Hawaii

Explanation:
On January 13, 2018, the state of Hawaii sent out an emergency alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile attack. The message was specifically noted to NOT be a drill. This caused widespread panic and fear amongst the island residents, and there were follow-up confirmations from local entities who thought the original warning was real. It was eventually determined that the alert was sent in error -- the explanation being that a technician accidentally sent out the "real" version when they were supposed to be testing the system during an end-of-shift changeover -- but the fact that it took around 15 minutes for the correction to be sent drew widespread criticism. On January 23, it was revealed that the governor of Hawaii knew the alert was a false alarm only two minutes after it was sent, but couldn't notify the public because he had forgotten the login information for his Twitter account.
The proliferation of online services requiring authentication, together with variations in security requirements, various flavours of Multi-factor authentication , a variety of password retrieval methods, and security advice not to re-use passwords across services, has resulted in the management and memorisation of passwords becoming a major headache for many people. This comic shows Cueball, representing the governor, frantically trying to retrieve his log in to Twitter and encountering a number of common frustrations:
Off-panel, another person is adding to the stress of his situation by screaming at him that people are beginning to panic and warning sirens are going off, underscoring the need to get the correction out as fast as possible. As the caption under the comic indicates, Randall has had a nightmare along these (very specific) lines, and is amused to find someone experiencing that nightmare in the real world.
The alt-text refers to USB security keys, physical USB devices that act as tangible 'passwords' for various accounts or devices. (A traditional key of shaped metal is literally a tangible password, with each digit of the password releasing one tumbler of a physical lock; Electronic keys replace the key-and-tumbler password system with a digital password signal.) In the context of this comic, the governor attempts to sign into his Twitter account using one such key, but can't insert it into his computer correctly (as USB devices are infamous for needing to be inserted in a particular orientation despite having a symmetrical outer appearance; also known as USB superposition .) Trying to flip the key around, Cueball drops it into a vent - similar to what happens in 1518: Typical Morning Routine .
[Cueball is standing, slightly crouched, at a desk with one hand on a laptop and the other holding his phone.] Off-screen voice: Hurry! Cueball: It keeps saying "Wrong Password!" I've tried everything it might be! Off-screen voice: The clock is ticking! Cueball: I requested a reset but haven't gotten it! Which email did I use?! Off-screen voice: Sirens are going off!! Cueball: It's not in my password manager! Is it in a browser? Which browser? Is Autofill synced to my phone?? Off-screen voice: OH MY GOD THE SCREAMING!!
[Caption below the panel:] I feel bad for everyone in Hawaii, but when the governor couldn't get into his Twitter account, he lived out one of my very specific nightmares in real life.
The Hawaii emergency agency also might have password problems. In a news article from June 2017 there was a photo showing an agency employee standing beside his own computer, which sports a password on a sticky note. This caused further criticism of the agency security practices .


Night Sky

Explanation:
With the increasing ubiquity of connected devices in people's lives have come concerns about the social and mental effects this is having. A common trend in lifestyle advice is the idea of " unplugging " and getting away from technology, with the idea that this can improve one's sense of wellbeing, and allow a focus on the important things in life, such as asking the "big" existential questions .
Cueball and Megan are taking one such activity: a nighttime walk without their phones. However, rather than being grandiose, the questions they ask are increasingly immediate to their current situation. Far from finding the experience liberating, they find it first frustrating, as they no longer have access to useful features of their phones, such as mapping with GPS, which would help them find their way, and a flashlight, which would let them see where they were going, and then unsettling, as without their devices to distract them they begin to imagine dangers, such as mountain lions , lurking in the darkness.
The fact that Megan enthusiastically affirms that those really are the "big questions" of life reveals that they are sarcastically teasing each other about their regrettable decision.
The reference to mountain lions might be related to the declaration that eastern cougars were officially declared extinct the day before this comic was published.
The title text claims that technology is so omnipresent that even the threatening mountain lion has a phone and is reading Facebook (and, therefore, is not so threatening, since it now can not notice them). Alternatively, either Cueball or Megan might be teasing the other.
[Cueball and Megan are walking under the night sky.] Megan: The internet is so overwhelming for me these days. It feels like everyone I know is yelling all the time.
[Frame is zoomed out. Stars are visible in the sky.] Megan: That's why it's so nice to unplug. Leave the phones at home, go for a walk, and look up at the stars. Megan: It helps you focus on what really matters.
[Frame is zoomed in again.] Cueball: Like "Where the hell are we?" Megan: And "Why did I leave my phone at home? It has my map and flashlight." Cueball: "Are there mountain lions around here? Did you hear a twig break?" Megan: Yeah, the big questions!


Campaign Fundraising Emails

Explanation:
Many politicians and organizations in the United States have taken to using email  to conduct aggressive fundraising drives seeking campaign contributions. Signing a petition or expressing interest in a cause can lead to being added to a myriad of mailing lists for similar groups, all looking for support. This comic shows a caricature of the kind of inbox that can result from this. The emails get more and more absurd as the list goes on. For example, the last one combines a request for campaign contributions with the infamous 'Nigerian prince' advance-fee scam phishing scheme.
[An e-mail inbox window is displayed. On each line appears an illegible e-mail address and a checkbox.] Donate now. It's crunch time, and we're low on cash. If you chip in just $5 by midnight, we… Donate $35.57 now! Our data team has determined that we should ask you for $35.57 to optimize the… Help. Our campaign made some mistakes and we need a lot of money ASAP. Any kind, but cash is… Washington is broken. When I win, I'll look those other senators in the eye and tell them: "Jobs." Then I… Hopeless. It's bad. Really bad. If you don't chip in now, the darkness spreading across the land will… As the first woman to fly a fighter jet through our state's formerly all-male university, I learned… We're broke. No paid staff. No ads. And the cafe has told us to stop using their wifi to send fundraising… When Amy decided to run for Congress, I was like "Huh?" but I checked Wikipedia, and apparently it's a branch of… Are you familiar with the Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch? His work illustrates my opponent's plan for… Being a single mom running a small business while going to law school while being deployed to Iraq taught me… I will lead the fight against the big banks, special interests, the Earth's climate, and our children. I… Wow. Have you seen this video of the squirrel obstacle course? Incredible! Anyway, I'm running because I… Outrageous. Granted, this was a few years ago, but did you hear what President Ford said about… Whoops. Due to a typo, we spent months running attack ads against Tom Hanks. Now, we need to make up for… They say we can't win— that we're "underdogs" with "no money" who "lost the election last week." But they don't… Our campaign's only chance is to seduce Jennifer ActBlue, heir to the ActBlue fortune. For that, we need a fancy… Doom. Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed, like rain on… Warmest greetings. I am the crown prince of Nigeria. I am running for Congress because I believe that…


Fruit Collider

Explanation:
Ponytail is suggesting that exotic new fruit can be created in a similar way to that in which exotic subatomic particles can, by smashing together more common varieties at high speed.
Particle accelerators are used to smash sub-atomic particles together at near-light speeds. This can result in a release of enough energy to produce massive exotic particles that do not exist under standard conditions. By examining the results, physicists can test theories in physics and, sometimes, unexpected consequences can force them to revise existing theories. When explaining particle accelerators to the general public, this kind of experiment is sometimes explained with a fruit analogy. For example, the University of Oxford's " Accelerate! " show says "It's like throwing together two apples really really hard and getting three bananas and a mango." In this comic strip, the analogy is taken literally, and claims that several interesting new types of fruit have been created.
Pineapples with apple skin.
The tough, spiny skin of pineapples makes them (almost) impossible to eat without a knife and, while high in fiber, can be a danger to the intestinal tract and is commonly considered inedible. Nevertheless, many people really like the taste of them. Creating a variety with the skin of an apple would allow them to be enjoyed without the usual inconvenience.
Pomegranates full of grapes .
A pomegranate is a large berry containing a large number of seeds with fleshy coverings. Many people find the high seed-to-flesh ratio offputting when eating them. If these were replaced with grapes, this ratio would be much lower; if it were a seedless variety of grape, it could be zero.
Watermelon -sized peaches .
This could be a reference to the Roald Dahl story James and the Giant Peach , or Randall may just really like peaches, as shown in 388: Fuck Grapefruit .
Strawberry banana [title text]
Strawberry and banana is a popular flavor combination for yogurts and smoothies. The "massive collider" in Europe refers to the Large Hadron Collider , the largest particle accelerator in the world. However the Large Hadron Collider was built to investigate the relationship between matter and forces [1] , and not to search for a strawberry banana [ citation needed ] .
Many fruit-based snacks and drinks will derive flavors from fruit blends. These are generally created by mixing the juice, or artificial substitute flavorings, of two separate, individual fruits, rather than by attempting to create a new fruit by smashing the constituent fruits together. Some man-made hybrid fruits have been created via cross-breeding, grafting, and genetic engineering. It is notable that fruiting plants are generally far more capable of mixing genes across species than animals are. It is often quite possible to produce a hybrid of two fairly distantly related fruits by forcing the pollen of one to fertilize the ovary of another, or even splicing the bulk of the genes together. Of course, this would be more likely to happen in a high-energy collision of their reproductive parts, rather than their fruits. Smashing two fruits together at high speeds will usually result in a sticky mess rather than a new fruit hybrid, as recognised in the title text.
It should be noted that the hypothesis presented in this strip has now been tested by The Slow Mo Guys .
[Ponytail points with a stick at a graph hanging on the wall. It depicts a collision of two apples producing a banana, a bunch of grapes, a cherry, three strawberries, and one product which is too small to distinguish clearly but which may be a single grape or berry.] Ponytail: When two apples collide, they can briefly form exotic new fruit. Pineapples with apple skin. Pomegranates full of grapes. Watermelon-sized peaches. Ponytail: These normally decay into a shower of fruit salad, but by studying the debris, we can learn what was produced. Ponytail: Then, the hunt is on for a stable form.
[Caption below the panel:] How new types of fruit are developed
Randall has previously indicated that he finds pineapple tasty but very hard to eat in 388: Fuck Grapefruit .
This comic was published on the Jewish holiday for the trees, Tu BiShvat (Hebrew: טו בשבט) , on which it is traditional to eat exotic fruits.


