Boathouses and Houseboats

Explanation:
Most English compound nouns can be constructed recursively. In many cases they are written open or spaced like "piano player" (a player of a piano.) But closed forms like "wallpaper" (paper for a wall) are not less common.
Randall is engaging in creative linguistics again. This time he is humorously suggesting to use a consistent naming scheme for things holding other things, the same way we call a boat holding a house a houseboat. He is extending this to all combinations boats, houses and cars. This would, however, be somewhat impractical, as these names do not include why one thing is on an other, and are also sometimes ambiguous: a carcar can be a tow truck as much as a car carrier, and a househouse can be either an apartment (house in a house) or an apartment building (house containing houses).
Additionally, he is somewhat inconsistent in some parts of the chart. While the chart is supposed to show examples of neologistic compound words <x><y> that refer to a <y> that holds an <x>, rather than a <y> in an <x>. However, Randall's examples sometimes are those of the latter example. He proposes to call lifeboats, which are boats held by other boats, "boatboat", instead of using that to refer to boats holding other boats, such as floating drydocks. Additionally, it is established naval practice to refer to a boat which is carried by another vessel as a "ship's boat", and call any vessel that carries a boat a "ship". In other words, according to usual naval terminology, a "boatboat" is a contradiction in terms; it is either a "boatship", synonymous with ship and hence redundant, or a "shipboat", the ship's boat. "Apartment" is a similar case: an apartment is a house in a house, while a house that holds a house is an apartment building or apartment complex. (However, in the title text, Randall points out an <x><y> could also refer to a <y> in an <x>, similar to the lifeboat and apartment examples. Nevertheless, "lifeboat" and "apartment" do not fit with the rest of the items of the chart and disobey the rule annotated in the corner.)
In the title text: "Truck food" is in some areas a common term for the meals offered by " food trucks" . Car phones were a feature in automobiles throughout the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, serving as the predecessors to mobile phones, although they were permanently installed into a car and not removable. Bananaphone , a song by Raffi Cavoukian, is also mentioned.
[A chart with three rows and three columns is shown, both with the same heading "car", "house", and "boat". On the top left a text with the word "this" two times embedded in a bubble and an arrow respectively pointing to the row and column heading reads:] A this that holds this
[Most entries have the common word in black, but crossed out in red with another word below also in red. Two entries remain in green.] A Car that holds a Car: Tow truck Carcar A House that holds a Car: Garage Carhouse A Boat that holds a Car: Car ferry Carboat A Car that holds a House: Mobile home Housecar A House that holds a House: Apartment Househouse A Boat that holds a House: Houseboat (green text) A Car that holds a Boat: Boat trailer Boatcar A House that holds a Boat: Boathouse (green text) A Boat that holds a Boat: Lifeboat Boatboat
[Caption below the frame:] I really like the words for "boathouse" and "houseboat" and think we should apply that scheme more consistently.
The first version of the comic image used a different wording to indicate which word held the other. The column word holds the row. The original wording can be seen here .


Sandboxing Cycle

Explanation:
A sandbox or sandpit is a playground where children can play safe without interfering the world outside. By this meaning the term was adopted by others like the sand table in military uses, or as a Wikipedia Sandbox , a playground for inexperienced editors to test their additions, and in computer security (sandbox) which Randall probably references at this comic.
Software is getting more and more complex, and in an effort to reduce programming work and security vulnerabilities, large applications are composed of multiple programs. Getting these mostly self-contained programs to work with each other can be tricky, since requirements can vary a lot between different applications, requiring a rather general interface or API for communication. The more open such interfaces are, the higher the risk of unintended side effects, like vulnerabilities and overly permissive data access which could be exploited by hackers.
At the top left panel it could be a software collection whose parts are not yet fully connected to each other; the parts of the system which are as yet unconnected are shown in red, symbolizing a problem. A simple example is a typical office suite used for documents, presentations, spreadsheets, charts, databases, and more. In the early days those separate applications weren't much connected together, copy and paste was one of the most important features; which suggests the applications haven't yet been fully developed. However, software is never fully developed, improvements can always be made.
The next panel uses some "new technology" (in green, representing a solution) to interconnect those parts not only internal but also to the world outside at the internet. In the simple office suite example this means a document can now use a spreadsheet directly by using just a simple connection to another file. If that spreadsheet is changed the document uses this new content without any need of copying it manually.
But this leads to the third panel, with undesired connections shown in red. The undesired connections mean that problems in specific applications may spread to other applications because nobody can oversee everything in a large environment. It even may destroy the original document in the office suite example or allow malicious users to exploit security holes.
The fourth panel shows (in green, representing a solution) a method applied to this problem known as sandboxing. This is a security mechanism for separating running programs without risking harm to others. This can tighten up sloppy security. A direct consequence of restricted communication is that the programs now again can't connect easily to each other, resulting in a situation very similar like in the first panel and restarting the "sandboxing cycle."
The point made by this comic is that it is often difficult to easily use a system without lowering security in that system; a dilemma that can be found both in the office suite example above or the social media example below.
The dilemma is again stated in the title text: Randall wants both ease of use and high security. In practice, a tradeoff has to be made.
[The comic consists of four panels arranged in a circle around the center. Black arrows connecting them clockwise in an infinite loop. All panels show the same 14 tiny circles and three different rings embedding some of the circles while other circles are outside. A few circles and rings are connected by lines but there is no connection between them all.]
[The panel at top left shows this configuration but with a few circles in red.] "I wish these parts could communicate more easily."
[Clockwise the next panel on the right shows new lines in green connecting nearly all remaining also now green circles and the lower most circle has a dashed green line to the outside.] "Ohh, this new technology makes it easy to create arbitrary connections, integrating everything!"
[At the third panel to the bottom right all green parts are now in black and even more connections are established. Parts of these and some others are now highlighted in red.] "Uh-oh, there are so many connections it's creating bugs and security holes!"
[At the fourth panel to the bottom left all red parts are now in black, showing a complex structure. Four green rings separate the structure with only green connections between them and to the outside.] "Ohh, this new technology makes it easy to enclose arbitrary things in secure sandboxes!"
[The arrow above the fourth panel connects it to the first and the circle continues from the beginning.]


Social Media Announcement

Explanation:
In 2018, especially after Facebook privacy abuses were revealed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal , many individuals began seeking alternatives. The #deletefacebook hashtag peaked around April 2018, and in some communities, this type of "why I'm leaving Facebook" announcements were popular. Randall parodies this mentality with Cueball, who wants to think he is making a point about standing by his values, values he assumes other people share. However the overly-long title of his manifesto is too specific to apply to anyone but himself, and also reveal a few embarrassing confessions that probably have nothing to do with his values (such as losing his Facebook password).
Mastodon is a distributed, federated social network with  microblogging features similar to Twitter . "Federated" means that there is one app hosted in many places, so users can choose a host that meets their needs, but everyone can still talk to each other, similar to email. Near the peak of #deletefacebook, mastodon became trending as a twitter alternative with less nazis .
Wil Wheaton famously moved to Mastodon from Twitter, but was ultimately disappointed by the experience , because while Mastodon's community is generally less toxic, it does not yet have the tools to handle the kind of targeted harassment that a celebrity might face.
Microsoft has been buying up professional-themed social media platforms lately, such as LinkedIn and GitHub , intending to integrate them more fluidly with their enterprise software suite. Mastodon seems  an unlikely target for an acquisition, since its decentralized nature means that one corporate entity can't control it, and the culture there is decidedly unprofessional as of this comic.
The title text presents an alternative approach by moving most social activities to the cloud-based proprietary team collaboration platform Slack . After making his first workspace in Slack he suggests that he wishes to avoid the people invited, so he creates a second account and a new workspace. This also didn't last long and he stops interacting on social media entirely and reverted to simple texting, probably sending old fashioned SMS-messages to others or just writing texts on paper no one reads.
[Cueball sitting in front of a laptop typing.] Why I'm Quitting Facebook, Joining LinkedIn, Deleting My LinkedIn, Rejoining Facebook, Quitting Twitter, Getting Locked Out of Facebook, Moving to Mastodon, and Lobbying Microsoft to Take Over Mastodon and Merge It With LinkedIn: A Manifesto.
In the original version of this comic, Cueball misspelled "Mastodon" as "Mastadon".


Trum-

Explanation:
The President of the United States , at the time when this comic was published, is Donald Trump and he shares the first letters of his surname with Harry S. Truman , who was US President between 1945 and 1953. Megan notes that both of these presidents' last names start with "T-R-U-M", but she also states that they are not much related.
There were several presidents of the US who even have the exact same last name. For example, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams , and the more recent father and son George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush . Similarly Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are 5th cousins. Grandfather and grandson William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison also share a last name.  And there are the two most distantly related presidents with the same surname, both Andrew Johnson and Lyndon B. Johnson have the last name of Johnson (7 letters), although the shared last name is coincidental, given they do not share any relatives with the name Johnson.
Besides T-R-U-M- and the cases of identical names, the longest common surname prefix is H-A-R (3 letters), shared by William Henry (or Benjamin) H-A-R-rison and Warren Gamaliel H-A-R-ding. (The next longest common surname prefixes are B-U-, shared by James B-U-chanan and George (H.) W. Bush; and C-L-, shared by Grover Cleveland and Bill Clinton.)
The longest common suffix (not counting identical names) is also 4 for I-S-O-N for James Madison and the two Harrison presidents. (It is an interesting fact that the name HARRISON contains both the second-longest common prefix and the longest common suffix among non-identical president surnames.)
The joke is that the matching of those few letters is the least weird thing. Trump's presidency is commonly considered weird in ways too varied to concisely list in this article, and both Megan and Cueball seem to agree on this.
The title text lists "absurd" last names that could start with the same letters as other presidents: Bill Eisenhamper, Amy Forb, Ethan Obample, and Abigail Washingtoast. These would refer to Dwight D. Eisenh ower , Gerald For d , Barack Obam a , and George Washingto n .
[Cueball and Megan walking together while talking.] Megan: It's pretty weird that we've had two totally unrelated presidents whose last names start with "T-R-U-M-" . Cueball: Oh, sure, that's definitely the weirdest thing about the presidency right now. Megan: It's less weird than every other fact . But still weird. Cueball: True.


