Talk:1669: Planespotting

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 14:16, 19 April 2016 by 108.162.221.11 (talk)
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How would one even pronounce "Mk. IVII"? IV is 4, VII is 7. I could see an argument for treating it as a really bizarre way to say 6. Or, if we treat it as two distinct digits (as opposed to a two-digit number), it could be either "1-7" or "4-2".

"Usage in ancient Rome varied greatly and remained inconsistent in medieval and modern times." But AFAIK each numeral only stood for a fixed amount, never for a "digit" (in the sense that its value could specify ones or tens depending on its position). So six ((5 - 1) + 1 + 1) is a plausible interpretation, though definitely not standard; but 17 or 42 would be treating Roman numerals as if they were Arabic. Huttarl (talk) 16:03, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
You're correct; in Roman numerals, there is not a concept of "this is an I, in the hundreds place, so it's really a 100". If you mean 100, that's always C. Hence the phrasing "two distinct digits (as opposed to a two-digit number). 108.162.221.11 14:16, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

I think that's actually MI, or 1001. 162.158.214.222 16:12, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

That was my first thought on reading it, too. Doesn't an underline and overline on a Roman numeral increase it by a factor of 10,000, or am I mis-recalling grade school? ---> 19:38 UTC, 18 April 2016
I read it as having too much space between strokes for it to be "MI" rather than "IVII", but poor penmanship is as likely as deliberate nonsense. In proper Roman Empire-era Roman numerals, the overline denotes "multiply by 1,000", but in English an overline/underline combo just means we're being fancy. 108.162.221.11 14:16, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

I assume there are other parts of this that are similarly nonsensical to people who know what Cueball thinks he's talking about. 108.162.221.32 14:43, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

When I first read the comic before the explanation I was assuming Cueball was roughly, and poorly, describing a Bombardier DHC-8. It is also known as a Q400 and is a twin-engine turboprop. The silhouette looks vaguely like it.R0hrshach (talk) 15:56, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
Wholeheartedly agreed on it being a DHC-8 version, which could be a Q400. The engine nacelles appear to extend behind the wing (unlike an ATR42/72 or Do328), and the T-tail eliminates a lot of other regional prop possibilities. It also ties in with Cueball calling it a "Q404". 108.162.237.170 17:07, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

De Havilland Canada (which developed the Dash-8) did belong to Boeing between 1988 and 1992, during which time the aircraft was commonly referred to as the "Boeing Dash-8". The Q400 variant was developed after DHC was sold to Bombadier, however. So it is possible that a DHC-8 could, in fact, have been made by Boeing, just not the Q400 variant.

There are so many things wrong about this comic. .42 (talk) 14:53, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Maybe I'm totally off base, but this reminds me of something called "Vaynespotting". In League of Legends, there's a character named Shauna Vayne. She has an extremely high skill-ceiling and skill-floor. Vaynespotting is a minigame where other players receive imaginary points for calling out a bad Vayne player when that player makes aggressive maneuvers, but doesn't have the skill to pull it off. Thefance (talk) 15:38, 18 April 2016 (UTC)


Is that black hat or white hat? 108.162.221.65 15:10, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Probably White Hat, but it is impossible to say. Have corrected explanation Kynde (talk) 16:11, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

Fixed the title text explanation regarding the hydroelectric plant. The water going over the dam still falls down (reservoir -> dam -> out of the plane?), but lifting the water in the plane would take more energy than the plant would produce.108.162.237.170 17:02, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

To me this comic looks like a clear reference to the "user agent" property of a browser notorious for being long, nonsensical and bearing little relationship to the version and the type of browser the client actually uses. E.g. In my Chromium this value is: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/49.0.2623.108 Chrome/49.0.2623.108 Safari/537.36. 141.101.80.72 17:46, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

The user agent string is not SUPPOSED to say what browser you HAVE, but what your browser is capable of doing. For start, Mozilla/ means that it's graphics browser, just like Netscape 4. Gecko means that authors of engine did read the HTML specifications (as authors of Gecko did), as opposed to authors of older versions of Internet Explorer (older than 7). It's because user agent string is only thing server knows about browser and therefore uses it to choose what version of page (and bug workarounds) it's supposed to use. And because some servers never update their definitions, every new browser needs to ADD his own strings to strings of some already existing browser instead of replacing them. -- Hkmaly (talk) 14:16, 19 April 2016 (UTC)


Dual Wielding could easily refer to the fact the plane has two engines or possibly four if it is dual wielding engine sets. I feel the current explanation of that line item is a little lacking. (173.245.56.60 17:52, 18 April 2016 (UTC))

Then please update the explanation :-) Kynde (talk) 17:58, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I understood the Mig-380 part as a mix, an Airbus-380 but made by Mig. I'm not sure if I explained myself properly...NeoRaist (talk) 18:15, 18 April 2016 (UTC)