Talk:2701: Change in Slope

I am an occasional data scientist, and I can confirm this is why we have monitor stands that tilt. 172.71.94.50 16:33, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

The third e in "neeed" in the title text seems to be a typo Victor (talk) 16:41, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

I think Randall may have added it to represent that the speaker prolongs the "e" sound for emphasis, although that's usually done with 4-5 e's. Barmar (talk) 16:53, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

I had to double-check this, myself (presumed the 'Bot created the lage faithfully, but went straight to source to see if I needed to find a vandalism post to revert). May need a comment (to prevent hypercorrection, if not to note the implied emphisis) and certainly will if it turns out to be a typo and gets corrected (for which I'm sure a future checker will discover Randall's revisiting, but then worth a note to that effect). 172.70.90.2 17:42, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

I guess Randall fixed it, because I'm only seeing 2 'e's in the title text. Just updated it on the wiki. Zman350x (talk) 01:26, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Bender Bot was one of the main characters in Futurama. Barmar (talk) 16:54, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Just donning my unnecessary pedantry hat for a moment: his name is Bender Bending Rodriguez --192·168·0·1 (talk) 23:02, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

A couple(?) of authors used the word(s) "(point of) inflection", which is not really suitable for a join between two straight segments. Was tempted to talk about "discontinuity", but that really only applies to the meta-slope (derivatives, to one degree or other) where it suddenly jumps (at a point), or the derivative's derivative has jumps (as it enters and leaves the smoothly linking curve). Hope it works well enough how I left it, though. 162.158.142.176 21:28, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

For anyone curious, I used an image editor to turn the entire comic sideways and it actually does seem to work, to some degree anyway. SSM24 23:37, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Added; thanks! 172.71.158.230 00:14, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

This one shows the beauty of Explainxkcd: people reading the explanation are likely to learn accessible methods of substantial practical utility. 162.158.166.173 00:38, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Hey, if it works for picking out lumber at Lowe’s, why not for graphs, too? - MadMarie

There was an old bit of explanation that related it to examining physical objects (for dent/bend-removal in metalwork, I think it was) that got wiped out by a later edit. Though I'm considering my own version, now generalised to cover your experience, as it seems quite relevant/analogous to me. 172.70.90.2 14:37, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Whoever wrote the 1st explanation needs to go touch grass and learn how real people talk, pissed me off so much I just effectively rewrote the whole thing from scratch 172.71.202.46 06:34, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Going in a different direction than "this is silly" - if we ignore the "viewing point/parallax" issue, doing a change of basis like this is similar to linear methods like [SVD https://hadrienj.github.io/assets/images/ch12_svd/ch11_SVD_geometry.png] & PCA, and considering the graph as a mappingg in a "higher dimension" is similar to the "kernel trick" popularized by Support Vector Machines 11:31, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Raw Data

I love this cartoon. This is definitely something that was relevant in my work!

At my old job I had some commercial or public-domain software for extracting the raw data behind a scatter plot. If anyone has something like that handy, I would love to see someone extract the data behind the graph on the left, so that we can:

  1. Apply the affine transformation which generates the image on the right with the tilted paper.
  2. Apply the statistical tests which Randall Munroe is alluding to.