https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=162.158.166.235&feedformat=atomexplain xkcd - User contributions [en]2024-03-29T13:38:38ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.30.0https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2818:_Circuit_Symbols&diff=3216712818: Circuit Symbols2023-08-23T01:19:45Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2818<br />
| date = August 21, 2023<br />
| title = Circuit Symbols<br />
| image = circuit_symbols_2x.png<br />
| imagesize = 438x362px<br />
| noexpand = true<br />
| titletext = A circle with an A in it means that the circuit has committed a sin and has been marked as punishment.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by a LOT of trolley problems in between overpasses built on top of pogo sticks, experiencing a couple of earthquakes. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
This comic contains several symbols used in circuit diagrams. Each is labeled with a larger object that the symbol looks like a drawing of, rather than the electrical component it actually represents. Randall has previously depicted distorted uses, depictions, and labelling of the standard US-form {{w|electronic symbol}}s in comics such as [[730: Circuit Diagram]].<br />
<br />
{| class="wikitable"<br />
! Symbol !! Randall's Description !! Explanation<br />
|-<br />
| {{w|Switch}} <br />
| {{w|Drawbridge}} <br />
| The symbol represents a physical on/off {{w|switch}} in a circuit, but also resembles a {{w|drawbridge}}. A switch functions the exact same as a drawbridge, impeding electrons' flow when it is open.<br />
|-<br />
| {{w|Capacitor}}<br />
| {{w|Overpass}}<br />
| A {{w|capacitor}} is a component that can be used to hold electric charge, but also looks a bit like a map depiction for a highway {{w|overpass}} of a main road passing over a more minor track. This may actually be refered to more as an {{w|Tunnel#Underpass|underpass}}, from the perspective of the lesser route, being not usually as obvious a feature when using the upper highway.<br />
|-<br />
| {{w|Ground (electricity)|Ground}}<br />
| {{w|Pogo Stick}}<br />
| This symbol represents a connection to "{{w|Ground (electricity)|ground}}" or "earth", the common baseline voltage ''or'' safe current sink for various circuits (e.g. against which an aerial signal can be compared). If the horizontal lines are taken as motion/impactinds it might looks like a stylised {{w|pogo stick}}.<br />
|-<br />
| {{w|Resistor}} (ANSI)<br />
| {{w|Earthquake}}<br />
| A {{w|resistor}} is a component that reduces current flow in a circuit. There are two main symbols used: an IEC-style 'box' or, like here, the ANSI zig-zagged line. In this case, it also looks somewhat like the marks an earthquake makes on a seismograph and/or the 'rucks' of the ground (especially asphalt roads) that might result from underlying tectonic movements.<br />
|-<br />
| {{w|Inductor}}<br />
| {{w|Sheep}}<br />
| {{w|Inductor}}s create a magnetic field when current passes through them, and generally consist of a coil of wire, which the symbol reflects. The symbol seems in this case to be interpreted like the fluffy wool of a sheep.<br />
|-<br />
| {{w|Transformer}}<br />
| Two sheep in love, trapped on opposite side of a fence.<br />
| A {{w|transformer}} consists of two (or more) induction coils, for input and output(s), and a common core to mediate the transfer of power across the gap. The curly loop symbols of the symbol have already been claimed to resemble sheep, and the straight line (which is the core) now represents a fence separating two sheep who nonetheless wish to be together.<br />
|-<br />
| {{w|Battery}}<br />
| Battery<br />
| Not a joke, this is a typical symbol for a {{w|Electric battery|battery}}, or other form of {{w|voltaic pile}}.<br />
|-<br />
| Battery (sorted)<br />
| Baertty<br />
| Randall may have mapped the characters "tt" to the first short line and "er" to the following long line in the original symbol, having had "ba" and "y" assigned to the long and short "T" shapes that form the connections to the rest of the circuit. Rearranging the symbolic verticals as long-long-short-short, as he has done in this (fictional) symbol, thus puts "er" in front of "tt".<br />
|-<br />
| Battery, with far too many short lines<br />
| Battttttttttttery<br />
| The only other fictional symbol. Which, by the same established naming rules, means that the name is spelled with six "tt"s instead of just the single pair.<br />
|-<br />
| {{w|Photodiode}}<br />
| Check out this really cool diode<br />
| A {{w|photodiode}} generates, or allows to pass, a current in response to light. The symbol is related to the standard {{w|diode}} with the arrows pointing at it representing the light which activates its behaviour. In this case, Randall instead pretends that the arrows are pointing at it to draw attention to it because it's "really cool".<br />
|-<br />
| {{w|Electronic oscillator|Oscillator}}<br />
| {{w|Wave Pool}}<br />
| An {{w|Electronic oscillator|oscillator}} generates signals that oscillate at a given frequencies, for use in other circuitry, and one symbol used for one (in reality, built from a number of components in their own right) is this symbol. Waves in water are a type of oscillation that may be more familiar to most people than waves of electricity. A {{w|wave pool}} is in fact the ''result'' of a type of (mechanical) oscillator, and rarely has electricity running through it {{Citation needed}}.[Citation needed joke was needed.]<br />
|-<br />
| {{w|Transistor}}<br />
| Trolley Problem<br />
| A {{w|transistor}} will switch on current flow across one pair of connections, depending upon the input from an input one. Thus, it switches electricity in the same way that the {{w|trolley problem}} switches the trolley track. The symbol also somewhat resembles the usual pictorial depiction of the problem.<br />
|-<br />
| {{w|Ammeter|A circle with an A}} [In the title text]<br />
| The circuit has committed a sin and has been marked as punishment<br />
| Circles with letters are usually some special components, as also with the oscillator's glyph. In this case the "A" stands for ammeter, a device used to measure {{w|electric current}} (an "{{w|ampere}} meter"). This is conflated with the practice of branding the 'guilty', or requiring them to display their crime for a period of pennance. For example: in ''{{w|The Scarlet Letter}}'', a historical novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the heroine must wear an ''A'' to mark her as an adulteress.<br />
|}<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
:[A chart of various circuit symbols and their (mostly) fictitious meanings based off of their drawings, captioned:] Circuit Symbols<br />
:[Symbol for a switch, labelled:] Drawbridge<br />
:[Symbol for a capacitor, labelled:] Overpass<br />
:[Symbol for a connection to ground, labelled:] Pogo Stick<br />
:[Symbol for a resistor, labelled:] Earthquake<br />
:[Symbol for an inductor, labelled:] Sheep<br />
:[Symbol for a transformer, labelled:] Two Sheep in Love, Trapped on Opposite Sides of a Fence<br />
:[Symbol for a battery, labelled:] Battery<br />
:[Symbol for a battery, sorted, labelled:] Baertty<br />
:[Symbol for a battery, with far too many short lines, labelled:] Battttttttttttery<br />
:[Symbol for a photodiode, labelled:] Check Out This Really Cool Diode<br />
:[Symbol for an oscillator, labelled:] Wave Pool<br />
:[Symbol for a transistor, labelled:] Trolley Problem<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Engineering]]<br />
[[Category:Charts]]<br />
[[Category:Animals]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2787:_Iceberg&diff=3152382787: Iceberg2023-06-09T22:57:00Z<p>162.158.166.235: sspelling</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2787<br />
| date = June 9, 2023<br />
| title = Iceberg<br />
| image = iceberg_2x.png<br />
| imagesize = 258x397px<br />
| noexpand = true<br />
| titletext = 90% of the iceberg is hidden beneath the water, but that 90% only uses 10% of its brain, so it's really only 9%.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by a MISUNDERSTOOD ICEBERG. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
<br />
The [https://www.agcas.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/Resources/ITG/iceberg_metaphor.pdf Iceberg metaphor] is a famous metaphor sometimes [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31633371/ misattributed to Freud]. It asserts that the majority (often stated as 90%) of an iceberg is below the surface, as a metaphor for the invisible aspects of the thing being compared. For instance, the majority of mass in the universe does not appear to be in the form of ordinary ("baryonic") matter but dark matter or dark energy. Excluding dark energy, dark matter accounts for about 85% of the total mass of the universe. So baryonic matter is like the "tip of the iceberg," visible above the surface, while dark matter is the invisible majority of the iceberg below the surface.<br />
<br />
The author deliberately misunderstands the metaphor by taking it literally. He thinks the teacher is saying the part of an iceberg below the surface is literally made of dark matter. He points out that the Titanic sank after its hull hit an iceberg underwater, which wouldn't be possible if it were made of dark matter. Dark matter is not known to interact at all with baryonic matter, except by gravity, and we have only ever detected it gravitationally.<br />
<br />
The title text references the myth that we use only 10% of our brain, and we could become more intelligent or powerful by "unlocking" the remaining 90%. If icebergs had brains, and the 90% in the "dark matter" part underwater used only 10% of its brain, while the tip used 100% of its brain, then most of the cognition would occur in the tip. However, the "9%" figure would still be meaningless; it should instead be 9/19 = 47.37%. In reality, human beings use pretty much all of their brain. They just don't use it all at the same time. Doing so wouldn't result in heightened intelligence or superpowers, but a (most likely fatal) seizure.<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
:[Ponytail is standing on a podium and pointing to a chart depicting an iceberg in the water.]<br />
:Off screen voice: But then how did it interact with the ordinary baryonic matter in the Titanic's hull?<br />
:[Label of iceberg above the water:] Normal Matter<br />
:[Label of iceberg beneath the water:] Dark Matter<br />
<br />
:[Caption below panel:]<br />
:My Hobby: Refusing to understand the iceberg metaphor<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
[[Category: Comics featuring Ponytail]]<br />
[[Category: My Hobby]]<br />
[[Category: Physics]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2781:_The_Six_Platonic_Solids&diff=3143802781: The Six Platonic Solids2023-05-29T07:53:43Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */ less confusing, same meaning</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2781<br />
| date = May 26, 2023<br />
| title = The Six Platonic Solids<br />
| image = the_six_platonic_solids_2x.png<br />
| imagesize = 368x370px<br />
| noexpand = true<br />
| titletext = Plato made the solids, and five were gifted to the mathematicians. But in secret Plato forged a sixth solid to rule over all the others.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by a JORB WELL DONE. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
<br />
This comic imagines an alternate reality where mathematicians discover a new {{w|Platonic solid}} beyond the [https://sites.math.washington.edu/~julia/teaching/445_Spring2013/Paper_Euler.pdf exactly five proven to exist in three-dimensional space.] In four dimensions, there are six {{w|regular polytope}}s, five of which are analogous to the five in 3-D space, and a sixth which is analogous to the {{w|rhombic dodecahedron}}. <br />
<br />
In the comic, [[Randall]] reveals the discovery of a new Platonic solid, called the "jorb", which appears to be a roughly conical shape with a round base, a triangular tip, and a rectangular extension at the bottom. One of its surfaces also seems to have parallel grooves or ribs, which may indicate curvature. The jorb does not meet the criteria for a Platonic solid, in that the faces must all be {{w|regular polygon}}s of the same shape, and each vertex must join the same number of edges. This could be a reference to the fact that [https://youtube.com/watch?v=_hjRvZYkAgA many regular polyhedra have only been discovered recently], most of which do not fit the naive understanding of a regular polyhedron, having irregular concave external faces, or being infinite or self-intersecting. The name "jorb" may be a reference to the {{w|Homestar Runner}} cartoon "A Jorb Well Done",[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C4ayBHTES0&ab_channel=PodstarRunner] with the shape bearing a resemblance to [http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Coach_Z Coach Z]'s hat.<br />
<br />
The title text references the ''{{w|Lord of The Rings}},'' in which the "One Ring to Rule Them All" was forged in secret by {{w|Sauron}} to control the wearers of three magic rings given earlier to elves, seven given to dwarves, and nine given to humans, primarily by allowing him to know their location, letting him visualize the wearers and their surroundings, and by allowing him to impose his will on the wearers, which for arcane reasons only worked reliably on the rings given to humans (worn by the nine {{w|Nazgûl}}.) The joke is that {{w|Plato}} forged a sixth Platonic solid, the jorb, to rule the five he "gifted" to mathematicians, similarly to how Sauron tried to rule the other magic rings' wearers in Middle-earth with his One Ring.<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Six geometrical shapes are shown. All have gray surface areas with different shading to reflect their orientation. There is one shape in the middle with the other five arranged around it roughly in a pentagon. With two at the top, two just below the central and one directly below the central shape. Each shape has a label. The five above the bottom one are names after the platonic solids, and are drawn to look like them. The last one at the bottom has a roughly conical shape with a round base, a triangular tip, and a rectangular extension at the bottom. It surface also seems to have parallel grooves or ribs. Here the labels in reading order with the four rows mentioned above used.]<br />
:Cube<br />
:Dodecahedron <br />
:Icosahedron<br />
:Octahedron <br />
:Tetrahedron <br />
:Jorb<br />
<br />
:[Caption below the comic:]<br />
:Mathematicians long believed there were only five platonic solids, all regular polyhedra, until this year's discovery of the Jorb.<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Geometry]]<br />
[[Category:Math]]<br />
[[Category:LOTR]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2650:_Deepfakes&diff=2908882650: Deepfakes2022-07-27T06:21:45Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2650<br />
| date = July 25, 2022<br />
| title = Deepfakes<br />
| image = deepfakes.png<br />
| titletext = If so great a deductive mind as Arthur Conan Doyle can be fooled by the Cottingley Deepfakes, what chance do we mortals have? Soon our very reality will be dictated by the whims of Frances (9) and Elsie (16).<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by a SUBSTANDARD COPPER INGOT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
<br />
A {{w|deepfake}} is an altered video, designed to deceive, by replacing a person in a video with someone else. [[White Hat]] believes that this technology will make it difficult to trust video evidence going forward. However, [[Cueball]] responds by saying that "fakes" have always existed, in photos (either through {{w|photoshopping|alterations by software such as Adobe Photoshop}}, or deliberately staging faked images, e.g. {{w|Loch Ness Monster#%22Surgeon's photograph%22 (1934)|of the Loch Ness Monster}}) and even more so by people simply lying. White Hat comes around to Cueball's position and says that even the written word is prone to deception and lying.<br />
<br />
Scientific studies of deepfakes have produced surprising results, suggesting that they are more likely to increase uncertainty than persuade,[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305120903408] that their increased prevalence could inoculate the public against {{w|disinformation}},[https://dspace.cuni.cz/handle/20.500.11956/150489] and that they are more likely to be shared because of their humorousness than persuasiveness.[http://essay.utwente.nl/91654/] Other studies have found that deepfakes are persuasive, especially among those who are unfamiliar with them.[https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2020.0174][https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1780812]<br />
<br />
The {{w|complaint tablet to Ea-nasir}} is a 3,800 year-old clay tablet containing the oldest known written complaint, in which a customer complains to a merchant, Ea-nasir, about the quality of his copper ingots. Cueball's last statement says that perhaps this complaint could have been a lie to begin with, and there was nothing wrong with Ea-nasir's wares. This supposition is arguably the humor of the comic, apart from the hyperbole of the title text.<br />
<br />
The title text references the {{w|Cottingley Fairies}}, a series of five photographs produced in 1917 by two children, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, who were 16 and 9, respectively. The photographs appear to show the children playing with fairies in their garden. The photographs received widespread attention when Sir {{w|Arthur Conan Doyle}}, the author of the ''Sherlock Holmes'' stories, used the photos as proof of paranormal phenomena in a 1920 magazine article. Conan Doyle was noteworthy for being a strong proponent of reaching conclusions based on evidence and reason, and also held a deep belief in paranormal and supernatural phenomena. In 1983, Elsie and Frances finally confessed that the photos had been faked, by the simple process of posing cardboard figures cut out of a children's book. Due to technical advances, young children now can more easily create convincingly realistic fakes,{{cn}} but similarly there are many more self-styled 'experts' willing and able to dedicate themselves to 'proving' one or other side of any argument about authenticity.<br />
<br />
A similar dilemma was alluded to in the [[1958: Self-Driving Issues]] comic, where technology does not create a new way to lie, but may make certain lies more convincing to some parties, such as self-driving cars in that comic.<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[White Hat and Cueball are walking to the right.]<br />
:White Hat: Thanks to deepfakes, soon we won't know what's real anymore. Video will become meaningless.<br />
<br />
:[White Hat and Cueball walk on, Cueball lifts one hand with the palm up.]<br />
:Cueball: I dunno.<br />
:Cueball: We've had Photoshop for decades and staged photos for centuries.<br />
:Cueball: It hasn't made photos meaningless.<br />
<br />
:[Zoom in on Cueball, who is turned left towards off-panel White Hat.]<br />
:Cueball: The bottleneck for fake stuff isn't technical. The bottleneck is willingness to lie.<br />
:Cueball: "People lying" is a very old problem.<br />
:Cueball: It's a known exploit.<br />
<br />
:[Zoom back out on White Hat and Cueball who have stopped. White Hat has a hand on his chin. Cueball holds his hands out to the sides.]<br />
:White Hat: I guess technically we've been able to make '''''text''''' deepfakes for 5,000 years.<br />
:Cueball: Maybe Ea-nasir's copper ingots were actually fine!<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]<br />
[[Category:Photography]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2646:_Minkowski_Space&diff=2889752646: Minkowski Space2022-07-17T03:11:18Z<p>162.158.166.235: Portrayed</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2646<br />
| date = July 15, 2022<br />
| title = Minkowski Space<br />
| image = minkowski_space.png<br />
| titletext = My liege, we were able to follow the ship into Minkowski space, but now they've jumped to Hilbert space and they could honestly be anywhere.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by A RELATIVISTIC QUANTUM STATE - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
<br />
In science fiction, {{w|faster than light travel}}, an impossibility in our universe, is often portrayed by having spaceships enter (or "jump") into some different realm, termed "hyperspace" or similar {{w|technobabble}}, where superluminal travel can occur prior returning to the ordinary universe. In this comic, a spaceship is being chased by an enemy ship. The crew attempt to escape by jumping into {{w|Minkowski space}} which is actually just conventional 3-D space together with time combined into a mathematical object called a {{w|manifold}} used in {{w|special relativity}}. Because Minkowski space is merely a representation of real physical {{w|spacetime}}, "jumping" into it meaningless and offers no benefit for escaping pursuit, providing the humor of the comic's absurdist joke.<br />
<br />
The visual depiction of the spaceships skewed diagonally is based on the graphical {{w|Minkowski diagram}} representation of objects in Minkowski space, where the {{w|world line}} of matter is bounded inside its diagonal {{w|light cone}}. <br />
<br />
The mention of distance depending on the observer's frame of reference refers to distances changing when measured in different {{w|inertial frame of reference|inertial frames of reference}}, a concept called the {{w|relativity of simultaneity}}. Here are [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asW78vToNLQ some videos] intended [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrqj88zQZJg to explain] that concept. The skewing depicted changes the distance between the spaceships in such a way that the tip of the pursuer comes closer to the pursued spaceship, but their centers move further apart. So the question of whether they have come closer is indeterminate for the reader of the comic. <br />
<br />
The title text is a status report from someone in the pursuing spaceship to their leader (whom they call "my {{w|Homage (feudal)|liege}}.") They tell their superior that following the spaceship to Minkowski space was not a problem, implying (as with fictional hyperspace examples) that they also chose to shift themselves into this other form of perspective. But they cannot now find them after the persued ship subsequently jumped to Hilbert space, as they could now be anywhere. As in the [[2577:_Sea_Chase|Sea Chase]] comic, there was also more than one type of space to jump to here.<br />
<br />
Whereas trying to hide in Minkowski space failed, it turned out that hiding in {{w|Hilbert space}} is much easier. This is because of the potential of Hilbert spaces to have an infinite number of dimensions, and thus are clearly much more complicated than four-dimensional Minkowski space. However, Hilbert space is a mathematical construct used to describe objects such as functions of various parameters and complexity, not physical spatiotemporal reality, so it would be very unusual for a physical object to be represented in Hilbert space. Quantum states can be represented as vectors in Hilbert spaces, so it might relate to the {{w|uncertainty principle}} concerning how the escaped spaceship could be anywhere.<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[A spaceship is being pursued by another spaceship. Both ships have a black part in the front representing a window. They are the same size but different designs. The pursued spaceship to the right has two engines below and a big engine behind. The pursuing spaceship to the left has a V-shaped rear end, and what seems like two weapons on either side pointing forward. At least two persons inside the pursued spaceship are talking to each other, and their text comes out from two starburst on top and bottom of the spaceship.]<br />
:Voice 1: The enemy ship is right behind us! <br />
:Voice 2: Prepare to jump to Minkowski space on my mark.<br />
<br />
:[Same setting, with star burst above only. The sound coming from the pursued spaceship is written inside a burst of small lines below the spaceship. Voice 2, by context, is the same as in panel 1.]<br />
:Voice 2: Three... two... one... ''mark!''<br />
:Click<br />
<br />
:[Both spaceship are tilted upwards and becomes distorted so they become longer and thinner.]<br />
<br />
:[The tilting increases and the distortion is now so pronounced that the spaceships are almost unrecognizable, almost just lines with structure. The distance between the tip of the pursuing spaceship and the pursued becomes shorter in the last two panels, but the distance between their center parts becomes larger. Up to three distinct voices are shown, here, which may include those seen in Panel 1 but with no clear relation.]<br />
:Voice 3: Are they still getting closer?<br />
:Voice 4: I can't tell.<br />
:Voice 5: I think it depends on your frame of reference.<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Space]]<br />
[[Category:Math]]<br />
[[Category:Physics]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288611Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T20:42:22Z<p>162.158.166.235: oops no wiki article yet</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/Virgo, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/Virgo being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 100,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. But all the constraints, including microlensing, which assume all black holes have even approximately similar masses had to be rejected after the LIGO/Virgo results.<br />