Chicken Pox and Name Statistics

Explanation:
This is another comic with one of Randall's fun facts .
In this comic statistics are used to point out some non-intuitive correlations.  The first panel sketches out the prevalence of chicken pox by age in the United States . As the graph indicates, prior to the introduction of the varicella vaccine in the United States, it was an exceptionally common childhood illness, with almost 100% of the population experiencing it at some point. The illness is highly memorable (since the symptoms last for days and are intensely uncomfortable) and noticeable (since the characteristic blisters are distinctive and difficult to hide), meaning that it was once a common experience that people expected to both experience and see in their peers. As the vaccine became widespread in the US, rates of varicella infection declined dramatically, and new infections are now relatively uncommon. The graph points out that this has led to a fundamental shift in experiences by age. For an American over the age of 30, nearly all your peers growing up would have had chicken pox. For an American under the age of 10, virtually none of them would have had it. This means that older people are likely to think of chicken pox as a normal part of life, while children are likely to have no experience with it, and may not even know what it is.
The second, seemingly unrelated graph, charts the popularity of certain names over time, in the US. It's normal and expected for certain names to rise and fall in popularity over time, which means that the number of people with those names ends up clustered by age. The names "Sarah" and "Brian" have gone from being highly popular to relatively uncommon for new babies, meaning that people with those names are much likelier to be older. Names like "Logan", "Brooklyn", "Jaxon" and "Harper" went from being virtually unused to having a spurt of popularity, meaning that (as of 2018) people with those names are much more likely to be under the age of 15 than over it.
The final panel points out that these trends, taken together, generate the interesting effect that you can, in some cases, estimate the odds of someone having had chicken pox, based solely on their first name. Having a name like "Brian" or "Sarah" raises the odds that you're over 30, which raises the odds that you had chicken pox. People named "Harper" or "Jaxon" are almost certainly young enough to have grown up with the vaccine in broad use.  These time-based trends predict both the odds of a person having had the illness personally, and the odds that they grew up in a time when infections were common and generally expected.
The cartoon demonstrates the correlative fallacy, i.e. what can go wrong if one attempts to draw conclusions based on a random comparison of two variables, as described by the famous saying: " Correlation does not imply causation ". In this case, there's a real correlation between names and the incidence of a particular disease. A superficial reading could suggest that either certain names make people prone to the disease, or that the disease, in some way, impacts a person's name. The real cause of this correlation is simply that certain trends just happen to coincide, causing them to statistically correlate without either variable having a real causal affect on the other.
The citations are real articles. The first citation DOI:10.15585/mmwr.mm6534a4 is on the Center for Disease Control (CDC) web site at [1] and the second citation DOI:10.1016/j.vaccine.2012.05.050 is an article in Vaccine at [2] . Both articles describe the effects of the vaccine for varicella which is the virus that causes chicken pox and shingles (also known as herpes zoster).
The title text states that people with all six of the names in the last panel (and indeed, most people in general) tend to think that it's weird we have teeth after thinking about it for a while, but that people named Trevor don't in an unexplained statistical anomaly. Teeth are a normal and near-universal part of the human anatomy (and that of many other animals). Like many aspects of biology, they're generally taken for granted, but can seem "weird" if you think about them too much. Randall has often demonstrated a tendency to over-analyze typical aspects of life until they become troubling. Here, he jokes that people with one particular name (Trevor) don't experience this, for unexplained statistical reasons.  This is, of course, fictional. The joke comes from the fact that, were that claim true, it would be as random and as hard to believe as the real phenomenon that the comic addresses.
[The first panel shows graph with only the x-axis labeled and with seven labeled ticks. The y-axis has three ticks with percentage labels. A red line rises from bottom to top as it goes from left to right. There is an arrow pointing at the graph with a label. Above the left part of the red line there is a title and beneath that a reference to the source of the data in gray font.] [According to the graph, the percentage is close to 0 for ages below 15 and close to 100 for ages above 30.] Fraction of kids your age who got chicken pox (Very rough US estimates based on DOI:10.15585/mmwr.mm6534a4 and DOI:10.1016/j.vaccine.2012.05.050) 100% 50% 0% Your age: 5  10  15  20  25  30  35 Vaccine introduced in 1995
[The second panel shows a graph with only the x-axis labeled and with seven labeled ticks. The graph has six gray lines with labels on them. To the right is a title and beneath that a reference to the source of the data in gray font.] [According to the graphs, Sarah and Brian are more popular names for older age groups.] Relative popularity of several names in your age group (Source: ssa.gov) Harper Sarah Jaxon Brian Brooklyn Logan Your age: 5  10  15  20  25  30  35
[The third panel shows a list of names with a percentage next to them. Above the list is a title and beneath that a statement in gray font:] Chicken pox incidence by name: (Very rough estimate) Brian: 75% Sarah: 60% Logan: 20% Brooklyn: 10% Jaxon: 4% Harper: 2%
[Caption below the panels:] Fun Fact: People named "Sarah" and "Brian" think chicken pox is normal and common, and people named "Logan" and "Harper" do not.


Super Bowl Watch Party

Explanation:
The Super Bowl is the annual championship game of the National Football League (NFL), the highest level of professional American football . In late January or early February each year, the winner of the American Football Conference (AFC) plays the winner of the National Football Conference (NFC) to determine the champion. In Super Bowl LII held on Sunday, February 4, (the day before this comic's release), the NFC champion Philadelphia Eagles defeated the AFC champion New England Patriots 41-33. Based on its wide-reaching cultural impact, the Super Bowl is the single most important American football game of the year.  Over a hundred million people (across the world) watch it, many of whom are not even fans of American football.
Many people have parties centered on watching the game. The full game lasts around four hours, including breaks for advertisements and a halftime.  The halftime show of the Superbowl includes a live musical performance, and is generally considered one of the most prestigious shows in the country, meaning it will generally be an elaborate show by a particularly popular artist or group.  Because of the high viewership of the Superbowl, advertising time is very expensive ($5 million for a 30-second national spot, as of 2019). This has led to companies putting substantial resources into producing the commercials, to make them as memorable as possible. The net effect is that the halftime show and the commercials, despite being interruptions to the game, have become attractions in their own right, with some viewers tuning in primarily, or even solely, to watch them.
Cueball and Megan (on the couch) have such a Super Bowl Watch Party going with their friends (hence the title), but in order to watch the game so that the end will be at the start of the next game, they have slowed down the broadcast so the game takes an entire year to watch. Television in the United States is broadcast at 29.97 frames per second (usually rounded up to 30fps) and takes four hours, for a total of 431568 frames. But by slowing the video down by a factor of 2300, the show would last a full year. (Actually it would last 33,119,967 seconds which is 383 days, 18 days more than a year. To make it last a year, minus 4 hours, it should be slowed down a factor of 2189). Each frame would be shown for about 76.7 seconds. Each day of watching the slow video would cover just under 40 seconds of "actual" time. With this method of viewing, the watchers are instead reduced to analyzing the game frame-by-frame, which may make it easier to understand the sequence of events, but also creates a feeling of tedium. [ citation needed ]
Due to this extension creating a lack of variety, Megan tries to make it interesting by guessing the next frame shown will be a cut to a different camera angle. Cuts happen frequently during the broadcast, especially when the ball is not in play, and these cuts may be marked by a black screen. If this is the case, then the cut will be around a minute of nothing to look at at this speed. Megan has a relatively high probability (albeit still incredibly low, with cuts being less than one in every 1000 frames) of being right simply by chance that the next frame will be a cut, but Cueball's tired comment that she always guesses that indicates that the game is so slow or the cuts are so rare that she is almost never correct.
Ponytail asks if they think the first ad block will come out before the end of February, about 20 days after the start of the Super Bowl show. The ads and halftime show are considered integral parts of the broadcast, and many advertisers debut elaborate commercials especially for this game, since so many people watch it. Many people claim to watch the Super Bowl only for the commercial breaks, as mentioned in 60: Super Bowl , and the anticipation for these is exaggerated for this game, as the wait is much longer with the extended broadcast. (In exchange, however, the commercials will be longer, too.)
The title text refers to how, during a commercial break during the 2018 Super Bowl, only blackness was broadcast for 28 seconds due to equipment failure at NBC.  At the rate they watch it would last almost 18 hours as described (17 hours 53 minutes).
In previous comics regarding the Super Bowl, Randall has explained that he now watches the Super Bowl ( 1480: Super Bowl ), despite previously expressing a lack of interest in the game ( 60: Super Bowl ) or any other sport ( 1107: Sports Cheat Sheet ). A slowly updating video is similar to the concept behind 1190: Time , and is also reminiscent of Douglas Gordon's 1993 art installation 24 Hour Psycho . Also, As Slow as Possible is an organ piece that is currently played in a German church - it will end in 2640, after 639 years of continuous playing. The theme of a group becoming interested in frame-by-frame shots is reminiscent of 915: Connoisseur . Related to frame-by-frame film watching is the Cinema interruptus concept used by film critic Roger Ebert at the Conference on World Affairs , where you first watch a film at normal speed, without interruptions, and then you watch it again, over several afternoons - while everybody present can stop the film at any time, and have a discussion about anything related to the scene. This is also a method that coaches use to discuss recordings of games.
[A woman, looking like Megan, walks up to a group of people watching TV. Cueball and Megan (with shorter hair than the walking woman) are sitting on a couch. A Cueball-like guy sits in front of them, while Ponytail lies on the ground, head resting on a hand, in front of a TV, which is quite far from the couch.] Woman: Morning. How's the game? Cueball: Eagles got to the 26-yard line around midnight.  They've been walking across the field since then.  Just entered a huddle. Megan: I bet the next frame will be a cut. Guy on floor: You always say that. Ponytail: Do you think the first ads will come by the end of February?
[Caption below the comic:] I'm at a year-round Super Bowl watch party. We're playing the stream at 1 / 2300x speed, so it will end just as next year's Super Bowl starts.


