16:41:17Z

Stardragon:

I think it is a funny comic, but the way water acts towards Beret Guy has nothing to do with what happens in an Endorheic basin. And also if he attracts water more than gravity, then a siphon is no help at all to get rid of the water. A pump would be needed that could make a larger pull then gravity. But the name is just something Beret Guy gives it. And since he is the only hydrophilic person in the world it is hard to say how it will work for him. But given that Randall named the comic it seems to me that either he did not care about this, did not think about it correctly, or else, also a possibility, I do not understand these concepts well enough --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 22:49, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

I sort of disagree with Kynde. I think the idea here is that Beret Guy is a local low point where water flows toward. It's not that he's "more attractive that gravity" but that from the perspective of the water he's now the lowest point around and thus it flows toward him. Like a Endorheic basin it can't flow out to somewhere else. This makes the siphon comment funnier in my opinion as they're suggesting that if then found an even lower point than Beret Guy they could siphons water off of him and to that lower point. Something that the water wouldn't do on its own because of "walls" in his water potential function. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.63.172|162.158.63.172]] 23:23, 26 June 2020 (UTC)Max

Do we have a category for comics where Randal is suspected of trolling the explainxkcd community? [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.132|108.162.245.132]] 00:32, 27 June 2020 (UTC)
:"All Comics"? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.167|162.158.158.167]] 00:43, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

"Generating Electricity" is most likely a reference to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project
:Qatarra makes sense; my first thought was the Salton Sea. It's certainly not a Minecraft reference, since rivers in Minecraft are flat (same altitude as the oceans) & hydroelectric dams do not exist in the game.
:[[Special:Contributions/172.69.33.125|172.69.33.125]] 17:25, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

(Prior item is unsigned.) Worth a link to https://what-if.xkcd.com/143/ aroujd the subject of siphons? If nothing else, it shows that Randall knows how they work (even if there's confusion over whether BG does, or just has the laws of nature do what he ''thinks'' they should do, as per Vacuum Energy). [[Special:Contributions/162.158.155.240|162.158.155.240]] 10:57, 27 June 2020 (UTC)
:That would be relevant yes. Looking into this I found that the page on what if [[what if?]] do no longer work here on explain xkcd...? The link is active but only displays a white page with "No input file specified." --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 09:56, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

:Ordinary siphoning wouldn't work unless MOND or modified inertia dark matter theories are true. [[Special:Contributions/172.68.141.146|172.68.141.146]] 18:25, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

No, an ordinary siphon will work fine - it just has to feed past the local maximum & then it'll drain to the sea, just as it would if you put a siphon in a reservoir and fed the siphon's output to a point past the dam. It's pretty clear that BeretGuy's local minimum is not all that deep. [[User:Cellocgw|Cellocgw]] ([[User talk:Cellocgw|talk]]) 12:31, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

So, does anyone know what a Colonial Engineer is? I'm unfamiliar with the term. A quick google search just turns up a plastic parts company and a minecraft mod and that's it.[[Special:Contributions/172.69.63.169|172.69.63.169]] 21:13, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

:Isn't it simply engineer from British colony? You know, from the time of British Empire, when that included Egypt, India and lot more ... -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 22:42, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

Taking a poo must be awful. All that toilet water getting attracted to his butt... [[User:DrPumpkinz|DrPumpkinz]] ([[User talk:DrPumpkinz|talk]]) 00:07, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

:Peeing would be worse... [[Special:Contributions/173.245.52.187|173.245.52.187]] 20:33, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

They could also dress him in a molybdenum disulfide membrane to generate electricity. [https://phys.org/news/2016-07-electricity-salt-three-atoms-thick-membrane.html Electricity generated with water, salt and a three-atoms-thick membrane]

I just changed the explanation slightly as gravity ''and'' personal attraction explains the foot-pooling of water and the not-yet-face-covering for the shower scene (plus hanging off his hand, at least until he raises his arm or brings it to his side to let it flow to is feet as well). Wanted to add in high surface tension (to explain how his feet are sticking outbl of his accumulation of shower-water), but - as you can see - this gets far too wordy. (Surface tension and core-attraction alone would not explain his feet or hand, of course.) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.77|162.158.154.77]] 10:58, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Everybody here has been nerd sniped so hard. Unrelated, but has anyone created an SCP page for Beret Guy yet? I think he's earned it [[User:Stardragon|Stardragon]] ([[User talk:Stardragon|talk]]) 16:41, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Talk:2365: Messaging Systems

2020-09-29T12:27:51Z

Stardragon:

I guess ordinary email should be in the same section as SMS as well. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.171|162.158.158.171]] 00:20, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

The comic should mention MMS, which is well integrated into SMS, so that it's supported by not quite as much as SMS but still by almost everybody, and counts as vaguely modern in that you can attach images and have no length limit. ―[[User:TobyBartels|TobyBartels]] ([[User talk:TobyBartels|talk]]) 00:46, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

My DynaTAC doesn't get SMS. --[[Special:Contributions/172.69.22.150|172.69.22.150]] 00:56, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Okay, got a basic explanation up; The comic is missing a bunch of different messaging services I feel. Also, I knew that somebody would say that their phone doesn't support SMS, I guess that habit of hedging writing with mostly is paying off.
[[Special:Contributions/172.69.63.143|172.69.63.143]] 01:01, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

"It [Whatsapp] is popular in multiple countries, namely Latin America and India." I have no idea what this means: should "namely" be "mainly"? But is the fixed version even true? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.225|162.158.158.225]] 11:28, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Discord is slowly moving towards supported by everyone because of Covid-19. [[User:Stardragon|Stardragon]] ([[User talk:Stardragon|talk]]) 12:27, 29 September 2020 (UTC)