Star Wars Voyager 1

Explanation:
Cueball has added together all the runtimes of the Star Wars movies (episodes I-IX) and then calculated the exact time at which a message sent to Voyager 1 will have that exact duration in light speed delay. He announces this information to Megan and Beret Guy only seconds before it occurs, allowing him to signal the moment by saying "Now!", after waiting in the beat panel.
Megan expresses surprise that the event isn't being celebrated with fireworks. Judging by the fact that she doesn't look up from her book, her surprise is sarcastic. Beret Guy breaks into song with the New Year's traditional " Auld Lang Syne ".
This comic highlights an interesting relationship between the Star Wars Episodes and the NASA Space Probe "Voyager 1", which most likely no one else has thought about, but most likely fitting well with fans of both xkcd and Star Wars .
The original Star Wars film was released on May 25th, 1977, only four months before Voyager 1 was launched on September 5th, 1977. The last film was released more than 42.5 years later on December 20th, 2019, only three weeks before this comic.
Voyager 1 was, with a distance of 148.68 Astronomical units (22.2 billion km; 13.8 billion mi) from Earth as of December 26, 2019, the most distant human-made object from Earth. This data is given with reference in the Wikipedia article for Voyager 1. That was less than a week after the release of the new movie. That is approximately 20.6 light hours away. With the recently released last episode the total viewing time of the nine episodes is 20.35 hours (not including the spin-off movies). So a discrepancy of 15 minutes. This could be explained by the title text.
In the mission status of the two Voyager probes there were a One-Way Light Time of 20 hours 36 minutes and 46 seconds on the day the comic was released. This corresponds to 20.613 light hours, only the 46 seconds deviation from exactly 20.6 hours.
This is an odd coincidence that Cueball/ Randall saw significant enough to mark with a timer and acknowledgment to Megan and Beret Guy (and the rest of the fans of xkcd).
In the title text Randall notes that there can be different ways of measuring run times, both if you do not count credits into the runtime or with more than one version existing of at least the original trilogies films, with added extra footage. This means that if you choose the longest possible run time, you may still have a chance to throw a party for some time to come, as every extra minute of film will add time before Voyager 1 reaches that extra light minute.
However as demonstrated in the Table of runtime below, then only for the very longest versions would this have worked around the time of the release of the movie. Now, three weeks later it is too late.
When Voyager 1 left the heliosphere it was traveling at about 17 kilometers per second (11 mi/s), making it the fastest heliocentric recession speed of any spacecraft, and it is not really slowing down. (Do note that the speed with which it travels from Earth is not the same since Earth is in orbit around the Sun and sometimes travels faster towards Voyager 1 than Voyager 1 leaves the sun, but then Earth turns and goes the other way!)
Since a light minute is 1.799×10 7 kilometers it takes Voyager 1 12.25 days to travel this far. So for every minute added to the run time, the party start time will be delayed by more than 12 days. However, it is already 14 days since the distance given on Wikipedia, so more than one extra minute is needed to postpone the party to after the release day of the comic.
The last possible chance is to assume that all run times have been rounded down, which could add anywhere from a half a minute to almost 9 full minutes if they round 125.9 down to 125, and not only rounded 125.4 (and not rounding 125.5 up). Actually, assuming all runtimes are rounded down, it is realistic that there is on average half a minute extra runtime per episode making 4.5 minutes extra time. This would buy 55 extra days from the 26th of December... But to find this out correctly, someone would need to review all the 9 episodes from the very first second to the very last of the most extended versions. It seems that it could still be possible to find a day where the party can still be held after the release day of the comic.
In the extreme case that all movies went 59 seconds over a full minute, but all times are rounded down, it would add 8 minutes and 51 seconds. This could give 108 extra days from 2019-12-26, meaning that Easter Sunday 2020 (2020-04-12) would be the last possible day for such a party.
This may also be a play on the confusion between the Star Wars and the Star Trek franchises. In the case of Star Trek, the very first movie dealt with a Voyager probe (Voyager 6 in this case), and the number of hours and quantity of Star Trek movies rivals and exceeds that of the main Star Wars movies; about 25 and a half hours between 13 movies.  Maybe we'll see this in an xkcd when Voyager gets a little further away?
[Cueball is looking down at the smartphone he is holding in one hand, while he is holding his other hand's finger up in the air. He is standing behind an armchair where Megan is sitting reading a book or paper. She holds it open with both hands. She has turned her head halfway towards him. Sitting on the floor in front of her is Beret Guy, legs bent and leaning back resting on one hand, with his phone in the other hand.] Cueball: The time it takes light to travel between Earth and Voyager 1 is exactly equal to the combined runtime of Star Wars episodes I-IX...
[A slim beat panel, showing only Cueball standing in the same pose as in the first panel.]
[Cueball looks up from his phone and raises his finger higher up. Megan has turned back to reading. Beret Guy looks up, and he has put his phone on the floor to put his, now free, hand on his heart, while singing, as indicated both with nodes before and after the lyrics he sings as well as letting his speech line start at a starburst near his head, rather than just beginning near the head, as normally.] Cueball: ... Now! Megan: Weird that I don't hear any fireworks. Beret Guy (singing): Should ollld acquaintance be forgooot


JPEG2000

Explanation:
JPEG2000 is a standard for digital image storage created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group from 1997 to 2000 to improve on the original JPEG standard, published in 1992. The original JPEG standard is the most widely used image format in the world for both digital cameras and the World Wide Web, while the newer and improved JPEG2000 standard is relatively rare.  As of 2020, it is supported by Photoshop, the Safari browser, and GIMP, but it remains unsupported or poorly supported by other popular software, including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers. Meanwhile, competing format WebP which appeared 10 years later is supported in all major browsers and has much wider support in other applications as well.
As a result, the conventional file name extensions for files using the JPEG2000 standard, .jp2 and .jpx, remain unfamiliar to many users while the .jpg extension, denoting the original standard, is well known.
The JPEG2000 standard was seen as an improvement by its creators, supporting many features not included in the original standard, such as multiple resolutions, progressive transmission, a lossless compression option, and alpha channel transparency.  The complexity of fully implementing the standard, as well as patent concerns, may have slowed adoption.
Cueball and Hairbun seem to have some desire for or stake in JPEG2000 adoption. Cueball begins to worry after more than 20 years without much progress but Hairbun is confident that it will eventually prevail, and she cares more about its eventual use than rapid adoption.
The core concept of this comic is that engineers often expect that a superior technology or standard will catch on, though often other factors keep an "inferior" standard dominant. (See various comics referencing Dvorak keyboards, as well as the term " betamaxed .")
The "we are in this for the long haul" statement might refer to the engineers believing that superior technology will eventually win despite the evidence to the contrary. Its humor comes from the fact that as of the comic publication in 2020, JPEG2000 shows no sign of becoming a widely-used standard.
The title text suggests that Randall feels bad that the standard hasn't been adopted, perhaps because he empathizes with the engineers who worked hard to develop it or anthropomorphizes the standard itself, which has been ignored by most of the computer-using world. Also he may actually believe it is the better standard that should have been more widely used. DCI, short for Digital Cinema Initiatives , is a collaboration of several major film studios to establish standards for the security and proper display of digital films. Version 1.0 of the DCI’s “Digital Cinema System Specification” was released in 2005.
[Cueball and Hairbun are sitting on office chairs opposite each other on a shared desktop with a small division wall between them. They are both working on their own respective computers.]
[Cueball leans back and stops typing. Hairbun continues to type.]
[Cueball makes a statement as he looks over at Hairbun who looks back at him when she replies. She has moved one hand off the keyboard down to her lap. Cueball's keyboard has disappeared!] Cueball: I'm starting to worry that JPEG 2000 isn't catching on as fast as we expected. Hairbun: Don't worry! We're in this for the long haul.


