395: Morning

Morning

|< < Prev #395 (March 12, 2008) Next > >|

Title text: I'd press on them to try to unstick them, but I can't reach. Can we try cycling day and night really fast?

|< < Prev Random explanation Next > >|

Explanation

This comic has been selected as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. Anyone is encouraged to help explain this comic! Every little bit counts; even just adding a sentence or fixing a typo is another step towards improving the wiki for everyone. Suggested improvements:   Explain the references to The Matrix to someone who has never heard of the movie.   Explain the "screen resolution of the world" in first panel. Is there truth to this? What resolution do our eyes actually have?   Explain the title text, especially "cycling day and night really fast".   The explanation of LCD screens is too technical. Click here to get started! If you are new to wiki editing, see our editing FAQ for guidance, or simply learn by doing!

A close-up of the sky with the dead pixels, at the top of the frame, with trees for reference.

This comic plays on the idea that physical reality might be a simulation running inside a supercomputer. This idea has been explored in popular culture before, as mentioned in the comic itself, but the second panel argues the revelation would still be a deeply existential horror of it were true.

The first panel mentions The Matrix, a 1999 action movie where the main character Neo discovers that the world he thought he knew was actually a simulation being run by an army of robots who keep the human race hypnotized inside the titular simulation. It is perhaps the most famous work of fiction to touch on the theme of reality being a simulation, and an easy cultural touchstone at the time this comic was written (thus her claim "We've all seen" it).

The reveal of Megan's reality being a simulation comes when she sees "dead pixels" in the sky. In LCD screens, especially TFT LCD, a dead pixel is a pixel that does not work properly, usually set as black or as some other color. LCD screens were a more common standard when this comic was written, but have largely been supplanted by LED screens wherever possible. Megan realizes that the reality is a computer simulation when she sees dead pixels in the sky, indicating that what she sees is an LCD screen.

In the last panel of the comic, there are three pixels — two red and one green — that look exactly like actual dead pixels.

Regarding the question in the first panel, "What resolution is life?" (by which "life" presumably means the "real world" or lived experience, not living biochemistry), the most scientifically meaningful response would involve Planck distance and Planck time, the smallest digital units of distance and time that time-space can be broken down into. Humans, of course, cannot perceive on that scale, but it is the fundamental building block of the time-space around us, similar to pixels (picture elements) on a screen or a bit (one-or-zero) of data. Datum. Data. Our experience occurs at a much higher level, so a lower order of resolution. Note that the trees are not pixelated, meaning that only the sky is a giant LCD screen.

The title text refers to usual techniques for fixing a dead pixel. One way is to apply pressure and release it, which isn't possible for Megan due to the distance of the sky. Another way is to make the area of the screen that the dead pixel is on change colors really quickly, which could happen if the day-night cycle was fast enough, or if the clouds overhead were sped up.

Transcript

[Megan is standing to one side.]

We've all seen The Matrix

We've all joked about "What resolution is life?"

But it doesn't blunt the shock

Of waking up one morning

[Megan looks up from field and sees several colored pixels in the sky.]

And seeing dead pixels in the sky.

  Add comment          Create topic (use sparingly)          Refresh 

Discussion

The explanation for comic 395: Morning was selected by the Explanation Improvement Project as This Week's Explanation for Improvement after being nominated in September 2026 by YZ100. During that week, editors focused on expanding and polishing this explanation as part of an ongoing effort to keep older or under-developed explanations fresh and complete. (view the explanation before improvement)

I always thought she was seeing airplanes, satellites, planets, or stars. --67.243.62.50 03:01, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

"Seeing dead pixels in the sky" seems like a rehash of an important quote in some work. Any ideas on what that work is? 24.104.10.45 06:16, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

It's like that quote from CJ in the first season of West Wing: We can all be better teachers.

It sounds so deep you think they must have borrowed it from somewhere. But no, it's original. Kudos to Randall. 108.162.219.223 21:37, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

It's reminiscent of the opening sentence of Neuromancer: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. 173.245.55.174 04:28, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Btw, if anyone is curious, life's resolution is approximately 1.572×10^33 DPI 108.162.212.213 16:29, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

And its framerate is, ignoring relativistic effects, roughly 1.8549×10^43 FPS. 162.158.106.10 17:19, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

I wonder how big the GPU is 172.69.208.136 16:17, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

The memory would be your real constraint, along with network latency if it's a distributed computing system. (Hey, what if that's the cause of relativistic effects? A node having more data than usual to process, so it slowly lags behind other nodes...) As for the speed of the system, as long as it's turing complete and has sufficient storage for the data, it doesn't matter how fast each frame is processed from the viewpoint of the simulation's Users, the people inside the sim would still experience time as normal. Just ask a Dwarf Fortress player if their dwarves ever perceive the effects of FPS Death. 108.162.246.194 12:28, 3 August 2021 (UTC)