Beverages

Explanation:
It is frequently stated that liquids take the shape of their container. While being poured, though, what that "shape" is is open to interpretation. The comic shows the "shape" of a liquid being "poured" down someone's throat (in the process of drinking) and highlights how unsettling this may look without any visible guidance for its flow. While the flow of the beverage wets every parts downwards, it looks as if the stomach is only partially filled, because the process of drinking is still underway and the glass is still half full, and because the contents of the glass would not be enough to fill the stomach in any case.  Therefore the shape of the liquid in the stomach area would not correspond to the full shape of the stomach, and there could be additional blobs of liquid where it might have splashed and detached from the main liquid mass, such as depicted by the two little disconnected pieces to the right of the stomach area.
The title text expands on this, encouraging the reader to think of the liquid travelling through the entire human digestive tract and to consider that it will eventually dilute through the entire human body ("shaped like me"), with what doesn't leaving the body to pass through the water treatment process ("some pipes and tanks"), and that finally most particles from any ingested liquid will mix with all water on Earth ("all of Earth's oceans"). But by the time a beverage is diluted enough to take the shape of Earth's oceans, the molecules will be so dispersed that the beverage effectively becomes invisible.
Note: A barium swallow is a medical procedure that actually studies the shape of a liquid when it is being swallowed, to diagnose problems in the esophagus and other structures.
[Inside a single frame, liquid pouring out of a glass through mouth, the esophagus, and to the stomach is shown. However the surrounding bodies like the organs or the glass are not pictured, are only defined by the shape of the liquid, and must be imagined. Further two small parts within or near the invisible stomach with no visible connection to the rest are also wetted.] [Caption below the frame:] It freaks me out to imagine what a beverage is shaped like when I’m in the middle of drinking it.


Curve-Fitting

Explanation:
An illustration of several plots of the same data with curves fitted to the points, paired with conclusions that you might draw about the person who made them. These data, when plotted on an X/Y graph, appear to have a general upward trend, but the data is far too noisy, with too few data points, to clearly suggest any specific growth pattern. In such a case, many different mathematical and statistical models could be presented as roughly fitting the data, but none of them fits well enough to compellingly represent the data.
When modeling such a problem statistically, much of the work of a data scientist or statistician is knowing which fitting method is most appropriate for the data in question. Here we see various hypothetical scientists or statisticians each applying their own interpretations to the exact same data, and the comic mocks each of them for their various personal biases or other assorted excuses. In general, the researcher will specify the form of an equation for the line to be drawn, and an algorithm will produce the actual line.
Nonetheless scientists work much more seriously on the reliability of their assumptions by giving a value for the standard deviation represented by the Greek letter sigma σ or the Latin letter s as a measure to quantify the amount of variation of the data points against the presented best fit . If the σ-value isn't good enough an interpretation based on a specific fit wouldn't be accepted by the science community.
Since Randall gives no hint about the nature of the used data set - same in each graph - any fitting presented doesn't make any sense. The graphs could represent a star map, the votes for the latest elected presidents, or your recent invoices on power consumption. This comic just exaggerates various methods on interpreting data, but without the knowledge of the matter in the background nothing makes any sense.

Linear regression is the most basic form of regression; it tries to find the straight line that best approximates the data. As it's the simplest, most widely taught form of regression, and in general differentiable functions are locally well approximated by a straight line, it's usually the first and most trivial attempt of fit.
The picture to the right shows how totally different data sets can result in the same line. It's obvious that some more basics about the nature of the data must be used to understand if this simple line really does make sense.
The comment below the graph "Hey, I did a regression." refers to the fact that this is just the easiest way of fitting data into a curve.

Quadratic fit (i.e. fitting a parabola through the data) is the lowest grade polynomial that can be used to fit data through a curved line; if the data exhibits clearly "curved" behavior (or if the experimenter feels that its growth should be more than linear), a parabola is often the first, easiest, stab at fitting the data.
The comment below the graph "I wanted a curved line, so I made one with math." suggests that a quadratic regression is used when straight lines no longer satisfy the researcher, but they still want to use simple math expression. Quadratic correlations like this are mathematically valid and one of the simplest kind of curve in math, but this curve doesn't appear to satisfy the data any better than does simple, linear regression.

A logarithmic curve grows slower on higher values, but still grows without bound to infinity rather than approaching a horizontal asymptote . The small b in the formula represents the base which is in most cases e , 10, or 2. If the data presumably does approach a horizontal asymptote then this fit isn't an effective method to explain the nature of the data.
The comment below the graph "Look, it's tapering off!" builds up the impression that the data diminishes while under this fit it's still growing to infinity, only much slower than a linear regression does.

An exponential curve , on the contrary, is typical of a phenomenon whose growth gets rapidly faster and faster - a common case is a process that generates stuff that contributes to the process itself; think bacteria growth or compound interest.
The logarithmic and exponential interpretations could very easily be fudged or engineered by a researcher with an agenda (such as by taking a misleading subset or even outright lying about the regression), which the comic mocks by juxtaposing them side-by-side on the same set of data.
The comment below the graph "Look, it's growing uncontrollably!" gives an other frivolous statement suggesting something like chaos. Also this even faster growth is well defined and has no asymptote at both axes.
A LOESS fit doesn't use a single formula to fit all the data, but approximates data points locally using different polynomials for each "zone" (weighting data points differently as they get further from it) and patching them together. As it has many more degrees of freedom compared to a single polynomial, it generally "fits better" to any data set, although it is generally impossible to derive any strong, "clean" mathematical correlation from it - it is just a nice smooth line that approximates the data points well, with a good degree of rejection from outliers.
The comment below the graph "I'm sophisticated, not like those bumbling polynomial people." emphasises this more complicated interpretation, but without a simple mathematical description it's not very helpful to find informative interpretations of the underlying data.