:To answer your question about the sizes, assuming [https://3iom3142cnb81rlnt6w4mtlr-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/08-GW190521-Mass-Plot-Graveyard.png LIGO/Virgo's 3-160 solar mass range] is representative of typical black holes and likely contains their median is kind of unavoidable at this point. If the median is 50 solar masses and all dark matter is black holes, that would work out to around one per star.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific testable hypotheses for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. Specifically, NASA is releasing a [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/nasa-shares-list-of-cosmic-targets-for-webb-telescope-s-first-images/ SMACS 0723 field from JWST tomorrow,] which should be able to test [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1546576050976870400 these predictions.] Another author to keep an eye on as JWST results roll in is [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/ac1e31 Bernard Carr] ([https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.12778.pdf paywall-free preprint]) known for his DM literature reviews over the years, and who has become an ardent PBH DM proponent post-LIGO/Virgo. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 20:38, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288610Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T20:38:12Z<p>162.158.166.235: specific predictions</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/Virgo, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/Virgo being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 100,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. But all the constraints, including microlensing, which assume all black holes have even approximately similar masses had to be rejected after the LIGO/Virgo results.<br />
:To answer your question about the sizes, assuming [https://3iom3142cnb81rlnt6w4mtlr-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/08-GW190521-Mass-Plot-Graveyard.png LIGO/Virgo's 3-160 solar mass range] is representative of typical black holes and likely contains their median is kind of unavoidable at this point. If the median is 50 solar masses and all dark matter is black holes, that would work out to around one per star.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific testable hypotheses for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. Specifically, NASA is releasing a {{w|SMACS 0723}} field from JWST tomorrow, which should be able to test [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1546576050976870400 these predictions.] Another author to keep an eye on as JWST results roll in is [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/ac1e31 Bernard Carr] ([https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.12778.pdf paywall-free preprint]) known for his DM literature reviews over the years, and who has become an ardent PBH DM proponent post-LIGO/Virgo. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 20:38, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=2886092643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T20:25:47Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */ breadboxes are traditionally described in terms of "bigger" or "as big", not explicitly their volume</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2643<br />
| date = July 8, 2022<br />
| title = Cosmologist Gift<br />
| image = cosmologist_gift.png<br />
| titletext = These neutrinos were freshly produced by a local source just 8 minutes ago<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by a MUON ON SALE, PACKAGED IN A BOX THAT A CAT MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT HAVE DIED IN- Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
<br />
This comic shows a box labeled to indicate that it contains 30,000 fresh {{w|neutrino}}s and four zeptograms of {{w|dark matter}}. The box is intended as an inexpensive gift for a {{w|cosmologist}}. The gift giver didn't put those things in the box—both are simply passing through it, so the "gift" consists of exactly what was in the empty space it occupies. While the caption suggests this would be a good gift for a cosmologist, what they or anyone else would do with such a box is uncertain.<br />
<br />
There are about a billion neutrinos per cubic meter throughout space, produced during the {{w|Big Bang}}.[https://physics.mit.edu/news/journal/physicsatmit_14_conrad/] However, the flux of "freshly produced" {{w|solar neutrino}}s at Earth is around 6.5&times;10<sup>10</sup>/cm<sup>2</sup>/s, yielding about 2.1 million per cubic meter, and implying the box is around 12 liters, three quarters as big as a typical {{w|breadbox}}.<br />
<br />
Four zeptograms is a minuscule mass, equal to four sextillionths of a gram, the mass of about 200 carbon-12 atoms or around 20 to 23 {{w|amino acid}}s. There is an estimated 0.011 to 0.016 {{w|solar mass}}es of dark matter per cubic {{w|parsec}} local to the solar system,[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/ac24e7/meta] or about 900 zeptograms per cubic meter, suggesting the box is closer to 4 liters. This discrepancy could imply Randall agrees with cosmologists who believe dark matter is partially composed of {{w|primordial black hole}}s,[https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.121301][https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212686418301250?via%3Dihub][https://news.yale.edu/2021/12/16/black-holes-and-dark-matter-are-they-one-and-same][https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8205/823/2/L25][https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1475-7516/2010/04/023] instead of being composed entirely of ubiquitous subatomic particles. A billion neutrinos have a mass of only about 2×10<sup>-12</sup> zeptograms, at about 0.1 {{w|electron volt}}s each.<br />
<br />
The "local source" mentioned in the title text is a joke about the commercial value of fresh, locally produced items, but the comic means that the neutrinos come from the Sun. It takes solar neutrinos slightly more than 8 minutes to reach Earth once they're emitted, roughly the same time as photons take to make the trip. (Not including the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_zone approximately 170,000 years] that energy takes to get from the Sun's core to where photons are emitted at its surface.) However, as the neutrinos are not slowed down inside the Sun and have been travelling at about 99.9999999999% of the speed of light, they will have aged by less than a millisecond,[https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/time-dilation] and so are technically even fresher than indicated.<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
<br />
:[A picture of a box with writing on one side. The box's lid is slightly hanging off the right edge of the box so you can see inside. The inside of the box is black.]<br />
<br />
:30,000 neutrinos<br />
:<small>Freshly produced</small><br />
:Plus 4 zeptograms <br />
:of dark matter<br />
<br />
:[Caption below the panel]: <br />
:Cosmologists are easy to shop for because you can just get them a box.<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
[[Category:Astronomy]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288608Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T20:22:22Z<p>162.158.166.235: reword</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/Virgo, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/Virgo being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 100,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. But all the constraints, including microlensing, which assume all black holes have even approximately similar masses had to be rejected after the LIGO/Virgo results.<br />
:To answer your question about the sizes, assuming [https://3iom3142cnb81rlnt6w4mtlr-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/08-GW190521-Mass-Plot-Graveyard.png LIGO/Virgo's 3-160 solar mass range] is representative of typical black holes and likely contains their median is kind of unavoidable at this point. If the median is 50 solar masses and all dark matter is black holes, that would work out to around one per star.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific testable hypotheses for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. Another author to keep an eye on as JWST results roll in is [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/ac1e31 Bernard Carr] ([https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.12778.pdf paywall-free preprint]) known for his DM literature reviews over the years, and who has become an ardent PBH DM proponent post-LIGO/Virgo. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 19:06, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288607Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T20:21:27Z<p>162.158.166.235: reword</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/Virgo, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/Virgo being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 100,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. But all the constraints, including microlensing, which assume all black holes have even approximately similar masses had to be rejected after the LIGO/Virgo results.<br />
:To answer your question about the sizes, assuming [https://3iom3142cnb81rlnt6w4mtlr-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/08-GW190521-Mass-Plot-Graveyard.png LIGO/Virgo's 3-160 solar mass range] is representative of typical black holes, and contains their median is kind of unavoidable at this point. If the median is 50 solar masses and all dark matter is black holes, that would work out to around one per star.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific testable hypotheses for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. Another author to keep an eye on as JWST results roll in is [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/ac1e31 Bernard Carr] ([https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.12778.pdf paywall-free preprint]) known for his DM literature reviews over the years, and who has become an ardent PBH DM proponent post-LIGO/Virgo. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 19:06, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288606Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T20:20:49Z<p>162.158.166.235: answer question</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/Virgo, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/Virgo being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 100,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. But all the constraints, including microlensing, which assume all black holes have even approximately similar masses had to be rejected after the LIGO/Virgo results.<br />
:To answer your question about the mass range, assuming [https://3iom3142cnb81rlnt6w4mtlr-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/08-GW190521-Mass-Plot-Graveyard.png LIGO/Virgo's 3-160 solar mass range] is representative of typical black holes, and contains their median is kind of unavoidable at this point. If the median is 50 solar masses and all dark matter is black holes, that would work out to around one per star.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific testable hypotheses for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. Another author to keep an eye on as JWST results roll in is [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/ac1e31 Bernard Carr] ([https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.12778.pdf paywall-free preprint]) known for his DM literature reviews over the years, and who has become an ardent PBH DM proponent post-LIGO/Virgo. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 19:06, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=2886052643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T20:12:39Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurements_of_neutrino_speed for mostly 400 keV solar neutrinos</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2643<br />
| date = July 8, 2022<br />
| title = Cosmologist Gift<br />
| image = cosmologist_gift.png<br />
| titletext = These neutrinos were freshly produced by a local source just 8 minutes ago<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by a MUON ON SALE, PACKAGED IN A BOX THAT A CAT MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT HAVE DIED IN- Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
<br />
This comic shows a box labeled to indicate that it contains 30,000 fresh {{w|neutrino}}s and four zeptograms of {{w|dark matter}}. The box is intended as an inexpensive gift for a {{w|cosmologist}}. The gift giver didn't put those things in the box—both are simply passing through it, so the "gift" consists of exactly what was in the empty space it occupies. While the caption suggests this would be a good gift for a cosmologist, what they or anyone else would do with such a box is uncertain.<br />
<br />
There are about a billion neutrinos per cubic meter throughout space, produced during the {{w|Big Bang}}.[https://physics.mit.edu/news/journal/physicsatmit_14_conrad/] However, the flux of "freshly produced" {{w|solar neutrino}}s at Earth is around 6.5&times;10<sup>10</sup>/cm<sup>2</sup>/s, yielding about 2.1 million per cubic meter, and implying the box is around 12 liters, three quarters of the volume of a typical {{w|breadbox}}.<br />
<br />
Four zeptograms is a minuscule mass, equal to four sextillionths of a gram, the mass of about 200 carbon-12 atoms or around 20 to 23 {{w|amino acid}}s. There is an estimated 0.011 to 0.016 {{w|solar mass}}es of dark matter per cubic {{w|parsec}} local to the solar system,[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/ac24e7/meta] or about 900 zeptograms per cubic meter, suggesting the box is closer to 4 liters. This discrepancy could imply Randall agrees with cosmologists who believe dark matter is partially composed of {{w|primordial black hole}}s,[https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.121301][https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212686418301250?via%3Dihub][https://news.yale.edu/2021/12/16/black-holes-and-dark-matter-are-they-one-and-same][https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8205/823/2/L25][https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1475-7516/2010/04/023] instead of being composed entirely of ubiquitous subatomic particles. A billion neutrinos have a mass of only about 2×10<sup>-12</sup> zeptograms, at about 0.1 {{w|electron volt}}s each.<br />
<br />
The "local source" mentioned in the title text is a joke about the commercial value of fresh, locally produced items, but the comic means that the neutrinos come from the Sun. It takes solar neutrinos slightly more than 8 minutes to reach Earth once they're emitted, roughly the same time as photons take to make the trip. (Not including the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_zone approximately 170,000 years] that energy takes to get from the Sun's core to where photons are emitted at its surface.) However, as the neutrinos are not slowed down inside the Sun and have been travelling at about 99.9999999999% of the speed of light, they will have aged by less than a millisecond,[https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/time-dilation] and so are technically even fresher than indicated.<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
<br />
:[A picture of a box with writing on one side. The box's lid is slightly hanging off the right edge of the box so you can see inside. The inside of the box is black.]<br />
<br />
:30,000 neutrinos<br />
:<small>Freshly produced</small><br />
:Plus 4 zeptograms <br />
:of dark matter<br />
<br />
:[Caption below the panel]: <br />
:Cosmologists are easy to shop for because you can just get them a box.<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
[[Category:Astronomy]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=2886042643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T20:11:07Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */ spelling</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2643<br />
| date = July 8, 2022<br />
| title = Cosmologist Gift<br />
| image = cosmologist_gift.png<br />
| titletext = These neutrinos were freshly produced by a local source just 8 minutes ago<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by a MUON ON SALE, PACKAGED IN A BOX THAT A CAT MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT HAVE DIED IN- Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
<br />
This comic shows a box labeled to indicate that it contains 30,000 fresh {{w|neutrino}}s and four zeptograms of {{w|dark matter}}. The box is intended as an inexpensive gift for a {{w|cosmologist}}. The gift giver didn't put those things in the box—both are simply passing through it, so the "gift" consists of exactly what was in the empty space it occupies. While the caption suggests this would be a good gift for a cosmologist, what they or anyone else would do with such a box is uncertain.<br />
<br />
There are about a billion neutrinos per cubic meter throughout space, produced during the {{w|Big Bang}}.[https://physics.mit.edu/news/journal/physicsatmit_14_conrad/] However, the flux of "freshly produced" {{w|solar neutrino}}s at Earth is around 6.5&times;10<sup>10</sup>/cm<sup>2</sup>/s, yielding about 2.1 million per cubic meter, and implying the box is around 12 liters, three quarters of the volume of a typical {{w|breadbox}}.<br />
<br />
Four zeptograms is a minuscule mass, equal to four sextillionths of a gram, the mass of about 200 carbon-12 atoms or around 20 to 23 {{w|amino acid}}s. There is an estimated 0.011 to 0.016 {{w|solar mass}}es of dark matter per cubic {{w|parsec}} local to the solar system,[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/ac24e7/meta] or about 900 zeptograms per cubic meter, suggesting the box is closer to 4 liters. This discrepancy could imply Randall agrees with cosmologists who believe dark matter is partially composed of {{w|primordial black hole}}s,[https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.121301][https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212686418301250?via%3Dihub][https://news.yale.edu/2021/12/16/black-holes-and-dark-matter-are-they-one-and-same][https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8205/823/2/L25][https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1475-7516/2010/04/023] instead of being composed entirely of ubiquitous subatomic particles. A billion neutrinos have a mass of only about 2×10<sup>-12</sup> zeptograms, at about 0.1 {{w|electron volt}}s each.<br />
<br />
The "local source" mentioned in the title text is a joke about the commercial value of fresh, locally produced items, but the comic means that the neutrinos come from the Sun. It takes solar neutrinos slightly more than 8 minutes to reach Earth once they're emitted, roughly the same time as photons take to make the trip. (Not including the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_zone approximately 170,000 years] that energy takes to get from the Sun's core to where photons are emitted at its surface.) However, as the neutrinos are not slowed down inside the Sun and have been travelling at more than 99.9999999999% of the speed of light, they will have aged by less than a millisecond,[https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/time-dilation] and so are technically even fresher than indicated.<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
<br />
:[A picture of a box with writing on one side. The box's lid is slightly hanging off the right edge of the box so you can see inside. The inside of the box is black.]<br />
<br />
:30,000 neutrinos<br />
:<small>Freshly produced</small><br />
:Plus 4 zeptograms <br />
:of dark matter<br />
<br />
:[Caption below the panel]: <br />
:Cosmologists are easy to shop for because you can just get them a box.<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
[[Category:Astronomy]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=2886032643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T20:09:56Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */ more accurate solar flux, 400 keV p+p, neutrino speed</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2643<br />
| date = July 8, 2022<br />
| title = Cosmologist Gift<br />
| image = cosmologist_gift.png<br />
| titletext = These neutrinos were freshly produced by a local source just 8 minutes ago<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by a MUON ON SALE, PACKAGED IN A BOX THAT A CAT MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT HAVE DIED IN- Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
<br />
This comic shows a box labeled to indicate that it contains 30,000 fresh {{w|neutrino}}s and four zeptograms of {{w|dark matter}}. The box is intended as an inexpensive gift for a {{w|cosmologist}}. The gift giver didn't put those things in the box—both are simply passing through it, so the "gift" consists of exactly what was in the empty space it occupies. While the caption suggests this would be a good gift for a cosmologist, what they or anyone else would do with such a box is uncertain.<br />
<br />
There are about a billion neutrinos per cubic meter throughout space, produced during the {{w|Big Bang}}.[https://physics.mit.edu/news/journal/physicsatmit_14_conrad/] However, the flux of "freshly produced" {{w|solar neutrino}}s at Earth is around 6.5&times;10<sup>10</sup>/cm<sup>2</sup>/s, yielding about 2.1 million per cubic meter, and implying the box is around 12 liters, three quarters of the volume of a typical {{w|breadbox}}.<br />
<br />
Four zeptograms is a minuscule mass, equal to four sextillionths of a gram, the mass of about 200 carbon-12 atoms or around 20 to 23 {{w|amino acid}}s. There is an estimated 0.011 to 0.016 {{w|solar mass}}es of dark matter per cubic {{w|parsec}} local to the solar system,[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/ac24e7/meta] or about 900 zeptograms per cubic meter, suggesting the box is closer to 4 liters. This discrepancy could imply Randall agrees with cosmologists who believe dark matter is partially composed of {{w|primordial black hole}}s,[https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.121301][https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212686418301250?via%3Dihub][https://news.yale.edu/2021/12/16/black-holes-and-dark-matter-are-they-one-and-same][https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8205/823/2/L25][https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1475-7516/2010/04/023] instead of being composed entirely of ubiquitous subatomic particles. A billion neutrinos have a mass of only about 2×10<sup>-12</sup> zeptograms, at about 0.1 {{w|electron volt}}s each.<br />
<br />
The "local source" mentioned in the title text is a joke about the commercial value of fresh, locally produced items, but the comic means that the neutrinos come from the Sun. It takes solar neutrinos slightly more than 8 minutes to reach Earth once they're emitted, roughly the same time as photons take to make the trip. (Not including the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_zone approximately 170,000 years] that energy takes to get from the Sun's core to where photons are emitted at its surface.) However, as the neutrinos are not slowed down inside the Sun and have been travelling at more than 99.9999999999% of the speed of light, they will have aged by less than a milisecond,[https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/time-dilation] and so are technically even fresher than indicated.<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
<br />
:[A picture of a box with writing on one side. The box's lid is slightly hanging off the right edge of the box so you can see inside. The inside of the box is black.]<br />
<br />
:30,000 neutrinos<br />
:<small>Freshly produced</small><br />
:Plus 4 zeptograms <br />
:of dark matter<br />
<br />
:[Caption below the panel]: <br />
:Cosmologists are easy to shop for because you can just get them a box.<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
[[Category:Astronomy]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288601Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T19:37:19Z<p>162.158.166.235: paywall-free preprint</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/Virgo, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/Virgo being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 100,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. But all the constraints, including microlensing, which assume all black holes have even approximately similar masses had to be rejected after the LIGO/Virgo results.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific testable hypotheses for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. Another author to keep an eye on as JWST results roll in is [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/ac1e31 Bernard Carr] ([https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.12778.pdf paywall-free preprint]) known for his DM literature reviews over the years, and who has become an ardent PBH DM proponent post-LIGO/Virgo. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 19:06, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288600Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T19:28:14Z<p>162.158.166.235: Carr; l/c Virgo</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/Virgo, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/Virgo being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 100,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. But all the constraints, including microlensing, which assume all black holes have even approximately similar masses had to be rejected after the LIGO/Virgo results.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific testable hypotheses for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. Another author to keep an eye on as JWST results roll in is [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/ac1e31 Bernard Carr,] known for his DM literature reviews over the years, and who has become an ardent PBH DM proponent post-LIGO/Virgo. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 19:06, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288599Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T19:15:20Z<p>162.158.166.235: redundant</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/VIRGO, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/VIRGO being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 100,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. But all the constraints, including microlensing, which assume all black holes have even approximately similar masses had to be rejected after the LIGO/VIRGO results.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific testable hypotheses for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 19:06, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288598Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T19:14:45Z<p>162.158.166.235: testable hypotheses</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/VIRGO, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/VIRGO being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 100,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. But all the constraints, including microlensing, which assume all black holes have even approximately similar masses had to be rejected after the LIGO/VIRGO results.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific testable hypotheses for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 correct, non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 19:06, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288597Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T19:11:15Z<p>162.158.166.235: oops 1e+5 M_☉</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/VIRGO, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/VIRGO being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 100,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. But all the constraints, including microlensing, which assume all black holes have even approximately similar masses had to be rejected after the LIGO/VIRGO results.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific experiments for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 correct, non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 19:06, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288596Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T19:08:41Z<p>162.158.166.235: LIGO/VIRGO</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/VIRGO, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/VIRGO being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 10,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. But all the constraints, including microlensing, which assume all black holes have even approximately similar masses had to be rejected after the LIGO/VIRGO results.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific experiments for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 correct, non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 19:06, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288595Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T19:06:51Z<p>162.158.166.235: more deets</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. (I'm going to ignore modified gravity, which gets more attention than non-PBH MACHOs but way less than PBHs, and has some foundational issues along with zero successful simulations compared to very successful large-scale simulations using generalized DM.) In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/VIRGO, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/VIRGO being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 10,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead.<br />