Tattoo Ideas

Explanation:
This comic is a list of potential tattoo ideas. Many of them play on the trope of regretting a tattoo by being tattoos of things that would not be useful outside of the immediate future, while others are simply ludicrous ideas with little functionality.
A tattoo by nature is designed to be permanent and difficult to change or remove.  A lot of the jokes below describe things that are designed to be impermanent and/or change frequently.
[A list with an underlined heading and then 14 items, the first 13 being struck out with a red line. The red lines are straight through the center of the text if the item is only on one line. The red lines are curly up and down if the items take up more than one line on the list. The last item has a red line around it in an ellipse.]
Tattoo Ideas Lorem Ipsum Text Email password Graph of the popularity of tattoos over time, with the date I got the tattoo marked (update regularly) "Changeme" Slide rule markings on forearms Eurion constellation, so no one can photocopy pictures of me The sentence "it's what my tattoo says" written in another language Tissot's Indicatrix Summary of the Snopes page on the tattoo epidural thing (lower back) Pre-surgical checklist Tattoo artist's social security number Boarding pass for an upcoming flight Recap of the plot of Memento This list, in its entirety


Bad Map Projection South America

Explanation:
This is the third comic in the series of Bad Map Projections displaying Bad Map Projection #358: Oops, all South Americas!. It came almost three years after the second 1799: Bad Map Projection: Time Zones (#79) (3 years after the first). And was first followed one and a half year later by 2489: Bad Map Projection: The Greenland Special (#299).
The comic shows a map projection in which every continent and large island has just been replaced with a differently scaled and rotated version of the continent of South America .
By overlaying this map with the selection of map projections presented in 977: Map Projections , it seems that the "underlying" projection used here is the Winkel tripel projection , also used in 2242: Ground vs Air .
The comic is similar to joke map designs in which continents like Africa and South America have been swapped, or where someone will jokingly replace Greenland with South America.
The caption of the comic is a reference to the Cap'n Crunch cereal type that became a meme, Oops! All Berries .
Interestingly on the original South America, the archipelago or main island (hard to tell) of Tierra del Fuego is replaced with a small South America, while all other South Americas, including the one replacing the Tierra del Fuego, include it in their shape.
The title text claims that the map projection does a good job preserving distance and azimuth, the joke being that the distance and azimuth being preserved for the non-South America continents are those of South America and not the original continent. Note that for the map as drawn in the comic, while this is true for most of the larger landmasses, many of the smaller South Americas are distorted more significantly (such as the South Americas that replace New Zealand).
From roughly left to right and top to bottom, the South Americas replace:
These are the 26 largest non-Antarctic landmasses, plus 2 peninsulas of those landmasses, and 8 more islands.
See also related comics with map changes in comics 1500: Upside-Down Map and 1653: United States Map .
[A map of the world, but every landmass has been replaced with South America, rotated and resized to roughly match the real landmasses they represent. South America is correct, except that the islands at the southern tip of the continent also have been switched to a small South America.]
[Caption below the panel:] Bad Map Projection #358: Oops, all South Americas!


Unsubscribe Message

Explanation:
When a website offers a subscription service (e.g., an email newsletter), they will offer the opportunity to unsubscribe from the service in the event that the subscriber is no longer interested in the service, or discovers that the service is not what they thought it was. As with any online process, subscribing and unsubscribing require messages to inform the viewer that the process has completed as intended. Some sites also request confirmation when unsubscribing, to prevent accidentally unsubscribing due to a mistyped URL or a misclicked link.
This comment explores the different "moods" that unsubscribe messages can carry, taking standard examples and pushing them further than is normally seen. It also pokes fun at the trend for websites to guilt users when they unsubscribe (or try to guilt them out of it before they complete the process), which is widespread among new-age website design and some examples of which can be seen at /r/Clickshaming/ . The first example appears to be a message in the confirmation phase, while the others are messages that the unsubscription is complete.
The first message is of a "very negative" mood, where the "confirmation" message begs to know why the user dared to unsubscribe to the service, sounding either very angry or alarmingly desperate, as if the service is endangered by the user's unsubscribing. This can be very off-putting and would be very likely to confirm to the user that they made the right choice; hearing such an aggressively needy tone when they leave could make them feel like they escaped something instead, and thus it is given three red X marks and ranked "Very Bad".
The second message is of a more controlled "negative" mood; the "process complete" message tells the viewer that they will be missed with a sad emoticon accompanying it. Although not quite so bad as the forceful clinginess of the "very negative" message, this one can still come across as an attempt to guilt the user into re-subscribing; thus it is rated with one red X and the label "Not Great".
The third message is of a fully "neutral" mood; the "process complete" message is simply a matter-of-fact statement that the user has been successfully unsubscribed from the service. Randall seems to consider this the optimal mood for an unsubscribe message to carry; thus it is rated with a green check mark and the label "Perfect".
The fourth message is of a "positive" mood; the "process complete" message cheerfully proclaims that the attempt to unsubscribe has been completed. This is the most common mood for many services that attempt to avoid emotionless, robotic messages; however, in this particular instance, it can come across as somewhat unnerving, since no service should seem happy to see a user leave. The tone also comes across like a proclamation of the sort you would see in a video game text box, making the action feel like an achievement, which wouldn't make sense for a company to do. This mood is rated with a green check mark, but also with the label "A Little Weird".
The fifth message is "very positive", where the "process complete" message expresses relief that the user has chosen to unsubscribe from their service, as though their subscription in the first place had been some sort of burden upon the service, and indeed, their leaving is stated to be the best thing to happen to the service. Like the "very negative" message, this response is likely to assure the user never returns, since they have been indirectly insulted and told "good riddance".
The title text expands on the joke by combining the positive reaction to unsubscribing with a more negative tone, which supports the user's choice to unsubscribe because they were unwanted. This references the 1% rule , which states that for users of an online service only approximately 1% will be significantly active.
Caption: Choosing the right emotional tone for your unsubscribe message
[A window labelled "Very Negative"] Website: You want to unsubscribe?!?! How could you do this to us?! We need you!!! ✗✗✗ Very Bad
[A window labelled "Negative"] Website: We're sad to see you go :( ✗ Not Great
[A window labelled "Neutral"] Website: You have been unsubscribed. ✓ Perfect
[A window labelled "Positive"] Website: Success! You have been unsubscribed!! ✓ A little weird
[A window labelled "Very Positive"] Website: You have been unsubscribed. This is the best gift you could have given us. Thank you. ✗✗✗ Very Bad


Solar System Changes

Explanation:
This comic shows a drawing with a standard sketch of the Solar System , featuring the Sun, 8 planets, the asteroid belt, and Pluto. Randall then proposes eight changes to the solar system that he would make if he had the power to do so. Each change is drawn in red with explanatory labels. Performing these changes would be impossible in practice [ citation needed ] , and would probably make the solar system unstable if actually performed [ citation needed ] .
See explanations of each proposed change in the table below.
The title text is being spoken by "someone who knows [that] Jupiter is within earshot," implying that the speaker does not wish to offend Jupiter. While Jupiter does have its own ring system , it is so faint that it wasn't discovered until 1979. Considering that Jupiter is known to disrupt the asteroid belt and send asteroids towards the inner solar system (cf. Kirkwood gap ) and completely destroy other celestial bodies ( Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 ), someone who is "within earshot" of Jupiter may wish to reassure the planet that they think its ring system is already very impressive when they really don't.
Randall has in the past proposed other types of ridiculous changes, such as in 1061: EST , 1069: Alphabet , and 1902: State Borders .
[A not-to-scale diagram of the solar system is shown with the right edge of the sun on the left side, featuring all eight planets along with their major moons, Pluto (along with its major moon), and the asteroid belt. The original solar system is drawn in black, but several changes have been proposed. If some of the existing planets are removed or changed, they are greyed out, possibly with red crosses over them or red circles or arrows. New planets, moons, rings and asteroids have been added all in red. Each change has been labeled with red text. Only the Sun and Mercury are completely unchanged, Earth and Neptune are not changed directly but their moons have changed. The only black text is a caption at the top:] Changes I Would Make to the Solar System
[Below each of the changes to the solar system is mentioned from left to right, with their labels, that are all in red text. Except for the label under Jupiter and Saturn, there is a line going from the changes to the relevant label.]
[Three additional planets, one Mercury sized and two smaller on either side very close to each other, have been drawn in between Mercury and the Sun. A bracket marks all three of them and a long line goes from that to the label above, which is even above the next label positioned above the planets.] Add mysterious planets inside Mercury's orbit
[A ring has been drawn around Venus, and a dot representing a moon has been added on its left. A small line goes from the label beneath to Venus.] After what it's been through, Venus deserves rings and a moon
[Next to Earth, drawn with four of the major continents visible, the Moon has been grayed out and crossed out with a red X. Also Mars has been grayed out and it is inside a red circle. An arrow goes from the circle around Mars to the Moon. a small line goes from the arrow between the Moon and Mars to the label above the planets.] Replace our moon with Mars. Mars is more interesting and we can consolidate missions.
[An additional planet, all in red, has been added between Mars and the asteroid belt, about halfway in size between Earth and Neptune. Four continents are visible in a large ocean, along with weather patterns as in an atmosphere. A small line goes from the planet to the label beneath.] The Solar System needs a super-Earth
[Numerous asteroids have been drawn, half in black, with the other half in red added to the existing asteroids that were already there. A small line goes from the asteroids to the label beneath.] More asteroids!
[Jupiter and Saturn have both been greyed out and also crossed out with two red X'es. Two arrows points from each of the original planets to a new larger red planet drawn above the two. This new planet has the belts, zones, Red Spot, and size of Jupiter, and the hexagon on the north pole and rings of Saturn. It also has the four largest moons from Jupiter on one side and the largest moon from Saturn on the other side, with all five drawn similarly to the original moons. Below the two original planets is a label.] Merge the big planet and the ringed planet into a big ringed planet ("Jaturn")
[Uranus is greyed out and also crossed out with a red X. A line goes down to the label beneath it.] Cut Uranus. Uranus and Neptune are redundant and Neptune is better. Tough but fair.
[Pluto and Charon have both been greyed out and are inside a red circle. An arrow points from Pluto and Charon to the right side of Neptune, where Pluto and Charon have been redrawn in red. Neptune's own largest moon is on the other side of Neptune. A line goes from the arrow up to a label above the planet.] Settle the planet thing by making Pluto a moon of Neptune