Also known as a constant function, since the function takes on the same (constant) value c for all values of x . The value of c can be determined simply by taking the average of the y -values in the data.
Apparently, the person making this line figured out pretty early on that their data analysis was turning into a scatter plot, and wanted to escape their personal stigma of scatter plots by drawing an obviously false regression line on top of it. Alternatively, they were hoping the data would be flat, and are trying to pretend that there's no real trend to the data by drawing a horizontal trend line.
The comment below the graph "I'm making a scatter plot but I don't want to." is probably done by a student who isn't happy with their choice of field of study.
The logistic regression is taken when a variable can take binary results such as "0" and "1" or "old" and "young".
The curve provides a smooth, S-shaped transition curve between two flat intervals (like "0" and "1").
The comment below the graph "I need to connect these two lines, but my first idea didn't have enough math." implies the experimenter just wants to find a mathematically-respectable way to link two flat lines.
Not a type of curve fitting, but a method of depicting the predictive power of a curve.
Providing a confidence interval over the graph shows the uncertainty of the acquired data, thus acknowledging the uncertain results of the experiment, and showing the will not to "cheat" with "easy" regression curves.
The comment below the graph "Listen, science is hard. But I'm a serious person doing my best." is just an honest statement about this uncertainty.
Mapping different curves to different segments of the data. This is a legitimate strategy, but the different segments should be meaningful, such as if they were pulled from different populations.
This kind of fit would arise naturally in a study based on a regression discontinuity design. For instance, if students who score below a certain cutoff must take remedial classes, the line for outcomes of those below the cutoff would reasonably be separate from the one for outcomes above the cutoff; the distance between the end of the two lines could be considered the effect of the treatment, under certain assumptions. This kind of study design is used to investigate causal theories, where mere correlation in observational data is not enough to prove anything. Thus, the associated text would be appropriate; there is a theory, and data that might prove the theory is hard to find.
One notable time this is used is when a researcher studying housing economics is trying to identify housing submarkets. The assumption is that if two proposed markets are truly different, they will be better described using two different regression functions than if one were to be used.
The additional curved lines visible in the graph are the kind of confidence intervals you'd get from a simple OLS regression if the standard assumptions were valid. In the case of two separate regressions, it would be surprising if all those assumptions (that is, i.i.d. Normal residuals around an underlying perfectly-linear function) were in fact valid for each part, especially if the slopes are not equal.
A classical example in physics are the different theories to explain the black body radiation at the end of the 19th century. The Wien approximation was good for small wavelengths while the Rayleigh–Jeans law worked for the larger scales (large wavelength means low frequency and thus low energy.) But there was a gap in the middle which was filled by the Planck's law in 1900.
The comment below the graph "I have a theory, and this is the only data I could find." is a bit ambiguous because there are many data points ignored. Without an explanation why only a subset of the data is used this isn't a useful interpretation at all. As a matter of fact, with the extra degrees of freedom offered by the piecewise regression, it could indicate that the researcher is trying to fit the data to confirm their theory, rather than building their theory off of the data.
This is often used to smooth gaps in measurements. A simple example is the weather temperature which is often measured in distinct intervals. When the intervals are high enough it's safe to assume that the  temperature didn't change that much between them and connecting the data points by lines doesn't distort the real situation in many cases.
The comment below the graph "I clicked 'Smooth Lines' in Excel ." refers to the well known spreadsheet application from Microsoft Office . Like other spreadsheet applications it has the feature to visualize data from a table into a graph by many ways. "Smooth Lines" is a setting meant for use on a line graph , a graph in which one axis represents time; as it simply joins up every point rather than finding a sensible line, it is not suitable for regression.
Drawing a bunch of different lines by hand, keeping in only the data points perceived as "good". Not really useful except for marketing purposes.
The comment below the graph "I had an idea for how to clean up the data. What do you think?" admits that in fact the data is whitewashed and tightly focused to a result the presenter wants to show.
Not a real method, but a common consequence of misapplication of statistical methods: a curve can be generated that fits the data extremely well, but immediately becomes absurd as soon as one glances outside the training data sample range, and your analysis comes crashing down "like a house of cards". This is a type of overfitting . In other words, the model may do quite well for (approximately) interpolating between values in the sample range, but not extend at all well to extrapolating values outside that range.
Note: Exact polynomial fitting, a fit which gives the unique th degree polynomial through points, often display this kind of behaviour.
The comment below the graph "As you can see, this model smoothly fits the- wait no no don't extend it AAAAAA!!" refers to a curve which fits the data points relatively well within the graph's boundaries, but beyond those bounds fails to match at all.
The name is also a potential reference to the TV show House of Cards . The plot in House of Cards began with a premise of a rise to power in the United States government, but as it continued into more seasons the premise was taken to an extreme, introducing more and more ridiculous plot points ("WAIT NO, NO, DON'T EXTEND IT!").
Cauchy-Lorentz is a continuous probability distribution which does not have an expected value or a defined variance. This means that the law of large numbers does not hold and that estimating e.g. the sample mean will diverge (be all over the place) the more data points you have. Hence very troublesome (mathematically alarming).
Since so many different models can fit this data set at first glance, Randall may be making a point about how if a data set is sufficiently messy, you can read any trend you want into it, and the trend that is chosen may say more about the researcher than about the data. This is a similar sentiment to 1725: Linear Regression , which also pokes fun at dubious trend lines on scatterplots.
A brief Google search reveals that Augustin-Louis Cauchy originally worked as a junior engineer in a managerial position. Upon his acceptance to the Académie des Sciences in March 1816, many of his peers expressed outrage. Despite his early work in "mere" engineering, Cauchy is widely regarded as one of the founding influences in the rigorous study of calculus & accompanying proofs.  Notably, his later work included theoretical physics, and Lorentz was also a well-known physicist.  Therefore, the title-text may be referring back to 793: Physicists .
Alternately, the title-text could be implying that the person who applied the Cauchy-Lorentz curve-fitting method may not be well qualified to the task assigned.
Curve-Fitting Methods and the messages they send
[In a single frame twelve scatter plots with unlabeled x- and y-axes are shown. Each plot consists of the same data-set of approximately thirty points located all over the plot but slightly more distributed around the diagonal. Every plot shows in red a different fitting method which is labeled on top in gray.]
[The first plot shows a line starting at the left bottom above the x-axis rising towards the points to the right.] Linear "Hey, I did a regression."
[The second plot shows a curve falling slightly down and then rising up to the right.] Quadratic "I wanted a curved line, so I made one with math."
[At the third plot the curve starts near the left bottom and increases more and more less to the right.] Logarithmic "Look, it's tapering off!"
[The fourth plot shows a curve starting near the left bottom and increases more and more steeper towards the right.] Exponential "Look, it's growing uncontrollably!"
[The fifth plot uses a fitting to match many points. It starts at the left bottom, increases, then decreases, then rapidly increasing again, and finally reaching a plateau.] LOESS "I'm sophisticated, not like those bumbling polynomial people."
[The sixth plot simply shows a line above but parallel to the x-axis.] Linear, no slope "I'm making a scatter plot but I don't want to."
[At plot #7 starts at a plateau above the x-axis, then increases, and finally reaches a higher plateau.] Logistic "I need to connect these two lines, but my first idea didn't have enough Math."
[Plot #8 shows two red lines embedding most points and the area between is painted as a red shadow.] Confidence interval "Listen, science is hard. But I'm a serious person doing my best."
[Plot #9 shows two not connected lines, one at the lower left half, and one higher at the right. Both have smaller curved lines in light red above and below.] Piecewise "I have a theory, and this is the only data I could find."
[The plot at the left bottom shows a line connecting all points from left to right, resulting in a curve going many times up and down.] Connecting lines "I clicked 'Smooth Lines' in Excel."
[The next to last plot shows a echelon form, connecting a few real and some imaginary points.] Ad-Hoc filter "I had an idea for how to clean up the data. What do you think?"
[The last plot shows a wave with increasing peak values. Finally the plot of the wave is continued beyond the x- and y-axis borders.] House of Cards "As you can see, this model smoothly fits the- wait no no don't extend it AAAAAA!! "


Unfulfilling Toys

Explanation:
This comic lists and illustrates six different classic toys that are missing a key piece or attribute that makes them work and/or that makes them unique or fun.
Slap bracelets are flexible curved strips of spring steel that roll up and become a bracelet when you slap them against your wrist. This function operates on the same principle and basic design as the rolled band of metal inside a tape measure. A rigid one would not twist and would be deeply frustrating and potentially painful.
A stomp rocket has a rubber pouch full of air, connected via a hose to a vertical cylinder contained snugly within the base of an air-propelled rocket.  By stomping on the pouch, the air is forced out the top end of the cylinder, launching the rocket into the air.  By sealing the air channel, the rocket would stay on the cylinder and the person would just be bounced into the air by the pouch — acting like the world's smallest bouncy house — or the pouch will burst, rendering the toy even more useless.
A Super Soaker ™ is a brand of water gun that works by first pumping air into the gun, thereby introducing pressurized air above the water, then releasing the water using the gun's trigger – the extra pressure from the pumped air makes the water go much further than a traditional water gun which relies upon the pressure generated from a single pump of the trigger itself.  In Randall 's version, the water cannot be released, so the fun part of the water gun – getting to spray your friends – isn't available.
In a classic glow stick , made of flexible plastic, one must first bend it enough to break the glass cylinder inside. This allows the chemicals inside to mix and begin glowing within the plastic tube.  If the entire tube were made of actual glass, however, it would not only shatter into many sharp glass pieces but would also cover the hands of the unfortunate user with a mixture of mild but not harmless chemicals. Also, depending on this contraption's construction and/or luck, the chemicals either won't mix and not glow at all, defeating the purpose of the glow stick, or stain your hands, clothes, and surroundings with a glowing liquid, which would be rather unfortunate.
In the original toy , a doll or figure with folded-up wings sits on top of a hand-held device with a wrapped string or other mechanism that lets it spin the doll very fast.  As the doll spins, centrifugal force causes the wings to unfold and provide lift, and the doll rises up in the air and flies, spinning, sometimes going quite high.  Without the wings, the doll will spin but otherwise remain flightless.
In a traditional yo-yo , one attaches a string to their finger and the other end of the string is looped around the shaft of the yo-yo, in such a way that it will hold the yo-yo but the yo-yo can still spin.  In this case, the string is presumably included but not attached to the yo-yo, so when the yo-yo reaches the end of its string it will fall off, instead of coming back to the person or spinning at the end of the string.
Nonetheless off-string yo-yoing technique exists that has been a division of the World Yo-Yo Contest since 2003. The division specifies that the string is tied to one finger but not the yo-yo. It was popularized by yo-yo player Jon Gates. It differs from the manipulation of a Diabolo because the string is tied to one finger instead of being tied to two sticks. The return is accomplished with a twist of the string called a bind. Diabolos don't return. A good example is here at this video titled "Crazy Stringless Yoyo Tricks!" .
Note that the phrase "no strings attached" is an idiom and usually refers to something being available without special conditions or restrictions, a favor being done with nothing expected in return, or a relationship intended to be very casual.  In this case, it is literal rather than an idiom, in that the string that is normally attached to the yo-yo is literally not attached.
In order to build the magnetic Rubik's Cube , you would need to embed magnets in the inward-facing sides of each cube. This actually can be achieved by using a checkered pattern for the polarity of each piece, a single piece uses the same polarity at all its connecting sides while the immediate neighbor is configured in the opposite. This video shows the principle and even a working 5x5x5 magnetic cube.
Because such a cube doesn't fall apart Randall had to remove it from his "deeply unfulfilling versions of classic toys."
It is also worth noting that although Randall said that there were 27 small magnetic cubes, only 26 small 'cubes' (or 'cubelets') appear in a traditional Rubik's cube, of three main types. There is no center block in a traditional Rubik's cube, instead there is a pivoting armature connecting the six face-centres (with just a single flat face) together while allowing their individual rotation, each of which can keep the 12 edge-centres (two externally-flat faces) rotatably-anchored to at least one face at a time by a form of dovetailed tab on those edge pieces and, similarly, those hold the eight corners (with three outer faces) in place even as they follow a single face's rotation primarily held by the two most currently relevent of the adjacent edges.
It might also refer to various square-shaped neodymium magnet-based toys, like this one or this one , which although they can be taken easily apart, they are successful and very fulfilling products on their own.
[The comic presents toys in six different frames.]
[Cueball slaps his wrist with a strap-like item in his hand.] Smack Rigid slap bracelet
[Cueball jumps on top of a pouch full of air connected via a hose to an air propelled rocket. The pouch does not budge and the rocket remains connected to its base.] Sealed stomp rocket
[Ponytail holds a water gun and makes use of its hand-operated pump system.] Pump pump pump Pump Click Pump-only SuperSoaker
[Megan pulls an item apart between her hands. The middle section breaks into many pieces on the ground and liquid is falling from the end parts.] Pop Glass glow stick
[Cueball holds a figurine sitting on top of a hand-held device and pulls a string connected to it.] Spin Wingless sky dancer
[Megan holds a yo-yo until the yo-yo falls from the string and starts rolling on the ground.] Roll No-strings-attached yo-yo
[Caption below the frames:] My least successful product line was probably "deeply unfulfilling versions of classic toys."


