994: Advent Calendar

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Advent Calendar
I think you could get up to about 11:59:57 before you'd have trouble swallowing the chocolates fast enough. At that point, you'd need some kind of a liquify-and-chug apparatus to get up over the 11:59:59 barrier. Anyway, Merry Christmas!
Title text: I think you could get up to about 11:59:57 before you'd have trouble swallowing the chocolates fast enough. At that point, you'd need some kind of a liquify-and-chug apparatus to get up over the 11:59:59 barrier. Anyway, Merry Christmas!

Explanation

In this comic, the picture depicts an Advent calendar, which has a chocolate every time they get halfway to Christmas. This is a joke because of Zeno's paradox, which said "Before a moving object can travel a certain distance, it must travel half that distance. Before it can travel half the distance it must travel 1/4 the distance, etc. This sequence goes on forever. Therefore, it seems that the original distance cannot be traveled, and motion is impossible." This means that eating chocolates at diminishing intervals will make it so Christmas never happens. The title text says that when you get close to midnight, it gets physically impossible to eat the chocolates that fast, but you could get the one second away mark with a chocolate liquidator and feeder tube.

1153: Proof is also about Zeno.

Transcript

[There's a single large panel. It shows a portion of an advent calendar.]
December 23rd
December 24th 12:00 AM
December 24th Noon
December 24th 6:00 PM
December 24th 9:00 PM
December 24th 10:30 PM
December 24th 11:15 PM
December 24th 11:37:30 PM
December 24th 11:48:45 PM
December 24th 11:54:22.5 PM
December 24th 11:57:11.25 PM
December 24th 11:58:35.63 PM
...
Zeno's Advent Calendar


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Discussion

To me this is a lesson in moderation, too much chocolate is not only a problem on x-mas, but also on Halloween. If we don't learn moderation, we will wake up on 25th with huge belly and type-1 diabetes. Enjoy responsibly (which is true for every good thing and state altering drugs). - e-inspired 98.211.199.84 15:42, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

I'll have you know that type 1 diabetes has nothing to do with sugar overdose, since it's mostly an autoimmune disease. Type 2 diabetes is the fatty's version, whose only connection to type 1 is the symptoms (and sometimes the treatment 141.101.98.212 05:42, 20 January 2014 (UTC)
You mean type-2 Beanie (talk) 12:23, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

I'm glad that isn't what this is for me. 81.135.136.159 10:42, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

I think the humor is too about the way most people find difficult to wait for the next day before eating the chocolate...--141.101.89.203 14:49, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Advent then is the opposite of lent, when one gives up, say, chocolate 173.245.54.167 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

AAAHH!! Stop being an idiot! Type 1 diabetes... what they said. I have type 1!! Stop accusing me of making myself diabetic!!! 173.245.55.73 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I don't get why people think Zeno's paradox is interesting as it relies on the stupid notion that objects somehow move by halving the distance between one and the other rather than moving in discrete amounts of distance over time. I hope Zeno got punched for being so dumb at least once in his lifetime. -Pennpenn 108.162.250.162 05:10, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

It's interesting because it's not really a paradox. Of course they knew that the runner will get to his destination in finite time. The whole point was that it's absurd to claim otherwise. The reason it gets repeated so often is that, any philosophical arguments aside, it's a good story to explain that an infinite sum has a finite solution. Sigma(n=0->inf,1/(2^n))=2. 15:30, 29 October 2018 (UTC) 172.68.189.19 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Makes me think of Thomson's Lamp. 108.162.238.221 14:10, 15 September 2019 (UTC)

I thought this was talking about Scientology. 172.68.143.24 18:41, 12 December 2019 (UTC)