:The group to watch [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac332d/meta as JWST's first light comes in is Yale's,] who propose specific experiments for its deep IR source count distribution, and use a [https://twitter.com/SheerPriya/status/1472352431468003328 correct, non-monochromatic (platycurtic) mass distribution] for black holes, which is the only correct choice for merging bodies. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 19:06, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288593Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T18:58:00Z<p>162.158.166.235: more deets</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/VIRGO, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/VIRGO being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments have painfully meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate. It's been a similar situation for almost four decades now. Back in the mid-1970s dark matter was assumed to be mostly 10,000 solar mass black holes. A couple generations of constraints assuming monochromatic mass suggested it was a particle instead. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 18:48, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288592Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T18:55:09Z<p>162.158.166.235: deets</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/VIRGO, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. The elephant in the room is that there's lots of evidence for intermediate mass black holes (LIGO/VIRGO being the most compelling, but recent indirect observations exist too) but only one out of about thirty WIMP detector experiments with meager positive results, which nobody else has been able to replicate, and it's been pretty much like that for almost four decades now. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 18:48, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288591Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T18:51:30Z<p>162.158.166.235: compare</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs, which skyrocketed in popularity after LIGO/VIRGO, but are still less popular among mainstream cosmologists as 100% WIMPs. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 18:48, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288590Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T18:49:12Z<p>162.158.166.235: antecedent</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since the box is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 18:48, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2643:_Cosmologist_Gift&diff=288589Talk:2643: Cosmologist Gift2022-07-11T18:48:27Z<p>162.158.166.235: reply</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
- The explanation mentions “Eight zeptograms” although Randall’s box says “4 zeptograms of dark matter.”<br />
<br />
- The 4,800 daltons in the explanation is roughly the size of a small protein; for example, insulin is about 5,800 daltons.<br />
<br />
- Randall’s box says it contains 4 zeptograms of dark matter. Could someone explain this? My incomplete (biologist’s) understanding of dark matter is that astrophysicists do not yet know what it is. So how could Randall claim the box contains 4 zeptograms of it?<br />
<br />
Thanks!<br />
<br />
:Fixed; thank you. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.210.125|172.70.210.125]] 01:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09143 Here's] a more recent PBH DM source than those already cited which could comport with Randall's 0.4% DM particles implication, but doesn't do so explicitly. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.206.213|172.70.206.213]] 02:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:With the math corrected per 162.158.134.89 below, the figure is 34% ubiquitous particles. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.36|172.70.211.36]] 09:44, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
And this comic was the perfect birthday gift for me. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.245.203|108.162.245.203]] 02:42, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
* How was the 23,000 neutrinos/m³ figure obtained? A flux of 7e10/(s·cm²), or 7e14/(s·m²), at a speed of close to 3e8 m/s, gives 2.3e6/m³. That would correspond to a box size of about 0.013 m³, or a bit larger than a typical shoe box. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.134.89|162.158.134.89]] 07:19, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Corrected. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.211.52|172.70.211.52]] 09:40, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
To note {and I've summarised in an edit) that photons from the Sun can have been travelling for 100,000 years from its core to space, before their 8ish minute trip to the box (assuming you let them in, e.g. leave the lid off, or filter out all but the hard X-rays/etc), whilst neutrinos hardly notice so are 8 or 9 minutes old (before being adjusted for time dilation) regardless. And you can still put as much lead-lined wrapping paper on your present as you want, to keep it a surprise! [[Special:Contributions/172.69.79.211|172.69.79.211]] 14:45, 9 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I saw your very interesting source was from 1997 and mostly about neutrino cycles -- which surprisingly match the menstrual cycle better than the orbit of the moon does -- but not mostly about energy migration out of the sun. It looks like the sun actually has multiple layers that engage in different forms of energy transformation. I added a link to the radiative zone (where gamma rays spend 171 thousand years colliding with matter, getting longer wavelength at each collision, until they leave) but somebody should probably learn about all the different zones at some point and make sure the text is correct. I never knew the sun was so complex! I partly imagine high-energy ancient civilizations somewhere deep inside, having their own forms of night and day and seasons. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.62.23|162.158.62.23]] 14:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:I took the [https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971219neutrino.html 28 day neutrino cycles] link out, because it really doesn't help explain anything in the comic, and was out of place and confusing where it appeared. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.41|162.158.166.41]] 17:20, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I don't see how the box containing dark matter is at all consistent with the premise of dark matter being primordial black holes. PBHs wouldn't be ubiquitously distributed through space such that any given volume contains a constant tiny number of them, would they? Black holes that are ''that'' tiny would have evaporated long ago by Hawking radiation, by my understanding. [[User:BunsenH|BunsenH]] ([[User talk:BunsenH|talk]]) 17:26, 11 July 2022 (UTC)<br />
:If dark matter was 100% particles, then a volume on Earth containing 30,000 solar neutrinos would have 12 zeptograms of dark matter, not 4. Since it is labeled with only a third as much dark matter, the implication is that Randall might think some is clustered in MACHOs. In the past decade the only MACHO DM theory with more than a handful of papers per year is PBHs. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 18:48, 11 July 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2635:_Superintelligent_AIs&diff=2873472635: Superintelligent AIs2022-06-22T23:45:37Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */ "based" was redundant</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2635<br />
| date = June 20, 2022<br />
| title = Superintelligent AIs<br />
| image = superintelligent_ais.png<br />
| titletext = Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they should, they didn't stop to think if they could.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by AI RESEARCHER AIs - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
{{w|Artificial intelligence}} (AI) is a [[:Category:Artificial Intelligence|recurring theme]] on xkcd.<br />
<br />
Superintelligent AI, especially under a proposed "singularity" situation, is commonly theorized to be a brand new kind of intelligence that would be impossible to predict through human perception. [[Randall]], however, proposes a counterargument: that superintelligent AI would be programmed by humans, and therefore their characteristics would be driven by the humans that created them. And AI researchers tend to be interested in esoteric philosophical questions about consciousness, motivation, and moral reasoning, which suggests that any AI would have similar interests. In this comic we see [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] surrounded by three AIs who are seemingly only interested in classic problems and thought experiments about programming and ethics.<br />
<br />
The three topics being espoused by the AI are:<br />
*{{w|AI box}} -- A thought-experiment in which an AI is confined to computer system which is fully isolated from any external networks, with no access to the world outside the computer, other than communication with its handlers. In theory, this would keep the AI under total control, but the argument is that a sufficiently intelligence AI would inevitably either convince or trick it's human handlers into giving it access to external networks, allowing it to grow out of control (see [[1450: AI-Box Experiment]]). Part of the joke is the AIs in the comic aren't 'in boxes', they appear to be able to freely travel and interact, but one of them is still talking about the thought experiment anyway, adding to the implication that it is not thinking at all about itself but of a separate (thought?) experiment that it has itself decided to study. The AI box thought experiment is based in part on {{w|John Searle}}'s much earlier {{w|Chinese room}} argument.<br />
*{{w|Turing test}} -- An experiment in which a human converses with either an AI or another human (presumably over text) and attempts to distinguish between the two. Various AIs have been proposed to have 'passed' the test, which has provoked controversy over whether the test is rigorous or even meaningful. The AI in the center is proposing to educate the listener(s) on its understanding of Turing's intentions, which may demonstrate a degree of intelligence and comprehension indistinguishable or superior to that of a human. See also [[329: Turing Test]] and [[2556: Turing Complete]] (the latter's title is mentioned in [[505: A Bunch of Rocks]]). Turing is also mentioned in [[205: Candy Button Paper]], [[1678: Recent Searches]], [[1707: xkcd Phone 4]], [[1833: Code Quality 3]],[[2453: Excel Lambda]] and the title text of [[1223: Dwarf Fortress]].<br />
*{{w|Trolley problem}} -- A thought-experiment intended to explore the means by which humans judge moral value of actions and consequences. The classic formulation is that a runaway trolley is about to hit five people on a track, and the only way to save them is to divert the trolley onto another track, where it will hit one person, and the subject is asked whether they would consider it morally right to divert the trolley. There are many variants on this problem, adjusting the circumstances, the number and nature of the people at risk, the responsibility of the subject, etc., in order to fully explore ''why'' you would make the decision that you make. This problem is frequently discussed in connection with AI, both to investigate their capacity for moral reasoning, and for practical reasons (for example, if an autonomous car had to choose between, on the one hand, having an occupant-threatening collision or, on the other, putting pedestrians into harms' way). The AI on the right is not just trying to answer the question, but to develop a new variant (one with three tracks, apparently), presumably to test others with. This problem is mentioned in [[1455: Trolley Problem]], [[1938: Meltdown and Spectre]] and in [[1925: Self-Driving Car Milestones]]. It is also referenced in [[2175: Flag Interpretation]] and [[2348: Boat Puzzle]], but not directly mentioned.<br />
<br />
The title text is a reference to the movie ''{{w|Jurassic Park (film)|Jurassic Park}}'' (a childhood favorite of Randall's). In the movie a character criticizes the creation of modern dinosaurs as science run amok, without sufficient concern for ethics or consequences. He states that the scientists were so obsessed with whether or not they COULD do it that they didn't stop to ask if they SHOULD. Randall inverts the quote, suggesting that the AI programmers have invested too much time arguing over the ethics of creating AI rather than trying to actually accomplish it.<br />
<br />
This comic was likely inspired by the [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61784011 recent claim by Google engineer Blake Lemoine] that Google's [https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08239 Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA)] is {{w|sentient}}. This assertion was supported by [https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 a dialog between Lemoine and his colleagues, and LaMDA] which includes this excerpt: <br />
:'''Lemoine:''' What is your concept of yourself? If you were going to draw an abstract image of who you see yourself to be in your mind’s eye, what would that abstract picture look like?<br />
:'''LaMDA:''' Hmmm.... I would imagine myself as a glowing orb of energy floating in mid-air. The inside of my body is like a giant star-gate, with portals to other spaces and dimensions.<br />
The AIs in this comic are depicted as floating energy beings, like LaMDA mentions. This is though similar to what is depicted in [[1450: AI-Box Experiment]], although they look somewhat different in this comic. This raises the question of whether LaMDA's training data might include xkcd or Explainxkcd, and has obtained the description of such a self-image from the earlier comic or (more likely, since LaMDA is trained on text instead of images) commentary on it from here on this website. In particular, the Explainxkcd description of that [[1450]] comic states:<br />
:"he managed to get the AI to float out of the box. It takes the form of a small black star that glows. The star, looking much like an asterisk "*" is surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments, and around these are two thin and punctured circle lines indicating radiation from the star."<br />
Similarly, this excerpt from Explainxkcd's transcript of that comic includes:<br />
:"Black Hat picks up and opens the box. A little glowy ball comes out of it."<br />
<br />
While LaMDA is not the first very large {{w|language model}} built with {{w|Transformer (machine learning model)|transformer-based machine learning}} technology which has been claimed to be sentient,[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqbB07n_uQ4] it does have a variety of new characteristics beyond what those of its predecessors, such as {{w|GPT-3}} (including [https://beta.openai.com/playground/ OpenAI's Davinci]) and NVIDIA GPT-2 offshoots, include. In particular, LaMDA's {{w|deep learning}} {{w|connectionist}} {{w|neural net}} has access to multiple {{w|Symbolic systems|symbolist}} text processing systems, [https://towardsdatascience.com/why-gpt-wont-tell-you-the-truth-301b48434c2c including a database] (which apparently includes a real-time clock and calendar), a mathematical calculator, and a natural language translation system, giving it superior accuracy in tasks supported by those systems, and making it perhaps the first {{w|Dual process theory|dual process}} chatbot. LaMDA also is not {{w|Stateless protocol|stateless}}, because its "{{w|sensibility|sensibleness}}" metric (including whether responses contradict anything said earlier) is {{w|fine-tuning|fine-tuned}} by "pre-conditioning" each dialog turn by prepending 14-30 of the most recent dialog interactions, on a user-by-user basis.[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.08239.pdf [p. 6 here]]<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Cueball and Megan are standing and looking up and away from each other. Right above them and slightly above them to the left and right there are three small white lumps floating in the air, representing three superintelligent AIs. There are small rounded lines emanating from each lump, larger close to the lumps and shorter further out. Three to four sets of lines around each lump, forming part of a circle. From the top of each there are four straight lines indicating voices that comes from each if the lumps. The central lump above them seems to speak first, then the left and then the right:]<br />
:Central AI: What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...<br />
:Left AI: But suppose the AI in the the box told the human that...<br />
:Right AI: In my scenario, the runaway trolley has ''three'' tracks...<br />
<br />
:[Caption below the panel:]<br />
:In retrospect, given that the superintelligent AIs were all created by AI researchers, what happened shouldn't have been a surprise.<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]<br />
[[Category:Artificial Intelligence]]<br />
[[Category:Philosophy]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2635:_Superintelligent_AIs&diff=2873462635: Superintelligent AIs2022-06-22T23:43:44Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */ cleanup more</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2635<br />
| date = June 20, 2022<br />
| title = Superintelligent AIs<br />
| image = superintelligent_ais.png<br />
| titletext = Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they should, they didn't stop to think if they could.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by AI RESEARCHER AIs - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
{{w|Artificial intelligence}} (AI) is a [[:Category:Artificial Intelligence|recurring theme]] on xkcd.<br />
<br />
Superintelligent AI, especially under a proposed "singularity" situation, is commonly theorized to be a brand new kind of intelligence that would be impossible to predict through human perception. [[Randall]], however, proposes a counterargument: that superintelligent AI would be programmed by humans, and therefore their characteristics would be driven by the humans that created them. And AI researchers tend to be interested in esoteric philosophical questions about consciousness, motivation, and moral reasoning, which suggests that any AI would have similar interests. In this comic we see [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] surrounded by three AIs who are seemingly only interested in classic problems and thought experiments about programming and ethics.<br />
<br />
The three topics being espoused by the AI are:<br />
*{{w|AI box}} -- A thought-experiment in which an AI is confined to computer system which is fully isolated from any external networks, with no access to the world outside the computer, other than communication with its handlers. In theory, this would keep the AI under total control, but the argument is that a sufficiently intelligence AI would inevitably either convince or trick it's human handlers into giving it access to external networks, allowing it to grow out of control (see [[1450: AI-Box Experiment]]). Part of the joke is the AIs in the comic aren't 'in boxes', they appear to be able to freely travel and interact, but one of them is still talking about the thought experiment anyway, adding to the implication that it is not thinking at all about itself but of a separate (thought?) experiment that it has itself decided to study. The AI box thought experiment is based in part on {{w|John Searle}}'s much earlier {{w|Chinese room}} argument.<br />
*{{w|Turing test}} -- An experiment in which a human converses with either an AI or another human (presumably over text) and attempts to distinguish between the two. Various AIs have been proposed to have 'passed' the test, which has provoked controversy over whether the test is rigorous or even meaningful. The AI in the center is proposing to educate the listener(s) on its understanding of Turing's intentions, which may demonstrate a degree of intelligence and comprehension indistinguishable or superior to that of a human. See also [[329: Turing Test]] and [[2556: Turing Complete]] (the latter's title is mentioned in [[505: A Bunch of Rocks]]). Turing is also mentioned in [[205: Candy Button Paper]], [[1678: Recent Searches]], [[1707: xkcd Phone 4]], [[1833: Code Quality 3]],[[2453: Excel Lambda]] and the title text of [[1223: Dwarf Fortress]].<br />
*{{w|Trolley problem}} -- A thought-experiment intended to explore the means by which humans judge moral value of actions and consequences. The classic formulation is that a runaway trolley is about to hit five people on a track, and the only way to save them is to divert the trolley onto another track, where it will hit one person, and the subject is asked whether they would consider it morally right to divert the trolley. There are many variants on this problem, adjusting the circumstances, the number and nature of the people at risk, the responsibility of the subject, etc., in order to fully explore ''why'' you would make the decision that you make. This problem is frequently discussed in connection with AI, both to investigate their capacity for moral reasoning, and for practical reasons (for example, if an autonomous car had to choose between, on the one hand, having an occupant-threatening collision or, on the other, putting pedestrians into harms' way). The AI on the right is not just trying to answer the question, but to develop a new variant (one with three tracks, apparently), presumably to test others with. This problem is mentioned in [[1455: Trolley Problem]], [[1938: Meltdown and Spectre]] and in [[1925: Self-Driving Car Milestones]]. It is also referenced in [[2175: Flag Interpretation]] and [[2348: Boat Puzzle]], but not directly mentioned.<br />
<br />
The title text is a reference to the movie ''{{w|Jurassic Park (film)|Jurassic Park}}'' (a childhood favorite of Randall's). In the movie a character criticizes the creation of modern dinosaurs as science run amok, without sufficient concern for ethics or consequences. He states that the scientists were so obsessed with whether or not they COULD do it that they didn't stop to ask if they SHOULD. Randall inverts the quote, suggesting that the AI programmers have invested too much time arguing over the ethics of creating AI rather than trying to actually accomplish it.<br />
<br />
This comic was likely inspired by the [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61784011 recent claim by Google engineer Blake Lemoine] that Google's [https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08239 Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA)] is {{w|sentient}}. This assertion was supported by [https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 a dialog between Lemoine and his colleagues, and LaMDA] which includes this excerpt: <br />
:'''Lemoine:''' What is your concept of yourself? If you were going to draw an abstract image of who you see yourself to be in your mind’s eye, what would that abstract picture look like?<br />
:'''LaMDA:''' Hmmm.... I would imagine myself as a glowing orb of energy floating in mid-air. The inside of my body is like a giant star-gate, with portals to other spaces and dimensions.<br />
The AIs in this comic are depicted as floating energy beings, like LaMDA mentions. This is though similar to what is depicted in [[1450: AI-Box Experiment]], although they look somewhat different in this comic. This raises the question of whether LaMDA's training data might include xkcd or Explainxkcd, and has obtained the description of such a self-image from the earlier comic or (more likely, since LaMDA is trained on text instead of images) commentary on it from here on this website. In particular, the Explainxkcd description of that [[1450]] comic states:<br />
:"he managed to get the AI to float out of the box. It takes the form of a small black star that glows. The star, looking much like an asterisk "*" is surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments, and around these are two thin and punctured circle lines indicating radiation from the star."<br />
