explain xkcd:Museum
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| Cost Savings |
 Title text: Unfortunately, my scheme to trick NASA has now taken over a decade longer than planned and has run way over budget. |
Explanation
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This is incomplete: This page was created by an OVER-BUDGET ORBITER. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
This comic depicts a ridiculous scheme, concocted by Cueball, to dupe various representatives at NASA into doing a menial task for him; specifically, he wants them to build an ordinary shed in his yard. The National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) is not associated with hobbyist carpentry and certainly cannot be conventionally ordered to build a shed on a needy citizen's property.[citation needed] Thus, Cueball tries to circumvent the expected barriers to this outcome by masking his true intentions in a long-winded cost-cutting presentation about a proposed satellite launch. Initially, it appears he is suggesting various ways to mitigate the cost/hassle of launching a satellite into orbit, but soon the suggestions become less about making the satellite's construction and launch more efficient and more about constructing a random structure on the ground, each one getting closer and closer to essentially saying "Ditch the satellite idea and just build a shed in my yard".
The title text expands on this theme by implying that Cueball has been attempting this scheme (which may have required the extensive effort and connections needed to even be prepared to be seen by the NASA project team with the initial red-herring proposal) for long enough that it mirrors the setbacks a team would experience if they were actually intending to send a satellite into orbit. The James Webb Telescope is one such mission which was very delayed, as already mentioned in prior comics, notably 2014: JWST Delays.
By taking "over a decade longer than planned", the actual time taken to (not yet) achieve his goal is far longer than it would normally be expected to take to just build a shed without NASA's complicity, excepting perhaps some particularly intransigent zoning laws, and how much more longer he has actually taken (i.e. the length of the originally planned timeline) is unknown but must have been significant. Likewise, the costs incurred by Cueball have probably far exceeded what most sheds (and their construction) require, even if the end-goal is a 'free' shed, paid for entirely by NASA.
Transcript
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This is one of 37 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
- [Cueball is standing in front of a framed graph on a wall, pointing at it with a short stick. The graph is a bar graph with steadily decreasing bar heights. Hairy and Megan, seated, are looking on from behind a desk.]
- Cueball: By lowering the planned satellite orbit, we can reduce the size of the launch vehicle required.
- Cueball: We can reduce costs further by eliminating the satellite entirely in favor of an aerial platform.
- Cueball: Some equipment could be moved to a ground-based facility, reducing required aircraft time.
- Cueball: Additional savings could be...
- [Caption below the panel:]
- I'm trying to get NASA to build a shed in my backyard.
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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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- 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
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