Networking Problems

Explanation:
Computer problems are frequent and can be difficult to solve [ citation needed ] . Networking problems in particular can puzzle even seasoned people and sometimes seem to have arbitrary issues causing them. Packets are units of data transfer used in computer networking, and one measure of network performance is lag , the amount of time it takes for data to travel from one point to another (and perhaps back); saying a packet's transmission is 'laggy' means it is unacceptably slow.
Lag in packet transmission and other network performance measures can appear quite random. Just to start with, your ISP may be engaged in traffic shaping, which can do very weird things indeed to your packets (making the first megabyte of a transfer faster than any other, for example); now imagine that your ISP's ISP (usually known as an "Upstream Provider") is engaged in something similar, and you begin to see the scale of the problem. Wireless latency can relate to things as unexpected as where people are standing, what they are touching, the weather, viruses and other system compromises, network activity by other unseen users, and so on. Because humans are wired to perceive patterns, they will find them even in random data , a fallacy that Cueball is probably suffering from here. He variously attributes the network behavior he sees to the packet number being even vs. odd, packet arrival time being before vs. after noon, and packet arrival day being today vs. yesterday. Such a pattern would make sense if it were merely "every other packet" regardless of odd or evenness, but that still leaves unexplained the other "patterns" Cueball is seeing.
These non-existent patterns that Cueball is 'finding' are driving him mad, so much so that he says he believes in ghosts now. The statement of belief in ghosts may be a reference to the intermittent or fluctuating nature of the network issues being caused by mischievous or malevolent spirits. Ghosts generally are not concerned with expressions of belief, but there are some religious traditions that include group clapping and chanting. Many works of fiction depict a future or alternate history where machines are worshiped as gods or spirits , such as the Adeptus Mechanicus of Warhammer 40,000 .  Some of this terminology can be found in present-day IT and other support personnel, including references to " daemons " and " black magic ".  Another possible reference Randall may be making is to the Ghost in the machine , a term describing AI. A third possibility is that Cueball's brain had stopped working, as Randall had suggested in his chart. it may also be a reference to 1316: Inexplicable , in which Megan concludes Cueball's computer is haunted.
The title text continues Cueball's maniacal attempts at self-assurance, with him alluding to J.M. Barrie's play Peter Pan by saying that latency falls every time you "CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YOU BELIEVE". In the play, Peter Pan says, "If you believe in fairies, wave your handkerchiefs and clap your hands." [ actual citation needed ] A more mundane explanation of the network behavior Cueball is experiencing might be that it is random but he's seeing a pattern anyway, or that there is a loose connection or trace and the vibration of clapping and speaking in the vicinity of the equipment in question closes the connection.
Similar superstition regarding computer devices was used previously in 1457: Feedback .
[A chart is shown with one horizontal line with 13 ticks (the first larger) and ending in an arrow. There are three labels along the line, at the start in the middle an towards the end before the arrow. Below are two clouds in gray with labels. The first cloud is long and it is getting thinner towards the right. It goes between the first and second label above the chart. The second blob is smaller and of equal thickness and it goes from the last label towards right. Above the chart is a heading and a subheading:] Types of Computer Problems By how much debugging them makes your brain stop working
[The three labels above and the two in the clouds:] None Some A lot Normal problems Networking problems
[Below the chart, only in the right part of the comic is a comic drawing. Cueball is kneeling before a rack of servers.  One of the server blades is extended and connected by a cable to a laptop sitting on a box, which Cueball is using.  Behind Cueball, there is a wireless router sitting on a stool, which is connected by a cable to another wireless router sitting on the floor, which is connected to another laptop. From behind him to the right an off-panel voice emanates from a starburst at the edge of the panel.] Cueball: Before noon, odd -numbered packets were laggy, but after noon, even -numbered ones are! It's the opposite of yesterday! Off-panel voice: Are you sure you're okay? Cueball: I'm fine and I believe in ghosts now!


Reaction Maps

Explanation:
This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time a Texting Tip. Randall suggests that readers send a set of driving directions as an intense / extremely annoyed response (a "Reaction Map", named after the " Reaction Face ", "Reaction Gif", and other memes).  The words "Reaction Map" in Chemistry refer to a diagram that shows how compounds react to form different compounds; an example can be found here .
In this comic, Ponytail texts the following car pun/joke:
You should name your new Honda Civic The Treaty of Edinburgh Because it's a Tudor compact ["Tudor" pronounced "two-door" in some USA accents, "tyudor" elsewhere.]
The Treaty of Edinburgh was a treaty drawn up in 1560, which falls during the Tudor period of the history of England , while a compact is another word for a treaty -- hence a Tudor compact. A Honda Civic is a compact car , which has a coupé body model with only two doors (there are also hatchback and 4-door sedan versions) -- hence a two-door compact. The joke is thus a double pun on the similarity of the words "Tudor" and "two-door", as well as a pun on the words "treaty" and "compact."
Pronouncing "Tudor" as "Tyoo-dor" (i.e. without American-style yod-dropping ) rather than "Too-" may hinder comprehension of this pun.
Puns rise and fall in popularity, and some people dislike them at all times. Recipients often groan , sometimes even while laughing or smiling. Because of this pun, Cueball gets so mad at Ponytail that he replies twice, first that their friendship is over and second that he hopes she falls in a lake. Both times he uses driving directions to do so because he wishes to show how mad he is by spending time finding cities with relevant names just to do it.
The list of map destinations , Truly (MT), Saari (MI), Toulouse (KY), A (WV), Friendship (SC), This Way (TX) is a way of saying, "Truly sorry to lose a friendship this way".
The list of map destinations , Hope (NY), Yoe (PA), Fallin Lake (AR) is a way of saying, "Hope you fall in [a] lake".
"A" is one of the three districts in Clay County, WV . The others are "B" and "C".
In the title text, Randall offers a different option if "A" is removed from Google Maps, Ina (IL) , to make this response : Jump (OH), Ina (IL), Big Hole (TX) ("Jump in a big hole".)
In 2245: Edible Arrangements , Cueball was irritated by a pun from Megan which was also themed on English history ("Vore of the Roses"), but in that strip, he evidently didn't get angry enough to send a map expressing that he would " Cancelada Arrangements " he had bought for her -- he simply told her so in person and then walked away when she kept punning.
[Caption to the left of the comic:]
Texting Tip
Is your reaction too intense to be expressed in an emoji or gif? Try using driving directions! The extra research it requires shows how strongly you feel.
[A split panel, showing Ponytail texting Cueball with her text messages shown above in gray and Cueball reading the texts angrily below]
Ponytail: You should name your new Honda Civic The Treaty of Edinburgh Ponytail: Because it's a Tudor compact Ponytail: Get it
[Cueball replies to Ponytail, with his text messages shown above him. Ponytail's last text ("Get it") is shown. Cueball sends Ponytail a screenshot of driving directions that go through Truly, Saari, Toulouse, A, Friendship, and This Way]
[Cueball continues to text Ponytail, with his text messages shown above him. He sends Ponytail a screenshot of driving directions that go through Hope, Yoe, and Fallin Lake]


