explain xkcd:Museum
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| Fishing |
 Title text: 'That's definitely above the catch-and-release size minimum for planetesimals.' 'I'm going to throw it back anyway.' |
Explanation
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This is incomplete: This page was created BY A FISH WITH THE WEIGHT OF THE SUN. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
Ponytail and Beret Guy are fishing in the middle of a body of water, and Beret Guy has hooked a rock. Similarly to the common meme that sees people catching objects such as boots and shopping trollies, he exclaims that it “feels like a big one”. Fishers may judge the size of a fish by the amount of resistance they feel on the line, and such objects would provide an unusually high level of resistance. (Also, the boat would be bulled down when reeling, so they could only tell that their downward pull is greater than the boat’s buoyancy.) In this case, though, Beret Guy can apparently feel that it must be “at least 1024 kilograms” — that is, an object the size of the Earth in its entirety, whose mass can be estimated at approximately 6.0 × 1024 kilograms (~13.1 × 1024 pounds at standard gravitational acceleration of the Earth).
Catch-and-release sizes restrict what sizes of catch of various species can be kept, generally to protect stocks. There may be minimum sizes (to protect young fish and ensure that they can reach mature reproductive age) or maximum sizes (to protect existing breeding populations). The title text claims the Earth is large enough to be kept, suggesting that planetesimals (asteroids and comets, for example) might be considered immature, and that they might be expected to grow to ‘adult’ planet size. Beret Guy is big-hearted enough to want to release the planet back after reeling it in, even though he could keep it.
Transcript
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This is one of 29 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
- [Ponytail and Beret Guy are sitting in a boat in the ocean, both holding fishing rods. One large fish and four smaller fish are seen swimming in the water, with three of the smaller fish in a group. Ponytail's fishing rod is about halfway down to the ocean floor, while Beret Guy has hooked his fishing line on a large rock sticking up from the seafloor.]
- Beret Guy: It feels like a big one! At least 1024 kilograms!
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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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