6/6 Time

Explanation:
Cueball suggests a regional time system similar to that used in many societies prior to the invention of mechanical time keeping , such as Japan during the Edo period or the Roman Empire , where the day is separated into two parts based on night and day and then subdivided by hour, minute, and second to give season-variable lengths for each. This method is also named temporal hour , and still in use in the Jewish religion time table.
Midpoints in time such as noon and midnight vary on the longitude from east and west, while the length of day and night depends on the latitude . The first problem is solved today by using time zones in which at noon the sun is in most cases at or close to the zenith and sunrise/sunset happens at different times. The second issue is attributed to the tilt of Earth's axis and the curvature of its surface; in summer days are longer than nights and vice versa in winter. In the polar regions, there are very long days (and nights) and by Cueball's suggestion the entire months-long polar day would last only 12 of the newly defined "hours".
The caption lays out the punchline in which Randall has very strong feelings and opinions on how standards of time should be measured (his feelings on Daylight Savings Time have been well-documented in other comics), but as bad as he believes the official standards are he also recognizes that his own rules would not be popular with other people. After coming to recognize this he has made a hobby or game out of making the worst possible system of measuring time and sharing it with other people.
The caption, though vague, can also be assumed to relate to the gradual deviation of certain regions from the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) zones with " Daylight Saving Time " that is observed inconsistently and smaller regions opting for awkward fractional increments of deviation from Coordinated Universal Time.
The title text refers to Einstein's special theory of relativity which postulates that the speed of light is the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of the light source (or the observers). An observer at high speed measures the same speed of light as an observer with no motion, measured from the same light source. In classical physics, the speed of the moving observer would be added up, but in special relativity, this isn't true. Instead, the time runs slower for the moving observer. Additionally to this time dilation , there is also a length contraction , without which the geometry wouldn't work.
"Today is one of the two days each year when my clocks run at the same speed as everyone else's" refers to the autumnal and vernal equinoxes when day and night are the same lengths, therefore causing his clocks to match the world. The comic was released one day after that year's September equinox, which would be the autumnal equinox for Randall.
[Cueball and White Hat are walking to the right.  Cueball has his hands up in an explaining position.] Cueball: Under my time system, the sun rises at 6 am and it sets at 6 pm, as it should . Cueball: The length of the second is different each day and night, and the current time shifts with your latitude and longitude. Cueball: Today is one of the two days each year when my clocks run at the same speed as everyone else's.
[Caption below the frame:] Time standards are so unfixably messy and complicated that at this point my impulse is just to try to make them worse.


Bad Opinions

Explanation:
Cueball is imagining bad opinions, searching them up on the Internet, and becoming angry with the people holding said opinions. An offscreen character, upon learning about this, sarcastically remarks that this indicates a "healthy relationship with the internet." Of course, if Cueball wasn't thinking of all these bad opinions, they most likely wouldn't have come to his attention, and he wouldn't have an opportunity to be mad about them. The fact that Cueball is the cause of his own agitation is the joke of (or perhaps, the sad part of) the comic. Cueball misses the offscreen character's point and remarks that he's not as bad as some person he has discovered, presumably through the aforementioned method of searching for bad opinions he thinks up.
In title text he goes further, where he can't find an opinion he imagined on the internet, but still wants to discredit it, just because he is so infuriated by just being able to imagine it. This is similar to straw man fallacy , where someone attempts to discredit an opponent by misrepresenting their argument, rather than addressing their real point.
Ironically, the comic itself could potentially be considered an example of this kind of behavior. It is possible that Randall imagined the absurd person and behavior depicted in the comic, and wrote a comic satirizing it, without knowing if such a person actually exists.
The unhealthy conversation habits enabled by the Interblag has been a regular theme in xkcd. In fact, this is a rather obvious callback to one of the most popular xkcd comics, 386: Duty Calls , wherein Cueball is actively seeking to discredit and correct people who are "wrong" on the internet. This is later done in 2071: Indirect Detection .
Perhaps due to the inherent combination of disconnection and intense focus involved in use of the internet, it's pretty common for people to get into arguments online.  Cueball has followed the trend of finding social success online by dedicating more time and energy to arguing pedantic points than his opponents.  He's done this to such a great degree that he is now actively seeking possible arguments, even when the situations do not arise on their own.  The end result is that his life has needlessly more stress, his interpersonal habits are those of contradiction and conflict, he makes unnecessary enemies, and he is always looking at a computer screen instead of his real world friends.
[Cueball sits at a laptop.] Offscreen voice: What are you doing? Cueball: I just thought of a bad opinion someone could have, and now I'm searching to see if anyone does so I can be mad at them. Offscreen voice: Sounds like you have a healthy relationship with the internet. Cueball: Hey, at least I'm not this guy I just found!


Stanislav Petrov Day

Explanation:
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who became known as "the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war " for his role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident . The incident was unknown to the public until it was revealed shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
On 26 September 1983, during the Cold War , the satellite-based early-warning system of the Soviet Union reported the launch of multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles from the United States . At the time, tensions with the U.S. were on edge, and high officials of the Soviet Union, including General Secretary Yuri Andropov , were thought to be highly suspicious of a U.S. attack.
Petrov checked ground-based radars which had not detected a launch, noted that the warning system had detected only 1-5 missiles instead of the hundreds that would have been expected in the event of a first strike , and chose to mark the system alert as a false alarm. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack, which would have probably resulted in immediate escalation of the Cold War stalemate to a full-scale nuclear war and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Investigation of the satellite warning system later confirmed that the system had indeed malfunctioned.
While it is highly probable that if Petrov had reported this incident to his superiors they would have come to the same conclusion, it was a point in time when many people feared that the Cold War might become hot. Andropov, the new Soviet leader, was considered weak by the US president Ronald Reagan , and the Western countries were deploying new missile installation in Europe to counter existing missiles in the Eastern Bloc. This fear of nuclear war meant that at this time the peace movement in most western countries reached one of its highest levels.
In this comic Cueball reacts to his alert on Stanislav Petrov Day as if it was a false alarm. This is of course a pun since what we celebrate is that Stanislav treated an alert as a false alarm. Also his first comment "Oh shoot" could have been the reaction of Stanislav if he had not assumed it was a false alarm.
In real life, many alerts reach everybody on their mobile devices, often causing them to be ignored without deeper knowledge about the issue behind. This was however not the point in this comic.
The title text presents a much less important false alarm where one of them, probably Cueball (or perhaps Randall ), was thinking about giving a gift to the other one in the form of an alarm clock that alerts randomly in the middle of the night. That particular alarm is one where she or he can just breathe a sigh of relief and go back to sleep because it's not a real alarm and is perfectly safe to ignore. However if this keeps going off when it’s not supposed to, then when you are actually supposed to wake up you may very well end up assuming that it’s another false alarm, and thus will sleep late anyway, completely defeating the point of the alarm. Also when a real alarm is supposed to wake you up in the middle of the night, you will have been trained to ignore alarms. This is all part of the joke.
On the 2007 anniversary, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a blog post for LessWrong suggesting that "Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a minute to not destroy the world." Not destroying the world has since evolved into an annual tradition. There is a website for the holiday, with several variations of a ritual involving lighting and snuffing candles. The intended mood is that of a somber holiday, somewhere between Thanksgiving and a funeral.
However, there are also more lighthearted takes . A "hardcore mode" would be just like the normal holiday, but "During said ceremony, unveil a large red button. If anybody presses the button, the ceremony is over. Go home. Do not speak." Alternatively, "you use a website connected to *another* house where people are also celebrating Petrov Day. If anyone in one house presses the button, the other house receives a launch alarm. They have 60 seconds to respond. At the end of 60 seconds, their party is over, and they must go home silently. The website has some chance of giving you a false alarm." The website can be found here with instructions on how to use it here .
Stanislav Petrov himself died in 2017, but in 2018 the Future of Life Institute decided to award his surviving family a $50,000 prize for his contributions. However, in the words of MIT Professor Max Tegmark, who presented the award, the fact that Petrov's son couldn't "get a visa to visit the city his dad saved from nuclear annihilation is emblematic of how frosty US-Russian relations have gotten, which increases the risk of accidental nuclear war.”
[Megan is looking at her phone while Cueball stands in front of her.] Megan: Hey, Wednesday was Stanislav Petrov Day. We missed it. Cueball: Oh, shoot! Cueball: I got a calendar alert for it, but I assumed it was a false alarm.