Backpack Decisions

Explanation:
Cueball , probably representing Randall , is having issues choosing a good backpack. He notices their different features and is indecisive. After presumably spending a long time choosing, he is able to narrow his choices down to two backpacks, only to discover that another backpack had the extra feature of being waterproof, a criterion he had not up to then been accounting for. This has made him more indecisive. Frustrated by the extra information load, he considers giving up on backpacks to take another look at messenger bags. Disregarding that thought, he decides to start over, evaluating all of the backpacks again considering the new information. Clearly he is spending a lot of time on this, and the chart below shows that he spends more time unsure of what backpack to pick than of any other major choice, such as a college or a car. This is unusual, since differences between backpacks impact one's life much less than those between colleges or cars. [ citation needed ]
A backpack and its features, or lack thereof, might impact a person on a more ongoing and intimate basis than a college choice (which, for Randall, was a long time ago) or a car (if your view of cars mainly concerns their function) in certain situations. A perfectionist technology geek, such as Cueball or Randall (as Cueball is implied to be) would likely remember, every time he used his backpack, the satisfaction of having found the perfect backpack, or the disappointment of being unable to do so.
The title text is Cueball having a conversation (or thinking to himself) about a backpack, which seems (absurdly) to be made of heavy tungsten mesh. In fact, at 85 pounds (39 kg), it is so heavy that Cueball thinks he will need to carry it around in a cart, defeating the purpose of the backpack. However, Cueball considers it simply because of the perfect pocket arrangement, which he cannot use anyway, due to the backpack's heaviness. The explanation about the pocket arrangement is written in all caps , indicating that Cueball is yelling from pure excitement at the pocket arrangement.
[Cueball stands in front of a store display with 17 backpacks and a couple of boxes on the shelf. He has pulled two backpacks down, and they sit at his feet along with a messenger bag (or satchel) behind him. He thinks to himself:] It's down to two: the one with the charger pocket and the one with— Wait, that other one is waterproof! Ugh. Do I even want a backpack? Maybe I should be looking at messenger bags again. OK, starting over.
[Caption below the comic:] Amount of time I’ve spent paralyzed by indecision over choosing the right… [A bar graph is shown. Each label is followed by a black bar representing the amount of time:] College [short bar that is 40 pixels wide] Phone [short bar that is 26 pixels wide] Apartment [short bar that is 33 pixels wide] Car [shortest bar, 20 pixels wide] Laptop [second longest bar, 46 pixels wide] Backpack [longest bar, 202 pixels wide]
Previous comics explained that decision paralysis might happen because there are detailed reviews online for the items (in 1036: Reviews ), you have very similar options and unlimited internet access (in 1801: Decision Paralysis ), or just that you're a nerd (in 309: Shopping Teams ).


The History of Unicode

Explanation:
An encoding of a character set is a mapping from characters to numbers.  For example, the letter "A" might be represented by the value 65.  A problem was that each script had its own character set.  Different characters could be represented by the same value.  Some languages, such as Japanese, had several inconsistent character encodings, so before people could send text, they would have to have agreed which character set to use. Unicode was planned as a way of solving this by providing for a single character encoding for all the various characters used in the world's languages.
Unicode is run by a consortium of major technology companies and stakeholders. The founders of Unicode include Joe Becker , who worked for Xerox in the 1980s.  He has a beard and may be the character featured in the first and third panels.
New characters have continued to be added to Unicode, and recently many " emoji " (picture characters) have been added.  Emoji were originally added to be compatible with text message encodings in Japan, but after devices in other countries started supporting them as part of Unicode, they caught on worldwide.  Now emoji characters are added for their own sake, not just for compatibility.
The lobster emoji , 🦞, was approved as part of Unicode 11, for release in 2018. This comic was published in 10 February 2018.
This comic shows the creator of Unicode talking about how it would change the way we thought about managing text, which could help with incompatible binary text encoding.  This seems to have derailed over the next 30 years, as shown in a real tweet from the junior Senator from Maine , Angus King . In the tweet , Sen. King writes that he is excited that the system is getting a new lobster emoji, showing that now the Unicode system is used for more frivolous reasons. He even signs using two emoji to form his name. There is a cattle breed called Angus cattle , so the cow emoji, 🐮, stands for "Angus", and the crown emoji, 👑, of course represents "King". Thus Angus King becomes 🐮👑. This is thus not part of the xkcd joke; it just uses the real tweet for comic effect. The tweet was released February 7th, only two days before this comic; the second comment on the tweet posted this comic and asked which came first, but of course the tweet did. A user comments that Senator King should see it as a badge of honor (🎖) to have his tweet included in an xkcd strip...
The title text imagines that Unicode will gain other unexpected roles in the next 30 years.  In particular it acts as an armed force, capable of intervening in military disputes, such as an annexation of Maine by its neighbor, New Hampshire.  The title text ends with three Unicode emoji: "🙏" code point 1F64F "PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS", "🚁" code point 1F681 "HELICOPTER", and "🎖" code point 1F396 "MILITARY MEDAL", suggesting that they are thanking them for their effort in the war, sending helicopters and soldiers to aid them against New Hampshire. The phrase "we're once again an independent state" may also be a political pun, as 2048 should be an election year, and King is an Independent senator.
[1988:] [A bearded man holds a document labeled "Unicode". Most likely he represents Joe Becker.] Bearded man: My "Unicode" standard should help reduce problems caused by incompatible binary text encodings.
[2018:] [A tweet from Twitter is shown. To the left of Senator Angus King's name is his avatar (a face with a mustache) and to the right is the blue checkmark used by Twitter to signify a verified user.] Senator Angus King @SenAngusKing Great news for Maine - we're getting a lobster emoji!!! Thanks to @unicode for recognizing the impact of this critical crustacean, in Maine and across the country. Yours truly, Senator 🐮👑 2/7/18 3:12 PM
[Cueball and the bearded man (the latter now grey-haired) are looking at a wall with the Unicode standard, labeled "1988", and Senator King's tweet, labeled "2018", posted on it.] Cueball: What... what happened in those thirty years? Bearded man: Things got a little weird, okay?


Impostor Syndrome

Explanation:
Impostor syndrome is a common psychological phenomenon where successful individuals are unable to internalize their success and fear being exposed as a "fraud" or "impostor." Events and accomplishments that would seem to be evidence of competence, skill, intelligence, and so forth, are instead viewed (by the person) as luck, timing, and the ability to appear more confident/competent than they actually are.
Ponytail , representing Dr. Adams, is introduced by Megan as "the world's top expert on impostor syndrome." Dr. Adams then demonstrates that she herself (like a relatively large number of women according to some reports [1] ) is afflicted by this syndrome. She realizes this after she reacts to the flattering introduction by starting about "other scholars" whom she deems to be superior to her.
The Dunning–Kruger effect , mentioned in the title text, is a cognitive bias wherein people who possess comparatively little direct expertise in a given field may unrealistically inflate their estimation of their own level of expertise in that field; while those who actually are highly competent (and especially experts on the topic at hand) are likely to downplay their level of expertise. This cognitive bias arises when people of low relevant ability lack the practical knowledge to validly assess their competence: The criteria for good or poor performance in a given field may not be weighed accurately by someone lacking direct expertise and formal training in that specific field. For instance, a commuter experienced in filtering through traffic quickly may consider themselves to be excellent at driving, while a professional evaluating driving habits may observe adherence to regulations and best practices for safety to be the primary criteria for being a "good" driver.
Conversely, people with extensive knowledge of a given field may develop an acute awareness of the necessarily limited scope of their (or any one person's) expertise. While this effect primarily refers to cognitive ability, it is also sometimes used to refer to people who are competent in one area (and thus not lacking metacognitive skills) believing that their abilities grant them unusually-high aptitude in a different but seemingly related area.
In practice, more expertise still largely correlates to higher confidence in one's expertise (that is to say that competence remains positively correlated with an individual's perception of their own competence), but a lack of the appropriate cognitive skills can result in that perception of competence starting at a high level yet increasing at a slower rate. However, in popular usage, the Dunning–Kruger effect is used to claim that a negative correlation exists, and that non-experts will claim expertise and confidence at a higher overall level than actual experts.
In the title text, a conference for the Dunning–Kruger effect was having trouble, presumably because the actual researchers were downplaying their knowledge and expertise to the point where they refused to be the keynote speaker, while the random undergrads (who lack experience in the topic) felt sufficiently confident in their knowledge of it to give the keynote. This more closely matches both the secondary usage (as undergrads are unlikely to lack metacognitive skills, but may inflate their understanding) and the popular usage (as the confidence is inverse to the actual competence) than the primary and in-practice observance made in the original research.
[Megan points at Ponytail and introduces her to Cueball.] Megan: This is Dr. Adams. She's a social psychologist and the world's top expert on impostor syndrome. Dr. Adams: Haha, don't be silly! There are lots of scholars who have made more significant… Dr. Adams: …Oh my God.