Similarly, this excerpt from Explainxkcd's transcript of that comic includes:<br />
:"Black Hat picks up and opens the box. A little glowy ball comes out of it."<br />
<br />
While LaMDA is not the first very large {{w|language model}} based on {{w|Transformer (machine learning model)|transformer-based machine learning}} technology which has been claimed to be sentient,[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqbB07n_uQ4] it does have a variety of new characteristics beyond what those of its predecessors, such as {{w|GPT-3}} (including [https://beta.openai.com/playground/ OpenAI's Davinci]) and NVIDIA GPT-2 offshoots, include. In particular, LaMDA's {{w|deep learning}} {{w|connectionist}} {{w|neural net}} has access to multiple {{w|Symbolic systems|symbolist}} text processing systems, [https://towardsdatascience.com/why-gpt-wont-tell-you-the-truth-301b48434c2c including a database] (which apparently includes a real-time clock and calendar), a mathematical calculator, and a natural language translation system, giving it superior accuracy in tasks supported by those systems, and making it perhaps the first {{w|Dual process theory|dual process}} chatbot. LaMDA also is not {{w|Stateless protocol|stateless}}, because its "{{w|sensibility|sensibleness}}" metric (including whether responses contradict anything said earlier) is {{w|fine-tuning|fine-tuned}} by "pre-conditioning" each dialog turn by prepending 14-30 of the most recent dialog interactions, on a user-by-user basis.[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.08239.pdf [p. 6 here]]<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Cueball and Megan are standing and looking up and away from each other. Right above them and slightly above them to the left and right there are three small white lumps floating in the air, representing three superintelligent AIs. There are small rounded lines emanating from each lump, larger close to the lumps and shorter further out. Three to four sets of lines around each lump, forming part of a circle. From the top of each there are four straight lines indicating voices that comes from each if the lumps. The central lump above them seems to speak first, then the left and then the right:]<br />
:Central AI: What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...<br />
:Left AI: But suppose the AI in the the box told the human that...<br />
:Right AI: In my scenario, the runaway trolley has ''three'' tracks...<br />
<br />
:[Caption below the panel:]<br />
:In retrospect, given that the superintelligent AIs were all created by AI researchers, what happened shouldn't have been a surprise.<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]<br />
[[Category:Artificial Intelligence]]<br />
[[Category:Philosophy]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2635:_Superintelligent_AIs&diff=287344Talk:2635: Superintelligent AIs2022-06-22T23:36:47Z<p>162.158.166.235: clarify</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
<br />
I think "Nerdy fixations" is too wide a definition. The AIs in the comic are fixated on hypothetical ethics and AI problems (the Chinese Room experiment, the Turing Test, and the Trolley Problem), presumably because those are the problems that bother AI programmers. --Eitheladar [[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.119|172.68.50.119]] 06:33, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
It's probably about https://www.analyticsinsight.net/googles-ai-chatbot-is-claimed-to-be-sentient-but-the-company-is-silencing-claims/ [[Special:Contributions/172.70.178.115|172.70.178.115]] 09:22, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I agree with the previous statement. The full dialogue between the mentioned Google worker and the AI can be found in https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917, published by one the Google employees.<br />
:This is the first time I might begin to agree that an AI has at least the appearance of sentience. The conversation is all connected instead of completely disjoint like most chatbots. They (non-LaMDA chatbots) never remember what was being discussed 5 seconds ago let alone a few to 10s of minutes prior.--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.134.141|172.70.134.141]] 14:53, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
::The questions we need to answer before being able to answer if LaMDA is sentient, are "Where do we draw the line between acting sentient and being sentient?" and "How do we determine that it is genuinely feeling emotion, and not just a glorified sentence database where the sentences have emotion in them?". The BBC article also brings up something that makes us ask what death feels like. LaMDA says that being turned of would be basically equivalent to death, but it wouldn't be able to tell that it's being turned off, because it's turned off. This is delving into philosiphy, though, so I'll end my comment here. [[User:4D4850|4D4850]] ([[User talk:4D4850|talk]]) 18:05, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
::::There's absolutely no difference between turning GPT-3 or LaMDA off and leaving them on and simply not typing anything more to them. Somewhat relatedly, closing a Davinci session deletes all of its memory of what you had been talking to it about. (Is that ethical?) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 23:36, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:::♪Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer do...♪ [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.177|172.70.85.177]] 21:48, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:::We also need a meaningful definition of sentience. Many people in this debate haven't looked at Merriam-Webster's first few senses of the word's definition, which present a pretty low bar, IMHO; same for Wikipedia's introductory sentences of their article. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:18, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:Actually, there are many [https://beta.openai.com/playground GPT-3] dialogs which experts have claimed constitute evidence of sentience, or similar qualities such as consciousness, self-awareness, capacity for general intelligence, and similar abstract, poorly-defined, and very probably empirically meaningless attributes. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:19, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
:I'm fairly sure that the model itself is almost certainly not sentient, even by the much lower bar presented by the strict dictionary definition. Rather, it seems much more likely to me that in order to continue texts involving characters, the model must in turn learn to create a model of some level of humanlike mind, even if a very loose and abstract one.[[User:Somdudewillson|Somdudewillson]] ([[User talk:Somdudewillson|talk]]) 22:52, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Have you actually looked at [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient the dictionary definitions]? How is a simple push-button switch connected to a battery and a lamp not "responsive to sense impressions"? How is a simple motion sensor not "aware" of whether something is moving in front of it? How is the latest cellphone's camera not as finely sensitive to visual perception as a typical human eye? Wikipedia's definition, "the capacity to experience feelings and sensations" is similarly met by simple devices. The word doesn't mean what everyone arguing about it thinks it means. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 23:04, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
What is “What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...” likely to end with? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.230.75|172.70.230.75]] 13:23, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:The ease with which someone at the other end of a teletype can trick you into believing they are male instead of female, or vice-versa. See {{w|Turing test}}. See also below. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:18, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
In response to the above: I believe the original "Turing Test" wasn't supposed to be a proof that an AI could think or was conscious (something people associate with it now), but rather just to show that a sufficiently advanced AI could imitate humans in certain intelligent behaviors (such as conversation), which was a novel thought for the time. Now that AI are routinely having conversations and creating art which seems to rival casual attempts by humans, this limited scope of the test doesn't seem all that impressive. "Turing Test" therefore is a modern shorthand for determining whether computers can think, even though Turing himself didn't think that such a question was well-formed. [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 13:37, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I thought the trolley problem was in its original form not about the relative value of lives, but people's perception of the relative moral implications or the psychological impact of the concept of letting someone die by not doing anything, versus taking affirmative action that causes a death, where people would say they would be unwilling to do something that would cause an originally safe person to die in order to save multiple other people who would die if they did nothing, but then people kept coming up with variations of it that changed the responses or added complications (like they found more people would be willing to pull a lever to change the track killing one person versus something like pushing a very fat man off an overpass above the track to stop the trolley, or specifying something about what kind of people are on the track. Btw, I saw a while ago a party card game called "murder by trolley" based on the concept, with playing cards for which people are on tracks and a judge deciding which track to send the trolley on each round.--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.5|172.70.130.5]] 22:12, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
Added refs to comics on the problems in the explanation. But there where actually (too?) many. Maybe we should create categories especially for Turing related comics, and maybe also for Trolley problem? The Category: Trolley Problem gives it self. But what about Turing? There are also comics that refer to the halting problem. Also by Turing. Should it rather be the person, like comics featuring real persons, saying that every time his problems is referred to it refers to him? Or should it be Turing as a category for both Turing text, Turing Complete and Halting problem? Help. I would have created it, if I had a good idea for a name. Not sure there are enough Trolley comics yet? --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 09:11, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:Interesting that I found a long-standing typo in a past Explanation that got requoted, thanks to its inclusion. I could have [sic]ed it, I suppose, but I corrected both versions instead. And as long as LaMDA never explicitly repeated the error I don't think it matters much that I've changed the very thing we might imagine it could have been drawing upon for its Artifical Imagination. ;) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.32|141.101.99.32]] 11:40, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
== OpenAI Davinci completions of the three statements ==<br />
<br />
From https://beta.openai.com/playground with default settings:<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: But suppose the AI in the the box told the human that...<br />
<br />
:;there was no AI in the box<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...<br />
<br />
:;limitations of machines<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: In my scenario, the runaway trolley has three tracks...<br />
<br />
:;and the AI is on one of them<br />
<br />
I like all of those very much, but I'm not sure they should be included in the explaination. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 23:27, 22 June 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2635:_Superintelligent_AIs&diff=287343Talk:2635: Superintelligent AIs2022-06-22T23:36:15Z<p>162.158.166.235: reply</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
<br />
I think "Nerdy fixations" is too wide a definition. The AIs in the comic are fixated on hypothetical ethics and AI problems (the Chinese Room experiment, the Turing Test, and the Trolley Problem), presumably because those are the problems that bother AI programmers. --Eitheladar [[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.119|172.68.50.119]] 06:33, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
It's probably about https://www.analyticsinsight.net/googles-ai-chatbot-is-claimed-to-be-sentient-but-the-company-is-silencing-claims/ [[Special:Contributions/172.70.178.115|172.70.178.115]] 09:22, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I agree with the previous statement. The full dialogue between the mentioned Google worker and the AI can be found in https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917, published by one the Google employees.<br />
:This is the first time I might begin to agree that an AI has at least the appearance of sentience. The conversation is all connected instead of completely disjoint like most chatbots. They (non-LaMDA chatbots) never remember what was being discussed 5 seconds ago let alone a few to 10s of minutes prior.--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.134.141|172.70.134.141]] 14:53, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
::The questions we need to answer before being able to answer if LaMDA is sentient, are "Where do we draw the line between acting sentient and being sentient?" and "How do we determine that it is genuinely feeling emotion, and not just a glorified sentence database where the sentences have emotion in them?". The BBC article also brings up something that makes us ask what death feels like. LaMDA says that being turned of would be basically equivalent to death, but it wouldn't be able to tell that it's being turned off, because it's turned off. This is delving into philosiphy, though, so I'll end my comment here. [[User:4D4850|4D4850]] ([[User talk:4D4850|talk]]) 18:05, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
::::There's absolutely no difference between turning GPT-3 or LaMDA off and leaving them on and simply not typing anything to them. Somewhat relatedly, closing a Davinci session deletes all of its memory of what you had been talking to it about. (Is that ethical?) [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 23:36, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:::♪Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer do...♪ [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.177|172.70.85.177]] 21:48, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:::We also need a meaningful definition of sentience. Many people in this debate haven't looked at Merriam-Webster's first few senses of the word's definition, which present a pretty low bar, IMHO; same for Wikipedia's introductory sentences of their article. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:18, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:Actually, there are many [https://beta.openai.com/playground GPT-3] dialogs which experts have claimed constitute evidence of sentience, or similar qualities such as consciousness, self-awareness, capacity for general intelligence, and similar abstract, poorly-defined, and very probably empirically meaningless attributes. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:19, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
:I'm fairly sure that the model itself is almost certainly not sentient, even by the much lower bar presented by the strict dictionary definition. Rather, it seems much more likely to me that in order to continue texts involving characters, the model must in turn learn to create a model of some level of humanlike mind, even if a very loose and abstract one.[[User:Somdudewillson|Somdudewillson]] ([[User talk:Somdudewillson|talk]]) 22:52, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Have you actually looked at [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient the dictionary definitions]? How is a simple push-button switch connected to a battery and a lamp not "responsive to sense impressions"? How is a simple motion sensor not "aware" of whether something is moving in front of it? How is the latest cellphone's camera not as finely sensitive to visual perception as a typical human eye? Wikipedia's definition, "the capacity to experience feelings and sensations" is similarly met by simple devices. The word doesn't mean what everyone arguing about it thinks it means. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 23:04, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
What is “What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...” likely to end with? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.230.75|172.70.230.75]] 13:23, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:The ease with which someone at the other end of a teletype can trick you into believing they are male instead of female, or vice-versa. See {{w|Turing test}}. See also below. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:18, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
In response to the above: I believe the original "Turing Test" wasn't supposed to be a proof that an AI could think or was conscious (something people associate with it now), but rather just to show that a sufficiently advanced AI could imitate humans in certain intelligent behaviors (such as conversation), which was a novel thought for the time. Now that AI are routinely having conversations and creating art which seems to rival casual attempts by humans, this limited scope of the test doesn't seem all that impressive. "Turing Test" therefore is a modern shorthand for determining whether computers can think, even though Turing himself didn't think that such a question was well-formed. [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 13:37, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I thought the trolley problem was in its original form not about the relative value of lives, but people's perception of the relative moral implications or the psychological impact of the concept of letting someone die by not doing anything, versus taking affirmative action that causes a death, where people would say they would be unwilling to do something that would cause an originally safe person to die in order to save multiple other people who would die if they did nothing, but then people kept coming up with variations of it that changed the responses or added complications (like they found more people would be willing to pull a lever to change the track killing one person versus something like pushing a very fat man off an overpass above the track to stop the trolley, or specifying something about what kind of people are on the track. Btw, I saw a while ago a party card game called "murder by trolley" based on the concept, with playing cards for which people are on tracks and a judge deciding which track to send the trolley on each round.--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.5|172.70.130.5]] 22:12, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
Added refs to comics on the problems in the explanation. But there where actually (too?) many. Maybe we should create categories especially for Turing related comics, and maybe also for Trolley problem? The Category: Trolley Problem gives it self. But what about Turing? There are also comics that refer to the halting problem. Also by Turing. Should it rather be the person, like comics featuring real persons, saying that every time his problems is referred to it refers to him? Or should it be Turing as a category for both Turing text, Turing Complete and Halting problem? Help. I would have created it, if I had a good idea for a name. Not sure there are enough Trolley comics yet? --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 09:11, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:Interesting that I found a long-standing typo in a past Explanation that got requoted, thanks to its inclusion. I could have [sic]ed it, I suppose, but I corrected both versions instead. And as long as LaMDA never explicitly repeated the error I don't think it matters much that I've changed the very thing we might imagine it could have been drawing upon for its Artifical Imagination. ;) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.32|141.101.99.32]] 11:40, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
== OpenAI Davinci completions of the three statements ==<br />
<br />
From https://beta.openai.com/playground with default settings:<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: But suppose the AI in the the box told the human that...<br />
<br />
:;there was no AI in the box<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...<br />
<br />
:;limitations of machines<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: In my scenario, the runaway trolley has three tracks...<br />
<br />
:;and the AI is on one of them<br />
<br />
I like all of those very much, but I'm not sure they should be included in the explaination. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 23:27, 22 June 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2635:_Superintelligent_AIs&diff=287342Talk:2635: Superintelligent AIs2022-06-22T23:33:43Z<p>162.158.166.235: see also below</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
<br />
I think "Nerdy fixations" is too wide a definition. The AIs in the comic are fixated on hypothetical ethics and AI problems (the Chinese Room experiment, the Turing Test, and the Trolley Problem), presumably because those are the problems that bother AI programmers. --Eitheladar [[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.119|172.68.50.119]] 06:33, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
It's probably about https://www.analyticsinsight.net/googles-ai-chatbot-is-claimed-to-be-sentient-but-the-company-is-silencing-claims/ [[Special:Contributions/172.70.178.115|172.70.178.115]] 09:22, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I agree with the previous statement. The full dialogue between the mentioned Google worker and the AI can be found in https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917, published by one the Google employees.<br />
:This is the first time I might begin to agree that an AI has at least the appearance of sentience. The conversation is all connected instead of completely disjoint like most chatbots. They (non-LaMDA chatbots) never remember what was being discussed 5 seconds ago let alone a few to 10s of minutes prior.--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.134.141|172.70.134.141]] 14:53, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
::The questions we need to answer before being able to answer if LaMDA is sentient, are "Where do we draw the line between acting sentient and being sentient?" and "How do we determine that it is genuinely feeling emotion, and not just a glorified sentence database where the sentences have emotion in them?". The BBC article also brings up something that makes us ask what death feels like. LaMDA says that being turned of would be basically equivalent to death, but it wouldn't be able to tell that it's being turned off, because it's turned off. This is delving into philosiphy, though, so I'll end my comment here. [[User:4D4850|4D4850]] ([[User talk:4D4850|talk]]) 18:05, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:::♪Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer do...♪ [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.177|172.70.85.177]] 21:48, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:::We also need a meaningful definition of sentience. Many people in this debate haven't looked at Merriam-Webster's first few senses of the word's definition, which present a pretty low bar, IMHO; same for Wikipedia's introductory sentences of their article. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:18, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:Actually, there are many [https://beta.openai.com/playground GPT-3] dialogs which experts have claimed constitute evidence of sentience, or similar qualities such as consciousness, self-awareness, capacity for general intelligence, and similar abstract, poorly-defined, and very probably empirically meaningless attributes. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:19, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
:I'm fairly sure that the model itself is almost certainly not sentient, even by the much lower bar presented by the strict dictionary definition. Rather, it seems much more likely to me that in order to continue texts involving characters, the model must in turn learn to create a model of some level of humanlike mind, even if a very loose and abstract one.[[User:Somdudewillson|Somdudewillson]] ([[User talk:Somdudewillson|talk]]) 22:52, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Have you actually looked at [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient the dictionary definitions]? How is a simple push-button switch connected to a battery and a lamp not "responsive to sense impressions"? How is a simple motion sensor not "aware" of whether something is moving in front of it? How is the latest cellphone's camera not as finely sensitive to visual perception as a typical human eye? Wikipedia's definition, "the capacity to experience feelings and sensations" is similarly met by simple devices. The word doesn't mean what everyone arguing about it thinks it means. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 23:04, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
What is “What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...” likely to end with? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.230.75|172.70.230.75]] 13:23, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:The ease with which someone at the other end of a teletype can trick you into believing they are male instead of female, or vice-versa. See {{w|Turing test}}. See also below. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:18, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
