explain xkcd:Museum

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|< < Prev #3217 (March 9, 2026)

Title text: As always, you are permitted to call one person for guidance, but that person must be a grandparent.

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Explanation

This is incomplete: This page was created but can be easily removed with this one great trick!. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

Many household problems have a range of commonly-circulated supposed solutions using easily available items and ingredients, such as using salt to lift a stain out of a carpet. Sometimes, when one of these problems presents itself, several competing remedies may be offered by those present. This comic imagines this as a competitive sport, in which the final test is to combine several of these problems into one grand challenge to be solved. Specifically, the contestants in this case are presented with:

• removing unpleasant odours (in this case, that of a skunk)
• curing a hangover
• removing chewing gum stuck in hair

and possibly

• removing a wild animal from the premises

The title text's requirement that any assistance must come from a grandparent may reference the fact that such treatments are sometimes referred to as 'old wives' tales', or possibly just that they are often handed down as family lore.

Transcript

This is one of 45 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Cueball, holding a microphone, is addressing 3 contestants (Megan, White Hat & Hairbun), each standing at desks, with cages containing skunks on the desks] Cueball: And now, for the final round, you have each been given a skunk with a hangover & chewing gum stuck to it's fur. You have 30 minutes. Good luck.

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Discussion

Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

pixels-assembly-3.png

how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!

(Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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