Robots

Explanation:
This comic refers to a YouTube video posted one day earlier by robotics company Boston Dynamics . The video shows a quadruped robot with a roughly canine form approach a door, then stop and 'look' to the side where a second robot appears, which has an articulated arm attachment on top. This robot sizes up the door, then uses its arm to grasp the handle and open the door. It holds the door open for the first robot, then follows it through the doorway.
The video was extremely popular, receiving over four million views in the first day. Many social media comments joked that humanity is doomed, as the robots we are developing will soon become capable enough to rise up and overthrow us. This is a common jest or anxiety expressed when robots manage to master a task that previously had given them difficulty. It is especially appropriate here, since the ability to open doors is extremely useful when dealing with humans. Randall has previously made the point that a robot uprising would promptly fail because most robots couldn't successfully open doors (or even successfully negotiate thresholds, in some cases). This latest advance seems to specifically undercut that assurance.
After Cueball sees this video, he reiterates the same line by saying that we're definitely going to die. Megan , however, offers an alternative view: that in fact, due to human nature, it is the robots that are in mortal peril from this technological development, not humans, since humans tend to respond aggressively to potential threats.
Taking Megan's point, Cueball sarcastically suggests that humans don't tend to overreact violently to perceived threats, to which Megan replies, equally sarcastically, that she must be thinking of another species.
The title text may refer to the Mad Scientist or Evil Genius tropes in science fiction, where someone builds an army of robots with the intent of using them to take over the world. Alternatively, the title text could refer to the real life phenomena of military programs expending enormous resources to develop unmanned offensive capabilities, such as the Predator drone and SWORDS mobile weapon platform . In the latter context, it may be sensible to show concern with the methods, reasoning, motivations, and long-term stability of people directing the development of potentially lethal robots. Boston Dynamics is one of the foremost innovators in the field of military-grade automation.
[Cueball is sitting at his desk in an office chair pointing to his laptop while looking back over his shoulder talking to Megan off-panel.] Cueball: Did you see this Boston Dynamics robot video? Cueball: We're definitely all gonna die.
[Megan walks in to the panel towards Cueball who still looks at her, but stops pointing.] Megan: You know, it's funny. Megan: Humans see a robot open a door, and we all instantly assume we're in mortal peril.
[Zoom in on the heads of Megan and Cueball, both now looking at the off-panel screen.] Megan: So doesn't it make more sense to say the robots are all gonna die? Cueball: Violently overreacting to a perceived threat? That doesn't sound like humans. Megan: Yeah, I must be thinking of some other species.
Possibly coincidentally, approximately seven weeks before this video and strip, the series " Black Mirror " released an episode entitled " Metalhead ". The episode set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are hunted by robots highly reminiscent of this line of Boston Dynamics robots. Clearly, the concept of these robots becoming a threat isn't unique to XKCD.


Unification

Explanation:
In physics, the fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces, are the interactions that do not appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. There are four fundamental interactions known to exist: the gravitational and electromagnetic interactions, which produce significant long-range forces whose effects can be seen directly in everyday life, and the strong and weak interactions, which produce forces at minuscule, subatomic distances and govern nuclear interactions. Some scientists speculate that a fifth force might exist, but, if so, it is not widely accepted nor proven.
This comic lists five physical forces (it split up electricity and magnetism), but also includes a number of other things (two countries and three businesses) that are known for "unifying" in a non-physics sense. East and West Germany united politically in 1990 , more than forty years after being divided at the end of World War II . Entertainment company Disney has united in a business sense with a number of others over the years; the comic mentions animation studio Pixar and the Star Wars franchise. The comic states that this is the progress toward unifying the fundamental forces of nature, which is absurd, with the addition of Disney and Germany , neither of which is one of the fundamental forces. [ citation needed ] Star Wars is, of course, all about The Force , but this has, for some reason, gone unnoticed by most physicists.
The title text jokes that some physicists tried to unify the force of gravity with the 2013 movie Gravity , starring Sandra Bullock . Of course, this is also absurd, but it turns out that this is just another jab by Randall at George Lucas for selling his rights to Star Wars to Disney . The jab comes when he makes it clear that the director of Gravity Alfonso Cuarón would refuse to sell the rights to his film to Disney, even if he was held in underground chamber of water for 10 31 years.
This water chamber and incredible time span is a reference to Proton decay , which is being investigated by trying to detect the Cherenkov radiation that could occur from possible decay of protons in water. These measurements are being conducted in immense water tanks buried under mountains to protect them against similar signals that could result from cosmic radiation. The same type of tanks have been used to detect neutrinos .
The half life of protons is currently believed to be between 10 31 –10 36 years. This should be compared to the age of the universe at around 1.3×10 10 years, which means that one second compared to the age of the universe is larger than the age of the universe compared to the smallest suggested half life of the proton (as used in the comic) by a factor of about 10,000, but even this time would not make Cuarón cave in...
[Ten rounded frames with text inside are shown in two rows. Below each frame there is a line going down and then this line either joins with one or two of the other frames lines or in two cases do not joins with any other. At the bottom of the panel the now five remaining lines turn towards the center of the bottom of the panel and ends in arrows that points towards three question marks. The first three frames' lines are unified, same goes for the next two, and the three after that. The lines of the last two are not joined with any other lines. The text in the transcript is given as it appears from left to right, disregarding if it is the top or bottom row, but this will alternate through the ten frames, starting with one up, then one down etc.]
[Group one, starting with up:] Electricity Magnetism Weak force
[Group two starting with down:] East Germany West Germany
[Group three starting with down:] Star Wars Disney Pixar
[Two single frames, the first is up:] Strong force Gravity
[All five arrows points to this:] ???
[Caption below the panel:] Progress toward unifying the fundamental forces of nature


