Editing 2251: Alignment Chart Alignment Chart

{{comic
| number    = 2251
| date      = January 6, 2020
| title     = Alignment Chart Alignment Chart
| image     = alignment_chart_alignment_chart.png
| titletext = I would describe my personal alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid."
}}

==Explanation==
"Alignment" and "alignment charts" come from tabletop roleplaying games, most prominently ''{{w|Dungeons & Dragons}}''. Every character has an {{w|Alignment (Dungeons & Dragons)|alignment}}, which very roughly identifies their tendencies. The most widely used alignment system was introduced in the ''{{w|Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set}}'' in 1977 and has been reused in many (but not all) subsequent editions of the game. This system uses two perpendicular axes, each divided into three levels (for a total of nine categories). The two axes are:
* Lawful/neutral/chaotic: this axis says whether a character is strongly devoted to, indifferent about, or categorically opposed to following established rules.
* Good/neutral/evil: this axis says whether a character is generally inclined to commit good deeds or evil deeds.

In this system, the "lawful" attribute is independent from the "good" attribute.  Lawful alignment means that a character is committed to a set of rules, which can refer to actual established laws, or to something like a rigid personal code, a set of traditions, or a chain of command, while a chaotic alignment means that a character has no interest in those, and may actively oppose them. The good vs evil scale is generally based on a character's concern for the lives and well-being of others; a good character will actively seek to help others and prevent harm, while an evil character will have no such concern and may actively harm others. Being 'good' is assumed to be independent of being 'lawful'. For example, a character who actively breaks laws to help those who are unjustly imprisoned or oppressed would be be considered to be "chaotic good".  In both cases, a neutral alignment can indicate a character's indifference to a concept, or that their commitment is conditional, or that they consciously seek to balance both sides. A character with the "neutral neutral" alignment is called a true neutral.

An alignment chart is a grid that divides the alignments, usually for the purpose of putting descriptions or particular characters on it. Alignment charts are frequently used as a [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mcdonalds-alignment-chart meme template], where humorous or absurdist things are organized into different alignments. In addition to the "classic" Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart, there are a number of variant alignment charts in use as meme templates. Many keep the three-by-three grid structure but replace the lawful-neutral-chaotic and good-neutral-evil axes with descriptions.

This comic claims to be a meta-alignment chart, where nine "alignment charts" are themselves sorted into the nine Dungeons and Dragons alignments, following the use of alignment charts to humorously classify abstract concepts. However, these "alignment charts" are mostly diagrams used in academic classifications, which are being treated as if they were blank meme templates. There are two levels of absurdity here: first, the idea of using these diagrams to classify things they were never intended for, and second, the conflation of chaos as a physics concept and an assigned moral weight as it applies to each of these classification systems.

The title text describes Randall's alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid" which references the true neutral, neutral good, lawful good, and lawful neutral charts in the Alignment Chart Alignment Chart. Lawful is the left side of an alignment chart, heterozygous is the top right or bottom left of a Punnett Square, silty is the bottom right of a soil chart, and liquid is the top right of a phase diagram. As such, the title text describes Randall's alignment as between Lawful Neutral and Neutral Good on this chart.