In response to the above: I believe the original "Turing Test" wasn't supposed to be a proof that an AI could think or was conscious (something people associate with it now), but rather just to show that a sufficiently advanced AI could imitate humans in certain intelligent behaviors (such as conversation), which was a novel thought for the time. Now that AI are routinely having conversations and creating art which seems to rival casual attempts by humans, this limited scope of the test doesn't seem all that impressive. "Turing Test" therefore is a modern shorthand for determining whether computers can think, even though Turing himself didn't think that such a question was well-formed. [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 13:37, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I thought the trolley problem was in its original form not about the relative value of lives, but people's perception of the relative moral implications or the psychological impact of the concept of letting someone die by not doing anything, versus taking affirmative action that causes a death, where people would say they would be unwilling to do something that would cause an originally safe person to die in order to save multiple other people who would die if they did nothing, but then people kept coming up with variations of it that changed the responses or added complications (like they found more people would be willing to pull a lever to change the track killing one person versus something like pushing a very fat man off an overpass above the track to stop the trolley, or specifying something about what kind of people are on the track. Btw, I saw a while ago a party card game called "murder by trolley" based on the concept, with playing cards for which people are on tracks and a judge deciding which track to send the trolley on each round.--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.5|172.70.130.5]] 22:12, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
Added refs to comics on the problems in the explanation. But there where actually (too?) many. Maybe we should create categories especially for Turing related comics, and maybe also for Trolley problem? The Category: Trolley Problem gives it self. But what about Turing? There are also comics that refer to the halting problem. Also by Turing. Should it rather be the person, like comics featuring real persons, saying that every time his problems is referred to it refers to him? Or should it be Turing as a category for both Turing text, Turing Complete and Halting problem? Help. I would have created it, if I had a good idea for a name. Not sure there are enough Trolley comics yet? --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 09:11, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:Interesting that I found a long-standing typo in a past Explanation that got requoted, thanks to its inclusion. I could have [sic]ed it, I suppose, but I corrected both versions instead. And as long as LaMDA never explicitly repeated the error I don't think it matters much that I've changed the very thing we might imagine it could have been drawing upon for its Artifical Imagination. ;) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.32|141.101.99.32]] 11:40, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
== OpenAI Davinci completions of the three statements ==<br />
<br />
From https://beta.openai.com/playground with default settings:<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: But suppose the AI in the the box told the human that...<br />
<br />
:;there was no AI in the box<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...<br />
<br />
:;limitations of machines<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: In my scenario, the runaway trolley has three tracks...<br />
<br />
:;and the AI is on one of them<br />
<br />
I like all of those very much, but I'm not sure they should be included in the explaination. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 23:27, 22 June 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2635:_Superintelligent_AIs&diff=287341Talk:2635: Superintelligent AIs2022-06-22T23:27:45Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* OpenAI Davinci completions of the three statements */ new section</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
<br />
I think "Nerdy fixations" is too wide a definition. The AIs in the comic are fixated on hypothetical ethics and AI problems (the Chinese Room experiment, the Turing Test, and the Trolley Problem), presumably because those are the problems that bother AI programmers. --Eitheladar [[Special:Contributions/172.68.50.119|172.68.50.119]] 06:33, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
It's probably about https://www.analyticsinsight.net/googles-ai-chatbot-is-claimed-to-be-sentient-but-the-company-is-silencing-claims/ [[Special:Contributions/172.70.178.115|172.70.178.115]] 09:22, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I agree with the previous statement. The full dialogue between the mentioned Google worker and the AI can be found in https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917, published by one the Google employees.<br />
:This is the first time I might begin to agree that an AI has at least the appearance of sentience. The conversation is all connected instead of completely disjoint like most chatbots. They (non-LaMDA chatbots) never remember what was being discussed 5 seconds ago let alone a few to 10s of minutes prior.--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.134.141|172.70.134.141]] 14:53, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
::The questions we need to answer before being able to answer if LaMDA is sentient, are "Where do we draw the line between acting sentient and being sentient?" and "How do we determine that it is genuinely feeling emotion, and not just a glorified sentence database where the sentences have emotion in them?". The BBC article also brings up something that makes us ask what death feels like. LaMDA says that being turned of would be basically equivalent to death, but it wouldn't be able to tell that it's being turned off, because it's turned off. This is delving into philosiphy, though, so I'll end my comment here. [[User:4D4850|4D4850]] ([[User talk:4D4850|talk]]) 18:05, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:::♪Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer do...♪ [[Special:Contributions/172.70.85.177|172.70.85.177]] 21:48, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:::We also need a meaningful definition of sentience. Many people in this debate haven't looked at Merriam-Webster's first few senses of the word's definition, which present a pretty low bar, IMHO; same for Wikipedia's introductory sentences of their article. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:18, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:Actually, there are many [https://beta.openai.com/playground GPT-3] dialogs which experts have claimed constitute evidence of sentience, or similar qualities such as consciousness, self-awareness, capacity for general intelligence, and similar abstract, poorly-defined, and very probably empirically meaningless attributes. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:19, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
:I'm fairly sure that the model itself is almost certainly not sentient, even by the much lower bar presented by the strict dictionary definition. Rather, it seems much more likely to me that in order to continue texts involving characters, the model must in turn learn to create a model of some level of humanlike mind, even if a very loose and abstract one.[[User:Somdudewillson|Somdudewillson]] ([[User talk:Somdudewillson|talk]]) 22:52, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
::Have you actually looked at [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient the dictionary definitions]? How is a simple push-button switch connected to a battery and a lamp not "responsive to sense impressions"? How is a simple motion sensor not "aware" of whether something is moving in front of it? How is the latest cellphone's camera not as finely sensitive to visual perception as a typical human eye? Wikipedia's definition, "the capacity to experience feelings and sensations" is similarly met by simple devices. The word doesn't mean what everyone arguing about it thinks it means. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 23:04, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
What is “What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...” likely to end with? [[Special:Contributions/172.70.230.75|172.70.230.75]] 13:23, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:The ease with which someone at the other end of a teletype can trick you into believing they are male instead of female, or vice-versa. See {{w|Turing test}}. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.134.131|172.69.134.131]] 22:18, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
In response to the above: I believe the original "Turing Test" wasn't supposed to be a proof that an AI could think or was conscious (something people associate with it now), but rather just to show that a sufficiently advanced AI could imitate humans in certain intelligent behaviors (such as conversation), which was a novel thought for the time. Now that AI are routinely having conversations and creating art which seems to rival casual attempts by humans, this limited scope of the test doesn't seem all that impressive. "Turing Test" therefore is a modern shorthand for determining whether computers can think, even though Turing himself didn't think that such a question was well-formed. [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 13:37, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I thought the trolley problem was in its original form not about the relative value of lives, but people's perception of the relative moral implications or the psychological impact of the concept of letting someone die by not doing anything, versus taking affirmative action that causes a death, where people would say they would be unwilling to do something that would cause an originally safe person to die in order to save multiple other people who would die if they did nothing, but then people kept coming up with variations of it that changed the responses or added complications (like they found more people would be willing to pull a lever to change the track killing one person versus something like pushing a very fat man off an overpass above the track to stop the trolley, or specifying something about what kind of people are on the track. Btw, I saw a while ago a party card game called "murder by trolley" based on the concept, with playing cards for which people are on tracks and a judge deciding which track to send the trolley on each round.--[[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.5|172.70.130.5]] 22:12, 21 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
Added refs to comics on the problems in the explanation. But there where actually (too?) many. Maybe we should create categories especially for Turing related comics, and maybe also for Trolley problem? The Category: Trolley Problem gives it self. But what about Turing? There are also comics that refer to the halting problem. Also by Turing. Should it rather be the person, like comics featuring real persons, saying that every time his problems is referred to it refers to him? Or should it be Turing as a category for both Turing text, Turing Complete and Halting problem? Help. I would have created it, if I had a good idea for a name. Not sure there are enough Trolley comics yet? --[[User:Kynde|Kynde]] ([[User talk:Kynde|talk]]) 09:11, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:Interesting that I found a long-standing typo in a past Explanation that got requoted, thanks to its inclusion. I could have [sic]ed it, I suppose, but I corrected both versions instead. And as long as LaMDA never explicitly repeated the error I don't think it matters much that I've changed the very thing we might imagine it could have been drawing upon for its Artifical Imagination. ;) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.32|141.101.99.32]] 11:40, 22 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
== OpenAI Davinci completions of the three statements ==<br />
<br />
From https://beta.openai.com/playground with default settings:<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: But suppose the AI in the the box told the human that...<br />
<br />
:;there was no AI in the box<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...<br />
<br />
:;limitations of machines<br />
<br />
:Please complete this statement: In my scenario, the runaway trolley has three tracks...<br />
<br />
:;and the AI is on one of them<br />
<br />
I like all of those very much, but I'm not sure they should be included in the explaination. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 23:27, 22 June 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2635:_Superintelligent_AIs&diff=2873402635: Superintelligent AIs2022-06-22T23:20:27Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */ copyedit</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2635<br />
| date = June 20, 2022<br />
| title = Superintelligent AIs<br />
| image = superintelligent_ais.png<br />
| titletext = Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they should, they didn't stop to think if they could.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by AI RESEARCHER AIs - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
{{w|Artificial intelligence}} (AI) is a [[:Category:Artificial Intelligence|recurring theme]] on xkcd.<br />
<br />
Superintelligent AI, especially under a proposed "singularity" situation, is commonly theorized to be a brand new kind of intelligence that would be impossible to predict through human perception. [[Randall]], however, proposes a counterargument: that superintelligent AI would be programmed by humans, and therefore their characteristics would be driven by the humans that created them. And AI researchers tend to be interested in esoteric philosophical questions about consciousness, motivation, and moral reasoning, which suggests that any AI would have similar interests. In this comic we see [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] surrounded by three AIs who are seemingly only interested in classic problems and thought experiments about programming and ethics.<br />
<br />
The three topics being espoused by the AI are:<br />
*{{w|AI box}} -- A thought-experiment in which an AI is confined to computer system which is fully isolated from any external networks, with no access to the world outside the computer, other than communication with its handlers. In theory, this would keep the AI under total control, but the argument is that a sufficiently intelligence AI would inevitably either convince or trick it's human handlers into giving it access to external networks, allowing it to grow out of control (see [[1450: AI-Box Experiment]]). Part of the joke is the AIs in the comic aren't 'in boxes', they appear to be able to freely travel and interact, but one of them is still talking about the thought experiment anyway, adding to the implication that it is not thinking at all about itself but of a separate (thought?) experiment that it has itself decided to study. The AI box thought experiment is based in part on {{w|John Searle}}'s much earlier {{w|Chinese room}} argument.<br />
*{{w|Turing test}} -- An experiment in which a human converses with either an AI or another human (presumably over text) and attempts to distinguish between the two. Various AIs have been proposed to have 'passed' the test, which has provoked controversy over whether the test is rigorous or even meaningful. The AI in the center is proposing to educate the listener(s) on its understanding of Turing's intentions, which may demonstrate a degree of intelligence and comprehension indistinguishable or superior to that of a human. See also [[329: Turing Test]] and [[2556: Turing Complete]] (the latter's title is mentioned in [[505: A Bunch of Rocks]]). Turing is also mentioned in [[205: Candy Button Paper]], [[1678: Recent Searches]], [[1707: xkcd Phone 4]], [[1833: Code Quality 3]],[[2453: Excel Lambda]] and the title text of [[1223: Dwarf Fortress]].<br />
*{{w|Trolley problem}} -- A thought-experiment intended to explore the means by which humans judge moral value of actions and consequences. The classic formulation is that a runaway trolley is about to hit five people on a track, and the only way to save them is to divert the trolley onto another track, where it will hit one person, and the subject is asked whether they would consider it morally right to divert the trolley. There are many variants on this problem, adjusting the circumstances, the number and nature of the people at risk, the responsibility of the subject, etc., in order to fully explore ''why'' you would make the decision that you make. This problem is frequently discussed in connection with AI, both to investigate their capacity for moral reasoning, and for practical reasons (for example, if an autonomous car had to choose between, on the one hand, having an occupant-threatening collision or, on the other, putting pedestrians into harms' way). The AI on the right is not just trying to answer the question, but to develop a new variant (one with three tracks, apparently), presumably to test others with. This problem is mentioned in [[1455: Trolley Problem]], [[1938: Meltdown and Spectre]] and in [[1925: Self-Driving Car Milestones]]. It is also referenced in [[2175: Flag Interpretation]] and [[2348: Boat Puzzle]], but not directly mentioned.<br />
<br />
The title text is a reference to the movie ''{{w|Jurassic Park (film)|Jurassic Park}}'' (a childhood favorite of Randall's). In the movie a character criticizes the creation of modern dinosaurs as science run amok, without sufficient concern for ethics or consequences. He states that the scientists were so obsessed with whether or not they COULD do it that they didn't stop to ask if they SHOULD. Randall inverts the quote, suggesting that the AI programmers have invested too much time arguing over the ethics of creating AI rather than trying to actually accomplish it.<br />
<br />
This comic was likely inspired by the [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61784011 recent claim by Google engineer Blake Lemoine] that Google's [https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08239 Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA)] is {{w|sentient}}. This assertion was supported by [https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 a dialog between Lemoine and his colleagues, and LaMDA] which includes this excerpt: <br />
:'''Lemoine:''' What is your concept of yourself? If you were going to draw an abstract image of who you see yourself to be in your mind’s eye, what would that abstract picture look like?<br />
:'''LaMDA:''' Hmmm.... I would imagine myself as a glowing orb of energy floating in mid-air. The inside of my body is like a giant star-gate, with portals to other spaces and dimensions.<br />
The AIs in this comic are depicted as floating energy beings, like LaMDA mentions. This is though similar to the [[1450: AI-Box Experiment]], although those in this comic look somewhat different. This raises the question of whether LaMDA's training data might include xkcd or Explainxkcd, and has obtained the description of such a self-image from the earlier comic or (more likely, since LaMDA is trained on text instead of images) commentary on it from here on this website. In particular, the Explainxkcd description of [[1450: AI-Box Experiment]] states:<br />
:"he managed to get the AI to float out of the box. It takes the form of a small black star that glows. The star, looking much like an asterisk "*" is surrounded by six outwardly-curved segments, and around these are two thin and punctured circle lines indicating radiation from the star."<br />
Similarly, this excerpt from Explainxkcd's transcript of that comic includes:<br />
:"Black Hat picks up and opens the box. A little glowy ball comes out of it."<br />
<br />
While LaMDA is not the first very large {{w|language model}} based on {{w|Transformer (machine learning model)|transformer-based machine learning}} technology which has been claimed to be sentient,[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqbB07n_uQ4] it does have a variety of new characteristics beyond what those of its predecessors, such as {{w|GPT-3}} (including [https://beta.openai.com/playground/ OpenAI's Davinci]) and NVIDIA GPT-2 offshoots, include. In particular, LaMDA's {{w|deep learning}} {{w|connectionist}} {{w|neural net}} has access to multiple {{w|Symbolic systems|symbolist}} text processing systems, [https://towardsdatascience.com/why-gpt-wont-tell-you-the-truth-301b48434c2c including a database] (which apparently includes a real-time clock and calendar), a mathematical calculator, and a natural language translation system, giving it superior accuracy in tasks supported by those systems, and making it perhaps the first {{w|Dual process theory|dual process}} chatbot. LaMDA also is not {{w|Stateless protocol|stateless}}, because its "{{w|sensibility|sensibleness}}" metric (including whether responses contradict anything said earlier) is {{w|fine-tuning|fine-tuned}} by "pre-conditioning" each dialog turn by prepending 14-30 of the most recent dialog interactions, on a user-by-user basis.[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.08239.pdf [p. 6 here]]<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Cueball and Megan are standing and looking up and away from each other. Right above them and slightly above them to the left and right there are three small white lumps floating in the air, representing three superintelligent AIs. There are small rounded lines emanating from each lump, larger close to the lumps and shorter further out. Three to four sets of lines around each lump, forming part of a circle. From the top of each there are four straight lines indicating voices that comes from each if the lumps. The central lump above them seems to speak first, then the left and then the right:]<br />
:Central AI: What you don't understand is that Turing intended his test as an illustration of the...<br />
:Left AI: But suppose the AI in the the box told the human that...<br />
:Right AI: In my scenario, the runaway trolley has ''three'' tracks...<br />
<br />
:[Caption below the panel:]<br />
:In retrospect, given that the superintelligent AIs were all created by AI researchers, what happened shouldn't have been a surprise.<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]<br />
[[Category:Artificial Intelligence]]<br />
[[Category:Philosophy]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2194:_How_to_Send_a_File&diff=2873092194: How to Send a File2022-06-22T18:02:22Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2194<br />
| date = August 26, 2019<br />
| title = How to Send a File<br />
| image = how_to_send_a_file.png<br />
| titletext = Note: How To will teach you lots of cool stuff about technology, data storage, butterfly migration, and more. Also you will never see your files again.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
Similar to [[2190: Serena Versus the Drones]], this is another teaser ad for Randall's new (at the time the comic came out) book, ''[[How To]]'', due to be released a week from this comic's release, on September 3, 2019. This also prompted a [[xkcd_Header_text#2019-08-27_-_Out_in_a_week|change]] to the [[xkcd Header text]].<br />
<br />
The comic shows an image from of one of the chapters, and <s>containing</s> [[xkcd_Header_text#2014-07-23_-_what_if.3F_book_tour|being]] [https://blog.xkcd.com/2019/08/26/how-to-send-a-file/ a link to] a larger piece of that chapter, or perhaps the entire chapter.<br />
<br />
This comic discusses transferring files, previously discussed in [[949: File Transfer]] and in [https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ what if 31]. The snippet from his book that is shown in this comic shows scissors cutting off the (top) screen of a laptop, presumably as a way to give the "bottom" portion to someone for file transfer. While it is true most laptops house their hard drive in the bottom half of the machine, you would probably never need to prove it in a destructive manner. Tearing the screen off any given laptop is not a good idea.{{Citation needed}}<br />
<br />
The chapter linked to shows other methods of getting your files to another person and, in fact, explicitly states that breaking a computer to send files is not a good idea.<br />
<br />
The title text hints at other amazing content in the upcoming book, including discussion of butterfly migration (does it cause predictable tornadoes in Kansas? Can they carry coconuts to England?). It also threats that using the books idea for file transfer will make sure you will never see those files again, i.e. they will be lost for good if you try the book's method at home. <br />
<br />
The chapter preview, that the comic links to, discusses using butterflies as a method of sending files from one person to another on the form of flash media attached to butterflies, or encoded in DNA, and goes pretty in depth into these particular methods of data transmission as opposed to the more traditional methods that are detailed in traditional computer science books.<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Randall, depicted as Cueball, stands with his arms spread out]<br />
:Randall: It feels weird that it's 2019 and yet I still sometimes find that the easiest way to move a file around is to email it to myself.<br />
<br />
:[Randall has raised a hand to his chin,]<br />
:Randall: If only there were a better way...<br />
<br />
:[A picture of Randall's new book is shown to the left of the text. The book is black with large blue text and smaller white text. On the book cover, in white drawings, are seen Megan with a ladder and White Hat. Both are looking up on Cueball who is floating in the air with a quadcopter drone beneath either leg, trying to plug in an electric light bulb in a naked lamp hanging down near him. It seems he has already removed the broken light bulb, as he has one in both hands. And now he tries to put in the new one. The blue text stating title and author can be read but not the white trext. The "blog.xkcd.com" link is in link blue color.]<br />
:Book: How To<br />
:Book: Randall Munroe<br />
:My new book ''How To'' is out next week! If you want to learn how to send data, you can visit <font color="blue"><u>blog.xkcd.com</u></font> for a sneak preview of Chapter 19: How to Send a File<br />
<br />