2018 CVE List

Explanation:
CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) is a standardized format for assigning an identity to a cybersecurity vulnerability (similar to the way that astronomical bodies are assigned unique identifiers by committees). Giving vulnerabilities a unique identifier makes them easier to talk about and helps in keeping track of the progress made toward resolving them. The typical format of a CVE identifier is CVE-[YEAR]-[NUMBER] . For example, the CVE identifier for 2017's widespread Meltdown vulnerability is CVE-2017-5754 . CVEs also contain a short description of the issue.
In this comic (released in February 2018), Randall presents a number of spurious predicted CVEs for later in 2018. Each CVE identifier is given as "CVE-2018-?????", reflecting the fact that they have not yet happened so we don't know exactly what their CVE identifier will be.
Following are short descriptions of all the vulnerabilities mentioned in the comic.
Apple products crash when displaying certain Telugu or Bengali letter combinations. This refers to a real vulnerability in iOS and MacOS publicized a few days before the comic was released, as well as past similar iOS vulnerabilities. An attacker can use a timing attack to extploit [ sic ] a race condition in garbage collection to extract a limited number of bits from the Wikipedia article on Claude Shannon. The reference to using a Timing Attack to exploit a race condition in garbage collection refers to Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws that can be exploited in a cloud server like the ones in Wikipedia. Claude Shannon was an early and highly influential information scientist whose work underlies compression, encryption, security, and the theory behind how information is encoded into binary digits. This is not a security problem, since Wikipedia articles are public. However, since Shannon formulated how the amount of unique or actual information some entity contains is proportional to the number of bits required to encode it, retrieving only a few bits casts a dark perspective upon the significance of the Shannon article's content. At the cafe on Third Street, the Post-it note with the WiFi password is visible from the sidewalk. Cafés often offer free access to WiFi as a service to patrons, as a business strategy to encourage said patrons to remain in the building and buy more coffee. Some use a password, so that only patrons can use the WiFi, and may display the password on signage inside. Since anybody could go into the cafe to read the post-it, and then use the network from nearby, the ability to read it from outside is, at most, a trivial problem. For systems that are supposed to be secure, writing passwords in a visible place is a major security flaw. For instance, following the 2018 Hawaii false missile alert , the agency concerned received criticism for a press photo showing a password written on a sticky note attached to a monitor. A remote attacker can inject arbitrary text into public-facing pages via the comments box. Describes a common feature on news sites or social media sites like Facebook. The possibility for users to "inject" text into the page is by design. This is a humorous reference to the relatively common security vulnerability " persistent cross-site scripting ", where input provided by a user, such as through a comment section, can result in dangerous content containing arbitrary HTML or JavaScript code being displayed to other users. MySQL server 5.5.45 secretly runs two parallel databases for people who say "S-Q-L" and "sequel." Some people pronounce " SQL " like "sequel", after SQL's predecessor "SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language)". The standard for SQL suggests that it should be pronounced as separate letters; however, the author of SQL pronounces it "sequel", so the debate persists (with even more justification than arguments about how to pronounce "GIF"). MySQL is an open-source relational database management system. The latest generally available version (at the time of writing) is MySQL 5.7. A flaw in some x86 CPUs could allow a root user to de-escalate to normal account privileges. Privilege escalation refers to any illegitimate means by which a system user gains greater access privileges than they are supposed to have. The most highly-sought privilege is that of the root user, which allows complete access to an entire system— a superuser . Any flaw that would allow an ordinary user to escalate to superuser status is a critical security threat, as they then have full control of the machine. This is what most hackers seek to achieve when attacking a device. This CVE presents the less-threatening reverse situation: allowing a root user to de-escalate to normal account privileges. In fact, root users can already do this at any time; superuser privileges allow them to take control of any user account, so they can simply switch to an account which has fewer privileges than the root user. Apple products catch fire when displaying emoji with diacritics. This is a reference to a common problem of modern gadgets catching fire (usually related to flaws in lithium-ion batteries), as well as to Apple products crashing when attempting to display certain character sequences. Diacritics are the accents found on letters in some languages (eg. č, ģ ķ, ļ, ņ, š, ž). These would not normally be found on emojis [ citation needed ] . 🔥̃ is an example of such an emoji. An oversight in the rules allows a dog to join a basketball team. This probably refers to the movie Air Bud , about a dog playing basketball. This has been a common theme in xkcd comics: see 115: Meerkat , 1439: Rack Unit , 1819: Sweet 16 , 1552: Rulebook . In 2017, it was discovered that an oversight in the constitution of the state of Kansas may permit a dog to be governor . Shortly before this comic published, the Secretary of State's office ruled that it could not . Haskell isn't side-effect-free after all; the effects are all just concentrated in this one computer in Missouri that no one's checked on in a while. Haskell is a functional programming language. Functional programming is characterized by using functions that don't have side effects because they can not change things accessible in other parts of the program, as in 1312: Haskell . The joke here is discovering that it does indeed have side-effects, manifested via external alteration, not violating the internal alteration paradigm. It may also be a reference to " The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas ," a short story by Ursula Le Guin in which a utopian city concentrates all its misery into one child who is locked away in a basement. Nobody really knows how hypervisors work. "Hypervisors" are a tool for computer virtualization. Virtualization is implemented via various combinations of hardware and/or software, which requires a computer to completely simulate another computer, with its own unique hardware and software, and to varying degrees as to whether or not the virtualization is aware of or can determine whether it is being virtualized. Many IT professionals and businesses rely heavily on various forms of virtualization, but most of the individual employees would be hard-pressed to explain how it works. Programs running on other virtual computers, or on the real computer, may be able to access information on a virtual computer in ways which would not be possible with a single real computer. Consequently, understanding how the hypervisor works is important to assessing the security of a virtual server. Meltdown and Spectre are related to this. Critical: Under Linux 3.14.8 on System/390 in a UTC+14 time zone, a local user could potentially use a buffer overflow to change another user's default system clock from 12-hour to 24-hour. This joke is about arcane systems that are running Linux in exceedingly rare situations, meaning that reproducing errors would be incredibly difficult or inconvenient, and would only affect a very tiny user base (if any at all). System/390 is an IBM mainframe introduced almost 30 years before this comic, which has a version of Linux. UTC+14 is a time zone used only on some islands in the Pacific Ocean (Primarily the Line Islands ) and is also the earliest time zone on Earth. Even if all of these absurd conditions were met, the resulting vulnerability would still be relatively benign: simply changing a user's preferred clock display format. Other xkcd comics make references to such obscure computer-time issues relating to time zones and time conversions, and how many programmers find these issues frustrating or even traumatizing. x86 has way too many instructions. The x86 architecture (used in many Intel and AMD processors) is very complicated. Processors typically implement such a complex architecture using programs (microcode) run on a set of hidden, proprietary processors. The details of these hidden machines and errors in the microcode can result in security vulnerabilities, such as Meltdown, where the physical machine does not match the conceptual machine. A more complicated instruction set is more complex to implement. [ citation needed ] The x86 architecture is considered "CISC" (a " Complex instruction set computer "), having many instructions originally provided to make programming by a human simpler; other examples include the 68000 series used in the first Apple Macintosh . In the 1980s, this design philosophy was countered by the "RISC" (" Reduced instruction set computer ") design movement - based on the observation that computer programs were increasingly generated by compilers (which only used a few instructions) rather than directly by people, and that the chip area dedicated to extra instructions could be better dedicated to, for example, cache. Examples of RISC style designs include SPARC , MIPS , PowerPC (used by Apple in later Macintoshes) and the ARM chips common in mobile phones. Historically, there was considerable discussion about the merits of each approach. At one time the Mac and Windows PC were on different sides; owners of other competing systems such as the Archimedes and Amiga had similar arguments on usenet in the early 1990s. This "issue" may be posted by someone who still recalls these debates. Technically, the extra instructions do slightly complicate the task of validating correct chip behaviour and complicate the tool chains that manage software, which could be seen as a minor security risk. However, the 64-bit architecture introduced by AMD , and since adopted by Intel , does rationalize things somewhat, and all recent x86 chips break down instructions into RISC-like micro-operations, so the complication from a hardware perspective is localized. Recent security issues, such as the speculative cache load issue in Meltdown and Spectre, depend more on details of implementation, rather than instruction set, and have been exhibited both by x86 (CISC) and ARM (RISC) processors. NumPy 1.8.0 can factor primes in O (log n ) time and must be quietly deprecated before anyone notices. Fantastically, this would be an unimaginable software threat, not to be confused with the even speedier, but future-bound, threat in hardware via Quantum computing . NumPy is the fundamental package for scientific computing with the programming language Python. O (log n ) is Big O notation meaning that the time it takes for a computer algorithm to run is in the order of log n , for an input of size n . O (log n ) is very fast and is more usual for a search algorithm. Prime factorization currently is O ( 2 n n)). If something can find the prime factors of a number this quickly, especially a semiprime with two large factors, it will enable attacks to break many crypto functions used in internet security. However, prime numbers have only a single factor, and "factoring primes" quickly is a simpler problem, that of proving that a number is in fact a prime . Apple products grant remote access if you send them words that break the "I before E" rule. Another joke on the first CVE and a common English writing rule of thumb , which fails almost as often as it succeeds. Possibly a jab at Apple's image, portraying their software as unable to handle improper grammar or spelling. Skylake x86 chips can be pried from their sockets using certain flathead screwdrivers. Skylake x86 chips are a line of microprocessors made by Intel. Some processors are soldered directly to a system board or daughter board, while others are attached to boards that plug into the system board by means of a socket (pins or connectors that make physical contact with receptacles or connectors on a system board). Some sockets, especially older ones, require force to insert or remove, and often require the use of a flat blade screwdriver or a specialized tool, but most modern ones use ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) techniques, often involving a lever or similar to tighten or loosen the friction/tightness of the contacts. No screwdriver is needed in this case. However, any processor can be forcefully removed from its socket with a screwdriver. [ citation needed ] Apparently Linus Torvalds can be bribed pretty easily. Linus Torvalds is the benevolent dictator for life of the Linux kernel codebase. Normally it is hard to make changes because he has the last word, and because the kernel is replicated in all Linux installations. Linus made the news in January 2018 when, having looked at one of Intel's proposed fixes for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, he declared " the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE ". Presumably, it may be found that he may be successfully bribed to be less blunt and/or less critical of vulnerability fixes that are complete and/or utter garbage. If this were the case, this would be a severe critical vulnerability to all Linux servers and machines. An attacker can execute malicious code on their own machine and no one can stop them. The point of an attack is to make someone else's machine perform actions against the owner's will. Anyone can make their own machine execute any code if they have root access and the necessary tools, but this would usually not be described as an attack, except in the case of a locked-down appliance, such as a video game console, a John Deere tractor, or pay TV decoder. Apple products execute any code printed over a photo of a dog with a saddle and a baby riding it. This could refer to a CVE vulnerability of JPG files where JavaScript embedded within the image file is executed by some application. In this case, though, the code is visible on the image instead of invisibly encoded within the image file. The code is also only executed if the image contains a photo of a baby in a saddle riding a dog. It's unclear whether the photo would be a digital photo, a printed photo (i.e. as taken using a digital camera), or maybe both. Other than by some metadata , either internal to the image file, or embedded along with it, as in a web page, or a PDF or other container file, this "bug" would require the device to figure out specifically what the photo contains image-wise (something that's REALLY HARD for computers to do reliably), but would also require OCR (optical character recognition) code to convert the text superimposed on the photo into executable code. In other words, it's hard to believe in 2018 that such a bug could exist. Maybe in the future when such things are more routine...? As an example, OCR used to be hard to do reliably, but now it's a lot more routine and built into a lot of devices. Under rare circumstances, a flaw in some versions of Windows could allow Flash to be installed. Adobe Flash has been an integral browser plugin for decades, but has fallen out of favor in the 2010s, and eventually discontinued because of its notoriously abysmal security record. All security experts advise against installing it. Preventing installation of Flash would make systems more secure, but most versions of Windows do not prevent Flash installation (provided, as of 2021, the user still has a copy of the files with which to do so). The joke here relates to the difficulty of keeping Flash up to date, or even installed properly to begin with. A common user experience, which is the subject of numerous jokes and memes, is the constant nagging notification to install or update Flash in order for web pages to display properly. Many IT professionals will bemoan the trouble they have experienced in the workplace due to these notifications and problems related to them. In late 2020, Microsoft released an optional Windows update that removes Flash and prevents users from installing it again. Turns out the cloud is just other people's computers. This refers to a meme that demands that "cloud" be replaced with "other people's computers" in all marketing presentation to CEOs and non-computer literate persons evaluating the security impact of using cloud services. Part of the humor here is that "the cloud" is, in actuality, simply a term for hosted services, or in other words computers being run by other people (typically businesses that specialize in this type of " Platform as a Service " or "PaaS" service model). Referring to "the cloud" as "other people's computers" is, at its core, entirely accurate, though it takes away the business jargon and simplifies the situation in such a way that it might cast doubt on the security, reliability, and general effectiveness of using "cloud" solutions.  In 908: The Cloud , it turns out that Black Hat is the "other people" whose computer is the Cloud. A flaw in Mitre's CVE database allows arbitrary code insertion. [~~CLICK HERE FOR CHEAP VIAGRA~~] Mitre's CVE database is where all CVEs are stored. This log message forms the punchline of the comic, as it implies that all of the exaggerated error messages above might have been inserted by hackers exploiting the vulnerability. To pour salt in the wound, they then included in a typical spam link purporting to offer inexpensive brand-name Sildenafil . It turns out Bruce Schneier is just two mischevious kids in a trenchcoat. Appears in the title text. Bruce Schneier is security researcher and blogger. The "two kids in a trenchcoat" is a reference to the Totem Pole Trench trope. Shortly before this comic was posted, a story went viral in which two kids were photographed attempting this for real to get into a screening of Black Panther .
[A heading is centered above a list of 21 vulnerabilities] Leaked list of major 2018 security vulnerabilities
CVE-2018-????? Apple products crash when displaying certain Telugu or Bengali letter combinations. CVE-2018-????? An attacker can use a timing attack to extploit a race condition in garbage collection to extract a limited number of bits from the Wikipedia article on Claude Shannon. CVE-2018-????? At the cafe on Third Street, the Post-it note with the WiFi password is visible from the sidewalk. CVE-2018-????? A remote attacker can inject arbitrary text into public-facing pages via the comments box. CVE-2018-????? MySQL server 5.5.45 secretly runs two parallel databases for people who say "S-Q-L" and "sequel." CVE-2018-????? A flaw in some x86 CPUs could allow a root user to de-escalate to normal account privileges. CVE-2018-????? Apple products catch fire when displaying emoji with diacritics. CVE-2018-????? An oversight in the rules allows a dog to join a basketball team. CVE-2018-????? Haskell isn't side-effect-free after all; the effects are all just concentrated in this one. computer in Missouri that no one's checked on in a while. CVE-2018-????? Nobody really knows how hypervisors work. CVE-2018-????? Critical: Under Linux 3.14.8 on System/390 in a UTC+14 time zone, a local user could potentially use a buffer overflow to change another user's default system clock from 12-hour to 24-hour. CVE-2018-????? x86 has way too many instructions. CVE-2018-????? NumPy 1.8.0 can factor primes in O (log n ) time and must be quietly deprecated before anyone notices. CVE-2018-????? Apple products grant remote access if you send them words that break the "I before E" rule. CVE-2018-????? Skylake x86 chips can be pried from their sockets using certain flathead screwdrivers. CVE-2018-????? Apparently Linus Torvalds can be bribed pretty easily. CVE-2018-????? An attacker can execute malicious code on their own machine and no one can stop them. CVE-2018-????? Apple products execute any code printed over a photo of a dog with a saddle and a baby riding it. CVE-2018-????? Under rare circumstances, a flaw in some versions of Windows could allow Flash to be installed. CVE-2018-????? Turns out the cloud is just other people's computers. CVE-2018-????? A flaw in Mitre's CVE database allows arbitrary code insertion. [~~Click here for cheap viagra~~]
Randall has previously referenced diacritics in 1647: Diacritics .
Bruce Schneier was previously mentioned in the title texts of 748: Worst-Case Scenario and 1039: RuBisCO .


