Talk:1402: Harpoons

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I took the sentient space craft joke to be a reference to the movie "Dark Star". 199.27.128.123 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Harpoon is a brand of rum. Did a bottle make it into space? 108.162.219.196 12:55, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

I tried to find who makes it but wasn't able to find a definitive source. I added http://www.harpoon-rum.eu/ for now but it would be nice to have the link to the canonical source. Any pointers? --Waldir (talk) 17:24, 1 August 2014 (UTC)
It's only headcannon. (ref to xkcd #1401)  A headcannon which fires a harpoon. 108.162.216.80 17:52, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Did this comic upload quite late in the day for anyone else? Is anyone else experiencing or did anyone else experience that "Latest Comic" is still going to 1401 as ix XKCD.com and XKCD.com/# 141.101.99.216 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

"This is obviously a joke, as sentient spacecraft cannot be created with current technology." Yeah, will need a citation on that... 108.162.229.148 13:23, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Definitely a joke. Appolo 12’s call sign was Yankee Clipper, and a clipper ship would not carry any harpoons.108.162.216.129 14:04, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

I'd believe someone might have smuggled some Harpoon (or even any brand of) rum up there, then brought it back down with them, ingested or otherwise (thus the drop right after the mission). Alternately, "incident" could be something more along the lines of losing an empty bottle of rum during a spacewalk (farfetched as it may be) and it reentering the atmosphere(?) - probably no more than stories, though - nothing official probably exists about anything like that going up or down in any manner. -- Brettpeirce (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)


Moby Dick is, let's say, extremely far-fetched. It was not the ship that was hunting the whale and harpooning it by itself. --141.101.104.143 17:27, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Could the Apollo 12 bump possibly be a reference to Futurama? "We're whalers on the moon, we carry a harpoon" 199.27.130.246 15:51, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Maybe it is a reference to a print ad by Bacardi-Martini, mentioned briefly in Buzz Aldrins book Magnificent Desolation. 141.101.104.82 22:10, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

While it is more likely that a harpoon (or bottle of harpoon rum) went to space and returned with the Apollo 11 mission, the caption makes it sound like the harpoon was only in space for the duration of the incident. Might it have been created and destroyed there?108.162.219.171 22:54, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

The graph explicitly asserts the Apollo 12 incident caused a "harpoon" to be in space, but only for a short time. Therefore, the harpoon was destroyed in space or returned to earth. Perhaps harpoon rum ascended with the astronauts; then was consumed on the moon, burned up in earth's atmosphere, or returned with the astronauts. (DP)

Whale killing

Saying "sailors would throw harpoons at a whale until it died" betrays a limited understanding of the process. Harpoons were barbed, and were meant to stick in the whale while it sounded (went deep.) A length of (about half-inch) rope kept the harpoon connected to the whaleboat. After the whale was exhausted (from towing the whaleboat while trying to shake off the harpoon? idk) the whaleboat could approach it, and the boatswain (not the harpooner) would kill it with an unbarbed lance. Holling Clancy Holling's Seabird shows how it was done, with pictures and all. 173.245.54.153 19:00, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Svend Foyn

Norwegian whaler Svend Foyn revolutionarized whaling by inventing explosive harpoon to hunt whales. He made whaling much easier and quicker. This method saved Norway from the famine thread in 19th century. -- Multimotyl (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)


[Citation needed] joke.

I thought the sentence "of course, Rosetta is not sapient[Citation needed]", was sort of funny. It implied "of course, Rosetta is not sapient[or is it?]", adding a bit of humour and mystery to the explanation. 108.162.222.77 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)