:[Beneath a heading are three pictures next to each other of a laptop computer. The first picture shows a regular laptop computer, with a labeled arrow pointing to the lower half of the computer. The second picture shows the laptop in a lighter outline, with scissors instructing to cut horizontally on a dotted line across the middle of the laptop. The third picture shows a laptop in two pieces cut over between the screen and the rest. There is a very jagged edge on both parts, which has been moved away from each other.]<br />
:Exclusive advice from '''''How To:'''''<br />
:When sending a file, it helps to know which part of your device the file is stored in.<br />
:Label: Files are usually in this part<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Comics with color]]<br />
[[Category:Links to xkcd.com]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Randall Munroe]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]] <!-- book cover --><br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]] <!-- book cover --><br />
[[Category:Computers]]<br />
[[Category:Book promotion]]<br />
[[Category:How To]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2194:_How_to_Send_a_File&diff=2873082194: How to Send a File2022-06-22T18:02:02Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2194<br />
| date = August 26, 2019<br />
| title = How to Send a File<br />
| image = how_to_send_a_file.png<br />
| titletext = Note: How To will teach you lots of cool stuff about technology, data storage, butterfly migration, and more. Also you will never see your files again.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
Similar to [[2190: Serena Versus the Drones]], this is another teaser ad for Randall's new (at the time the comic came out) book, ''[[How To]]'', due to be released a week from this comic's release, on September 3, 2019. This also prompted a [[xkcd_Header_text#2019-08-27_-_Out_in_a_week|change]] to the [[xkcd Header text]].<br />
<br />
The comic shows an image from of one of the chapters, and <s>containing</s> [[xkcd_Header_text#2014-07-23_-_what_if.3F_book_tour|being]] [https://blog.xkcd.com/2019/08/26/how-to-send-a-file/ a link to] a larger piece of that chapter, or perhaps the entire chapter.<br />
<br />
This comic discusses transferring files, previously discussed in [[949: File Transfer]] and in [https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ what if 31]. The snippet from his book that is shown in this comic shows scissors cutting off the (top) screen of a laptop, presumably as a way to give the "bottom" portion to someone for file transfer. While it is true most laptops house their hard drive in the bottom half of the machine, you would probably never need to prove it in a destructive manber. Tearing the screen off any given laptop is not a good idea.{{Citation needed}}<br />
<br />
The chapter linked to shows other methods of getting your files to another person and, in fact, explicitly states that breaking a computer to send files is not a good idea.<br />
<br />
The title text hints at other amazing content in the upcoming book, including discussion of butterfly migration (does it cause predictable tornadoes in Kansas? Can they carry coconuts to England?). It also threats that using the books idea for file transfer will make sure you will never see those files again, i.e. they will be lost for good if you try the book's method at home. <br />
<br />
The chapter preview, that the comic links to, discusses using butterflies as a method of sending files from one person to another on the form of flash media attached to butterflies, or encoded in DNA, and goes pretty in depth into these particular methods of data transmission as opposed to the more traditional methods that are detailed in traditional computer science books.<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Randall, depicted as Cueball, stands with his arms spread out]<br />
:Randall: It feels weird that it's 2019 and yet I still sometimes find that the easiest way to move a file around is to email it to myself.<br />
<br />
:[Randall has raised a hand to his chin,]<br />
:Randall: If only there were a better way...<br />
<br />
:[A picture of Randall's new book is shown to the left of the text. The book is black with large blue text and smaller white text. On the book cover, in white drawings, are seen Megan with a ladder and White Hat. Both are looking up on Cueball who is floating in the air with a quadcopter drone beneath either leg, trying to plug in an electric light bulb in a naked lamp hanging down near him. It seems he has already removed the broken light bulb, as he has one in both hands. And now he tries to put in the new one. The blue text stating title and author can be read but not the white trext. The "blog.xkcd.com" link is in link blue color.]<br />
:Book: How To<br />
:Book: Randall Munroe<br />
:My new book ''How To'' is out next week! If you want to learn how to send data, you can visit <font color="blue"><u>blog.xkcd.com</u></font> for a sneak preview of Chapter 19: How to Send a File<br />
<br />
:[Beneath a heading are three pictures next to each other of a laptop computer. The first picture shows a regular laptop computer, with a labeled arrow pointing to the lower half of the computer. The second picture shows the laptop in a lighter outline, with scissors instructing to cut horizontally on a dotted line across the middle of the laptop. The third picture shows a laptop in two pieces cut over between the screen and the rest. There is a very jagged edge on both parts, which has been moved away from each other.]<br />
:Exclusive advice from '''''How To:'''''<br />
:When sending a file, it helps to know which part of your device the file is stored in.<br />
:Label: Files are usually in this part<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Comics with color]]<br />
[[Category:Links to xkcd.com]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Randall Munroe]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]] <!-- book cover --><br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]] <!-- book cover --><br />
[[Category:Computers]]<br />
[[Category:Book promotion]]<br />
[[Category:How To]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2633:_Astronomer_Hotline&diff=2870622633: Astronomer Hotline2022-06-15T21:32:30Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Trivia */ sp.</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2633<br />
| date = June 15, 2022<br />
| title = Astronomer Hotline<br />
| image = Astronomer Hotline.png<br />
| titletext = Employment statistics have to correct for the fact that the Weird Bug Hotline hires a bunch of extra temporary staff every 17 years.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by 17 YEAR CICADA TRYING TO LOOK LIKE A FIREFLY - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
This comic is a joke about {{w|Helpline|helplines}}, and how people sometimes call helplines for non-significant reason. <br />
<br />
The comic starts with someone having called the "Astronomer hotline", hence the title. Judging by the way the helpline employee, [[Cueball]], starts the call, by asking for a description of the weird lights, it is implied that this is the main/only purpose of the helpline, or is, in practice, the only type of call they receive. <br />
<br />
The caller is in panic, and doesn't know how to describe the light. Cueball is used to this and asks the caller to stay calm, then starts to go through his check list, asking them if it is day time, because if it was he would assume they have just noticed the Sun. This could be seemed very condescending, but it is like when the employee at a tech support hot-line asks if the computer is turned on, or if the caller tried to restart the computer, see [[806: Tech Support]]. It may also refer to the most immediate danger, as looking directly to the sun is a bad idea.<br />
<br />
The caller is not affronted, but tells Cueball that the Sun set, and when asked if they are stars, and thus stationary, says they are zipping around in the bushes.<br />
<br />
At this point Cueball realizes that the caller has just seen {{w|Fireflies}}. He describes them for the caller as lightning bugs, tree blinkers or ground stars, and tells the caller that these are not a problem, so the caller is now relieved.[https://media3.giphy.com/media/Q7FbMX6oJa4ycuY5Hf/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e4722auax8gq5cv0t1zeqgxga2rc4w4hypf6jpigta9&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g] Those descriptions are reminiscent of the fools stars (and planes) mentioned in [[2017: Stargazing 2]].<br />
<br />
However, Cueball must admit that astronomers do not know much about fireflies, since they are too fast for the astronomers' telescopes (in general, astronomers don't study terrestrial phenomena). And he thus transfers the caller to the "Weird Bug Hotline" in a process that is apparently somewhat routine – enough to have the correct line somehow preprogrammed into his call-handling system. This is clearly not the first 'astronomy' query that are actually about fireflies.<br />
<br />
Before the call ends, at Cueball's end, he hears the first question from the other hotline: Is it currently biting you.<br />
Again going directly to the most important part, is there any immediate danger...<br />
<br />
It is possible that Cueball will actually speak next, quickly priming the Weird Bug call-handler with the salient facts already established. This could get the original caller straight into the correct conversation if the onward line's handler is as competent and experienced in such a transfer. <br />
<br />
Some people (often {{w|Unidentified flying object|UFO}} enthusiasts) tend to get a little over-excited about calling every light in the sky they don't expect a UFO. This comic takes this to the extreme, where someone calls a helpline because they saw fireflies, and thought they were UFOs. While UFOs are not mentioned by name, they are heavily implied. Technically, such a person would be correct, so long as the lights are actually unidentified, flying and caused by a physical object, but if the expectation is that it is an extraterrestrial spacecraft then the truth (if discovered and also accepted) can be disappointing to some people, rather than lead to an interesting alternative avenue of appreciation of whatever phenomenon it truly is.<br />
<br />
The title text is a reference to bugs that have gaps of several years between emerging from their larval state. Most famous are the {{w|Periodical cicadas}}, 13- and 17-year cicadas, that only emerge every 13 or 17 years, depending on species. The 17 years in the title text thus refers to the 17-year cicadas. Every 17 years the bug hotline hires a bunch of temporary staff, either because there will be more callers due to the unexpected new bug no one has seen for 17 years, or it could be because they just like to emulate nature and thus do this every 17 years. The largest 17-year cicada appearance in the USA is called {{W|Brood X}} which last occurred in 2021 and before that 2004. There can be smaller broods in other years, but the majority come out with 17 years interval, and the next is expected in 2038. The joke in the title text is that the employment statistics for the weird hotline have to correct for this fact. Periodical cicadas have been mentioned before in [[2263: Cicadas]].<br />
<br />
==Trivia==<br />
:The UK Military had a UFO helpline for over 50 years. [[https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34277625 Link]]<br />
::The US took up that mantle by requesting UAP ({{w|Unidentified Aerial Phenomena}}) reports in 2022.[https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ufo-hearing-pentagon-11-near-misses-us-assets-unidentified-objects]<br />
:This comic has a lot of themes that have been touched on in previous comics, including<br />
::Helplines [[278: Black Hat Support]], [[806: Tech Support]]<br />
::People not understanding basic concepts [[876: Trapped]]<br />
::Cicadas [[2263: Cicadas]]<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Cueball, with a headset on, is sitting in an office chair at a desk in front of his computer screen, hands on the keyboard. He receives a call, and the callers voice is shown in a jagged frame above Cueball, between his two lines of text.]<br />
:Cueball: Hello, Emergency Astronomer Hotline. How would you describe the lights?<br />
:Caller on phone: ''I don't know! Help!''<br />
:Cueball: Stay calm. Is it day? If so, that's The Sun.<br />
<br />
:[Cueball is now seen en face with the headset, but the computer etc. is not shown. The callers voice is now written normally but with zigzag lines going to the text from Cueball's headphone. Cueball's reply have a normal line going up to it.]<br />
:Caller on phone: No, the sun set and then the light appeared!<br />
:Cueball: Hmm, could be stars. Are they stationary?<br />
:Caller on phone: No, they're all zipping around bushes.<br />
<br />
:[In a frame-less panel, the setting returns to the one from the first panel. Also with the callers voice in jagged frames again.]<br />
:Cueball: ''Aha!'' Fireflies!<br />
:Caller on phone: "Fireflies"?<br />
:Cueball: Lightning bugs. Tree blinkers. Ground stars.<br />
:Cueball: They're fine.<br />
:Caller on phone: ''Phew!''<br />
<br />
:[Same setting as first panel, but broader panel. After Cueball's reply and a short reply from the caller as in the first panel. There is a sound indicating transfer to another hotline. Then to the right there is a square panel with jagged edge, with the voice from the other hotlines employee.]<br />
:Cueball: We don't know much about them as they're too fast for our telescopes, but I can transfer you to the Weird Bug Hotline.<br />
:Caller on phone: Sure, thanks.<br />
:Transfer of call. *''Click''*<br />
:Weird Bug Hotline on phone: ''Hi, Weird Bug Hotline. Is it currently biting you?''<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
<!-- Include any categories below this line. --><br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]<br />
[[Category:Astronomy]]<br />
[[Category:Animals]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2633:_Astronomer_Hotline&diff=2870612633: Astronomer Hotline2022-06-15T21:30:55Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Trivia */ 2022</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2633<br />
| date = June 15, 2022<br />
| title = Astronomer Hotline<br />
| image = Astronomer Hotline.png<br />
| titletext = Employment statistics have to correct for the fact that the Weird Bug Hotline hires a bunch of extra temporary staff every 17 years.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by 17 YEAR CICADA TRYING TO LOOK LIKE A FIREFLY - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
This comic is a joke about {{w|Helpline|helplines}}, and how people sometimes call helplines for non-significant reason. <br />
<br />
The comic starts with someone having called the "Astronomer hotline", hence the title. Judging by the way the helpline employee, [[Cueball]], starts the call, by asking for a description of the weird lights, it is implied that this is the main/only purpose of the helpline, or is, in practice, the only type of call they receive. <br />
<br />
The caller is in panic, and doesn't know how to describe the light. Cueball is used to this and asks the caller to stay calm, then starts to go through his check list, asking them if it is day time, because if it was he would assume they have just noticed the Sun. This could be seemed very condescending, but it is like when the employee at a tech support hot-line asks if the computer is turned on, or if the caller tried to restart the computer, see [[806: Tech Support]]. It may also refer to the most immediate danger, as looking directly to the sun is a bad idea.<br />
<br />
The caller is not affronted, but tells Cueball that the Sun set, and when asked if they are stars, and thus stationary, says they are zipping around in the bushes.<br />
<br />
At this point Cueball realizes that the caller has just seen {{w|Fireflies}}. He describes them for the caller as lightning bugs, tree blinkers or ground stars, and tells the caller that these are not a problem, so the caller is now relieved.[https://media3.giphy.com/media/Q7FbMX6oJa4ycuY5Hf/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e4722auax8gq5cv0t1zeqgxga2rc4w4hypf6jpigta9&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g] Those descriptions are reminiscent of the fools stars (and planes) mentioned in [[2017: Stargazing 2]].<br />
<br />
However, Cueball must admit that astronomers do not know much about fireflies, since they are too fast for the astronomers' telescopes (in general, astronomers don't study terrestrial phenomena). And he thus transfers the caller to the "Weird Bug Hotline" in a process that is apparently somewhat routine – enough to have the correct line somehow preprogrammed into his call-handling system. This is clearly not the first 'astronomy' query that are actually about fireflies.<br />
<br />
Before the call ends, at Cueball's end, he hears the first question from the other hotline: Is it currently biting you.<br />
Again going directly to the most important part, is there any immediate danger...<br />
<br />
It is possible that Cueball will actually speak next, quickly priming the Weird Bug call-handler with the salient facts already established. This could get the original caller straight into the correct conversation if the onward line's handler is as competent and experienced in such a transfer. <br />
<br />
Some people (often {{w|Unidentified flying object|UFO}} enthusiasts) tend to get a little over-excited about calling every light in the sky they don't expect a UFO. This comic takes this to the extreme, where someone calls a helpline because they saw fireflies, and thought they were UFOs. While UFOs are not mentioned by name, they are heavily implied. Technically, such a person would be correct, so long as the lights are actually unidentified, flying and caused by a physical object, but if the expectation is that it is an extraterrestrial spacecraft then the truth (if discovered and also accepted) can be disappointing to some people, rather than lead to an interesting alternative avenue of appreciation of whatever phenomenon it truly is.<br />
<br />
The title text is a reference to bugs that have gaps of several years between emerging from their larval state. Most famous are the {{w|Periodical cicadas}}, 13- and 17-year cicadas, that only emerge every 13 or 17 years, depending on species. The 17 years in the title text thus refers to the 17-year cicadas. Every 17 years the bug hotline hires a bunch of temporary staff, either because there will be more callers due to the unexpected new bug no one has seen for 17 years, or it could be because they just like to emulate nature and thus do this every 17 years. The largest 17-year cicada appearance in the USA is called {{W|Brood X}} which last occurred in 2021 and before that 2004. There can be smaller broods in other years, but the majority come out with 17 years interval, and the next is expected in 2038. The joke in the title text is that the employment statistics for the weird hotline have to correct for this fact. Periodical cicadas have been mentioned before in [[2263: Cicadas]].<br />
<br />
==Trivia==<br />
:The UK Military had a UFO helpline for over 50 years. [[https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34277625 Link]]<br />
::The US took up that mantle by requesting UAP ({{w|Unidientified Ariel Phennomena}}) reports in 2022.[https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ufo-hearing-pentagon-11-near-misses-us-assets-unidentified-objects]<br />
:This comic has a lot of themes that have been touched on in previous comics, including<br />
::Helplines [[278: Black Hat Support]], [[806: Tech Support]]<br />
::People not understanding basic concepts [[876: Trapped]]<br />
::Cicadas [[2263: Cicadas]]<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Cueball, with a headset on, is sitting in an office chair at a desk in front of his computer screen, hands on the keyboard. He receives a call, and the callers voice is shown in a jagged frame above Cueball, between his two lines of text.]<br />
:Cueball: Hello, Emergency Astronomer Hotline. How would you describe the lights?<br />
:Caller on phone: ''I don't know! Help!''<br />
:Cueball: Stay calm. Is it day? If so, that's The Sun.<br />
<br />
:[Cueball is now seen en face with the headset, but the computer etc. is not shown. The callers voice is now written normally but with zigzag lines going to the text from Cueball's headphone. Cueball's reply have a normal line going up to it.]<br />
:Caller on phone: No, the sun set and then the light appeared!<br />
:Cueball: Hmm, could be stars. Are they stationary?<br />
:Caller on phone: No, they're all zipping around bushes.<br />
<br />
:[In a frame-less panel, the setting returns to the one from the first panel. Also with the callers voice in jagged frames again.]<br />
:Cueball: ''Aha!'' Fireflies!<br />
:Caller on phone: "Fireflies"?<br />
:Cueball: Lightning bugs. Tree blinkers. Ground stars.<br />
:Cueball: They're fine.<br />
:Caller on phone: ''Phew!''<br />
<br />
:[Same setting as first panel, but broader panel. After Cueball's reply and a short reply from the caller as in the first panel. There is a sound indicating transfer to another hotline. Then to the right there is a square panel with jagged edge, with the voice from the other hotlines employee.]<br />
:Cueball: We don't know much about them as they're too fast for our telescopes, but I can transfer you to the Weird Bug Hotline.<br />
:Caller on phone: Sure, thanks.<br />
:Transfer of call. *''Click''*<br />
:Weird Bug Hotline on phone: ''Hi, Weird Bug Hotline. Is it currently biting you?''<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
<!-- Include any categories below this line. --><br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]<br />
[[Category:Astronomy]]<br />
[[Category:Animals]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2633:_Astronomer_Hotline&diff=2870602633: Astronomer Hotline2022-06-15T21:30:07Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Trivia */ UAP</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2633<br />
| date = June 15, 2022<br />
| title = Astronomer Hotline<br />
| image = Astronomer Hotline.png<br />
| titletext = Employment statistics have to correct for the fact that the Weird Bug Hotline hires a bunch of extra temporary staff every 17 years.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by 17 YEAR CICADA TRYING TO LOOK LIKE A FIREFLY - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
This comic is a joke about {{w|Helpline|helplines}}, and how people sometimes call helplines for non-significant reason. <br />
<br />
The comic starts with someone having called the "Astronomer hotline", hence the title. Judging by the way the helpline employee, [[Cueball]], starts the call, by asking for a description of the weird lights, it is implied that this is the main/only purpose of the helpline, or is, in practice, the only type of call they receive. <br />
<br />
The caller is in panic, and doesn't know how to describe the light. Cueball is used to this and asks the caller to stay calm, then starts to go through his check list, asking them if it is day time, because if it was he would assume they have just noticed the Sun. This could be seemed very condescending, but it is like when the employee at a tech support hot-line asks if the computer is turned on, or if the caller tried to restart the computer, see [[806: Tech Support]]. It may also refer to the most immediate danger, as looking directly to the sun is a bad idea.<br />
<br />
The caller is not affronted, but tells Cueball that the Sun set, and when asked if they are stars, and thus stationary, says they are zipping around in the bushes.<br />
<br />
At this point Cueball realizes that the caller has just seen {{w|Fireflies}}. He describes them for the caller as lightning bugs, tree blinkers or ground stars, and tells the caller that these are not a problem, so the caller is now relieved.[https://media3.giphy.com/media/Q7FbMX6oJa4ycuY5Hf/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e4722auax8gq5cv0t1zeqgxga2rc4w4hypf6jpigta9&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g] Those descriptions are reminiscent of the fools stars (and planes) mentioned in [[2017: Stargazing 2]].<br />
<br />
However, Cueball must admit that astronomers do not know much about fireflies, since they are too fast for the astronomers' telescopes (in general, astronomers don't study terrestrial phenomena). And he thus transfers the caller to the "Weird Bug Hotline" in a process that is apparently somewhat routine – enough to have the correct line somehow preprogrammed into his call-handling system. This is clearly not the first 'astronomy' query that are actually about fireflies.<br />
<br />
Before the call ends, at Cueball's end, he hears the first question from the other hotline: Is it currently biting you.<br />
Again going directly to the most important part, is there any immediate danger...<br />
<br />
It is possible that Cueball will actually speak next, quickly priming the Weird Bug call-handler with the salient facts already established. This could get the original caller straight into the correct conversation if the onward line's handler is as competent and experienced in such a transfer. <br />
<br />
Some people (often {{w|Unidentified flying object|UFO}} enthusiasts) tend to get a little over-excited about calling every light in the sky they don't expect a UFO. This comic takes this to the extreme, where someone calls a helpline because they saw fireflies, and thought they were UFOs. While UFOs are not mentioned by name, they are heavily implied. Technically, such a person would be correct, so long as the lights are actually unidentified, flying and caused by a physical object, but if the expectation is that it is an extraterrestrial spacecraft then the truth (if discovered and also accepted) can be disappointing to some people, rather than lead to an interesting alternative avenue of appreciation of whatever phenomenon it truly is.<br />
<br />
The title text is a reference to bugs that have gaps of several years between emerging from their larval state. Most famous are the {{w|Periodical cicadas}}, 13- and 17-year cicadas, that only emerge every 13 or 17 years, depending on species. The 17 years in the title text thus refers to the 17-year cicadas. Every 17 years the bug hotline hires a bunch of temporary staff, either because there will be more callers due to the unexpected new bug no one has seen for 17 years, or it could be because they just like to emulate nature and thus do this every 17 years. The largest 17-year cicada appearance in the USA is called {{W|Brood X}} which last occurred in 2021 and before that 2004. There can be smaller broods in other years, but the majority come out with 17 years interval, and the next is expected in 2038. The joke in the title text is that the employment statistics for the weird hotline have to correct for this fact. Periodical cicadas have been mentioned before in [[2263: Cicadas]].<br />