Self-Driving Issues

Explanation:
Cueball explains being worried about self-driving cars , noting that it may be possible to fool the sensory systems of the vehicles. This is a common concern with AIs ; since they think analytically and have little to no capability for abstract thought, they can be fooled by things a human would immediately realize is deceptive.
However, Cueball quickly assumes that his argument actually doesn't hold up when comparing AI drivers to human drivers, as both rely on the same guidance framework. Human drivers follow signs and road markings, and must obey the laws of the road just as an AI must. Therefore, an attack on the road infrastructure could impact both AIs and humans. However, humans and AIs are not equally vulnerable.  For example, a fake sign or a fake child could appear to a human as an obvious fake but fool an AI. A creative attacker could put up a sign with CAPTCHA-like text that would be readable by humans but not by an AI.
Cueball further wonders why, in this case, nobody tries to fool human drivers as they might try to fool an AI, but White Hat and Megan point out that most road safety systems benefit from humans not actively trying to maliciously sabotage them simply to cause accidents. [ citation needed ]
The title text continues the line of reasoning, noting that if most people did suddenly become murderers, the AI might be needed to be upgraded in order to deal with the presumable increase in people trying to cause car crashes by fooling the AI - a somewhat narrowly-focused solution given that a world full of murderers would probably have many more problems than that. As Megan sees humans as a 'component' of the road safety system, it might also be suggesting a firmware update for the buggy people who have all become murderers, one that would fix their murderous ways. We are not currently at a point where we can create and apply instantaneous firmware updates for large populations; even combining all the behavioral modification tools at our disposal -- psychiatry , cognitive behavioral therapy , hypnosis , mind-altering drugs , prison , CRISPR , etc. -- is not enough to perform such a massive undertaking, as far as we know. The update might be about the car's firmware since it can used to disable the brakes and thus causing or preventing many deaths.
[Cueball is speaking while standing alone in a slim panel.] Cueball: I worry about self-driving car safety features.
[In a frame-less panel it turns out that Cueball is standing between  White Hat and Megan, holding his arms out towards each of them, while he continues to speak.] Cueball: What's to stop someone from painting fake lines on the road, or dropping a cutout of a pedestrian onto a highway, to make cars swerve and crash?
[Zoom in on Cueball's head as he continues to contemplate the situation holding a hand to his chin, while looking in White Hat's direction. Megan replies from off-panel behind him.] Cueball: Except... those things would also work on human drivers. What's stopping people now? Megan (off-panel): Yeah, causing car crashes isn't hard.
[Zoom back out to show all three of them again.] White Hat: I guess it's just that most people aren't murderers? Cueball:  Oh, right. I always forget. Megan: An underappreciated component of our road safety system.
The title text was published with a typo: "murderers" was misspelled as "muderers."
The theme of human fear and overreaction to the advent of more or less autonomous robots also features in 1955: Robots .
Self-driving cars is a recurring subject on xkcd.
A variation on the idea that humans are mentally "buggy" is suggested in 258: Conspiracy Theories , though in that case divine intervention is requested to implement the "firmware upgrade".
This comic appeared one day after the Electronic Frontier Foundation co-released a report titled The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation . The report cites subversions and mitigations of AI such as ones used in self-driving cars. However, the report tends toward overly technical means of subversion. Randall spoofs the tenor of the report through his mundane subversions and over-the-top mitigations.


The Simpsons

Explanation:
This is another comic with one of Randall's fun facts .
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom centered on the lives of the fictitious Simpson family . It is a very long-running series, having started with a Christmas episode in 1989, with the rest of the first season airing in 1990. As of the publication of this strip, it is still in production, having been on the air for 28 years with the same characters and primary cast. The decision was made early in the series that the characters wouldn't age, meaning that the parents, Homer and Marge , remained perpetually in their mid-thirties. The three children, Bart , Lisa , and Maggie , have remained 10, 8, and 1 year old, respectively. One of the interesting impacts of this dynamic is that the audience and the world have significantly aged over the course of the show, but the characters remain the same age. A rather dramatic example is that many of the early fans were similar in age to the children, but have now grown up, many have married and had children of their own, and they are now closer in age to the parents. This is a commentary on the longevity of the show.
The title text further relates this to the Harry Potter series, providing an explanation for why nobody has aged. Harry Potter is the protagonist in a series of young adult novels (later adapted into films) about the adventures of a boy wizard in his magical school, Hogwarts . The series begins when Harry is accepted to Hogwarts, at age 11, and the timeline implies that he was born in 1980. When "The Simpsons" began, Bart was 10, implying he was also born in 1980. Unlike Bart Simpson, Harry and his compatriots explicitly age over the course of the series. This strip ties the two series together, joking that the lack of aging in the Simpsons is a result of magic from the Harry Potter universe, intended to stop Bart from ever turning 11, for fear that he'd be accepted to Hogwarts.
[A black frame containing a gray table of two columns and three rows. Most of the text is also gray. The columns and rows have titles. A black jellybean-shaped loop is visually grouping three entries together, the top two in the right column with the bottom left entry. The text in those three boxes are black. Above the table there is a heading:] Fun Fact:
1990 2018 Lisa 8 36 Bart 10 38 Homer & Marge 36-ish 64-ish
[Caption below the panel:] If you were Bart and Lisa's age during the first few seasons of The Simpsons, this year you're the same age as Homer and Marge.
This is another entry in xkcd's genre of comics that emphasize how surprising the passage of time can be.
This was the second Fun fact comic in three weeks, following 1950: Chicken Pox and Name Statistics , after more than two years break from the series. It seems that Randall returned to his old themes this month.


