spiral

spiral

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Title text: none

Explanation

This is not a comic, but a webpage on xkcd.com There are many other similar xkcd webpages, some of which are explained here. Explain xkcd is trying to decide how they should be treated. You are welcome to help us decide how we should categorise, call, or present these kinds of explanations. Kindly leave a comment here. This page should not be categorized until we decide how to explain these non-comics (see discussion above).

This page is linked from 1488: Flowcharts.

This appears to be a selection of images with the golden ratio spiral superimposed to display hidden meaning in their appearance. These spirals originate from a specialised point of the subjects and continue along some meaningful lines of the subject. The humour here could be that the golden ratio is normally found in famously aesthetically pleasing objects, whereas the images Randall has provided do not quite fulfil that brief.

Transcript

[Nine eclectically unrelated images are the only contents of this entire web-page, each overlaid with at least one golden spiral and the frame of squares that define its shape. All but one image are photos, and a number of them show subjects that might be considered quirky, or at least 'niche', even before the overlay is applied.]

[A photo Weird Al Yankovic, wearing an "LA Dodgers" baseball cap, and a sports jacket. His head and eyes are askew in a deliberate 'wacky' pose. The spiral begins in one of his eyes and a significant part of the other his face matches the curve, the spiral's framing lines are angled even more skewed than his head.]

[An old 1970s 'Batman'-themed water-pistol, shaped as Batman himself in a frankly disturbing pose. The spiral originates from the base of the 'crotch'-trigger, and the curve eventually closely matches the profile around the back of Batman, from the the thighs, over his cape-clad back and to his neck, the constructing grid being orthagonal to the image and the whole segmented spiral overlay sits neatly within the image edges.]

[A besuited and smiling young man, perhaps dressed for a wedding reception, is holding a small portable sewing machine and standing in front of a scene in which three policemen stand in attendence of an apparent accident. A standard UPS delivery van has apparently reversed off the road and down an embankment, which it is now angled up. The spiral starts on one of the van's headlights and sort of aligns with the top bottom and one side of the inclined van's front, as well as across the face of the young man. The grid is aligned to the highly rotated truck front, closely matching its upper and lower edges and the the central pillar between the two-part front windows.]

[A very limber cat, mostly white but patterned with light-gingerish splodges, is sprawled in a very relaxed-looking but typically feline spine-twisting pose, apparently on a leather sofa. The back of its head manages almost to rest its own groin, due to its apparently effortless contortions. Starting almost at the point of one of its eyes, the curve really only significantly matches the cat's back/side from its rear-legs/rump to its midriff, the constructive grid at a seemingly arbitrary angle.]

[A stock photo of a young Bill Gates casually on top of an office desk, smiling, leaning on a monochrome (white-on-blue) computer monitor displaying something with the Microsoft Logo (1982-1987). Various other computers and peripherals are on another desk in the background, in front of a window showing a likely third/fourth-storey view onto a possibly snow-dusted campus-like location with a pine forest stand visible in the near distance. Spiralling from the eye of Bill Gates, the curve toys with following some of his hair, but seems to mostly have been allowed to eventually align to the lower hem of the cream sweater he is wearing. The spiral's frame may have been rotated to intersect various edges of computer monitors, but is otherwise angled fairly arbitrary and not particularly precisely with the subjects head.]

[Vladimir Putin, posed barechested and holding a fishing rod in a forest/river setting, perhaps one of his (im)famous and (maybe) unintentionally homoeretic calender shoots from the mid 2010s. The origin of the spiral is one of his nipples, with a few incidental contacts with his body (e.g. his man-cleavage and angled forearm), but the main congruence seeminly being the underside of the bush-hat he's wearing. The frmework is orthagonal, with particular additional relationship to the underyling image.]

[A bright-eyed Joe Biden, toothily smiling into the camera in a likely publicity shot from his time as Vice-President. There are two counterrotating spirals, both originating from the same spot near the corner of one of his eyes, one of which tries to match the shape of his lower lip, the other seems to be keyed to the top of his thin but tidy grey-white head of hair. The framing scaffoldings are orthagonal but effectively perpendicular to each other, in an almost perfect 45° reflective relationship.]

[The only image that is not a photographic scene, it is a scan or screen-shot of a road-atlas style map, mostly of parts of Massachusetts. It primarily encompasses Cape Cod and Boston. The spiral originates in the rough centre of Cape Cod Bay (not labeled) then spirals round to follow the geographically-curved shape of Cape Cod itself past Provincetown and Orleans, before cutting out across both land and sea, via Falmouth, up through Taunton and almost straight through the centre of Boston, just barely skirting Massachusetts Bay itself on the landward side, before exiting back to sea heading out towards the Gulf Of Maine to the north-east at the extreme top of the image. The skewed grid, for the spiral is slightly off-orthagonal.]

[Another cat, with an orange-with-white mackeral coat, laid on a possibly wooden-effect laminate flooring, apparently at ease or (from the tail) pleasantly excited/playful. Its head is currently fully inserted (neck-to-neck) into a 'horse head' toy, possibly latex, with a fiberous mane and in a tanned/red hue that blends well with the cat's own fur. It is smaller than any actual horse-head would be, but still looks to be roughly the same volume as the uncovered part of the cat's body and has a mouth-open and visibly staring eye that gives the impression of the whole 'cat-horse' chimera-creature being startled. There are three different spirals superimposed. One starts on the floor below the outstretched rear legs to conform with the cat's belly and the back of its nearest foreleg. The second originates within its body, in order to follow the curve of its back and down behind the most outstretched rear paw. Its third spiral is set 'behind'/above its tail to somwhat follow the underside of its curved tail, to the back, in a curve that is a 180-degree rotation around its contact point with the second spiral, while the first 'fits' to the second at right-angles, and centre-to-edge (to within almost the width of the lines involved) as far as the alignment of the grids are concerned.]

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