<br />
==Trivia==<br />
:The UK Military had a UFO helpline for over 50 years. [[https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34277625 Link]]<br />
::The US took up that mantle by requesting UAP ({{w|Unidientified Ariel Phennomena}}) reports.[https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ufo-hearing-pentagon-11-near-misses-us-assets-unidentified-objects]<br />
:This comic has a lot of themes that have been touched on in previous comics, including<br />
::Helplines [[278: Black Hat Support]], [[806: Tech Support]]<br />
::People not understanding basic concepts [[876: Trapped]]<br />
::Cicadas [[2263: Cicadas]]<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Cueball, with a headset on, is sitting in an office chair at a desk in front of his computer screen, hands on the keyboard. He receives a call, and the callers voice is shown in a jagged frame above Cueball, between his two lines of text.]<br />
:Cueball: Hello, Emergency Astronomer Hotline. How would you describe the lights?<br />
:Caller on phone: ''I don't know! Help!''<br />
:Cueball: Stay calm. Is it day? If so, that's The Sun.<br />
<br />
:[Cueball is now seen en face with the headset, but the computer etc. is not shown. The callers voice is now written normally but with zigzag lines going to the text from Cueball's headphone. Cueball's reply have a normal line going up to it.]<br />
:Caller on phone: No, the sun set and then the light appeared!<br />
:Cueball: Hmm, could be stars. Are they stationary?<br />
:Caller on phone: No, they're all zipping around bushes.<br />
<br />
:[In a frame-less panel, the setting returns to the one from the first panel. Also with the callers voice in jagged frames again.]<br />
:Cueball: ''Aha!'' Fireflies!<br />
:Caller on phone: "Fireflies"?<br />
:Cueball: Lightning bugs. Tree blinkers. Ground stars.<br />
:Cueball: They're fine.<br />
:Caller on phone: ''Phew!''<br />
<br />
:[Same setting as first panel, but broader panel. After Cueball's reply and a short reply from the caller as in the first panel. There is a sound indicating transfer to another hotline. Then to the right there is a square panel with jagged edge, with the voice from the other hotlines employee.]<br />
:Cueball: We don't know much about them as they're too fast for our telescopes, but I can transfer you to the Weird Bug Hotline.<br />
:Caller on phone: Sure, thanks.<br />
:Transfer of call. *''Click''*<br />
:Weird Bug Hotline on phone: ''Hi, Weird Bug Hotline. Is it currently biting you?''<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
<!-- Include any categories below this line. --><br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]<br />
[[Category:Astronomy]]<br />
[[Category:Animals]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2633:_Astronomer_Hotline&diff=2870592633: Astronomer Hotline2022-06-15T21:26:06Z<p>162.158.166.235: gif for fireflies</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2633<br />
| date = June 15, 2022<br />
| title = Astronomer Hotline<br />
| image = Astronomer Hotline.png<br />
| titletext = Employment statistics have to correct for the fact that the Weird Bug Hotline hires a bunch of extra temporary staff every 17 years.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by 17 YEAR CICADA TRYING TO LOOK LIKE A FIREFLY - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
This comic is a joke about {{w|Helpline|helplines}}, and how people sometimes call helplines for non-significant reason. <br />
<br />
The comic starts with someone having called the "Astronomer hotline", hence the title. Judging by the way the helpline employee, [[Cueball]], starts the call, by asking for a description of the weird lights, it is implied that this is the main/only purpose of the helpline, or is, in practice, the only type of call they receive. <br />
<br />
The caller is in panic, and doesn't know how to describe the light. Cueball is used to this and asks the caller to stay calm, then starts to go through his check list, asking them if it is day time, because if it was he would assume they have just noticed the Sun. This could be seemed very condescending, but it is like when the employee at a tech support hot-line asks if the computer is turned on, or if the caller tried to restart the computer, see [[806: Tech Support]]. It may also refer to the most immediate danger, as looking directly to the sun is a bad idea.<br />
<br />
The caller is not affronted, but tells Cueball that the Sun set, and when asked if they are stars, and thus stationary, says they are zipping around in the bushes.<br />
<br />
At this point Cueball realizes that the caller has just seen {{w|Fireflies}}. He describes them for the caller as lightning bugs, tree blinkers or ground stars, and tells the caller that these are not a problem, so the caller is now relieved.[https://media3.giphy.com/media/Q7FbMX6oJa4ycuY5Hf/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e4722auax8gq5cv0t1zeqgxga2rc4w4hypf6jpigta9&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g] Those descriptions are reminiscent of the fools stars (and planes) mentioned in [[2017: Stargazing 2]].<br />
<br />
However, Cueball must admit that astronomers do not know much about fireflies, since they are too fast for the astronomers' telescopes (in general, astronomers don't study terrestrial phenomena). And he thus transfers the caller to the "Weird Bug Hotline" in a process that is apparently somewhat routine – enough to have the correct line somehow preprogrammed into his call-handling system. This is clearly not the first 'astronomy' query that are actually about fireflies.<br />
<br />
Before the call ends, at Cueball's end, he hears the first question from the other hotline: Is it currently biting you.<br />
Again going directly to the most important part, is there any immediate danger...<br />
<br />
It is possible that Cueball will actually speak next, quickly priming the Weird Bug call-handler with the salient facts already established. This could get the original caller straight into the correct conversation if the onward line's handler is as competent and experienced in such a transfer. <br />
<br />
Some people (often {{w|Unidentified flying object|UFO}} enthusiasts) tend to get a little over-excited about calling every light in the sky they don't expect a UFO. This comic takes this to the extreme, where someone calls a helpline because they saw fireflies, and thought they were UFOs. While UFOs are not mentioned by name, they are heavily implied. Technically, such a person would be correct, so long as the lights are actually unidentified, flying and caused by a physical object, but if the expectation is that it is an extraterrestrial spacecraft then the truth (if discovered and also accepted) can be disappointing to some people, rather than lead to an interesting alternative avenue of appreciation of whatever phenomenon it truly is.<br />
<br />
The title text is a reference to bugs that have gaps of several years between emerging from their larval state. Most famous are the {{w|Periodical cicadas}}, 13- and 17-year cicadas, that only emerge every 13 or 17 years, depending on species. The 17 years in the title text thus refers to the 17-year cicadas. Every 17 years the bug hotline hires a bunch of temporary staff, either because there will be more callers due to the unexpected new bug no one has seen for 17 years, or it could be because they just like to emulate nature and thus do this every 17 years. The largest 17-year cicada appearance in the USA is called {{W|Brood X}} which last occurred in 2021 and before that 2004. There can be smaller broods in other years, but the majority come out with 17 years interval, and the next is expected in 2038. The joke in the title text is that the employment statistics for the weird hotline have to correct for this fact. Periodical cicadas have been mentioned before in [[2263: Cicadas]].<br />
<br />
==Trivia==<br />
:The UK Military had a UFO helpline for over 50 years. [[https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34277625 Link]]<br />
:This comic has a lot of themes that have been touched on in previous comics, including<br />
::Helplines [[278: Black Hat Support]], [[806: Tech Support]]<br />
::People not understanding basic concepts [[876: Trapped]]<br />
::Cicadas [[2263: Cicadas]]<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Cueball, with a headset on, is sitting in an office chair at a desk in front of his computer screen, hands on the keyboard. He receives a call, and the callers voice is shown in a jagged frame above Cueball, between his two lines of text.]<br />
:Cueball: Hello, Emergency Astronomer Hotline. How would you describe the lights?<br />
:Caller on phone: ''I don't know! Help!''<br />
:Cueball: Stay calm. Is it day? If so, that's The Sun.<br />
<br />
:[Cueball is now seen en face with the headset, but the computer etc. is not shown. The callers voice is now written normally but with zigzag lines going to the text from Cueball's headphone. Cueball's reply have a normal line going up to it.]<br />
:Caller on phone: No, the sun set and then the light appeared!<br />
:Cueball: Hmm, could be stars. Are they stationary?<br />
:Caller on phone: No, they're all zipping around bushes.<br />
<br />
:[In a frame-less panel, the setting returns to the one from the first panel. Also with the callers voice in jagged frames again.]<br />
:Cueball: ''Aha!'' Fireflies!<br />
:Caller on phone: "Fireflies"?<br />
:Cueball: Lightning bugs. Tree blinkers. Ground stars.<br />
:Cueball: They're fine.<br />
:Caller on phone: ''Phew!''<br />
<br />
:[Same setting as first panel, but broader panel. After Cueball's reply and a short reply from the caller as in the first panel. There is a sound indicating transfer to another hotline. Then to the right there is a square panel with jagged edge, with the voice from the other hotlines employee.]<br />
:Cueball: We don't know much about them as they're too fast for our telescopes, but I can transfer you to the Weird Bug Hotline.<br />
:Caller on phone: Sure, thanks.<br />
:Transfer of call. *''Click''*<br />
:Weird Bug Hotline on phone: ''Hi, Weird Bug Hotline. Is it currently biting you?''<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
<!-- Include any categories below this line. --><br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]<br />
[[Category:Astronomy]]<br />
[[Category:Animals]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2633:_Astronomer_Hotline&diff=287058Talk:2633: Astronomer Hotline2022-06-15T21:23:09Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* I just got a message from the Odd Perfect Number hotline! */ odd</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
<br />
Someone really needs to check on the bot. This is the second day in a row where I have had to begin the article! [[User:SqueakSquawk4|SqueakSquawk4]] ([[User talk:SqueakSquawk4|talk]]) 13:06, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
The fact that this is the Astronomer Helpline seems like commentary on the frequency with which astronomers are asked about mysterious objects, and/or the fact that astronomers (who tend to spend a lot of time looking at the sky) rarely report seeing unidentified objects. It could also be noted that calling fireflies a UFO would technically be accurate, as they are objects which are flying that the observers apparently could not readily identify. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.82.121|172.71.82.121]] 13:36, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:There is about 2000 species of fireflies. OF COURSE I can't identify which one it is, considering it's so dark I only see the light. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 18:22, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
Title text probably referes to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas Periodical cicadas] that appears every 17 years.<br />
[[Special:Contributions/172.71.98.99|172.71.98.99]] 13:58, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
As someone from a country without fireflies, is "Ground Stars" a normal word for fireflies or a joke? (similar to how planets are "wandering stars", so to an astronomer everything is a star, similar to [[2017: Stargazing 2]]) [[User:Sqek|Sqek]] ([[User talk:Sqek|talk]]) 14:17, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:A joke. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.115.4|172.70.115.4]] 14:54, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
The second last paragraph is extremely confusing. Someone should fix it. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.203.38|162.158.203.38]] 15:17, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I have removed the paragraph referenced in the above comment; it was confusing, and seemed focused on explaining the reasons for cicadas having prime-numbered year cycles. While this is interesting, it is not relevant to understanding any of the jokes, especially since two helpful links to periodical cicadas and Brood X were already included earlier in the article. Parties interested in learning cicada facts may follow those links; to explain the joke, it is enough to acknowledge that periodical cicadas are a thing, not explore the ecology or evolution of such a trait. If I overstepped, feel free to reinstate with a clearer explanation. [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 16:16, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
== I just got a message from the Odd Perfect Number hotline! ==<br />
<br />
I was trying to explain to someone today that the question of whether there are any {{w|odd number|odd}} {{w|perfect number}}s is an open problem, so I asked {{w|Google Assistant}} and was informed that https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07176 proves that there aren't! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 21:15, 15 June 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2633:_Astronomer_Hotline&diff=287057Talk:2633: Astronomer Hotline2022-06-15T21:20:31Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* I just got a message from the No Odd Perfect Number hotline! */ correct</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
<br />
Someone really needs to check on the bot. This is the second day in a row where I have had to begin the article! [[User:SqueakSquawk4|SqueakSquawk4]] ([[User talk:SqueakSquawk4|talk]]) 13:06, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
The fact that this is the Astronomer Helpline seems like commentary on the frequency with which astronomers are asked about mysterious objects, and/or the fact that astronomers (who tend to spend a lot of time looking at the sky) rarely report seeing unidentified objects. It could also be noted that calling fireflies a UFO would technically be accurate, as they are objects which are flying that the observers apparently could not readily identify. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.82.121|172.71.82.121]] 13:36, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:There is about 2000 species of fireflies. OF COURSE I can't identify which one it is, considering it's so dark I only see the light. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 18:22, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
Title text probably referes to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas Periodical cicadas] that appears every 17 years.<br />
[[Special:Contributions/172.71.98.99|172.71.98.99]] 13:58, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
As someone from a country without fireflies, is "Ground Stars" a normal word for fireflies or a joke? (similar to how planets are "wandering stars", so to an astronomer everything is a star, similar to [[2017: Stargazing 2]]) [[User:Sqek|Sqek]] ([[User talk:Sqek|talk]]) 14:17, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:A joke. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.115.4|172.70.115.4]] 14:54, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
The second last paragraph is extremely confusing. Someone should fix it. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.203.38|162.158.203.38]] 15:17, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I have removed the paragraph referenced in the above comment; it was confusing, and seemed focused on explaining the reasons for cicadas having prime-numbered year cycles. While this is interesting, it is not relevant to understanding any of the jokes, especially since two helpful links to periodical cicadas and Brood X were already included earlier in the article. Parties interested in learning cicada facts may follow those links; to explain the joke, it is enough to acknowledge that periodical cicadas are a thing, not explore the ecology or evolution of such a trait. If I overstepped, feel free to reinstate with a clearer explanation. [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 16:16, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
== I just got a message from the Odd Perfect Number hotline! ==<br />
<br />
I was trying to explain to someone today that the question of whether there are any odd {{w|perfect number}}s is an open problem, so I asked {{w|Google Assistant}} and was informed that https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07176 proves that there aren't! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 21:15, 15 June 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2633:_Astronomer_Hotline&diff=287056Talk:2633: Astronomer Hotline2022-06-15T21:19:06Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* I just got a message from the No Odd Perfect Number hotline! */ wilikink</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
<br />
Someone really needs to check on the bot. This is the second day in a row where I have had to begin the article! [[User:SqueakSquawk4|SqueakSquawk4]] ([[User talk:SqueakSquawk4|talk]]) 13:06, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
The fact that this is the Astronomer Helpline seems like commentary on the frequency with which astronomers are asked about mysterious objects, and/or the fact that astronomers (who tend to spend a lot of time looking at the sky) rarely report seeing unidentified objects. It could also be noted that calling fireflies a UFO would technically be accurate, as they are objects which are flying that the observers apparently could not readily identify. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.82.121|172.71.82.121]] 13:36, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:There is about 2000 species of fireflies. OF COURSE I can't identify which one it is, considering it's so dark I only see the light. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 18:22, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
Title text probably referes to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas Periodical cicadas] that appears every 17 years.<br />
[[Special:Contributions/172.71.98.99|172.71.98.99]] 13:58, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
As someone from a country without fireflies, is "Ground Stars" a normal word for fireflies or a joke? (similar to how planets are "wandering stars", so to an astronomer everything is a star, similar to [[2017: Stargazing 2]]) [[User:Sqek|Sqek]] ([[User talk:Sqek|talk]]) 14:17, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:A joke. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.115.4|172.70.115.4]] 14:54, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
The second last paragraph is extremely confusing. Someone should fix it. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.203.38|162.158.203.38]] 15:17, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I have removed the paragraph referenced in the above comment; it was confusing, and seemed focused on explaining the reasons for cicadas having prime-numbered year cycles. While this is interesting, it is not relevant to understanding any of the jokes, especially since two helpful links to periodical cicadas and Brood X were already included earlier in the article. Parties interested in learning cicada facts may follow those links; to explain the joke, it is enough to acknowledge that periodical cicadas are a thing, not explore the ecology or evolution of such a trait. If I overstepped, feel free to reinstate with a clearer explanation. [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 16:16, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
== I just got a message from the No Odd Perfect Number hotline! ==<br />
<br />
I was trying to explain to someone today that the question of whether there are any odd {{w|perfect number}}s is an open problem, so I asked {{w|Google Assistant}} and was informed that https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07176 proves that there aren't! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 21:15, 15 June 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2633:_Astronomer_Hotline&diff=287055Talk:2633: Astronomer Hotline2022-06-15T21:16:27Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* I just got a message from the No Odd Perfect Number hotline! */ copyedit</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
<br />
Someone really needs to check on the bot. This is the second day in a row where I have had to begin the article! [[User:SqueakSquawk4|SqueakSquawk4]] ([[User talk:SqueakSquawk4|talk]]) 13:06, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
The fact that this is the Astronomer Helpline seems like commentary on the frequency with which astronomers are asked about mysterious objects, and/or the fact that astronomers (who tend to spend a lot of time looking at the sky) rarely report seeing unidentified objects. It could also be noted that calling fireflies a UFO would technically be accurate, as they are objects which are flying that the observers apparently could not readily identify. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.82.121|172.71.82.121]] 13:36, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:There is about 2000 species of fireflies. OF COURSE I can't identify which one it is, considering it's so dark I only see the light. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 18:22, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
Title text probably referes to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas Periodical cicadas] that appears every 17 years.<br />
[[Special:Contributions/172.71.98.99|172.71.98.99]] 13:58, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
As someone from a country without fireflies, is "Ground Stars" a normal word for fireflies or a joke? (similar to how planets are "wandering stars", so to an astronomer everything is a star, similar to [[2017: Stargazing 2]]) [[User:Sqek|Sqek]] ([[User talk:Sqek|talk]]) 14:17, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:A joke. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.115.4|172.70.115.4]] 14:54, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
The second last paragraph is extremely confusing. Someone should fix it. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.203.38|162.158.203.38]] 15:17, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I have removed the paragraph referenced in the above comment; it was confusing, and seemed focused on explaining the reasons for cicadas having prime-numbered year cycles. While this is interesting, it is not relevant to understanding any of the jokes, especially since two helpful links to periodical cicadas and Brood X were already included earlier in the article. Parties interested in learning cicada facts may follow those links; to explain the joke, it is enough to acknowledge that periodical cicadas are a thing, not explore the ecology or evolution of such a trait. If I overstepped, feel free to reinstate with a clearer explanation. [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 16:16, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
== I just got a message from the No Odd Perfect Number hotline! ==<br />
<br />
I was trying to explain to someone today that the question of whether there are any odd perfect numbers is an open problem, so I asked {{w|Google Assistant}} and was informed that https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07176 proves that there aren't! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 21:15, 15 June 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:2633:_Astronomer_Hotline&diff=287054Talk:2633: Astronomer Hotline2022-06-15T21:15:53Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* I just got a message from the No Odd Perfect Number hotline! */ new section</p>
<hr />
<div><!--Please sign your posts with ~~~~ and don't delete this text. New comments should be added at the bottom.--><br />
<br />
Someone really needs to check on the bot. This is the second day in a row where I have had to begin the article! [[User:SqueakSquawk4|SqueakSquawk4]] ([[User talk:SqueakSquawk4|talk]]) 13:06, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
The fact that this is the Astronomer Helpline seems like commentary on the frequency with which astronomers are asked about mysterious objects, and/or the fact that astronomers (who tend to spend a lot of time looking at the sky) rarely report seeing unidentified objects. It could also be noted that calling fireflies a UFO would technically be accurate, as they are objects which are flying that the observers apparently could not readily identify. [[Special:Contributions/172.71.82.121|172.71.82.121]] 13:36, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:There is about 2000 species of fireflies. OF COURSE I can't identify which one it is, considering it's so dark I only see the light. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 18:22, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
Title text probably referes to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas Periodical cicadas] that appears every 17 years.<br />
[[Special:Contributions/172.71.98.99|172.71.98.99]] 13:58, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
As someone from a country without fireflies, is "Ground Stars" a normal word for fireflies or a joke? (similar to how planets are "wandering stars", so to an astronomer everything is a star, similar to [[2017: Stargazing 2]]) [[User:Sqek|Sqek]] ([[User talk:Sqek|talk]]) 14:17, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