{| class="wikitable"
!Alignment
!Chart
!Explanation
|-
|Lawful Good
|{{w|Soil texture|Soil chart}}
|This chart shows the USDA classification of soil types by their relative proportions of sand, clay and silt. The chart is a ternary diagram (very common in geology), so soils with more clay plot towards the upper corner, soils with more sand to the bottom left, and soils with more silt to the bottom right. This chart has been used humorously as an alignment chart ([https://www.reddit.com/r/PrequelMemes/comments/8wakd4/anakin_soil_reference_chart/ for example]) and may have been the inspiration for Randall to use scientific diagrams as alignment charts. In addition to being Lawful Good, this grid cell is also the upper left cell of the chart and will be read first, making it a good place to put this chart as a "jumping off point". [https://what-if.xkcd.com/83/ What If 83 "Star Sand"] cites Randall as "...very satisfied with this chart, it's like the erosion geology edition of the electromagnetic spectrum chart..."
|- 
|Neutral Good
|{{w|Punnett square}}
| Punnett squares are a visual method of determining what traits an organism might have based on the traits of the organism's parents. It relies on the principle that a trait is either dominant (indicated with capital letters) or recessive (indicated with lowercase letters). The exact combination of dominant or recessive genes that a child organism receives from their parents determines their traits. Heterozygous and homozygous refers to the pairs of alleles in an organism’s genotype, indicating mixed or same alleles, respectively. Randall later uses "heterozygous" in the title text.  Note that it is possible for a phenotype to be expressed the same between some heterozygotes and homozygotes, e.g., persons with genotypes heterozygous "Aa" and homozygous "AA" will both express blood type A.
Therefore, the Punnett Square is a good chart because it is both a simple and true geometric predictor of inheritance, but it tends to be neutral because of complicating factors such as polygenic inheritance; these and other factors will cause genotypic frequency to deviate from expected 1:2:1 patterns.
|-
|Chaotic Good
|{{w|IPA vowel chart with audio|IPA vowel chart }}
|This chart shows the relationship between different vowels according to the {{w|International Phonetic Alphabet}}. The position of the vowel on the chart serves roughly as an indicator of the position of the tongue in the mouth of the speaker. As different vowel sounds are created by changes in different parts of the mouth, including lip roundness which is expressed in the chart implicitly as an invisible third dimension, vowel identification is qualitative and often up to interpretation, and vowel expression can change dramatically from region to region or even person to person within the same language, the categories described by the chart might be considered chaotic. The chart is missing the near-open central vowel [ɐ] and the open central vowel [ä] (often written as /a/).
|-
|Lawful Neutral
|{{w|Phase diagram}}
|A phase diagram shows the equilibrium phases of matter present for a particular temperature, pressure, and composition.  The diagram included is a unary phase diagram of a typical material that has a solid, liquid, and gas phase depending on the temperature and pressure for a fixed composition.  Phase diagrams are useful for understanding how a material may change as its conditions change.  For example, the air pressure of Mars is such that there is no temperature at which liquid water can exist in equilibrium on its surface.  Water exists as ice until the temperature reaches a point where it sublimates directly into steam.

This phase diagram does not specify what material is depicted, but it is certainly ''not'' the phase diagram of water.  On this diagram, compressing the liquid phase will transform the material into a solid, which is how most materials behave, but the solid/liquid phase line for water tilts the opposite direction.  This is why water ice floats on liquid water, for example.

Phase diagrams follow the laws of thermodynamics and concern themselves with the order in which things ''should'' be, so they are inherently lawful.
|-
|True Neutral
|Alignment chart
|All alignment charts are neutral unless humans contaminate them. The chart in this cell has the same overall shape as the Alignment Chart Alignment Chart in the comic. It's important to note that this is called the Alignment Chart Alignment Chart alignment chart. However, that may be [https://xkcd.com/745/ doing 'doing "doing it wrong" wrong' wrong].
|-
|Chaotic Neutral
|CIE chromaticity diagram
|The {{w|chromaticity}} diagram is a chart of colors.  Visible colors form a shape like a triangle with two bulging sides in the diagram.  The curved line within the diagram shows the chromaticities of {{w|Black body|black bodies}} over a range of color temperatures.  The chromaticity diagram shows colors independent of luminance.  
The chart is not a simple geometric shape, so it is labeled as chaotic. Points on the diagram can be specified as combinations of three underlying iluminants (the colors of which may not all be visible).  It can also be described in polar form with angle and radial distance from some central point, where the maximum radial distance depends on the angle. 
The fact that the colors may not show properly on a screen, making the diagram incorrect, may also contribute to its chaotic aspect, as well as the fact that the official standard is behind a paywall.   
|-
|Lawful Evil
|Political compass
|[https://www.politicalcompass.org/ Political Compass] separates ideas about governance into economic and social political thought.  For example, Gandhi and Stalin supposedly both had similar economic perspectives (collectivist) but radically different social perspectives (libertarian vs authoritarian).

