explain xkcd:Museum
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| Inflation Timeline |
 Title text: Depending what corners of the internet you hang out on, 'regular' may at times awkwardly coexist with 'sexy.' |
Explanation
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This is incomplete: This page was created by an INFLATIONARY BOT. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
Cosmic inflation is the theory that the very early universe briefly expanded at an enormous rate. This explains the "clumpiness" of the early universe, which is necessary to explain the formation of large-scale structures (e.g. galaxies, galaxy clusters, galaxy filaments, etc.) as the universe evolved. "Regular" inflation refers to the economic process in which the average price of goods and services increases over time. This is usually gradual, but can be very rapid during times of economic distress.
The comic puts both of these on the same timeline of the universe. Cosmic inflation occurs shortly (~10-35 s) after the Big Bang. Regular inflation occurs only during the time of human society after money started being used. Because of the logarithmic scale of the graph, the cosmic inflation period, which is only a tiny fraction of a second, looks much larger than regular inflation, which has existed for at least a few thousand years. This misinterpretation is likely Randall's intention in the comic.
The title text refers to a third meaning, that of body inflation as a sexual fetish or kink, which has no direct relationship to cosmology or economics. Randall points out that body inflation happens at the same time as economic inflation, presumably because both arise from human activities. The suggestion that this coexistence may be "awkward" perhaps implies that people are paying to indulge in the fetish, and that those prices are subject to economic inflation. The "inflation" might also refer to something akin to a blow-up doll.
Another comic showing the Cosmic Inflation on a graph is 2240.
Transcript
- [Caption:] Timeline of Inflation
- [A log scale timeline marked by "Age of the Universe (Seconds)" at each factor of 1010, ranging from 10-40 to 1020. A bar labeled "Cosmic" begins off-panel to the left and continues up to roughly 10-32 seconds. A second, much thinner bar labeled "Regular" covers another period between roughly 1016 and 1018 seconds.]
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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. βWhile 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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