Incoming Calls

Explanation:
This comic shows a graph (a 100% stacked area chart) of incoming phone calls over time to Randall since he was older than six years. Not covered are major modern ways to communicate like SMS , talking on Facebook , or other messaging apps.
Wrong numbers used to be a small but significant portion of the phone calls that Randall received and remained fairly steady until the late 1990s, when they began a gradual and accelerating decline, eventually tapering off to nearly none in 2015. This is likely due to the rise of cellphones and programmable land-line phones, which contain their own address books and only require the caller to enter the number once, greatly reducing the chances of accidentally entering a wrong number in general and eliminating the possibility entirely for anyone with whom you have taken the time to save their number.
Appointment reminders and miscellaneous similar calls have steadily increased with time, likely due to a combination of Randall's increasing responsibilities as he ages, and thus the number of appointments and legitimate businesses who need to contact him, and the increased use by businesses of automated reminder systems. The appointments section seems to be slightly tapering off, possibly for the rise of using other means, such as SMS, for reminders.
The proportion of family members started slowly decreasing until 1998 where it remained almost constant until roughly 2008-2009. Possible reasons for the decline is that Randall's family has been passing away from old age, or that Randall has ceased contact with them; a possible reason for the increase thereafter is Randall's meeting of his current wife, thus gaining in-laws.
A note to keep in mind though is that the graph represents the relative percentage of calls, not the absolute number; therefore, a third possibility is simply that the number of calls hadn't changed, but rather the volume of phone calls from everyone else has gone up. Likewise, the increase in phone calls from family might simply be due to the number of phone calls from everyone else going down while family calls have remained constant. Additionally, as mentioned below, phone communication may be be decreasing due to the rise of other communication mediums.
The proportion of friends who call Randall rapidly increased in the 1990s and began to overtake family, likely due to a combination of gaining new friends over time and old friends growing into teenage years owning a cell phone roughly starting in the 2000s. At that time the Internet wasn't a primary method of communication especially when away from home, thus phone calls were the main way to connect with friends when apart. Over time, Randall's friends and family have been less likely to make phone calls to him, likely as phone calls have been succeeded by other methods of communication. This is supported by an entry for "that one friend who hates texting" which has grown to encompass pretty much the entire "Friends" category; presumably all his friends EXCEPT that "one friend" do all their communicating with Randall by text or other chat services.
Additionally, although there was a large percentage of phone calls from legal telemarketers in the 1990s, this percentage has significantly dropped, perhaps due to the National Do Not Call Registry in the United States, which prohibits telemarketing/automatic dialing to those on the list. Political advertisements are exempt from this list. Instead, there has been a rise in phone calls from scammers and political advertisements.
Telemarketers may target calls based on victims' age or other publicly available statistics. The rise and fall of auto insurance scammers may indicate targeting people in their early twenties. It could also be tied to other events, such as the purchase of an automobile. There have also been various reports online about the commonality of this scam in and around 2013, ( [1] ) indicating this may have been a particularly challenging problem during this period.
The title text refers to a common scamming tactic in which a robocaller , typically one named "Emily," will claim to be having trouble with their headset and say "Can you hear me now?" The trick is either to keep you on the line while taking a second or two to connect you to a real person to get scammed, or to get a recording of you saying "yes" for potential fraudulent use (or both).
[A line graph shows the portions of phone calls by type over time beginning slightly before 1990 until today.] Incoming personal calls over time or: why I finally stopped picking up for unknown numbers
[The x-axis is labeled with years beginning at 1990 in five-year segments up to NOW (2018). The y-axis shows a relative distribution of callers.] [The calls are (from top to down):] Appointment reminders, misc. (small growing all over time) Family (larger in the beginning, constant with some fluctuations since 2000) Friends (growing from 1995 to 2005, then decreasing but intersected with "that one friend who hates texting", after that decreasing) Legal telemarketers (peak in the beginning, decreasing over time) Auto insurance scammers (a big peak between 2005 and 2012) Other scammers (beginning in 2010, replacing the auto insurance, increasing until today) Political (starting in 2002 and increasing since then) Wrong numbers (constant up to 2000 and then decreasing to nearly today)


Data Pipeline

Explanation:
In the first panel Cueball shows Ponytail and White Hat a Data Pipeline he has constructed that, as he puts it, 'collects and processes all the data we need'. This implies that the three are running some sort of project that requires data processing. Ponytail assumes that this data pipeline is an unstable mess of scripts that will cease to function correctly should any unexpected input be received. Cueball tries to claim it isn't, but his hesitation (including using the word "might") essentially states that this is very likely, although he seems to hope that it might not be. Ponytail then seems impressed and expresses this to him. She, however, gets interrupted by Cueball who tells her that the system just malfunctioned and collapsed. He, however, states that he can fix it, making it seem like this cycle of patching and collapsing could repeat infinitely, or until all problems have been patched. Knowing Cueball's code, though, it seems more likely he can't patch it.
In the title text, Ponytail or White Hat proceeds to question how such an important system can run on such a small computer. However, Cueball makes it worse by saying he uses his phone due to the better connection. While this might give the pipeline more uptime, it also means its system resources are far more limited.
This comic can be logically connected to the Code Quality series ( 1513: Code Quality , 1695: Code Quality 2 and 1833: Code Quality 3 ), similarly showing Cueball having a coding ineptitude and Ponytail's exasperation with it, though this Cueball shows a higher level of competence by having produced something useful, albeit fragile. However, Ponytail doesn't see the actual code in this case, and there's no issues with or comments on coding syntax like in the Code Quality series.
Cueball's hesitant response in this comic has some similarities to 410: Math Paper .
[Cueball is standing with an open laptop, showing it to Ponytail and White Hat.] Cueball: Check it out - I made a full automated data pipeline that collects and processes all the information we need.
[Ponytail is looking down at Cueball's laptop.] Ponytail: Is it a giant house of cards built from random scripts that will all completely collapse the moment any input does anything weird?
[Borderless beat panel]
[Cueball looks at his laptop.] Cueball: It... might not be. Ponytail: I guess that's someth- Cueball: Whoops, just collapsed. Hang on, I can patch it.


Bluetooth

Explanation:
Bluetooth is a technology invented in the mid 1990s and intended for devices to connect wirelessly over a relatively short range for the purpose of transmitting information and/or audio.  For example, a headset that connects via Bluetooth could be connected to a computer that's also Bluetooth-enabled, and then whatever would normally come out of the computer's speakers would come out the headset's ear pieces instead, and whatever was spoken into the headset's microphone would be transmitted to the computer's audio input system as if coming in through the computer's microphone.  For this to work, the two devices need to be paired, which means they need to know the unique identification number of the other device and have been given permission to communicate with it, as well as knowing what kind of data exchanges are both possible and allowed. Pairing is not always a smooth process, especially given the somewhat limited methods some of these devices have for user interaction.  For example, headsets typically don't have screens and user interfaces that make it easy to select what computer or other device you want them to connect to, so you're often confronted by blinking lights and/or sounds to make it through the pairing process, with each device having its own method for initiating or accepting a pairing request.
Cueball is talking to White Hat about Bluetooth and wireless connectivity. He asks if it has become easier to stream audio via Bluetooth since he last used it. White Hat then jests that it has become an easy-to-use and streamlined service, where connecting devices is easy, and he gives some examples of how easy it is to use. Cueball is excited about this, until White Hat reveals that he was lying and that Bluetooth is still as hard to use as ever.  Cueball then invokes the name of "Josiah Bluetooth", a fictitious person implied to have invented the eponymous Bluetooth. "Josiah" is an old-timey name and suggests the amusing idea that in the 1700s or 1800s a hardy inventor named Josiah Bluetooth came up with the idea for wireless audio.  (Note that while there is no "Josiah Bluetooth" person, there is a " Josiah " Bluetooth ceramic speaker.)
This comic also references the common problem of audio playing through the wrong device when Bluetooth is activated.
The title text is another misdirection joke because while the first part of the sentence is true (Bluetooth was indeed named after a tenth-century Viking king), it goes on to make the silly claim that King Harald himself developed a wireless charging standard. This is a reference to the Qi wireless power transfer standard that, like Bluetooth, is a well-branded industry standard with a catchy name and wide adoption that also does not work quite as well as promised even 10 years after its first release. (It could also be a reference to Medieval Vikings charging into battle, which is, by most accounts, usually a fairly wireless affair [ citation needed ] (assuming one discounts chainmail armor). In this case, the standard could be a pun as a standard also denotes a royal or military flag.)
Specifically, the Viking king referenced in the title text, Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson , usually called Harald Bluetooth, was a ruler of Denmark and Norway who died in 985 or 986. Jim Kardach of Intel named the Bluetooth protocol after him, apparently as he united the various Norse tribes of Denmark into a single kingdom just as Bluetooth unites communication protocols. The Bluetooth logo unites the two Norse runes corresponding to "H" and "B" for Harald Bluetooth.
[Cueball and White Hat are talking, Cueball is holding a cell phone and wireless headphones.] Cueball: I haven’t used a wireless/bluetooth thingy in like ten years. Is audio stuff still a nightmare? White Hat: Nah, it’s great now.
[Zoom in on White Hat, who is holding his palm out. Cueball is off-screen.] White Hat: You tap devices together twice to link them and they flash in sync. (It pairs using accelerometer timing and sound.) Tap them three times to disconnect. White Hat: You can pair multiple inputs and outputs and it handles it smoothly. Cueball (off screen): Nice! White Hat: It just works. Sound comes from where you expect. Cueball (off screen): Wonderful.
[Zoom out to White Hat and Cueball facing each other.] White Hat: Haha, just kidding, it’s a nightmare. Cueball: Noooooo! White Hat: When I connect to my car, music starts blasting from my headphones while the car repeatedly plays a “New connection!” chime. Cueball: This is not what Josiah Bluetooth intended!
Though it has been around since 2001, Bluetooth has been a well known technology for use with wireless speakers and headphones since smartphones became popular in the early 2010s.
Bluetooth was the subject of particularly wide public attention in 2016 when Apple announced the removal of the 3.5 mm headphone jack in their then-latest smartphone, the iPhone 7 . Apple believes the future of audio lies in Bluetooth earphones, but some others argue that the technology is not advanced enough to replace wired earphones. The debate continues as other companies have followed suit in removing headphone jacks in favor of Bluetooth devices.