Worst Thing That Could Happen

Explanation:
Ponytail and her friends are considering upgrading some part or program of their computers. They may feel the need to upgrade because the software they are currently using has some vulnerability that is only patched in newer revisions (this comic was released just two weeks after the end of extended support for Windows 7 ), or because they want to have access to some new feature. As part of the decision-making process, Ponytail asks her friends, "What's the worst that could happen?" If the computers they are discussing are privately owned, she may be concerned about losing personal data or having to learn new software interfaces. On the other hand, if they are discussing a corporate computer system, there may also be business-related risks. If their company relies on functionality offered by their current system that has been deprecated or modified in the updated version (such as in 1172: Workflow , or as with many specialized tools or machines in the real world), they may suffer downtime while they modify the rest of their workflow. Even if the upgraded system should continue to fit their needs, they may need to take some downtime to perform the update and deal with the risks of something going badly along the way, and there may be major costs associated with license subscriptions and support contracts. "What's the worst that could happen?" is also a common rhetorical question ; Ponytail may be expressing a belief that nothing bad could happen as a result of the upgrade, and not expecting an answer.
Unfortunately, Ponytail's friends answer with their ideas for the worst things that could happen ever , not as a result of the upgrade , as Ponytail meant, or they are taking the question to the logical extreme and invoking chaos theory . The result is a list of "worst things" ridiculously unconnected to a computer upgrade. At the end, however, Megan interprets these as possible results of the upgrade, and advises against upgrading. A list with explanations can be found below. Ponytail facepalms at her friends' overly-literal senses of humor.
Alternatively, Ponytail could be facepalming at the fact that the worst thing which could happen, according to her team, is that they are put on a ridiculous game show in which, if they answer a question incorrectly, they are chucked in garbage disposal. This may be bad, but it is nowhere near as bad as an erupting supervolcano or nuclear war. [ citation needed ] However, Cueball has shown anxiety and difficulties in social situations, such as the less-than-helpful advice in 1917: How to Make Friends , so he (and likewise Hairy and Megan) may consider that embarrassment on the game show (which might then be immortalized online) is worse than instantaneous death in a nuclear war.
Megan and Cueball have previously experienced a severely-botched upgrade in 349: Success , in which Cueball somehow caused them to end up in shark-infested waters off the coast of a deserted island when he was just trying to get their computer to dual-boot BSD.
The title text talks about searching upgrade release notes for some of the things listed to be sure none are potential side effects of an upgrade. "Ctrl-F" is a common keyboard shortcut for "find text string" in many programs. Since Randall is just reading but not changing the patch notes, a web browser, PDF viewer, or word processing program such as Adobe Reader or Microsoft Word might have been used.
[Ponytail is standing in front of a desk with a computer. One of her hands is on the keyboard. Behind her, Cueball, Hairy, and Megan are looking at the computer screen.] Ponytail: We should upgrade.  What's the worst that could happen? Cueball: Supervolcano. Hairy: Robot uprising. Megan: Everyone falls down a well at once.
[Zoom in on Cueball, Hairy, and Megan. Cueball has turned toward the other two.] Cueball: Instead of hitting the tallest thing around, lightning starts hitting the nicest. Megan: Seagulls all get handguns. Hairy: A really slow nuclear war.
[Large panel with the original setting. Ponytail has turned towards the other three but is now facepalming, as Cueball gesturing with his hands at chest-height are still looking at the other two facing him.] Cueball: We all have to go on a game show where they show you photos of people you've met once and ask you their names, and if you get one wrong a trapdoor opens and you fall into a garbage disposal. Hairy: Ooh, that's a good one. Megan: Yeah, let's put off the upgrade.


Parker Solar Probe

Explanation:
This is an informative comic meant to represent the relative distances of astronomical objects relative to the Parker Solar Probe . It also shows where the probe will be in 2025 if its mission continues going according to plan. As explained by the caption at the top of the image, the distances between entities on the chart is drawn to scale; the sizes of said entities, however, are not, which is humorously showcased front-and-center by Cueball and Megan being shown as Earth-sized.
The Parker Solar Probe is a robotic spacecraft launched by NASA in 2018 with the mission of repeatedly probing and making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. It travels in an elongated orbit that passes close to the Sun and sometimes passes near Venus, arranged such that Venus nudges the orbit slightly in each pass to bring the probe's perihelion (the lower end of its orbit) closer and closer to the Sun. Two days before this comic was published the probe again passed through perihelion , establishing new records for closeness to the Sun (0.12 AU ) and speed (244,225 mph). [1] By the end of the probe's planned lifetime in 2025, it will pass within 0.046 AU (6.9 million km), or about 5 solar diameters, of the Sun's center, at a speed of 430,000 mph (690,000 km/h). The title text incorrectly states this distance to be 9 or 10 solar diameters measured from the Sun's surface .
Helios 2 was a solar probe launched in the 1976 that formerly held the records for closest man-made object to the Sun and fastest man-made object. Both records were surpassed by the Parker probe in 2018.
Cueball and Megan are standing on Earth. The way this diagram is drawn, they look like they could fall off Earth toward the Sun -- hence the comment "Careful!" -- though the joke is that in real life they would fall toward the center of the Earth, not toward the Sun. Also the surprise for many people is that it is much harder to reach the sun than Pluto. Because we already travel so fast here on Earth, and to reach the sun this speed has to be reduced, which is a larger speed difference than the one needed to escape the Sun's gravity well. If you could "fall" off Earth, you would just keep the approximately same distance to the Sun, but drifting slowly away from Earth.
The title text says the probe will get within 9 or 10 Sun- diameters of the Sun's surface . This is a bit of a mistake: it will actually get within that many Sun- radii (only 4½ or 5 Sun-diameters) of the center of the Sun, which corresponds to 4 or 4½ Sun-diameters above its surface. All the same, the title text makes the point that "Sun-diameters" (or "Sun-radii", for that matter) sounds like an astronomical distance, until you use the same scale for other distances. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is approximately 106 Sun-diameters; by that scale, 4 Sun-diameters is indeed "practically all the way down". Below is a table showing these and other distances using more common units of measurement.
[A tall, but very narrow box with Earth at the top, with Cueball and Megan standing precariously "on top" of Earth on each side of the center, trying to keep their balance. At the very bottom is shown a slice of the Sun. Between Earth and the Sun the two inner planets and two spacecraft are depicted with relation to their distance from the Sun. The spacecraft closest to the Sun is shown two times at different times, as it moves closer and closer to the sun. All 7 objects have labels close to them. The largest distance is between Venus and Mercury, with the Earth-Venus distance the second longest. The distances between the objects below Mercury are much shorter. There is a caption above the slim panel:]
Looking down toward the Sun and the Parker Solar Probe (Distances are to scale, sizes are not to scale)
Earth Cueball: Careful!
Venus
Mercury
Helios 2 (1976)
Parker Solar Probe (today)
Parker Solar Probe (2025)
Sun (Not to scale)


Cicadas

Explanation:
Cicadas are a species of insect whose nymphs burrow underground and emerge as adults to reproduce several years later.  One common species in North America is the 17-year cicada, also known as the periodical cicada . These cicadas form distinct broods which burrow and emerge as a group every 17 years, with different broods starting the cycle at different times.  This results in a couple of weeks every 17 years when the cicadas swarm in huge numbers, then vanish just as quickly when the adults die off.  Cicadas also make a distinctive buzzing sound, which makes their periodic appearance even more memorable.
In the comic, Cueball and Ponytail have accidentally created 17- second cicadas using genetic engineering .  This means that rather than seeing a massive swarm every 17 years that lasts for a few weeks, they have to deal with a swarm every 17 seconds that lasts for a few moments. This makes it very difficult for them to do their work, especially to figure out how the cicadas were created because the swarm keeps interrupting their work. Note that the comic has been drawn differently than most other straight four-panel comics, probably to highlight the interruptions of the buzzing swarm - see the transcript .
The title text is a pun on " circadian rhythm ." In particular, it might resemble something said to someone getting adjusted to a new sleep schedule. But here it is the 17 seconds interruption, not a time zone shift, that has to be adjusted for.
This entire comic seems to only have been a lead-up to the "cicadian rhythm" punchline. This is an interesting suggestion since Randall has mentioned in an interview that he makes up the title text after completing the comic. [ actual citation needed ] Seems like he made an exception here; unless he didn't.
[This comic is laid out in a variation of a regular four-panel comic. One wide panel is overlaid by two smaller panels, which are placed where the second and fourth panels would be. These panels are slightly offset so they extend above the wide panel.]
[Cueball and Ponytail are facing each other across a desk while having a conversation. Cueball is holding up a tablet in his hand while Ponytail is typing at a laptop on the desk.] Cueball: What can you tell from genome comparison? Ponytail: I think there's a duplication on the - Ponytail: Look out!
[An overlaid panel shows that the air is full of flying cicadas, many of which have landed on Cueball, Ponytail, the laptop, the tablet, and the desk. Ponytail and Cueball have their arms up in a futile attempt to shield themselves from the bugs, with Cueball having put the tablet down on the table.] Bzzzzzzz
[The cicadas are gone, and Cueball and Ponytail resume their conversation. Cueball has picked up the tablet again] Ponytail: - a duplication on the gene right before the cleavage site, so the resulting protein - Ponytail: Look out!
[An overlaid panel shows that the air is again full of flying cicadas, which have once again landed on Cueball, Ponytail, the laptop, the tablet, and the desk. Ponytail and Cueball have raised their arms to shield themselves again.] Bzzzzzzz
[Caption below the large panel:] Our genetics work has produced 17-second cicadas, but we're having a hard time figuring out how.
The widely-accepted scientific explanation for the long and seemingly arbitrary 17-year lifecycle is that seventeen is a prime number - it's believed that this is an evolutionary adaptation against lifecycles of competitors taking easy advantage of the cicada as a food source (if a predator) or emerging early to dominating their shared food source (if a fellow feeder), since 17 years cannot be divided by any whole number of years other than itself and 1.
A 16-year cicada might find a creature with an 8-year, 4-year, or biennial cycle could profit from it in a 'clash' of expectations, but only a cycle that is a multiple of 17 (by an identical accident of evolution, that must also match the 'beat' years of the Cicada to be useful) would affect the presumed ancestors of the comic-strip breed. Predators often work to yearly cycles of plenty and scarcity of food or can survive a low number of famine years between the better ones, but if they have less than one year of 'bounty' for every decade or so of 'normal' feeding then they cannot build up the numbers needed to threaten such prey that plays the long-game.
Other broods of cicada have 13-year lifecycles (the next lowest prime number), and would potentially clash for resources (or hybridize) only every 221 years. Even if this causes a single bad cycle, for both sub-species, the next cycle of appearance is their own once more (for each) and the respective populations have plenty of opportunity to recover from this event by the time a further two centuries pass.  Thus it is theorized the happenstance evolution of a period of dormancy that gives a cycle of a significantly large prime-number of years - though still low enough to survive that period - is ultimately more advantageous than any cousins who tried to evolve to a period with smaller factors/shorter harmonics.


