252: Escalators

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Escalators
The one time I tried, I got hit by a slinky going down at double speed.
Title text: The one time I tried, I got hit by a slinky going down at double speed.

Explanation

This comic is ostensibly two simple line graphs on the same chart. One shows society's expectations, the other what Randall actually felt. The visual joke is that the societal expectation graph is treated like an actual down-moving escalator, with people on it.

An escalator is a moving stairway going in one direction, either up or down. You walk up to it and stand on the closest step to the end you're approaching from. You then stand still while it moves you, and when you reach the end you step off and continue walking. Many people like to treat the escalator like normal stairs, and will continue moving along the steps with the flow as if it were a regular staircase, which increases the speed you reach the end.

This comic is about the urge to step against the flow on a down-moving escalator. You start at the end and attempt to reach the start, trying to keep your upward speed greater than the downward speed of the escalator, so that you reach the beginning.

The title text refers to the Slinky toy, a coiled spring that is designed to go down stairs by itself in an amusing manner. Since the Slinky is moving with the flow, its effective speed is doubled. A normal Slinky is very small and would not be able to halt an average human being through its inertia, but it could tangle up in their feet or otherwise trip them up.

Transcript

[Graph with y axis titled "Urge to try running up the down escalator", with "weak" by the bottom and "strong" by the top. x axis has every two years labeled and every year signified by a smaller mark, which stops at 24. A red line with "What I was supposed to feel" with points at every line rises, peaks at 7 years old, then falls "tangent graph" shaped until the end. Along this line are shown various stick-figures at 12, 14, 20 and 24. A second red line runs "What I've actually felt" which stays consistently high.


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Discussion

I just wanted to point out that I think it's funny how in-depth some of these wiki's are and how others aren't. In this one we have good hearted contributors explaining what an escalator is, while in the last article I read the author uses NSFW as if it's common parlance. My rhetorical question is this: who, reading this article, immediately recognizes the acronym NSFW yet has no previous knowledge of escalators? Although not an Explain XKCD reader, my kindergartener has less knowledge of work ethics (let alone Internet slang regarding work ethics) yet has a basic understanding of escalators in popular culture, including the phenomenon of "running up the down". That is all ;) 71.154.215.156 17:51, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Welcome to public wiki's ;-) You get what people are willing to write. Both articles could do with some wikilinks. Mark Hurd (talk) 18:37, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
Haha! I suppose someone who spends all his time indoors on the internet would understand NSFW but not an escalator. Maybe that's who I was writing for. And maybe that says too much about my life. ;) --Druid816 (talk) 21:54, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

I've confirmed "tangent graph" is from the official transcript, but it doesn't look like a tangent graph, except perhaps on its side. It looks more like a bell curve to me. Mark Hurd (talk) 10:18, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

I have to assume by "tangent graph" he doesn't literally mean a graph of the trigonometric tangent function, but a graph that shows an asymptotic approach to a particular value (in this case, probably zero). 108.162.219.223 19:14, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

I changed the explanation to make it less about what an escalator is, and more about the intent behind the joke. 108.162.219.223 19:14, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

It depends on what kind of escalators it is. If you are running up the 70-meter-long down escalator which has a Chin-Up Bar at the end of it, you should feel like what you was supposed to feel.--Handbug (talk) 04:19, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

It also depends on whether you have need of doing this, for example if you are rushing to the metro station finding an overcrowded upward escalator and a sparsely crowded downward escalator every day, then you will have much strong urge to put in that chart.--Handbug (talk) 04:23, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

I've actually run up a down escalator. It was: 1) exciting, and 2) actually pretty hard to do. Leafy Greens (talk) 02:40, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

One could also interpret the graph as the y axis as the altitude on an escalator and the x axis as time. If someone started running up the down elevator as soon as they got on, their altitude would remain at the top, whereas if someone rode the elevator down, their altitude would go down as shown in the graph. Phlaxyr (talk) 20:47, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

Sometimes when I'm going up an escalator and there are lots of people behind me, when I get to the top, instead of walking off I just stop and stand there, forcing everyone behind me to start walking backwards :) --The Cat Lady (talk) 11:32, 13 August 2021 (UTC)