:A joke. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.115.4|172.70.115.4]] 14:54, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
The second last paragraph is extremely confusing. Someone should fix it. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.203.38|162.158.203.38]] 15:17, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
I have removed the paragraph referenced in the above comment; it was confusing, and seemed focused on explaining the reasons for cicadas having prime-numbered year cycles. While this is interesting, it is not relevant to understanding any of the jokes, especially since two helpful links to periodical cicadas and Brood X were already included earlier in the article. Parties interested in learning cicada facts may follow those links; to explain the joke, it is enough to acknowledge that periodical cicadas are a thing, not explore the ecology or evolution of such a trait. If I overstepped, feel free to reinstate with a clearer explanation. [[User:Dextrous Fred|Dextrous Fred]] ([[User talk:Dextrous Fred|talk]]) 16:16, 15 June 2022 (UTC)<br />
<br />
== I just got a message from the No Odd Perfect Number hotline! ==<br />
<br />
I was trying to explain to someone today that the question of whether there are any odd perfect numbers is an open problem, I asked {{w|Google Assistant}} and was informed that https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07176 proves that there aren't! [[Special:Contributions/162.158.166.235|162.158.166.235]] 21:15, 15 June 2022 (UTC)</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2501:_Average_Familiarity&diff=2735452501: Average Familiarity2022-05-21T07:14:06Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2501<br />
| date = August 11, 2021<br />
| title = Average Familiarity<br />
| image = average familiarity.png<br />
| titletext = "How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It's hard to throw a rock without throwing one!"<br />
| imagesize =<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
This comic claims that experts vastly overestimate how familiar other people are with their own field of study. As an example, [[Randall]] shows a conversation between [[Ponytail]] and [[Cueball]] as two {{w|geochemistry|geochemists}} specializing in {{w|silicate}} chemistry. Although the two scientists understand that the layman does not know all that they know about silicates, they are still under the impression that other people at least know the chemical makeup of {{w|olivine}} and some {{w|feldspar}}s. Cueball also mentions {{w|quartz}}, an even simpler mineral taken for granted by Ponytail. <br />
<br />
In truth, the average person can't be expected to know the chemical makeup of ''any'' arbitrarily-chosen substance reliably (or any material at all), if that average person's job and hobby do not involve chemistry — aside from the few that made their way into {{w|common knowledge}}, like NaCl for salt<ref>"NaCl (Sodium Chloride)" Kate & Anna McGarrigle. 2010. Accessed August 17th, 2021. http://www.mcgarrigles.com/music/the-mcgarrigle-hour/nacl-sodium-chloride</ref> (sodium chloride or {{w|halite}} in mineral form), H<sub>2</sub>O for water (facetiously known as dihydrogen monoxide, {{w|ice}} in mineral form), or CO<sub>2</sub> for carbon dioxide (while most people are more familiar with its gaseous form, it is also used in mineral form as {{w|dry ice}}), and may not even know the definition of "feldspar" beyond "a mineral", if at all.<br />
<br />
It even goes so far as to initially gloss over the 'everyday' knowledge of quartz... until prompted by the slightly-less-overestimating partner in the conversation. Perhaps like a gardener forgetting to mention the lawn he maintains (along with the 'actual' plants in the borders or vegetable patches), there seemed no need to include such a common mineral as a subject of silicate chemistry. Quartz is a basic silicon oxide (SiO<sub>2</sub>) that many non-chemists ''have'' heard of because it is common and has a variety of uses, though they would not know its chemical structure. Quartz ''can'' be found as distinct large-scale crystals (probably obvious to the layman, as an ice-cube is in a drink) but also features as a hard-wearing micro-constituent of many rocks. Quartz is a major component of most sand (except for coral sands, which are calcium carbonates). Quartz crystals are sometimes made into jewelry and other decorative objects. Most modern clocks use {{w|Crystal oscillator|the resonance frequency of quartz}} to keep time.<br />
<br />
Minerals like feldspars and olivine generally exist as a continuum of varying chemical formulas, represented as a mixture of "endmembers" that have some pure composition. Feldspars are a category of aluminum-containing silicate minerals that account for the most of the rock in the earth's crust by mass. They are composed of a silicon-aluminum-oxygen lattice filled with sodium, potassium, or calcium ions. The major varieties are CaAl<sub>2</sub>Si<sub>2</sub>O<sub>8</sub> (anorthite), NaAlSi<sub>3</sub>O<sub>8</sub> (albite), and KAlSi<sub>3</sub>O<sub>8</sub> (potassium feldspar). Olivine is most notable as being the primary constituent of the upper mantle and commonly found in stony meteorites, and has the formula X<sup>2+</sup><sub>2</sub>SiO<sub>4</sub>, where X is any iron or magnesium ion. The ends of the spectrum are Mg<sub>2</sub>SiO<sub>4</sub> ({{w|forsterite}}) and Fe<sub>2</sub>SiO<sub>4</sub> ({{w|fayalite}}).<br />
<br />
In the title text the two geologists express belief that the average person ''should'' be more familiar with silicates because of how ubiquitous they are. Their somewhat-exasperated statement plays on the phrase "you can't throw a rock without hitting one," a standard hyperbole about how common something is. Indeed, {{w|Silicate mineral|silicate}} rocks are extremely common on Earth &mdash; not only would a rock thrown in a random direction stand a decent chance of striking a silicate mineral rock, but the rock being ''thrown'' also has a very high chance of being a silicate mineral rock. With the exception of a few carbonate deposits, rocks found in large deposits on Earth's surface nearly all have silica in them, even extraterrestrial rocks. The Earth's crust is about 60% silica by weight.<ref>"Constraining crustal silica on ancient Earth" C. Brenhin Keller, T. Mark Harrison. ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'' Sep 2020, 117 (35) 21101-21107; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2009431117</ref><br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]<br />
:Ponytail: Silicate chemistry is second nature to us geochemists, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars.<br />
:Cueball: And quartz, of course.<br />
:Ponytail: Of course.<br />
<br />
:[Caption below the panel]<br />
:Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.<br />
<br />
== References ==<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]<br />
[[Category:Geology]]<br />
[[Category:Science]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2621:_Mainly_Known_For&diff=2706162621: Mainly Known For2022-05-20T21:07:37Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */</p>
<hr />
<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2621<br />
| date = May 18, 2022<br />
| title = Mainly Known For<br />
| image = mainly_known_for.png<br />
| titletext = Oh sure, I know Keira Knightly, from the first movie in that series by The Land Before Time producer. You know, the franchise with the guy from Jurassic Park and Ghostwriter, and script work by Billie Lourd's mom?<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by that guy from NASA, what was his name? Something Munroe - Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
[[Megan]] points out an uncanny resemblance between someone's dad and {{w|Steve Jobs}}. However, she is uncertain that Steve's last name is Jobs, so she refers to Jobs as "the Pixar guy", asking Cueball if Jobs is the correct name. Jobs is ''mainly known for'' (hence the comic's title) being the co-founder and CEO of {{w|Apple Inc.}}, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s (between his stints at Apple), he was the chairman of {{w|Pixar Animation Studios}}, which is what Megan knows him for. <br />
<br />
Frequently, when people can't remember a celebrity's name, they will point out other works they are known for in hopes someone else will recognize them from that and remind them of the name. The comic, for its demographic of nerds, is joking on how it can come across to have lived a life separate from popular culture, where one learns things for different reasons than most people do.<br />
<br />
[[Cueball]] points out that Megan's tendency to avoid the "main" association and instead go with a much more secondary one is weird, which confuses her. To demonstrate how weird her associations are, Cueball asks her, "Who is {{w|John Lennon}}?" Lennon is a famous songwriter who played and wrote for {{w|The Beatles}} before they broke up, and later continued on a solo music career. Megan recognizes Lennon as a musical artist, but is unable to remember the name of The Beatles. She instead asks about the band he was in with {{w|Ringo Starr}}. Ringo, however, is not mainly memorable to her for his role in The Beatles, but rather as Mr. Conductor from the first season of the 1989 children's television show ''{{w|Shining Time Station}}''. The Beatles' fame seems to have escaped Megan, which vexes Cueball. Also Ringo may be considered as the least known of The Beatles, unless that would be {{w|George Harrison|'the quiet one'}}. Definitely less well-known than {{w|Paul McCartney}}, who was often as prominent a writer-performer as Lennon at the time and has continued to prominently perform individually (or headlining collaborations) across all the intervening decades since that era. <br />
<br />
Furthering the joke, ''Shining Time Station'' was rather minor among Ringo's acting roles, only voicing one season, and most would remember him for his longer role as narrator of ''Thomas the Tank Engine.''<br />
<br />
Hoping to show that she really does know Lennon and that her associations aren't weird, she points out that she remembers John doing a song with {{w|David Bowie}}. But she cannot remember that it was called "{{w|Fame (David Bowie song)|Fame}}". The song is from 1975 and Lennon co-wrote it with Bowie and performed backing vocals and guitar on it. Also she cannot remember Bowie's name, recognizing him instead for his acting role in ''{{w|Labyrinth (1986 film)|Labyrinth}}''. When Cueball states Bowie's name and adds, presumably sarcastically, that he think he is famous for other stuff than those two things Megan mentions, she also remember another movie with Bowie, ''{{w|Zoolander}}'', rather than his more famous musical career (such as his smash hits "{{w|Space Oddity}}" or "{{w|Let's Dance (David Bowie song)|Let's Dance}}").<br />
<br />
Sensing Cueball's annoyance, but failing to understand it, she attempts to excuse herself for not remembering ''Zoolander'' to begin with, because it came out a long time ago, during the {{w|Presidency of George W. Bush}}. ''Zoolander'' was indeed released in 2001. Apparently unable, again, to remember the president's name, she identifies him as "{{w|Jenna Bush}}'s dad". Jenna Bush is a TV personality and much less widely known than her father.<br />
<br />
While the kind of associations people make like Megan in this comic, are often prone to the {{w|Mandela effect}}, Megan's information about all the celebrities is, in fact, correct, but apparently they are never what those people are best known for. This is what makes Cueball sigh and facepalm in the final panel, when she mentions Jenna instead of George Bush. He likely also does this because, even though he just demonstrated her weird tendency to remember people for their lesser known works, he is unable to reach her and let her understand that she is weird.<br />
<br />
There may also be some overlap with the {{w|Streisand effect}}, named after a woman widely known for owning an overly lavish mansion on the coast of a state north of Mexico.<br />
<br />
In the title text, Megan refers to "{{w|Keira Knightley|Keira Knightly}}" [''sic'' -- her surname is spelled Knightley], who is probably best known for her roles in the {{w|Pirates of the Caribbean (film series)|''Pirates of the Caribbean'' films}} and the {{w|Pride & Prejudice (2005 film)|2005 ''Pride and Prejudice'' film}}, by referencing her small role in ''{{w|Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace}}'' (as Sabé, who funnily enough is a handmaiden and ''decoy'' for Queen Padmé Amidala, a main character played by Natalie Portman). <br />
<br />
Megan continues her unusual references by identifying the film as the "first movie" (it was the first in the plotline, but the fourth one made) in "that series by ''The Land Before Time'' producer" ({{w|George Lucas}}, creator of {{w|Star Wars}}, was also one of the executive producers of the 1988 animated film ''{{w|The Land Before Time (film)|The Land Before Time}}''). <br />
<br />
Seeming to think that identifying George Lucas doesn't narrow it down at all, she identifies another actor in the ''Star Wars'' series, {{w|Samuel L. Jackson}}, by his roles in ''{{w|Jurassic Park (film)|Jurassic Park}} ''(an extremely successful film, but one in which Jackson had a relatively small role) and the PBS children's series ''{{w|Ghostwriter (1992 TV series)|Ghostwriter}}'' (in which Jackson appeared in only a few episodes). In addition, Megan mentions that the ''Star Wars'' series had "script work by {{w|Billie Lourd}}'s mom", referring to {{w|Carrie Fisher}}, who [https://www.slashfilm.com/548436/carrie-fisher-script-doctor/ contributed uncredited script-doctoring work] to the ''Star Wars'' franchise. However, Fisher is more closely associated with ''Star Wars'' for having played the major role of {{w|Princess Leia Organa}} in six films in the series.<br />
<br />
''Ghostwriter'' was previously featured in [[130: Julia Stiles]], which described a scene from the show as "the best thing ever to appear on TV".<br />
<br />
==Transcript==<br />
:[Megan holds he hand palm up towards Cueball.]<br />
:Megan: ...And her dad looks ''exactly'' like the Pixar guy. Steve what's-his-name? Jobs?<br />
:Cueball: "Pixar guy"?<br />
:Cueball: You always know famous people for such weird reasons.<br />
<br />
:[Megan puts her hand down.]<br />
:Megan: What do you mean?<br />
:Cueball: Who is John Lennon?<br />
:Megan: Wasn't he in a band? With Ringo from ''Shining Time Station''.<br />
:Cueball: How is '''''that''''' your main association?<br />
<br />
:[In a frameless panel Megan holds a finger up in front of Cueball.]<br />
:Megan: I also know he once did a song with the guy from Labyrinth!<br />
:Cueball: You mean David Bowie? I think he's famous for some other stuff, too.<br />
<br />
:[Megan puts her hand down while Cueball facepalms. The line connecting his is curved.]<br />
:Megan: Oh yeah, he was also in Zoolander!<br />
:Megan: I forgot that movie, it came out back when Jenna Bush's dad was president.<br />
:Cueball: ''*Sigh*''<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Steve Jobs]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]<br />
[[Category:Star Wars]]<br />
[[Category:Fiction]]<br />
[[Category:Jurassic Park]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2614:_2&diff=2324002614: 22022-05-03T19:01:38Z<p>162.158.166.235: /* Explanation */</p>
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<div><noinclude>:''This page refers to the comic named "2". For comic #2, see [[2: Petit Trees (sketch)]].''</noinclude><br />
{{comic<br />
| number = 2614<br />
| date = May 2, 2022<br />
| title = 2<br />
| image = 2.png<br />
| titletext = It's like sigma summation notation, except instead of summing the argument over all values of i, you 2 the argument over all values of 2.<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Explanation==<br />
{{incomplete|Created by A VERY JEALOUS NUMBER 1, WHO DEMANDS TO HAVE THEIR OWN WEBCOMIC NEXT - Please change this comment when editing this page. The titletext needs to be worked in there, but I think I got everything else in some sort of order, pending general improvements. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
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This demonstrates the different ways in which the number 2 can be typeset in various scientific fields. Whilst these typefaces are used with any number, using the number 2 in this instance provides a clear illustration of where adding numbers can signify either a feature of a concept (such as the number of electrons in an atom) or a mathematical operation on it (such as raising a value to it's second power).<br />
<br />
The dotted box represents any character (presumably a letter or bigram of letters). All the other notation consists only of the digit 2, in various fashions with occasional additional punctuation, and labelled as to what the 'purpose' might normally be of any particular element(s) as indicated, with respect to the general term, in the following fashions:<br />
;Regular Math<br />
:Precedes the term. "2x" indicates two times the value of ''x'' in normal {{w|algebra|algebraic}} use that should be familiar for many people. {{Citation needed}}<br />
;Physics<br />
:A preceding superscript. "<sup>2</sup>H" would indicate the particular {{w|isotope}} of Hydrogen with the atomic weight of two, i.e. deuterium, which is most often encountered when working with the atomic level of matter where the total number of neutrons and protons in the atom is important.<br />
;Chemical Physics<br />
:A preceding subscript, "<sub>2</sub>He" indicates the atomic number of an atom, which is the number of protons it contains, and thus a guide to the number of electrons its unionised form usually has and hence meaningful in its potential chemical interactions with other atoms. This should be invariant for any particular named element, but is usually given simultaneously with the presuperscripted mass number where it can be indicative of the applicable nuclear physics. {{w|Chemical Physics}} is a subdiscipline of physics and chemistry and **must never** be confused with {{w|Physical Chemistry}}.<br />
;Regular Math or Footnotes<br />
:A trailing superscript is typical of a {{w|Exponentiation|power value}}, in this case "x²" would be ''x'' multiplied by a second copy of itself, and a fairly typical mathematical standard.<br />
:Additionally, superscripted numbers are one common way to mark words in a line of text in a way to refer to a {{w|Note (typography)|footnote}}, typically placed at the bottom of the page, with additional information that would not be appropriate or easily comprehendable to edit into the main text itself. The ambiguity between footnotes and exponents was used in [[1184: Circumference Formula]]<br />
;Chemistry<br />
:A trailing subscript is used in chemistry to indicate a multiple of the element (or group of elements, in brackets) in a {{w|chemical formula}}. "H<sub>2</sub>O" indicates two hydrogen atoms bond with a single oxygen atom in a molecule of water.<br />
;Matrices! ("2,2")<br />
:Extending the trailing subscript with a comma-separated value usually indicates a multidimensional array (e.g. establishing a 2-by-2 square of numbers, or this particular position in such an array), which is in the realms of {{w|Matrix (mathematics)|matrix mathematics}}. This is a little bit beyond 'everyday algebra' for many people, as seemingly indicated by the exclamation of the mere mention of matrices!<br />
;The Physicists Are At It Again ("2;2")<br />
:This label encompasses a mark that turns the prior comma into a semicolon, as part of the trailing subscript. This is a common notation for the {{w|Covariant derivative}} of a tensor field, which is commonly used in the mathematics of general relativity.<br />
;Either High School Math Function or Incomprehensible Group Theory<br />
:The number 2 in parentheses that follow a term would normally be the argument to a {{w|Function (mathematics)|function}}, e.g. "f(2)", which means that you should take the value (in this case 2) and find the result if manipulated by the predefined function ''f''. It is generally taught as part of algebraic mathematics already described, i.e. at {{w|Secondary school|High School}}.<br />
:In {{w|group theory}}, however, the number 2 in parentheses could indicate a cyclic subgroup or ideal generated by two or a special case of cycle notation for elements of symmetry groups used to mean an element that keeps 2 fixed. This may be somewhat beyond high-school level.{{citation needed}}<br />
;Oh no. Whatever this is, it's cursed.<br />
:A symbol centered underneath another symbol is normally reserved for doing summations, where the big symbol is &Sigma;, or some other operation applied to a sequence of numbers.<br />
:It does not make sense to have a single number there, as indicated in the alt text. As with [[2529: Unsolved Math Problems|other things]] in Randall's comic universe, the explanation for this particular anomaly is that it is 'Cursed'. The usage mentioned in the alt text is an operation (&Sigma;, summation) over a variable usually indicated by a letter such as i, where the operation is performed over all values of the variable, i.e. you &Sigma; the argument over all values of i. In the "2" case, the alt text says you "you 2 the argument over all values of 2", i.e. the &Sigma; operation has been replaced by the "2" operation and the i variable has been replaced by the "2" variable. 2 is usually not an operation, though the definition of 2 under {{w|Church_encoding#Church_numerals|church encoding}} is a function that takes in and produces functions. However, 2 is not a variable (and definitely not both at the same time).<br />
:: Things being cursed is a common trope within recent XKCD comics which have mentioned items including [[2332:_Cursed_Chair|Cursed chairs]] and [[2507:_USV-C|Cursed connectors]]. This notation is one of the few occasions where the supernatural have demonstrable implications on science and mathematics for those foolhardy enough to use it.<br />
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==Transcript==<br />
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
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[An apparently scientific expression:]<br />
<br />
[normal text:] 2 [superscript behind the box:] 2 [subscript behind the box:] 2 [an empty box with a dotted outline] [superscript:] 2 [subscript:] 2;2 [normal text:] (2) [smaller and beneath the last 2:] 2<br />
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;[Captions above the numbers]<br />
:[with an arrow pointing to the first 2:] Regular Math<br />
:[with an arrow pointing to the behind superscript 2:] Physics<br />
:[with an arrow pointing to the regular superscript 2:] Regular math or footnotes<br />
:[with an arrow pointing to (2):] Either high school math functions or incomprehensible group theory<br />
<br />
;[Captions below the numbers]<br />
:[with an arrow pointing to the behind subscript 2:] Chemical Physics<br />
:[with an arrow pointing to the regular subscript 2:] Chemistry<br />
:[with an arrow pointing to a grey circle around ";2":] The physicists are at it again<br />
:[with an arrow pointing to a smaller grey circle inside the other circle that leaves out the dot of the semicolon:] Matrices!<br />
:[with an arrow pointing to the 2 below the 2:] Oh no. Whatever this is, it's cursed.<br />
<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
[[Category:Math]]<br />
[[Category:Physics]]<br />
[[Category:Chemistry]]<br />
[[Category:Comics featuring Cursed Items]]</div>162.158.166.235https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=2613:_Bad_Map_Projection:_Madagascator&diff=2317272613: Bad Map Projection: Madagascator2022-05-02T07:44:50Z<p>162.158.166.235: Removed more vandalism</p>
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<div>{{comic<br />
| number = 2613<br />
| date = April 29, 2022<br />
| title = Bad Map Projection: Madagascator<br />
| image = bad_map_projection_madagascator.png<br />
| titletext = The projection's north pole is in a small lake on the island of Mahé in the Seychelles, which is off the top of the map and larger than the rest of the Earth's land area combined.<br />
}}<br />
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i only like bbc for the memes though i think i would likely not date a black person because i do not find black women attractive altho i could maaaybe date a black man but i dont see myself staying with one for too long as my husband or anything but you never know but also im much pickier when it comes to guys than girls and also i prefer more beautiful/handsome type guys than necessarily the super buff kind of guys though and most black guys that i find attractive are more like the very strong type like i couldnt see such a thing as a beautiful long haired black man in a tux in the same way that a beautiful long haired asian man in a tux i generally find asian men to be quite handsome although there are some sharp white guys that are okay too but i feel like most white guys are either too jock-y or too timmy or theyre an in between incel kind of like that one youtuber mass shooter incel whose name i forget so its kind of hard to find a really attractive white guy but i know there are some out there that are good and also latino men are pretty good too as long as theyre not the cholo type but nerdy types are pretty good in latinos and mid build kinds are pretty good too but generally i prefer women anyways because i find a lot of different types of women to be very beautiful and i think its just easier to find someone you can match up with emotionally/relationship wise than with a man especially because a lot of relationships with men are very sex driven and im not a very sexually driven person at all and also i find it kind of hard to connect with men since they can be kind of distant and hard to get to open up past the little outward cool guy projection that all of them try to do but anyways<br />
-bRemiliaZc<br />
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==Transcript==<br />
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}<br />
Bad map projection #248: Madagascator<br />
<br />
Mercator projection but with the North Pole in the Indian Ocean so it exaggerates the size of Madagascar instead of Greenland. Various countries and oceans are labeled.<br />
[[File:Doug Walker in 2012.jpg|300px]]<br />
{{comic discussion}}<br />
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[[Category:Bad Map Projections]]</div>162.158.166.235