Satellite

Explanation:
This comic humorously compares the relationship between humans and satellites to the relationship between humans and pets .  "He followed me home, can we keep him?" is a stock phrase said by children pleading with their parents to keep a "found" animal as a pet.  The stock response is to admonish the child to look after the pet's needs, especially the less fun ones, like cleaning up after the pet.  In this comic, Science Girl wishes to adopt an "abandoned" satellite, but rather than being asked to clean up after the satellite's waste, she is lectured by her parents on how to properly discard it once it stops working. This would be like saying "you have to promise to bury the dog in the backyard when it dies, not leave its corpse to decompose in the dining room like the last one," which is not how most pet-adoption conversations go. [ citation needed ]
A graveyard orbit is an orbit far away from operational satellites.  Graveyard orbits are used when a satellite is far enough away from the Earth that de-orbiting it into Earth's atmosphere is too expensive to be practical.  The most widely-used graveyard orbit is approximately 300 km above geostationary orbit ; a satellite at the end of its life will briefly accelerate to move further away from Earth, so Science Girl's parents refer to "boosting" the satellite into a graveyard orbit.
Kessler syndrome is a proposed scenario in which satellite collision(s) produce many pieces of orbiting space junk, which then hit other satellites and create even more pieces of junk, which hit more satellites, and so on. In this scenario Earth becomes surrounded by so much man-made debris that the risk of a collision makes space activities difficult. Apparently Science Girl has recreated this scenario before in her parents' home, requiring extensive cleanup of the dining room and making it unusable for weeks. Kessler syndrome was the premise of the movie Gravity , where the collision of two satellites produces pieces of shrapnel that go on to tear apart other satellites including the International Space Station and a Space Shuttle .  A variation of Kessler syndrome was the focus of the first part of the Neal Stephenson novel Seveneves , where cascading collisions of fragments of the moon led to natural and artificial debris field around the Earth.
The title text is more advice from Science Girl's parents. They tell her that if she is going to let her satellite reenter the atmosphere and burn up, she should do it above the deep end of the bathtub. This echoes how satellites in orbit can be purposefully de-orbited, and are usually planned so that any debris that isn't fully destroyed lands in the ocean and does not pose a safety risk.  When it is possible, satellites are generally directed towards the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area, commonly known as the " spacecraft graveyard ", to land over a thousand miles away from any populated landmass.
Abandoned satellites were in the news recently, as two defunct satellites had a near miss on January 29, 2020, the week before this comic strip was published. This is becoming more of an issue, especially in Low Earth Orbit, as more and more satellites are built, and old satellites go defunct.
Humans orbited by satellites were previously featured in 1300: Galilean Moons ; here, of course, the satellites were natural satellites, i.e. moons.
An alternative reading is that the characters are actually planet-sized creatures around which the discarded debris of primitive lifeforms, carelessly sent into space, orbits.  Saturn happens to have a density less than that of water, so it could conceivably float in a suitably-sized bathtub.
[Science Girl is facing Cueball and Megan. A small satellite orbits her, indicated by a tilted circle around her at about neck height. The satellite is between her and her parents.] Science Girl: Hey, look, I found a satellite! Can I keep it? Please? Cueball: Sweetie, no. Megan: Put it back where you found it.
[Zoom in on Science Girl who looks straight out of the panel, the satellite is passing by her ear with the circle going behind her. The satellite is detailed in this zoom in. There is a central main part of the satellite, almost square, with a small protrusion at the "top" and two small lines (antennae) at the "bottom." Two solar panels extend on either side, each longer than the central part.] Science Girl: But I think it was abandoned! Science Girl: And it's so cute! Science Girl: Please? Science Girl: Pleeeease?
[Back to all three again, Science Girl has her arms raised above her head. The satellite is beneath her head.] Megan: Fine. But you have to promise to boost it to a graveyard orbit when it stops working. Don't just leave it drifting around. Science Girl: Yaaaay!
[Same setting as in the first panel, so Science Girl has lowered her arms.] Cueball: We're serious. I am not cleaning up after Kessler syndrome again. Megan: We couldn't use the dining room for weeks! Science Girl: I promise, I promise.


Tax AI

Explanation:
The deadline for filing tax returns in the United States is April 15, so many people in the US are already in the process of filing their taxes at the time of this comic's publication. Traditionally, people used tax provider companies, but it is becoming more popular to use tax preparation software, such as TurboTax or a service from the Free File Alliance , which helps to fill in the tax forms after a user enters their income information and deductions for the year.
In this comic, Cueball has attempted to train an artificial neural net to prepare his US tax return , but it has made several comical errors, purportedly because it was not trained extensively enough.  Most of the errors consist of malapropisms , words that sound almost the same but mean very different things switched for comic effect.  This suggests Cueball trained the neural net by talking to it.
The title "Tax AI" can be considered a pun, either referencing the AI software Cueball just trained to prepare his tax return, or an exhortation to tax AI entities, as a possible slogan supporting Robot tax .
The title text references 2173: Trained a Neural Net , which indicates that getting a human to do something is basically using a "pretrained neural net". Cueball has chosen to use a local tax provider to help him file his taxes, aka a "pretrained neural net" in the form of a human named Greg.
Randall also "trained" humans to do his tax returns in 1566: Board Game . Tax returns and the troubles of filling them out were also the subjects of 1971: Personal Data and 1977: Paperwork .
[Cueball is sitting, hands on his knees, in his office chair at his desk reading a message on the screen of his laptop. The message is shown above the laptop an is indicated to be on the screen with a zigzag line starting at a starburst on the screen.] Laptop: You may claim up to 1040 defendants on your seitan local income tax for fiscal year 20202 by taking the standard deduckling and atomizing your clams.
[Caption below the panel:] I used a neural net to prepare my tax returns, but I think I cut off its training too early.


