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Revision as of 13:20, 1 March 2025

Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki!
We have an explanation for all 3185 xkcd comics, and only 52 (1.6%) are incomplete. Help us finish them!

 Go to this explanation

Latest comic

Inverted Catenaries
Some tires are marketed as 'all-shape tires,' but if driven in a climate with both inverted catenary falls and triangle falls, they wear out really fast.
Title text: Some tires are marketed as 'all-shape tires,' but if driven in a climate with both inverted catenary falls and triangle falls, they wear out really fast.

Explanation

Ambox warning blue construction.svg This is incomplete:
This page was created BY A TRAPEZOIDAL WHEEL. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

During the winter, in snowy areas, people need to replace their typical, all-season tires with snow tires made specifically for the slick environment. In this comic, instead of snow, rounded shapes called inverted catenary curves fall from the skies. On a plane covered in inverted catenaries all the same size, square wheels whose side length matches the arc length of the catenary are capable of rolling smoothly, contrary to how they would act on a normal road. Regular wheels would cause a significantly bumpier ride on this terrain, so Cueball plans to swap them out with square wheels to better suit the season.

Mathematicians have found what types of roads would suit weird wheels the most, and inverted catenary curves are best suited for a square wheel. People have made real tracks demonstrating this.

Note however, this assumes the catenaries are arranged periodically with no spacing between them, fully cover the surface, and are consistent in shape and orientation. The orientation also would restrict the direction of travel, effectively meaning your vehicle would be travelling on rails.

The title text mentions all-shape tires (as a play on all-terrain tire), which is advertised to supposedly fit any shape road. However, different shapes would require very different wheels; for example, falling triangles would form a sawtooth road, for which one would optimally require wheels pasted together from pieces of an equiangular spiral. Any hypothetical all-shape wheel would wear out very quickly on most surfaces.

Transcript

Ambox warning green construction.svg This is one of 27 incomplete transcripts:
Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!
[Megan and Cueball are walking together as inverted catenary curves fall from the sky. A few have landed in a regular formation, all flat-side down and evenly spaced, with some touching each other.]
Cueball: Oh wow, the first inverted catenary fall of the year!
Cueball: Time to swap out my all-season tires for square ones.

comment.png  Add comment      new topic.png  Create topic (use sparingly)     refresh discuss.png  Refresh 

Discussion

Make changes, try things out, or just have fun with the wiki here! Just leave everything above the line alone, please.


This is a test. PoolloverNathan[stalk the blue seas] 20:48, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

This is not. —While False (museum | talk | contributions | logs | rights | printable version | page information | what links there | related changes | Google search | current time: 09:23) 18:38, 17 November 2022 (UTC)
A foreign student asked me to help fight against his math teacher. That was unusual. He was in that class for just a couple of weeks. The teacher's phone number was sent to me. The student asked me to spam-call the teacher. 172.71.155.55 22:58, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

here i'm just messing around in html, ignore this

furhhfghure guyrburgryhuyvfr "rvhru"

interesting way of writing quotations xd

hmmm this one of putting "<p>" in a line break will come in handy for when i want it to start at the same place than the first line

Please beware that <p> on mediawiki also disables automatic paragraph breaks, so you need a closing </p> or you'll break automatic paragraph formatting for the rest of the page. Zmatt (talk) 22:06, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

edit: da hek did that "</div>" come from An user who has no account yet (talk) 14:14, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

hi uh its hard to get here. is this a reference to undocumented feature??? hmm... this is interesting.
108.162.241.216 02:05, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

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yum yum [citation needed]

Hiuiedeixgeyceiyedhcdiedcve {{trout}}

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You can read a brief introduction about this wiki at explain xkcd. Feel free to create an account and contribute to the wiki! We need explanations for xkcd comics, characters, What If? articles, and everything in between. If it is referenced in an xkcd comic, it should be here.

  • The incomplete explanations are listed here. Feel free to help out by expanding them!

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Don't be a jerk!

There are a lot of comics that don't have set-in-stone explanations; feel free to put multiple interpretations in the wiki page for each comic.

If you want to talk about a specific comic, use its discussion page.

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