As politics is how laws are made, this is inherently lawful. Representing all politics in terms of two very general axes is not only a gross oversimplification, it is often used to put one's favored ideology as far away from Hitler or Stalin. This common use of a fallacy similar to the straw man makes this chart evil.

Like the USDA soil chart, the political compass has actually been [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/political-compass used as an alignment chart], largely to mock the original political compass chart.
|-
|Neutral Evil
|{{w|QAPF diagram|QAPF rock diagram}}
|This diagram is used to classify coarse-grained felsic (low magnesium and iron) igneous rocks by the relative volumes of the minerals quartz, alkali feldspars, plagioclase feldspars, and feldspathoids in the rock. It consists of two ternary diagrams - quartz and feldspathoid minerals cannot coexist (they will react to form feldspars) so only three of these components will be in any given rock. Rocks in the upper triangle of the diagram contain quartz, with rocks with more quartz plotting closer to the top, while rocks in the lower triangle contain feldspathoids, with rocks with more feldspathoids plotting lower. Rocks closer to the left corner of the diagram contain more alkali feldspar and rocks closer to the right corner contain more plagioclase feldspar. The field on the diagram for granite is labeled in the comic, but each area outlined on the diagram has its own rock name (monzonite, syenite, granodiorite, etc.). All the rocks that the QAPF diagram is used to classify look superficially like granite, but their chemistry, mineralogy, and origin differ.
The QAPF diagram and the names of the more obscure rock types on it can be somewhat arcane, which may be why it is considered evil here.
|-
|Chaotic Evil
|Omnispace classifier
|The other eight diagrams shown in this comic, squished together into one, with the shapes of the diagrams corresponding to those of the originals. The diagram is labeled chaotic, since it does not have a simple geometrical shape.  Probably self-referential humour, in that the diagram created for this comic is considered to be chaotically evil.
|}

An alignment chart was also featured in [[2408: Egg Strategies]], which was published exactly one year later.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.|There's several Transcript-friendly chart descriptions still need putting in... And probably changes to the existing transcriptisation where it isn't in line with typical Transcript standards.}}

:[A 3×3 grid of squares. Each square contains a label at the top and a drawing of a chart, and each square has a caption below it. From left to right, a row at a time:]

:----

:Soil Chart

:[describe this chart here]

:* Clay
:* Silty Clay
:* […]

:Lawful Good

----

:Punnett Square

:[A 2x2 grid with a capital or lowercase R at either the left or top of each row and column, and each square containing the two letters of its row and column.]

:Neutral Good

:----

:IPA Vowel Chart

:[describe this chart here]

:Chaotic Good

:----

:Phase Diagram

:[describe this chart here]

:Lawful Neutral

:----

:Alignment Chart

:[A 3×3 grid of nine empty squares, each with an unreadable label below it.]

:True Neutral

:----

:CIE Chromaticity Diagram

:[describe this chart here]

:* Green
:* Yellow
:* …

:Chaotic Neutral

:----

:Political Compass

:[describe this chart here]

:Lawful Evil

:----

:QAPF Rock Diagram

:[The diagram is a rhombus with each corner labeled: ‘Q’ at the top, ‘A’ at the left, ‘P’ at the right, and ‘F’ at the bottom. The diagram is divided into trapezoids and triangles, each with labels. The writing in most subdivisions are unreadable. The readable subdivisions:]
:* Granite [around the top left]
:* Basalt [just below the right corner]
:* Foidolite [at the bottom]

:Neutral Evil

:----

:Omnispace Classifier

:[describe this chart here]

:Chaotic Evil





{{comic discussion}}

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