Leap Smearing

Explanation:
Clocks usually measure time by regularly-sized intervals, but the natural world is not always so accommodating.  Since the solar year is not an integer number of days long, we add leap days every four years (except for years divisible by 100 but not 400) to prevent our calendars from drifting with respect to the seasons.  We also add leap seconds to the clock every now and then, to prevent noon on our clocks from drifting away from solar noon.  Unfortunately, Earth's day is not as regular as Earth's year, so leap seconds cannot be predicted with a formula but are added as needed, most recently in 2016.  Officially, the leap second is added at midnight UTC (so a clock will tick 23:59:59... 23:59:60 ...00:00:00), but this is an extremely inconvenient edge case, to the point that there are many proposals to do away with leap seconds entirely (as of this comic strip's publication, the matter will be discussed in the World Radiocommunication Conference in 2023).
Rather than inserting an extra tick into timestamps and dealing with the resulting hiccups (e.g. programs hard-coded to expect that every minute will contain exactly sixty seconds ), Google 's services 'smear' the leap second over the course of a 24-hour period, officially called Leap Smear by Google. The smear is centered on the leap second (at midnight) so from noon the day before to noon the day after each second is 11.6 μs longer (1s/(24*60*60) = 11,574 μs). This difference is too small for most of Google's services to be bothered with, and by centering on midnight, the difference in time will never be more than half a second at midnight; just before midnight it will be half a second behind, after midnight it'll be half a second ahead.  This comic's joke arises from the idea of extending this practice to smearing leap days over the month of February.  This comic strip was published February 10th, 2020, almost three weeks before the leap day on February 29th, 2020.
In the comic, Cueball is visiting one of Google's facilities, presumably during office hours on the 10th day of February, when the comic was released. But when he looks at their clocks he sees they are all around 3:00 AM (which is in the middle of the night). He thus asks Ponytail and Hairy why their clocks are wrong. Ponytail tells him it is because of leap day smearing.
Ponytail explains that adding an extra day creates too many glitches. So they just run their clocks 3.4% slower during February. She thus states that it works approximately like leap smearing for seconds, so that the extra day's 24 hours are spread evenly over the course of February, keeping it at the regular 28 days, but still running over 24*29 = 696 hours, even though their clocks only go through 672 hours = 24*28.
Thus the 24 hours less to count are spread out over the 696 real hours, which means their clocks run 24/696 = 3.445 % slower (matching the 3.4% Ponytail mentions). Every smeared day will thus be about 0.86 hours, or 51 minutes and 40 seconds, longer (24/28) than a standard day. So when day-smearing clocks read 3:02 AM on February 10th (the comic was released on February 10th), about 9.1264 smeared days will have passed. This translates to about 9.4523 standard days (9.1264*29/28), which is approximately 10:51 AM on February 10th, well within normal working hours.
The joke of course is that contrary to leap second smearing this would be very inconvenient for those following it, due to the fact that clocks would be noticeably out of sync with Earth's rotation (and perhaps more importantly, with everyone else's clocks) for most of the month. (Although it does mean they would sync up better with some of their partners abroad; see 1335: Now and 448: Good Morning .)  A different kind of time-smearing was looked at in the far earlier comic 320: 28-Hour Day , which was actually designed with a form of convenience in mind, and it would be interesting to see what the results could be of creatively combining both systems.
The title text humorously suggests that some people (at Google) suspect that the real reason for the leap day smearing was actually a "No, I didn't forget Valentine's Day" excuse that got out of hand.  The idea is, that maybe a CEO at Google forgot to buy something for their romantic partner for Valentine, and thus tried to suggest that it was not because they forgot, but that at work it was still February 14th.  Presumably, in February 2016, they used this excuse to buy 12 extra hours (as the end of a smeared Feb 14 is exactly halfway through the month) to get their partner a present, and then required the company to actually implement "leap day smearing" by 2020 to maintain the illusion.
Randall has some issues with Valentines , see for example 1016: Valentine Dilemma . This comic was released four days before Valentines Day of 2020. It was the first time in 8 years he made any reference to Valentine around this time of year, but the seventh time in total. Randall has since not mentioned Valentine's day.
1481: API also covered leap seconds in its title text.
[Cueball, Ponytail, and Hairy are looking up at a digital clock on a wall. It displays the time in white on a black background, with a logo on the frame beneath the time.] 3:02 AM Google
Cueball: Why do the clocks say it's 3AM? Ponytail: Adding an extra day creates too many glitches. Instead, we're just running our clocks 3.4% slower during February, to avoid the irregularity.
[Caption below the panel:] This year, Google has expanded their leap second "smearing" to cover leap days as well.


Blockchain

Explanation:
This comic is a flowchart intended to help project leaders decide if their project needs a blockchain.
A blockchain is a data storage structure shared between various computers.  Each block is digitally signed and includes the digital signature of the block before it, which makes it highly resilient against tampering.  However, what sets blockchains in the context of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin apart from e.g. Merkle trees used in programs such as Git is that anyone can write to a blockchain.  This is sometimes specified as a "public" or "permissionless" ledger or blockchain.  In order to prevent the blockchain from being vandalized, various mechanisms are used to determine consensus about which additions to the blockchain are legitimate.  Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies use a " proof of work " system, where writing a block includes some task which is computationally difficult to perform but simple to verify, such as finding a magic number (called a " cryptographic nonce ") that, when appended to the block, makes its hash value start with lots of zeroes.  This results in a system which is, in ideal circumstances, extremely difficult to vandalize, as the attacker must find new nonce values for the block he wishes to modify and every succeeding block, and then broadcast the modified blockchain from enough nodes to convince the rest of the network to go along with it instead of the legitimate one.
In practice, in order to actually make this so-called "51% attack" unfeasible, the network needs to have as many legitimate actors using as much computing power as possible.  This results in the Bitcoin network using approximately a million times more energy per transaction than Visa's network, while smaller cryptocurrencies have actually experienced 51% attacks and double-spending .  For almost any practical project, there is no need to allow everyone in the world to have write access to a database, so it is generally quite acceptable to use a straightforward centrally-controlled permissioning system rather than proof-of-work or other decentralization schemes to restrict write access.  This is why all branches of the flowchart lead to the answer "No".
Part of the joke is that the only question asked in the flowchart, "Are you making the decision using a flowchart you found?" has nothing to do with blockchains or any details of the project itself, and can only honestly be answered 'yes' (which is why the 'no' branch leads to a block reading "You definitely are" before leading to the final "No" answer).  For a flowchart with a little more technical content, you can see Figure 6 (page number 42, page 53 of the PDF) of the Blockchain Technology Overview published by NIST .  In particular, they conclude that blockchain is only potentially useful if you need a data store that must never be erased (not even for the sake of e.g. removing illegal or harmful content, which has been written into blockchains in the past ), must be auditable, and where lots of people need to write to it (more than can feasibly be enumerated or controlled in any way) but none of them can be trusted to have administrative authority over it.
Presumably, if a project were in the rare category of truly needing a blockchain, that decision would be made by a technical expert who is not consulting this flowchart.  This flowchart is probably intended as a "resource" for clueless project managers who have latched on to "blockchain" as a buzzword, such as the investors who tripled the stock price of Long Island Iced Tea after it changed its name to "Long Blockchain Corp." and professed a pivot into the blockchain space.  As stated above, one of those real-world problems which is "solved" by blockchains is the libertarian ideal of creating a system which allows anyone to perform transactions while (hopefully) preventing anyone from double-spending their coins, much as physical cash does, but without relying on trusted third parties such as government regulators, banks, or mints.  Even in that case, however, cryptocurrency exchanges are running into challenges with anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer regulations, which (among other things) ban certain actors from being served by banks, so they are having to use ordinary certificates, passwords, and identification documents, which are definitely not implemented via a blockchain.
In the title text block chains are compared to grappling hooks . These hooks are devices with several claws (hooks) attached to the end of a rope. A grappling hook is one of Link's weapons from the The Legend of Zelda series. Additionally, Luke Skywalker used a grappling hook to swing with Princess Leia across a chasm in the first Star Wars film, A New Hope .
Like Blockchains, grappling hooks are thus seen as a cool tool when they encounter a problem for which they are the right solution, like boarding an enemy ship... However, just like for blockchains, in real life there are very few cases where these hooks are the best solution for a given problem.  As an example of a problem that is not well-solved by a grappling hook, see 2128: New Robot where an electrically-charged "search and rescue" robot has been equipped with such a hook.
Blockchain was previously mentioned in 2030: Voting Software , with Megan and Cueball expressing distrust in its use for electronic voting.
Flowcharts are a recurring theme in xkcd. If you are unfamiliar with them see 518: Flow Charts . Similar simple flowcharts like this comic, where there is only one reply has been used before like 1723: Meteorite Identification and 2026: Heat Index . See also the similar 1691: Optimization , where the flowchart, as it does here, asks if you are using flowcharts.
[A flowchart is shown. A rectangular block at the top has one line down to a diamond shaped block. From there lines go right and down from two of the edges. The line to the right immediately takes a turn and goes down to a rectangular block. From this block a line goes to the block to the left, which is also the one that the down line from the diamond points to, so both routes ends here. There are text in each of the four blocks and labels above the lines for the two options going out from the diamond.] [Start block:] Should your project use a blockchain?
[Diamond:] Are you making the decision using a flowchart you just found?
[Reply:] No
[Right block:] You definitely are
[From right block of if reply was:] Yes
[Result block:] No