Code Golf

Explanation:
This was the first comic in the My Hobby series in over a year. It directly followed the second Fun fact comic in the same month, 1959: The Simpsons , after more than two years break from that series. It seems that Randall returned to his old themes this month.
Code golf is the attempt to use as few characters as possible to write a computer program with a certain function, analogously to regular golf's goal of getting the ball into the hole with as few strokes as possible. Reverse code golf would be to write a given program, probably to achieve a trivial outcome, using as many characters as possible. Randall's approach to this in the code example shown in the comic is to create overly long function names, using the beginning lines of Herman Melville 's notoriously long-winded whaling novel Moby-Dick . Regular code golf also results in names of functions and variables that have nothing to do with their purpose in the program, but would minimise their length.
Using "as many characters as possible" to produce code is actually an impossible goal. It would be a trivial task to make any given program longer by inserting useless code or comments. Furthermore, some programming languages place no limit on function names, so these could simply be made longer. Even if the language Randall is using does limit function name length, he has not maximised the ones he has used, since the first two are 50 characters long, and the last much shorter. The code is written in a programming language that looks similar to Python , but with the keyword “define” instead of “def” to define functions. Python has no limit for function name length, and was previously featured in comic 353: Python .
The first two functions defined implement “zero” and “successor”, the two basic operations of Peano arithmetic . Presumably, the programmer will next implement natural number addition, then integers, then whichever branches of mathematics the original problem needs, all from scratch. Generally, you would use built-in functions to perform mathematical operations, so it is redundant to implement them yourself from scratch.
The title text suggests that Randall has also invented a reverse version of regular golf, where the aim is to take as many strokes as possible to get the ball in the hole. Similarly to Reverse Code Golf , the only challenge here would be the player's own boredom threshold, since they could always add more strokes by tapping the ball in a direction other than that of the hole.
Alternatively, he actually plays golf in reverse, starting from the hole (or pin) and hitting the ball towards the tee (he may or may not also be playing in the opposite direction of the hole layout established by the organisation which manages the course). This would however, be a flagrant violation of the Laws and Customs of Golf, as it interferes with other players' games and some aspects are impossible or unpractical (if Randall takes the view that the ball should start in the hole, the rules prohibit using any clubs to remove it in that it would damage the hole, and he would have to putt off the green).
The comment that he has "been playing for years all across the country and [is] still on the first hole" is ambiguous. Normally, when a golfer says they have been playing all across the country they mean that they have played rounds at many different courses. Randall could be implying the same, but that he's never finished the first hole (which, as noted above, would hardly be surprising), and so still counts it as playing one continuous first hole. Alternatively, he may literally mean that he has been playing the ball continuously across the whole country. Under normal golf rules this would result in his shots going " Out of Bounds " when it went beyond the boundaries of the original course. In one way, this would help him, as he would incur a penalty stroke. However, he would then have to play his next shot from the same spot as the last one, which would hamper him from continuing to play across the country. Since Randall has invented the sport, though, he may have chosen not to include Out of Bounds rules.
Interestingly, the comic ends with an unmatched left parenthesis (something which might be intended to create unresolved tension .
[There is code written as colored text in a black box (all black text here below is white in the comic):] define callMeIshmaelSomeYearsAgoNeverMindHowLongPrecisely (): return 0 define havingLittleOrNoMoneyInMyPurseAndNothingParticular ( toInterestMeOnShoreIThoughtIWouldSail ): return 1+toInterestMeOnShoreIThoughtIWouldSail define aLittleAndSeeTheWateryPartOfTheWorld (
[Caption under the black box:] My hobby: Reverse Code Golf


Interaction

Explanation:
Cueball and White Hat are attempting to make small talk. White Hat begins the conversation with a typical greeting, asking, "How are you doing?" Normally this is a habitualized greeting pattern, where the person being greeted would respond with a generic positive like, "Good," "Okay," "Can't complain," etc. Instead, Cueball answers with a very open and honest statement about the social anxiety he thinks he is successfully dealing with. White Hat then admits that he is experiencing the same thing, and the two congratulate each other for having a "normal" conversation with another human. After that, there is an awkward silence where neither knows what to talk about next. Finally, White Hat makes note of the awkwardness and Cueball suggests they stop before it gets worse.
The scene is ironic because their dialogue mirrors the common pattern of typical minor daily interactions, but also differs greatly from anything "normal." White Hat & Cueball are being really weird here, specifically because their dialogue is inappropriately open & honest. The literal semantic content of their dialogue is probably more accurate & meaningful than the usual pleasantries people exchange, but the effect is very different.
So basically they have not managed to behave like regular human beings, and thus have nothing to congratulate each other for. Except for White Hat's opening line nothing in the conversation has in any way resembled normal behavior. Due to their serious issues with small talking and interacting with other people, even this simple interaction fails completely, hence the title of the comic.
The title text states that, after saying goodbye, they don't move away, keeping up the uncomfortable silence, continuing to display their problems. Neither of them wish to be the first to turn away, or one or both are locked in the situation and has no clue how to finish it, even though they are both obviously aware of their problems and what makes them anxious. This may be a reference to the final stage direction " They do not move. " in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot , where the protagonists frequently discuss leaving, but do not move.
Randall has previously made several comics with a similar theme, showing Cueball's (or his own) problems with several social situations / interactions / small talk, especially the comic 222: Small Talk which is very similar to this one. He made three of those type of comics in a span of about a month more than two yeas ago finishing with 1650: Baby .
[White Hat and Cueball have just met and begins an interaction.] White Hat: How are you doing? Cueball: Really excited to be confidently handling this extremely basic social interaction!
[White Hat holds is arms slightly out.] White Hat: Same here! Cueball: Hey, congrats! White Hat: You too! Cueball: Thanks!
[In a frame-less beat panel, they just stand still.]
[Same setting as in the first panel.] White Hat: And now it's falling apart before my eyes. Cueball: I'm gonna quit while I'm ahead. White Hat: Same. Cueball: See you later!


Generations

Explanation:
This comic is making fun of the various names we give "generations" while also predicting some future names. The release of this comic coincides with the Pew Research Center's recent announcement that they have decided where the Millennial generation ends .
Each generation listed is exactly 18 years long, which is the approximate length of each "generation" anyway (given that coincidentally, there are exactly 54 intermediate years between the end of World War II and the New Millennium). A number of the entries are parodies of the terms "Generation X," "Generation Y," etc., by substituting other letters or characters that would seem emblematic of the time period.
"Generations" are arbitrary. They're just labels we use to obliquely talk about cultural trends. But since Pew Research has become the latest to weigh in, and everyone loves a good pointless argument over definitions...
xkcd presents A Definitive Chronology of the Generations
1730-1747 The Founders 1748-1765 Generation ƒ 1766-1783 The Adequate Generation 1784-1801 Generation Æ 1802-1819 The generation we cut a lot of slack because they produced Lincoln 1820-1837 The Gilded Generation 1838-1855 The Second-Greatest Generation 1856-1873 Generation – • • – 1874-1891 The kids who died in the Gilded Generation's factories and mines 1892-1909 Oops, one of us is Hitler 1910-1927 The Greatest Generation 1928-1945 The Silent Generation 1946-1963 Baby Boomers 1964-1981 Generation X 1982-1999 Millennials 2000-2017 Generation 💅 [nail polish emoji] 2018-2035 Zuckerberg's army 2036-2053 The Hovering Ones 2054-2071 Spare Parts 2072-2089 More Gen-Xers somehow 2090-2107 The Paperclip Machines 2108-2125 The Mixed Bag (produced 4 Lincolns, 1 Napoleon and 2 Hitlers) 2126-2143 The Procedural Generation 2144-2161 Generation Ω 2360-2378 Star Trek: The Next Generation


Namespace Land Rush

Explanation:
When a new web service starts, such as a forum, a social media server or an email portal, the people who sign up get to choose their username on the service, which, in most cases, blocks future users from using those usernames. Common names such as "john" are likely to be taken quickly. This is analogous to the way that land was distributed in America, with the first to claim able to choose the best land.
This comic is a list of usernames Randall suggests should be used if they are available.
The title text is a self-reference to "xkcd"; the name of the comic is a purposefully unpronounceable phrase created by Randall. The fact that an unpronounceable name is portrayed as a disadvantageous outcome is also humorous because the comic has a section dedicated to unpronounceable usernames.
(Note: for a more serious list of problematic user names to block from a service provider’s point of view, see Hostnames and usernames to reserve as well as RFC 2142 .)
Namespace Land Rush Cheat Sheet (Note: if an item is "quoted", it is meant literally, otherwise the reader is supposed to substitute their own information for words in <angle brackets>)
When a new service appears that lets you register a name, here are some you may want to try and get first:


Spatial Orientation

Explanation:
Location in space is always relative, as we cannot observe empty space itself and find an absolute location. Planets are subject to different types of  motion, including rotation, precession,  and others.
The Earth (rotation)
Cueball starts by stating that as he is facing west, the Earth's spin will be carrying him backwards. Except at the poles, everything on Earth's surface is being rotated to the east, "toward" the rising sun in the east or "away" from the setting sun in the west.
On the equator, Earth's spin is about 464 meters per second (with 464 m being 1/60 of 1/60 of 1/24 of Earth's equatorial circumference of 40070 km, based on the number of seconds in a day, ignoring the difference between sidereal and ephemeris days). So, on the equator at sunrise, on the day of a March or September equinox, this spin, by itself, would take someone toward the sun at about 464 meters per second.
This spin would be slower than 464 m/s at 39 degrees North. The average radius of the Earth is 6371 km. This means that the distance from a line between the poles through the center of the Earth to a point on Earth's surface at 39°N is approximately 6371 km times the cosine of 39° (0.68 radians), which is 4951 km. So, the distance around the Earth along the 39° latitude "line" is 2π times 4951 km, which is about 31,109 km. (This estimate ignores the oblateness of the Earth.) The rotation of the Earth on its axis would transport points on Earth at 39° latitude to the east at 360 meters per second (1/60 of 1/60 of 1/24 of 31,109). Determining how the direction that is currently east for Cueball is oriented relative to the sun and the solar system depends on some of the issues Cueball identifies later.
The Earth (orbit)
Cueball then seemingly corrects himself in his head, having accounted for the fact that the Earth is also revolving around the sun.
The Earth's orbit around the sun is counter-clockwise, when viewed from above the North Pole looking down. Earth's counterclockwise orbit around the sun means that, for most latitudes, the direction the Earth is moving around the sun corresponds roughly to west at noon, and east in the middle of the night. The Earth is spinning, so "east" from any given location on the surface is not always the same direction relative to the sun.
The speed of the Earth's orbit around the sun depends on the time of year. The Earth moves faster around the sun when it is closest to the sun in early January, and slower when it is far away in early July (which may be counterintuitive to those in the in the northern hemisphere). However, Earth's average orbital speed is reportedly about 29.78 kilometers per second, with Earth's average distance from the sun being a bit less than 150 million kilometers. Earth's orbit around the sun is nearly circular, with an eccentricity of just 0.0167.
Earth's tilted axis
Cueball knows that the earth's axis is tilted (by 23°) relative to its orbit around the Sun and knows that he is 39° north of the equator, but is unsure how to combine this information to figure out his orientation relative to the plane of the solar system.
The Earth’s orbit around the Sun, under Keplerian assumptions, is an ellipse, which lies within a plane. Furthermore, the entire solar system, to some extent, lies within a plane, since the orbital inclinations of Mars and the gas and ice giants are within 2½° of Earth’s and the orbital inclinations of a major body in the solar system (such as a planet) rarely, if ever, varies from that of another by more than 8°. With the exception of Eris, all planets and dwarf planets have an orbital inclination within about 30° of Earth’s.
Cueball is attempting to determine where the plane of the solar system lies with regard to him. Ignoring any possible difference between Earth’s orbit and this plane, and assuming that Cueball is standing on flat ground, the angle between the line from the center of the earth through Cueball (which runs through his body parallel to his legs and spine if he is standing straight up) and the plane of the solar system can be expressed in terms of two angles: the angle between the plane of Earth’s equator and the solar plane, and the angle between the Earth’s equatorial plane and the vertical line through Cueball. Cueball is at 39°N, so if Cueball is standing straight up, the angle between the plane of the Earth’s equator and the long axis of his body is also 39°. As stated in the comic, Earth’s axis is currently tilted by about 23.4° (an amount which is very slowly decreasing as part of a 41,000 year cycle).
Cueball is trying to determine whether to add together 39° and 23° to get the angle between himself and the solar system’s plane or subtract them. The answer depends on the time of day and the time of year. On the day of the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere (around June 21), the north pole is tilted toward the sun, so at the longitude that is currently experiencing solar noon, the solar plane passes through a point that is 23° north of the equator. So, if it is solar noon on the summer solstice, Cueball should subtract the angles to find that the direction his body is pointing is roughly 16° away from the solar plane. If he were to somehow lean so that he could tilt his body 16° to the south, the solar plane would pass through the vertical axis of his body and his scalp would be pointed directly toward the sun. On the other hand, on the day when the northern hemisphere is experiencing the winter solstice (around December 21), the northern hemisphere is pointing away from the sun, so at solar noon on that day, he would add the angles together to find that his vertical stance is 62° away from the plane of the solar system. (The sun is never truly directly overhead at latitudes further from the equator than 23.4°. At arctic latitudes that are less than 23.4° from the north pole – more than 67° north of the equator - the sun is not visible on the day of the winter solstice even when it is noon.)
If it is not a solstice day, or if it is not noon, the calculations could become more complicated. The comic was uploaded roughly two weeks before the northern hemisphere’s spring equinox. Cueball notices that the sun is “passing over his left shoulder” as he faces west. At temperate latitudes in the northern hemisphere, the sun would be to the left of a person facing west around midday almost any time of year, although how many degrees to the left depends on the calculations discussed above.
An easier way to identify a line that is aligned with the solar plane would be to simply point directly at the sun (without hurting his eyes). Since the distance between Cueball and the center of the Earth is minuscule compared to the distance between the Earth and the Sun, if he simply points directly at the Sun (preferably without looking directly at it), his arm and finger will be pointing in a direction that is basically perpendicular to the line connecting the Earth and Sun, which obviously lies on the plane of the Earth's orbit. The Earth's position will have changed minimally in the eight minutes it took the sun's light to reach earth, so the apparent direction to the sun matches the actual direction. However, this will only provide one line that lies on the plane of the solar system and a line is insufficient to uniquely identify a plane.
The Moon
Cueball knows about the Moon's path across the sky and knows that its orbit around the Earth appears counter-clockwise when viewed from above the North Pole, but is confused about whether the Moon is moving toward the Sun or away from it.
Like the Earth, the Moon, when viewed from above Earth’s North Pole, both orbits counterclockwise and rotates on its axis counterclockwise (with equal rotational periods such that the same side of the moon always faces us). (In fact, almost every body in the Solar System both orbits the body it is orbiting counterclockwise and spins on its axis counterclockwise, with the rotational axes of Venus and Uranus being major exceptions.)
A new moon happens when the moon is closer to the sun than the earth is, thus casting the near side of the moon in darkness because it is the far side of the moon that is facing the sun. Conversely, a full moon happens when the moon is on the other side of the Earth from the sun; this is why a lunar eclipse can only occur during a full moon. In that sense, it could be said that the moon is moving perpendicular to the line between it and the sun at the time of the full moon and the new moon, moving toward the sun after the full moon until the next new moon, and moving away from the sun after the new moon until the next full moon.
In another sense, since the moon is orbiting the Earth and the Earth’s orbit around the sun is elliptical, it could be said that the moon is getting closer to the sun whenever Earth is moving toward its perihelion, the point in its orbit that is closest to the sun, around January 2 to January 5, and moving away as the Earth moves toward its aphelion, the point in its orbit that is furthest from the sun, around July 3 to July 6. (Yes, the Earth is closest to the sun in January, despite what those in the northern hemisphere who are tilted away from the sun at that time may think.) In yet another sense, since the Moon follows the path of the Earth, and the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is roughly circular, and the instantaneous motion of an object in a circular orbit is always perpendicular to the radius connecting it to the orbited body, it could be said that the moon is always moving perpendicular to the line connecting the Earth and Sun, which is at most a fraction of a degree away from the line connecting the Moon and the Sun.
The semi-major axis of the moon’s orbit around the Earth (the furthest distance between the Moon and the center of its orbit) is 384,400 km. Compared to the semi-major axis of Earth’s orbit around the Sun, which is 149,600,000 km, the axis of the Moon’s orbit is only 0.26% as large. The Moon’s orbital period is 27.3 days, but its synodic period (the time between full moons; the time it takes the moon to reappear at the same point in the sky) is 29.5 days.
Cueball internally attempts to orient himself amidst the galactic chaos but is confused and has to restart. It is then revealed to the reader, that some passersby were only trying to ask Cueball for directions to the theater, and he was just grossly overthinking it. (A recurring theme in xkcd. See: 222: Small Talk , 439: Thinking Ahead , 1643: Degrees ). One can imagine Cueball having his mind in astrophysics so much that he needs to calculate the angle of the road relative to the plane of the galaxy to determine which way a destination is in conversational terms.
In the title text, Cueball mentions he has a pocket Stonehenge. During the equinoxes the sun lines up with the actual Stonehenge's pillars. Assuming you were at the actual monument, armed with the date you could calculate the cardinal directions based on the sun's location relative to the pillars.
[Cueball appears to be tilted on a descending slope, with his arms held out. There is a thought bubble above his head, with the top, left and right of the bubble cut off due to its size. His thoughts are arranged into four paragraphs in the bubble.] Cueball (thinking): I'm facing West so the Earth's spin is carrying me backward. But our orbit is carrying me forward around the Sun. The Sun is passing over my left shoulder. I'm at 39°N, so I'm tilted. But wait, Earth's axis is tilted by 23°. Do I add or subtract that to get the tilt of the Solar System? Ok, I see the Moon. It follows the Sun's path, but is it moving toward it or away? I know it orbits counterclockwise from the North... My head hurts. Let me start over.
[Two off-screen voices coming from the bottom right of the panel.] Off-screen voice #1: He's just standing there. Hey, do you know which way the theater is or not? Off-screen voice #2: Let's ask someone else.
[Caption below the panel:] I spend way too much time trying to work out my orientation relative to other stuff in the universe.