Horror Movies

Explanation:
This comic is the first in the Horror Movies series, which was followed by 2076: Horror Movies 2 a month later.
Horror movies are a genre of movie or film which attempt to elicit the emotional response of fear in the viewer.  Some enjoy that type of movie because it allows them to experience and release that emotion, perhaps as a form of catharsis or release.  Others take a more detached view and enjoy watching bad things happen to other people, perhaps deriving humor or enjoyment out of a situation that they are glad not to be in themselves.
White Hat suggest to Cueball that they see a horror movie, and Cueball appears excited and states Sure! I love watching terrible things happen to people and feeling afraid! This is basically the idea about seeing horror movies, so people who like them might make a statement like this if they say they enjoy them.  As the caption speaks against horror movies, it's most likely that Cueball is being sarcastic.
Randall comments on this in the caption below the panel saying that he simply does not understand why people would want to watch a movie whose themes and intended emotions are steeped in such negativity. While he fully admits he is criticizing from a position of ignorance (and tries his best not to think less of horror movie fans) he still cannot wrap his head around them.
In the title text a conversation between Randall and a friend goes on, as the friend double checks that his favorite movie of all time is Jurassic Park . This movie could be considered a "horror" film as there are elements of fear and terror, especially when the dinosaurs that Randall loves so much are chasing and eating humans. However, this movie type is usually placed in the adventure or science fiction genre. Randall agrees that he likes it, but instead of claiming that Jurassic Park isn't a horror film, replies by saying that he likes dinosaurs and actually wants there to be an island full of them. He then continues by giving an example of an alternative premise for Jurassic Park which maintains the horror aspect of the film by removing the dinosaurs and adding serial killers instead, and that type of movie wouldn't appeal to Randall. An amusement park about "Serial killers in creepy masks" refers to the movie trope from the Scream , Halloween and the Friday the 13th series of films, among others. The friend then states that such an idea would be really great for a horror movie. While Randall may not agree, he could see the humor in watching Jeff Goldblum (who portrays Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park), in the scene where his attempts to prevent the "brilliant" idea of breeding serial killers as an amusement park attractions from coming to fruition, fails! This of course also fails in the case with Dinosaurs in the original movie, but how could Jeff fail to convince people about the bad idea in breeding human serial killers for an amusment park? It is that scene, and only that, Randall would like to watch from that alternative movie.
[White Hat and Cueball are standing together and talking. White Hat points at Cueball who has raised his arms.] White Hat: Wanna see a horror movie? Cueball: Sure! I love watching terrible things happen to people and feeling afraid!
[Caption below the frame:] I know everyone's into what they're into, but I have never understood horror movies.
In early issues, Randall frequently referenced his fear of velociraptors based on watching Jurassic Park as a kid.


Internal Monologues

Explanation:
This comic explores some seemingly strange perspectives that academics or professionals might have due to their deeper knowledge and understanding of the fields that they study.
Many seemingly mundane phenomena can actually be quite weird or counterintuitive if you understand how they really work. The five people featured in this comic, all from different disciplines, are all aware of certain facts about reality that seem so strange even they have trouble believing they are true; yet, undeniably, they are.
Four of the five people are pondering things that they happen to find very interesting but that aren't too concerning to an everyday person, whereas what Blondie is pondering could have widespread or even global effects on our way of life. In the title text, Blondie amends her thought, since she actually knows an even more concerning truth: we've already all been hacked, and we just don't know it yet.
Below, the people's thoughts are explained in detail.
Botany
Much of the mass of trees is extracted from the air. An Australian ABC program explains that " Trees are made from air ". More precisely: The bulk of the mass of a tree is composed of cellulose and water.
Cellulose is a polysaccharide, a large molecule consisting of many glucose molecules (C 6 H 12 O 6 ) bonded together. Plants make those glucose molecules through photosynthesis: they make them by combining water (H 2 O) and carbon dioxide molecules (CO 2 ) using the energy from sunlight, releasing oxygen in the process (O 2 ). Plants get the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and arguably the water also as it usually comes from rain which is condensed water vapor.
The main photosynthesis balance is given by the formula :
6 CO 2 + 6 H 2 O -> C 6 H 12 O 6 + 6 O 2
Physics
Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces in physics but also to humans the most preeminent one. In everyday experience, most people tend to think of gravity merely as a pervasive downward force, but as a physicist, Cueball is more aware that in fact, all gravitational forces are mutual; any pair of objects will exert a gravitational force on each other, regardless of how big they are. Therefore, he is correct in saying that his phone and the Earth are being "pulled together", and finds it remarkable that he is able to sense this interaction between two objects of such an disparate size even when the gravitational pull of the phone is hard to detect.
Computer Security
Anyone well versed in computer security understands just how insecure the systems that we depend on actually are.
In the title text it is noted that possibly all our systems are already hacked, and we just haven't found out yet. Since malicious hackers do their work covertly, a successful hack often isn't discovered until days, weeks, or even years later if at all.  By that time they may have successfully hacked many other systems using the same techniques and/or exploiting the same widely unknown or un-patched security flaws.  Some high profile hacks recently discovered at the time of this posting include a 50-million user hack of Facebook and Google+ announcing they are shutting down the consumer side of Google+ , in part due to a security flaw that was discovered and patched months ago.
Graphic Design
Graphic designers recognize fonts and design elements, and see how they come together. In this comic, the graphic designer wonders how the Law & Order font was chosen for a particular storefront's sign. Law & Order is a police procedural TV series created by Dick Wolf in 1990, which has had various spinoffs. The font used for the title sequence of Law & Order is called Friz Quadrata , and is also the font used for the signage of the New York Police Department headquarters.
Medicine
Doctors are well versed in human anatomy , and are likely to think about what is inside of people more than the average person would. And most people would actually like not to think about all the blood and bones we are all carrying around with us. Not to mention the poop or the contents of our stomach that could be considered vomit or the pee etc.
Most people do not think about that the person next to them is actually a skeleton packed in meat and animated by electricity... But Ponytail does, because she is being exposed to this fact all the time through her study of medicine.
[Beneath a two line caption are five characters shown, with their thoughts inside thought bubbles. Below them are labels giving their respective fields of science.] Internal Monologues from various fields
Botany Megan: I can't get over the fact that trees are made of air.
Physics Cueball [looking at a phone in his hand]: It's so weird that I can feel the Earth and my phone being pulled together.
Computer security Blondie: I wonder if today will be the day everyone gets hacked and it all finally collapses.
Graphic design Hairy: I wonder how that store ended up with the Law & Order font for their sign.
Medicine Ponytail: We're all acting normal even though we're full of blood and bones and poop.


Rock Wall

Explanation:
Mantle geologists study that part of the planet that's below the top " crust " of the planet.  The top layer of the planet, which is several dozen miles thick, is the only layer we've been able to explore, by digging tunnels , spelunking , etc. The only way to study the mantle and other inner layers of the earth are through non-visual, non-tactile, indirect methods, and by analyzing old samples of the mantle that have made their way to the surface.
In this comic, Ponytail , talking to Megan , is describing her job as a mantle geologist as that of living on one side of a thick wall that is, and likely always will be, impossible to get around, but she has to study what is on the other side of the wall.  In this case the wall is horizontal rather than vertical, the wall being the earth's crust, and makes a complete sphere, so the only way to get past the wall would be to go through.  It is theoretically possible to go through, but as of the comic's posting, humanity is far from doing so.  (The deepest hole dug as of at that time, as measured by true vertical depth , is the Kola Borehole , which only goes down to 12,262 metres out of the estimated 35,000 meters needed to get through at that location.)
In the title text Randall states that he doesn't trust mantle/core geologists. Because if they got the chance he believes they would not hesitate (even the duration of a heartbeat) to strip away Earth's crust to study the mantle or even worse the core directly. Of course if they only did this locally to look at the mantle it would not shatter the Earth although that local area may become a volcano. But if they actually peeled the entire outer layer away, we humans would have no place to live, as the mantle is really hot and would melt easily (producing magmas and therefore lavas when magma’s exposed to surface, see title text of 1405: Meteor to be more confused). However, after a while all these erupted lavas would solidify and become a new crust. Humanity needs to withstand just some millennia of active worldwide volcanism.
If they somehow exposed the core even locally something weird would be bound to happen. [ citation needed ]
But Randall is afraid that their craving to get around that 20 mile wall would prevent the researchers from even hesitating if they did get that chance. Fortunately, we can study planetary cores in the solar system without stripping Earth's surface by visiting an asteroid which is thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet. The Psyche mission is scheduled to launch in 2022 and arrive at 16 Psyche in 2026.
This comics seems to be a spin-off from the previous comic 2057: Internal Monologues , where Randall tried to find some interesting monologues from scientist from different research fields. Maybe he did not find an internal monologue he liked for geologists, but ended up with this idea instead. Thinking about the core or mantle, lava and magma seems to be something Randall does a lot, and thus he must have some ideas about how a geologist would , as in 913: Core .
[Ponytail is gesturing towards Megan with her hand, while talking to her.] Ponytail: I live next to a wall of rock 20 miles thick.  There's no way around or over it. I'm trapped on this side forever. Ponytail: I study the stuff on the other side.
[Caption below the frame:] Mantle geology seems like the most frustrating field.