Further Research is Needed

Explanation:
In most scientific fields, it's very common to end research papers with the caveat that "more research is needed", or words to that effect. This is particularly true when reporting results on a topic that's not well studied, and in which there's not enough literature to form a broad consensus. This is a very reasonable suggestion, an individual research project may produce results that suggest a certain conclusion, but it would be foolhardy to take something as established fact based on a single study. Individual studies may produce misleading information, they may have flaws that don't become evident until later, they may be based on assumptions that don't hold up, or the results may end up having an alternate explanation (as when a correlation is found, but does not establish specific causation). It's all too common for science reporters, particularly in low-quality outlets, to draw broad and bold conclusions from a single study, but actual scientists quickly learn to be more cautious. Peer-reviewed papers will generally make clear that conclusions are tentative, and may be modified or even overturned by future research.
This comic's fictional paper, however, ends with a statement that the paper has resolved all the problems about its topic, and that no more research is necessary. Humorously, the authors are so confident in their research skills that they believe that they have solved all the problems in that particular topic that can be solved. Munroe jokes that he'd like to see researchers with "the guts" to make such a proclamation. In real life, doing so would likely damage the reputation of the study's authors, because it would belie both a breathtaking arrogance and a lack of understanding of the research process. If nothing else, studies need to be replicated, to establish that the initial data gathering was accurate. In addition, no single study could realistically address every aspect, variation and complication in a given topic. It's simply not feasible that a single paper could "[resolve] all remaining questions" on any given topic, and making such a ridiculous claim would badly damage a researcher's credibility. At the same time, if no further research were necessary, every researcher in the field, including the author who wrote the study, would need to either change fields or change careers. The title text ironically states that "further research" is indeed needed to understand how the researchers who wrote the paper were able to resolve all the problems in that topic or field, thus allowing the researchers to justify future funding for their research.
Perhaps the statement most like this made by a real scientist was by Albert A. Michelson , at the 1894 dedication of the University of Chicago's Reyerson Physical Laboratory: "[I]t seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice." (Variants of this statement are sometimes misattributed to William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin .) Even this statement is couched in much less certainty than the concluding statement presented in this comic strip, and sure enough, just eleven years later, Albert Einstein wrote his Annus Mirabilis papers . These four papers explained the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass-energy equivalence, turning established physics on its head. Ironically, Michelson made this statement despite the fact that he himself had upset a major of notion of established physics just seven years before, when the Michelson-Morley experiment demonstrated that the speed of light was constant, disproving the Aether theories then prevalent in physics. This result in turn was part of the inspiration for Einstein's theory of special relativity.
[A panel, representing an excerpt from a scholarly journal, with two sentences clearly visible. Below the text is one more readable word, with a horizontal line below it, and then four numbered lines with unreadable text. The text is written with normal capitalization rather than in all caps.] We believe this resolves all remaining questions on this topic. No further research is needed. References 1. 2. 3. 4.
[Caption below the panel:] Just once, I want to see a research paper with the guts to end this way.


Phylogenetic Tree

Explanation:
In biology, phylogenetic trees are a way of showing evolutionary relationships between species. Each split in the tree represents a species that was the common ancestor of the two species beneath it, resulting in a bifurcating structure that can be followed all the way back to a single root - the most recent common ancestor of all species in the tree.
In sport, a tournament tree is a diagrammatic way of showing the progress of competitors in an elimination tournament. Each split in the tree represents the winner of a match between the two competitors beneath it. This too results in a bifurcating tree structure, which eventually terminates at a single root representing the champion of the tournament. Tournament brackets are a recurring theme at xkcd.
In this comic, Randall has taken advantage of the similarity between these two diagrams in order to prank his fellow biologists.
Each year in the United States, in March and early April, 68 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I college basketball teams play in a single elimination postseason tournament to decide the national champion of college basketball. This tournament is colloquially known as March Madness . Associated with this tournament, it has become commonplace to guess the outcomes of each game, and predict who will win the tournament. A diagram illustrating the progress and elimination of teams through the tournament is called a bracket . Presumably Randall is referring to the men's college basketball tournament here, though there is a separate women's college basketball tournament that is also referred to as "March Madness".
Randall has replaced the trees in a biology paper with a basketball March Madness bracket , which is not related to biology. The 2019-20 NCAA college basketball regular season had not ended yet at the time of this comic's publication, so the partial bracket shown is a fictional bracket. Compared to a phylogenetic tree, the 'root' of a tournament tree is the final result (once known), rather than the common ancestor that was prior in time to all those that came after; the 'leaves' are all the initially hopeful competitors, rather than the latest extant (or unsucceeded extinct) organisms.
The title text shows the inverse of what the comic says: Apparently the March Madness bracket pool removed Randall after he tried to introduce biology-related evidence comparing the National Basketball Association (NBA) and American Basketball Association (ABA) to organisms and claiming the ABA is an endosymbiont living inside the NBA. An endosymbiont is an organism living inside another organism. In a way, this can be considered true of these two leagues, as the NBA and ABA merged in 1976 after which the ABA ceased to exist. 4 teams from the ABA, the Denver Nuggets , Indiana Pacers , Brooklyn Nets and San Antonio Spurs , continue to exist today as NBA teams. It is additionally humorous that Randall brings up the ABA/NBA merger in a March Madness bracket group, as March Madness is a college basketball tournament, as opposed to professional basketball played by the NBA and ABA.
A March Madness bracket was also the topic of 1819: Sweet 16 .
The bracket shows the Duke University basketball team winning the NCAA college basketball tournament. Strangely, it shows Gonzaga University linked only to explicitly non-Gonzaga branches, suddenly appearing out of the bottom section, which is not possible in a sports bracket context, but possible in biology if Gonzaga is an identified ancestral root with all descendant evolved species identified by a new term. In fact, the implied unchanged continuity of Duke from 'universal ancestor' to niche population sharing the world with all of its diverged and re-evolved outbranchings (rather than perhaps used as a term for a typically broad cladistic group of branches, such as Archaea) would be more curious - or just imply an inherent of available precision in the necessary paleobiological studies that classify the proposed UA and its descendency.
As of the publish date of this comic, all of the college basketball teams mentioned (except the University of Virginia) were ranked in the top 25 of the Associated Press poll . The University of Virginia was the 2019 national champion (winner of the tournament), so that may have been why they were mentioned.
[A circular phylogenetic tree is shown, with various parts of the tree colored red, green, blue, and black.  Text is written on the root of the tree and the first few branches, getting smaller until it becomes unreadable.  The visible text is:] Duke Duke Gonzaga Louisville Duke UVA FSU Dayton UVA Kansas FSU
[Caption below the panel:] I was kicked off the biology project after I secretly replaced all the phylogenetic trees in our new paper with March Madness brackets.