Do you think it's a good idea for us all start rolling loads of dice to increase the latency of the simulation? It'd be nice to screw with whatever's running the thing. But would macroscopic "randomness" even affect a system that powerful? It's something to think about. Lyricalcarpenter (talk) 04:15, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

IMO, the unspoken big picture is that during a prairie winter you can get "white out" conditions when an overcast sky matches the color of snow cover. This eliminates all shadows and you can walk face first into a snow drift without seeing it. The whole world looks like dead pixels. 108.162.216.87 (talk) 04:06, 4 November 2014 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

"It is likely what she is seeing is a star or other stellar object." I'm not sure this bit fits the context of the image. It is supposed to be dead pixels, and stellar objects don't often pop out of no where (unless an infinite improbability drive is involved). Kirdneh (talk) 21:08, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

It may just be me, but I thought the dead pixels she is seeing form the words "And seeing dead pixels in the sky.", making the comic self-referential in a typical xkcd way. Does anyone agree with me? Richmond tudor (talk) 06:35, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

Has nobody else noticed the several square pixels depicted in the sky? Zoom in, Gramps! 199.27.129.11 02:41, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Am I the only one that doesn't actually think the pixels are there just to annoy the reader like it says in the explanation? It seems like they're there because the text says so. 108.162.216.51 17:46, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

I didn't notice the red and green dots until this page "explained" it. Until then, I conjectured that the "dead pixels" were snowflakes that had fallen from the sky to the ground. The trees look like evergreens, which made me think of winter. 162.158.63.6 21:24, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

Is this a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reference? 162.158.146.40 (talk) 16:45, 8 March 2023 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Hardly. The comic itself alludes directly, and unambiguously, to it being a Matrix thing. (I'm as much a duoquadragintiphile as anyone, but it really doesn't always boil down to that.) Now maybe there's a twisted path of inspiration between H2G2 and the world of Neo, but hardly so simple and surely nothing to concern us here. For one thing, when Deep Thought designed the Earth computer, he/it didn't make it a virtual illusion to its inhabitants. 172.71.178.64 17:06, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

This is crazy OnOv -- OniroxOverload (talk) 12:02, 19 August 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

What resolution is life? I've started a new paragraph about the question in the first panel. I'm interpreting the question to mean "In what resolution do we experience life?" and not "What is the resolution of organic chemicals?". 158.173.67.2 19:47, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

Pixel Close-Up Could someone include a close-up of the three colored pixels? They may be difficult for some viewers to see in the strip. I definitely need to clean my screen. 158.173.67.2 19:51, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

Open image in new tab, and then enlarge it. Once I had done that I discovered where the pixels were, and was then able to see them at standard size. 87.75.44.78 11:03, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Understood. I figured it out. However, I thought newer readers might want a close-up panel, maybe with a box highlighting the pixels. I'll warm up GIMP and see what I can do. ... Five Minutes Later ... Done. However, am I clear to upload a close-up of the comic? I noticed the following pronouncement: "This is my own work [.] I confirm that I am uploading this file following the terms of service and licensing policies on explain xkcd." 158.173.67.235 14:37, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Are you asking if a few pixels are copyrightable?

Yes, you are cleared. If you are unable to upload it, paste a link to an image hosting site here and i'll do it for you. FaviFake (talk) 15:54, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Me again, with a temp account. I can't upload the image because I don't have permission to create a new page. I didn't mean to ask whether pixels were copyrightable, but whether a close-up of an existing strip constitutes "my own work" enough to be compliant with policy. Temp.thisisme (talk) 17:37, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

As long as it's relevant, which a derivative demonstrative version of xkcd will be, there's no problem with explainxkcd taking your copy. And it would also be fair use as far as the usual xkcd license.html stipulations. (The gods know that I've done a fair few acknowledged derivatives myself, some even found their way onto here!)

Because you are a new user/were not even a named user originally, the suggestion already given above probably is your next step. Upload it to some image hosting service of your choice, then give us the URL for that and someone who can upload images will do so for you (attributing the contribution to you accordingly, I expect). 78.151.45.228 18:49, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Ok, so it's been 'sorted' already, but the kind of thing I meant (to avoid fuzzy pixels) is this type of thing. That one's at 4x scaling.

And it probably doesn't help to have a larger image and then downscale it again. But you do what you want to do. 78.151.45.228 21:29, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

Nice! I uploaded it, it'll take a bit of time to update. FaviFake (talk) 00:37, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

> Mention that OLED screens are much more popular nowadays. Do they also suffer from dead pixels?

This seems unnecessary. Could we remove this?

> Could the dead pixels that Megan sees actually be simple stars visible during the day?

Probably not. Stars aren't even green, and the comic makes it very clear that those are dead pixels and that the joke is definitely not about stars. Morpheus (talk) 03:49, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

Makes sense, I removed them. keep in mind they're only suggestions, anyone can edit or remove them. FaviFake (talk) 09:07, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

Though I agree with the judgement on this, see, for example: https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/advice/skills/green-stars-observe-night-sky 78.151.45.228 19:38, 15 September 2026 (UTC)
        Add comment