Modified Bayes' Theorem

Explanation:
Bayes' Theorem is an equation in statistics that gives the probability of a given hypothesis accounting not only for a single experiment or observation but also for your existing knowledge about the hypothesis, i.e. its prior probability. Randall's modified form of the equation also purports to account for the probability that you are indeed applying Bayes' Theorem itself correctly by including that as a term in the equation.
Bayes' theorem is:
P(H | X) is the probability that H , the hypothesis, is true given observation X . This is called the posterior probability . P(X | H) is the probability that observation X will appear given the truth of hypothesis H . This term is often called the likelihood . P(H) is the probability that hypothesis H is true before any observations. This is called the prior , or belief . P(X) is the probability of the observation X regardless of any hypothesis might have produced it. This term is called the marginal likelihood .
The purpose of Bayesian inference is to discover something we want to know (how likely is it that our explanation is correct given the evidence we've seen) by mathematically expressing it in terms of things we can find out: how likely are our observations, how likely is our hypothesis a priori , and how likely are we to see the observations we've seen assuming our hypothesis is true. A Bayesian learning system will iterate over available observations, each time using the likelihood of new observations to update its priors (beliefs) with the hope that, after seeing enough data points, the prior and posterior will converge to a single model.
The probability always has a value between zero and one, the latter value represents a 100% probability. Both extremes would be:
It is a linear-interpolated weighted average of the belief from before the calculation and the belief after applying the theorem correctly. This goes smoothly from not believing the calculation at all up to be fully convinced to it.
Bayesian statistics is often contrasted with "frequentist" statistics. For a frequentist, probability is defined as the limit of the relative frequency after a large number of trials. So to a frequentist the notion of "Probability that you are using Bayesian Statistics correctly" is meaningless: One cannot do repeated trials, even in principle.  A Bayesian considers probability to be a quantification of personal belief, and so concepts such as "Probability that you are using Bayesian Statistics correctly" is meaningful. However since the value of such subjective prior probablities cannot be independently determined, the value of P(H|X) cannot be objectively found.
The title text suggests that an additional term should be added for the probability that the Modified Bayes Theorem is correct. But that's this equation, so it would make the formula self-referential, unless we call the result the Modified Modified Bayes Theorem. It could also result in an infinite regress -- needing another term for the probability that the version with the probability added is correct, and another term for that version, and so on. If the modifications have a limit, then a Modified ω Bayes Theorem would be the result, but then another term for whether it's correct is needed, leading to the Modified ω+1 Bayes Theorem, and so on through every ordinal number .
Modified theories are often suggested in science when the measurements doesn't fit the original theory. An example is the Modified Newtonian dynamics theory, among many others, in which some physicists try to explain dark matter with not much success.
[The comic shows a formula with a header in gray on top:] Modified Bayes' theorem:
[The formula:] P(H|X) = P(H) × (1 + P(C) × ( P(X|H)/P(X) - 1 ))
[Variables and functions are described also in gray:] H: Hypothesis X: Observation P(H): Prior probability that H is true P(X): Prior probability of observing X P(C): Probability that you're using Bayesian statistics correctly


Hygrometer

Explanation:
Here, Megan is talking to Cueball about hygrometers . But before she can even finish explaining what it does, Cueball has looked up, found, and purchased the product. A hygrometer is an instrument for measuring the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, or the amount of water in solids such as soil or wood.
It seems Randall (or Cueball) loves being able to measure things and therefore finds instruments or measurement tools that end in -ometer very interesting, and wishes to own all of them. Many measuring instruments use the suffix -meter which is derived from the Greek noun μέτρον for "measure". The character "o" always belongs to the first term, but it also belongs to old Greek words like Thermo -meter, micro -meter, or even hygro -meter. Other measurement devices such as speedometer use an English word with an "o" appended to mimic the Greek-derived terms, purportedly for easier marketing. Because themes in science often based on Greek terminology that ending at the first part appears often. Nonetheless, Randall believes that this "o" belongs to the general term for measuring devices.
In the title text, Randall states he is working on assembling a combination of usually unrelated measuring instruments, for a purpose that is neither stated in the comic nor easy to guess. The list consists of:
Finally, he mentions an ometerometer , a concatenation of -ometer with itself, which would be a device for measuring devices. It has been included in a humorous list of Other Types of Ometers from 2007, where it was described as measuring the measuring capacities of other measuring devices.
[Megan and Cueball are walking and talking. Cueball is holding his phone with one hand, looking at it.] Megan: ...A hygrometer is a device for measuring— Cueball: I want one! Ooh, found one for $7.99 with free shipping! I'm buying it. Megan: —Humidity. Cueball: Oh, cool!
[Caption below the frame:] For some reason, I feel a powerful compulsion to own any device whose name ends in "-ometer."


Tectonics Game

Explanation:
This comic is to show similarity to many simulation games , which have various niche popularity.  Similar to Maxis' Spore , the game in question allows you to terraform entire worlds.  However, in a typical Randall twist, unlike most simulation games, you could not speed up the progress of time to make world-changing endeavours occur in a matter of seconds.  The game operates in real time, which means most of the user time-frame will be spent idly watching nearly non-moving continents, drifting at the real speed of continental drift, a couple of inches a year, which makes for very slow gameplay. Thus several hundred millennia of play time is needed to reach a game achievement of forming a kilometre high mountain.
Many computer games simulate to one degree or another real items and tasks, but often simplify them to fit into a game format -- to make them more exciting, to make them quicker, to advance a particular plot line or quest, etc.  For example, a game about farming might allow you to grow corn, but whereas in real life corn takes about 90 days to germinate from seed and grow to maturity, in a game the growth might be instantaneous or measured by minutes, rather than by days/weeks/months. The comic may thus be a jab at how our lives already are real time MMORPG .
In this game, especially, one would expect such shortcuts, given the extreme time frames required for geological events to be manifested.  The joke is that this game is so realistic that it's played in "real-time", which means for every second or hour or eon something would take in real life, in the game it would take the same second or hour or eon to happen.  Playing such a game where the events take longer than the person would be alive would likely be unsatisfying. [ citation needed ] A mildly less extreme example of a simulation game being played in real-time would be the Desert Bus video game where you have to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona , to Las Vegas, Nevada , in real time at a maximum speed of 45 MPH. The trip requires eight hours of continuous play to complete, at which point you score one point with the option to continue playing for additional points at the rate of one point per successful eight hour trip.  The action consists almost entirely of just keeping the bus from veering off the road.  It cannot be paused or sped up, and failure requires a tow back to the starting point at the same 45 MPH speed.
The frames show some elements of gameplay.  The first frame shows a destructive plate margin in which an oceanic plate (grey) is being subducted under a continental plate (brown with a person standing on it) while sediments between the plates are compressed to form mountains.  Clockwise from top left, the second frame shows a cross section through the planet and various statistics about the planet (CO 2 levels of 840 ppm, solar irradiation of 1184 W/m 2 and heat-flow through the crust of 91 mW/m 2 ). Solar irradiation and heat-flow are similar to the Earth, but CO2 levels are raised.  Bottom right displays several stats titled L T , L M , L A and L L , and bottom left is a view of the planet showing the proportion covered by ice (3%), land (31%) and water (66%). It seems that the raised CO2 levels have reduced the amount of ice compared to the Earth. The final panel shows some of the achievements that can be unlocked, the first is 1 km mountain and the last achievement of the first row is 10 km mountain. Below that seem to be achievements in the formation of an atoll.
Large igneous provinces are suspected to be related to extinction level events and rapid climate changes in real life. Thus, they 'are the worst' in this game.
In the title text type A3 V stars are mentioned which are white main sequence stars at mass from 1.4 to 2.1 times the mass of the Sun. Thus they have a shorter lifespan than the Sun, hundreds of millions of years, compared to the 10 billion years lifespan of the Sun. By starting the game now with an A3 V star, there would be plenty of time to complete the game before the real Sun would go to a Red Giant destroying the Earth.
[Cueball is standing behind Ponytail, who is sitting on the floor playing a video game on a TV which displays a diagram of tectonic plates.] Cueball: What game is that? Ponytail: Tectonics! Ponytail: You steer chunks of crust around, rifting, subducting, and building and eroding mountains.
[A view of the game screen is shown. It includes a large cross-section of the Earth with smaller charts around it.] Ponytail (narrating): You try to keep your climate stable and your biosphere rich. Ponytail (narrating): Avoid making large igneous provinces! They're the worst .
[Cueball holds his hand out in a frameless panel.] Cueball: Cool! Cueball: Can I try? Ponytail (off-panel): Sure!
[Cueball plays the game while Ponytail watches.] Cueball: ...How do I unpause? Ponytail: It's not paused. Cueball: ... Ponytail: Continents can only move a few inches per year.
[Cueball has stopped playing and holds the controller in one hand. Ponytail points at the screen that shows an achievement page with no completed achievements, but a progress bar halfway done for an achievement with the number 1 and a mountain.] Cueball: It's real-time? Ponytail: Just 400 millennia to go until your first mountain achievement!


Barnard's Star

Explanation:
Barnard's Star is a very-low-mass red dwarf about 6 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Ophiuchus . It is the fourth-nearest known individual star to the Sun after the three components of the Alpha Centauri system; it is the closest star to Earth in the Northern Hemisphere. It is a red dwarf with a mass of 0.144 Solar masses, a diameter one fifth that of the Sun, and it is 7–12 billion years old. Because of this low mass the gravitational pressure in the core is much lower and thus the fusion rate is far smaller than in the core of the Sun. In fact this star is so dim that, even though it's one of the nearest, it can't be seen by the naked eye. The low fusion rate also means that the lifespan of small stars is much longer. While huge stars might last a few hundred million years, and the Sun about 10 billion years, a small red dwarf has a lifespan of about a trillion years.
Barnard's Star is the star with the greatest proper motion in the sky. Proper motion is motion in the sky other than that caused by Earth's rotation or orbit. Barnard's star is both very close to the sun (as these things go) and moving now at a speed of more than 140 km/s toward the Sun. It will make its closest approach to the Sun in approximately 10,000 years, at a distance of about 3.75 light-years.
The image on the right shows different stars near the Sun over 100,000 years and it can be seen that none of them are getting closer than 3 light-years. This is a safe distance to our Solar System and the stars will not influence the orbits of the planets or smaller bodies. It's also obvious that much closer approaches never have happened since the Solar System formed 4.5 billion years ago because otherwise the nearly circular orbits of the planets in the same plane wouldn't be possible. Closer encounters have happened in the past by mostly small stars like Scholz's Star which actually passed through the Oort cloud at a distance of 0.82 light-years about 70,000 years ago, and at least one estimate suggests that a star is expected to pass through the Oort Cloud every 100,000 years or so. This distance is still too far away to influence the orbits of the planets, but those encounters cause comets perturbed from the Oort cloud to the inner Solar System roughly 2 million years later.
The comic shows the sizes and the distances not in a proper scale. If the Sun was 1.4 cm (1.4 Mio km in real) in diameter, Barnard's Star would be less than 3 mm at a distance of 356 km. Even Jupiter wouldn't fit into this picture -- at ten times smaller than the Sun, it would be a few pixels, but at a distance of 7.8 m to the Sun and all the other planets would fit into a circle less than 100 meters in diameter. The distances to others stars are far beyond human imagination and at its closest distance a message still takes 3.75 years from Barnard's Star to the Sun.
In regards to "20,000-year-long high-speed flyby", the joke here is suggesting Barnard's Star would need to scream out the maleficent, trolling statement as quickly as possible due to 20,000 years being such a small segment of time relative to the lifespan of the star (and our Sun, for that matter).
The title text emphasizes that this close approach will not be any hazard to the Solar System, but someone is envious of the long lifetime of Barnard's Star or annoyed by its unpleasant behavior (yelling at the sun for 20,000 years would be a minuscule amount of time for the stars, but for humans it would be a vast length of time, and would get annoying very quickly).
[A black sky is shown with a yellow spot near the bottom, left of the center. Three smaller red spots at the diagonal from top left to bottom right indicate a moving star over time. Above these red spots lines are connected to a text that starts and ends with many A s, first growing, and at the end getting smaller:] ...AAAAHHi Sun! I was here billions of years before you formed and will shine for trillions of years after you dieEEEEEEAAA...
[Caption below the frame:] Sometimes, I wonder what Barnard's Star is saying to the Sun as it performs its 20,000-year-long high-speed flyby.


Carnot Cycle

Explanation:
This comic shows a Pressure–volume diagram which is used in this case for a Carnot cycle , a theoretical thermodynamic cycle covered in most thermodynamics classes which looks a lot like the figure drawn. The most common example of a (suboptimal) Carnot cycle is the vapor compression cycle used in refrigerators . However in this case, Randall has replaced the labels of the 4 stages of the real Carnot cycle with new ones.
Pressure–volume diagrams were first developed to understand the efficiency of steam engines and plot the change of pressure p with respect to volume V for a specific process. The process forms a cycle and the amount of energy involved can be estimated by the area under the curve on the chart. The Carnot cycle describes the ideal efficiency that such an engine can achieve during the conversion of heat into work, or vice versa like in a refrigeration system. The real steps are called (explained in short):
An isothermal process is a change of a system, in which the temperature remains constant. In this diagram the volume increases (expansion) or decreases (compression). The term isentropic describes a lossless process where no heat leaves the gas, here the increased volume only causes a further decrease in pressure; it is also called an adiabatic process and is the thing which warms air when you compress it quickly. Isentropic means "doesn't cause the heat death of the universe", which is a rare thing.
The prefix iso- is derived from the Ancient Greek word ísos which translates to equal and used widely in modern days in science like here to indicate a process at the same temperature (-thermal) which is not shown in the graph. The prefix is- to the term entropy is used because isoentropic sounds stupid.
In the comic, the cycle also has two phases of expansion followed by two phases of contraction (or "decline"), but the names of steps one to three are replaced with other words beginning with the prefix "iso-" meaning same or equal, and the factors that are held constant are absurd.
Each step in this comic is explained below:
1. Isometric expansion. When heated, the gas becomes larger due to increasing volume
Isometric (literally "equal dimensions") can refer to a property or process that is symmetrical in all dimensions (i.e. the gas is expanding radially) or to a type of thermodynamic process where volume is held constant but temperature is free to vary, the exact opposite of the first step in the real Carnot cycle. Additionally, the comic text uses a circular argument (become larger due to increasing volume).
In mathematics, an isometric mapping (between metric spaces) is a map that keeps all the distances intact. If we measure the distance the same way throughout the cycle, then isometric expansion (or for that matter, isometric compression) is not really an expansion (or a compression).
2. Isotonic expansion. The gas expands further due to dark energy while percent milkfat remains constant.
Isotonic is a descriptor commonly associated with sports drinks (and not thermodynamics), which contain similar concentrations of salt and sugar as in the human body. Dark energy is hypothesized to be a cause for the expansion of the universe, which obviously isn't relevant to thermodynamics.(Yet.) The density of milk depends on milkfat and solids-non-fat, which includes lactose. Fortified milk has increased solids-non-fat but the same percentage of milkfat, resulting in increased calories and an increased density. So the fortification of milk results in increased calories, possibly referred to as dark energy, and a contraction, as less space is needed for 1 kg of milk. However, this explanation does not match the expansion suggested in the comic.
Later Randall again combined dark energy (and also dark matter) with milkfat in 2216: Percent Milkfat .
3. Isopropyl compression. While inflation is held constant, the gas contracts due to tightening interest rates.
Isopropyl alcohol is commonly used for cleaning. Inflation and contraction could refer to changes in gas volume, but the reference to interest rates puts them in the context of macroeconomics . Raising ("tightening") interest rates tends to reduce inflation and/or "contract" the economy. High interest rates are a feature of the third stage (recession) of the Juglar cycle . In economics (and other sciences) to better understand model parameter relations, some parameter may be held constant in theory. This could refer to the Fisher equation . Holding one parameter constant is also done in the Carnot cycle (for a physical parameter): not only in theory but also in practice! (In free market economies the inflation cannot be directly held constant).
But inflation may also refer to dark energy mentioned at the isotonic expansion section above. Inflation in cosmology is a theory of the exponential expansion of space in the early universe, an effect associated with the "accelerating universe" and for which findings the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was given. The National Geographic blog entry Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 – The Accelerating Universe explains that "...Today, most physicists, influenced by inflation, would ... call it dark energy."
4. Decline and fall. The gas diminishes and goes into the West while remaining Galadriel, completing the cycle.
Galadriel is a character in The Lord of the Rings . She is one of the leading elves , a race that in the time of the book is said to be dwindling (in number and importance) in Middle Earth and migrating westward to Valinor . Galadriel is one of the last elves to leave, after successfully resisting temptation to take the One Ring and become an all-powerful queen who dominates Middle-earth, instead saying "I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel." The title may be a reference to Edward Gibbon 's 18th century masterpiece The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , or to the novel Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (which is itself a reference to Gibbon's book). This stage is present in the cycle because in the real cycle, at this stage, volume of the gas decreases without exchange of heat. It is the last stage after which the gas has its original value of variables, thus completing the cycle.
The title text refers to Richard Wagner and J.R.R Tolkien . Wagner's Ring Cycle consists of four operas. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings , which some have suggested was inspired by Wagner's Ring. Their works are known as literary cycles .
[A cartesian plot in the first quadrant with axes labeled "P" on the vertical axis and "V" on the horizontal axis, with a rhombus-shaped set of four points with arrows between them.] [Caption above the graph:] The four stages of the Carnot Cycle
[The first line starts at the top-left point and goes right and slightly downwards to the next point. The label is:] 1. Isometric Expansion When heated, the gas becomes larger due to increasing volume
[The next line starts at the last point and goes downwards and a little to the right.] 2. Isotonic Expansion The gas expands further due to dark energy while percent milkfat remains constant
[The next line starts at this last point and goes to the left and slightly upwards.] 3. Isopropyl Compression While inflation is held constant, the gas contracts due to tightening interest rates
[The last line goes upwards and slightly to the left, returning to the first point.] 4. Decline and Fall The gas diminishes and goes into the west while remaining Galadriel, completing the cycle