Picking Bad Stocks

Explanation:
Cueball and Ponytail are discussing the stock market. Ponytail explains that there has been no reliable way to consistently pick stocks that outperform the market average. She also states that there could be a corollary to that; there is no way to consistently pick bad stocks (presumably for this discussion, bad stocks refers to stocks whose value is expected to go down).  Cueball states that he could consistently pick bad stocks, and the last panel shows him at a trading terminal purportedly buying bad stocks, while White Hat and Megan use his bad stock picks as indications that those stocks should be removed from whatever stock index they manage.
Generally, people invest in the stock market hoping to make money.  They buy stock in companies whose value they expect will increase, and sell stock when they feel its value is about to stop increasing or start decreasing.  Someone who could tell whether a stock's price will rise or fall (more than the average stock) in a given time interval could make a lot of money, but this is an infamously difficult problem.  Market prices already reflect the consensus estimate of what a stock should be worth based on all public information about the company. Some investors use fundamental analysis , that is, they attempt to understand companies based on their financial statements and market position to identify which stocks are likely to become more or less valuable over time, while others use technical analysis which seeks to identify patterns in the stock prices themselves.  Technical analysis was featured in comic 2101 . However, while the rise and fall of stock prices are sometimes connected to real events (strong or weak profit statements, new product announcements, major scandals) that one person might predict better than another, they more often exhibit random-walk behavior. Many studies, such as the long-running " Investment Dartboard Contest " run by The Wall Street Journal , have found that an index of stocks that represent the total market, or even a set of randomly-selected stocks (often colloquially stated as "picked by a monkey") beats paying an expert to choose your portfolio.
Realistically, in investing, someone who purposely trades in bad stocks is called a short seller , and someone who could consistently pick bad stock could make a lot of money in the stock market. Short selling consists of selling a stock before you own it, with the anticipation that the stock's price will drop soon, and you can later purchase the stock to fulfill the sale. The difference between the selling price and the purchase price is your profit, just as with any normal ("long") purchase and sale. However, in US stock markets, it is illegal to sell stocks that you don't own, so when you short a stock, you need to borrow that stock from a third party (possibly the trading firm you're working with, or some other firm that the trading firm has a stock loan relationship with, that currently holds a position in the stock you're shorting) to cover the sale. This is all done automatically by the trading platform you use. Between the time you sell the stock until the time you repurchase the stock on the open market, you will have what's called a short position on the stock, and you need to pay interest to the company that lent you that stock. Because of the interest payments, short sales are almost always short-term positions, as the interest paid on the loan can quickly exceed any profit you might make on the sale. A. Gary Shilling , a financial analyst, famously remarked that " markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent. "  Ponytail attempted to explain short selling to Cueball in 2094: Short Selling (perhaps that comic and this one are part of the same conversation), although Cueball found Ponytail's advice much less helpful than he has found this comic's conversation. However, in this case, Ponytail is not describing short selling but instead, investing in every stock except for the bad ones
Cueball's statement about wanting revenge on a ghost may be a reference to 2259: Networking Problems , in which Cueball was driven insane trying to debug network problems and came to believe in ghosts.  Perhaps the CEO of company #208 has had a similar experience with a network.
If Cueball's statement that a company is developing a "camping Roomba " is correctly attributing the trademark (as opposed to genericizing it to refer to any small cleaning robot), then presumably company #1434 is iRobot .  While a Roomba for camping may sound like a ridiculous concept that is not likely to make much money, developing a robot that can navigate and move around natural environments would be a major advancement leading to new opportunities for both their civilian and military product lines.  A campground offers a more challenging environment than indoors, while being slightly more controlled than a truly wild area, making for a good development step.  Dropping iRobot from this company's index is probably not a move that would be suggested by a stock broker who is earnestly trying to make money, but maybe Cueball's "market anti-sense" knows something we don't.
In the title-text, it seems that Cueball is worse at picking bad stocks than he thinks he is; a legitimate investor could have seen what Cueball saw and taken it as a good sign. This only validates Ponytail's point regarding the stock market - there is no way to consistently identify what stocks will go up or down.
[Cueball and Ponytail are walking together.]
Cueball: I feel like by now I should know about the stock market. Cueball: What is investing?  Do you just open a website and pick the companies you like?
[Cueball and Ponytail are still walking; Ponytail is holding out her hand palm-up.]
Ponytail: Well, you totally can. Ponytail: But there's a lot of evidence that no investing strategy consistently picks stocks that outperform the average of the whole market.  A lot of fund management is a myth.
[Close-up on Ponytail, who has turned to Cueball.]
Cueball (off-screen): Huh, okay. Ponytail: But there's a weird corollary to that idea: it implies that, ignoring fees and stuff, it's just as hard to consistently lose money by picking bad stocks from an index.
[Cueball and Ponytail are both back in frame.  They are standing still and facing each other.]
Ponytail: If someone could consistently buy bad stocks, you could beat the average by hiring them, letting them pretend to invest, then buying every stock except the ones they pick. Ponytail: In a way, bad judgement is just as helpful as good judgement.
[In a frameless panel, Cueball and Ponytail are standing facing each other; Cueball is raising his hands.]
Cueball: Oh my God. Cueball: I can do that! Ponytail: No, it's just an example-- Cueball: This is the job I was born for.
[Cueball is either sitting in a box or being viewed on a camera screen.  He is sitting in front of a computer console, and a camera is pointed at him.  Megan and White Hat are viewing him, and White Hat is holding a tablet.]
[Text box: Soon...] Cueball: Hey, this company's CEO wants revenge on the same ghost as me!  I'm buying! Cueball: Ooh, and this one is planning to develop a "Camping Roomba."  That's a sure bet! Megan: Drop companies #208 and #1434 from the index. White Hat: Done.


Grandpa Jason and Grandpa Chad

Explanation:
This is another comic with one of Randall's fun facts .
The comic contains three separate curves, with the x-axis being the date and the y-axis being the frequency of three separate sets of data:
The graph shows that the names "Jason" and "Chad" were extremely uncommon in the US prior to the 1960's, but then experienced a surge in popularity, peaking in the late 1970's, and falling off thereafter.  There are a couple of interesting effects when certain names become temporarily trendy. It means that those names become closely associated with a particular age cohort, so one can guess a person's age range based solely on their first name, and therefore predict other tendencies associated with age (this is also explored in 1950: Chicken Pox and Name Statistics ).  A side effect of this is that, when this cohort first comes of age, those names enter the public consciousness as being associated with youth, trendiness and irresponsibility. Of course, that cohort continues to age, and eventually becomes the adult cohort, then the senior cohort, but stereotypes are often slow to change. 2165: Millennials is similarly about how a label has outlived the demographic that it was used to describe, while the people described by the label have outgrown the traits that the label entails.
In addition to dealing with with the inertia of our assumptions and stereotype, this comic also continues a long XKCD tradition of pointing out how quickly time is passing, and how slow we often are to realize it. In this case, those of us in Randall's general age range are used to thinking of "Jason" and "Chad" as names for young, trendy, party animals.  The fact that only a small fraction of people with these names are under the age of 30, and a growing number of them are now grandparents (and that trend is likely to increase rapidly in the next few years), forces us to acknowledge that quite a bit of time has passed since we first formed our world views, and that means we've aged, even if we haven't noticed it.
The title text adds a caveat to the assertion, mentioning the lack of any real evidence for the distribution of ages of Grandparents, but tacitly admits that the matter is not sufficiently important to seek any further precision.
Other possible caveats of the data:
The title text ends with the text "No further research is really *needed,*" referencing 2268: Further Research is Needed . This is also a joke in itself. The emphasis on *needed* is an admission that although more research is *possible*, it's simply not warranted, given the fairly trivial nature of the topic.
[A progression chart covering the period of years between 1950 to 1995. One line, representing the birth years of people becoming grandparents, is dotted and begins low at the start, climbs, then steeply declines. Two solid lines, representing the birth years of people named "Chad" or "Jason", begin in the early 1960s, rise almost concurrently, however one declines steadily while the other has a curve almost before the end of the chart. The overlapping area between the dotted and solid lines is shaded. The lines show the following data:]
Birth years of people becoming grandparents this year (United States, very rough estimate) [A dotted line which begins at 1950, rises to its peak at 1970, then steeply declines to zero by the late '70s.]
Birth years of people named "Jason" and "Chad" (Social Security data) [Chad: A solid line beginning at 1962, rises to its peak by 1975, then drops through the '80s and '90s. Jason crosses underneath it in 1985, but then re-crosses it in 1993.] [Jason: A solid line beginning at 1963, rises to its peak between 1977-80, then declines, dropping beneath Chad around 1985 but climbing above it again in 1993.]
[Caption below the comic:] Fun fact: We have now entered the era of "Grandpa Jason" and "Grandpa Chad."


Ringtone Timeline

Explanation:
After the telephone was invented, a way of indicating when a call was coming through was needed.  Special voltages sent through the line were used to activate a physical bell on the other end, leading to what we recognize as a phone ringing sound , and that method of generating sound persisted for quite some time, even when new methods of detecting and generating ringing sounds were developed.
Eventually, however, people realized they were no longer confined to the traditional bell ringing sound, as computers became more and more involved with the telephone process, and variations of bell-type sounds were introduced, often sounding like spaceship sounds from sci-fi movies. Probably the most iconic "cool space beeps" are the chirps from the communicators from Star Trek (which themselves resemble flip-phones in style). Another common ringtone was the Nokia tune .
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, actual songs, or song snippets were able to be used as a ringing sound. It became common to record song snippets from the radio, or to use song MP3 files as ringtones. Many of these songs are grating to hear, and also a social faux pas if they sound in theatres or other listening venues.  As an example, this Geico ad featuring bad ringtones, including "the worst ringtone [the Geico gecko has] ever heard", aired in 2010, around the end of the "song and novelty ringtone" period (according to Randall's periodization).
As people got sick of that, they reverted to use the default ring tone, a spaceship / computer sound, although this time often of higher quality and more melodious in nature. Nowadays, there are more people electing to use a more traditional ringing sound, both as the novelty has worn off, and possibly also as an ironic statement about ringtones. Randall (in the person of Cueball) made a statement like this in 479: Tones in 2008, which according to his reckoning was in the waning years of the novelty ringtone epoch.
The final stage the comic is pointing to is do away with traditional sound entirely, and going with the vibrate mode most portable phones have; what little sound there is is more of a low rumbling sound. Using this setting is common for schools, workplaces, or churches, as it can be disruptive to have a phone ring in a public place . Some users have chosen to always set their phones to the vibrate setting, to avoid having to change their ringing settings back and forth. Randall claims that vibrate mode is the "final victory" over ringtones, which he apparently dislikes.
In the title text, Randall ironically uses a "novelty ringtone" which is an audio recording of a phone vibrating. This would sound like a phone on vibrate mode, but his actual phone is not vibrating, and is actually producing a "ringing" sound. However, if the original phone was vibrating on a hard surface (as opposed to in a pocket, muffled by fabric), the sound would be much louder and more grating.  A recording of that sound, played as an audio ringtone, would go back to being annoying again. But maybe less imaginatively so than might be a version of the staccato "drum-da-da-drum-da-da-drum" of a phone's periodic handshaking with a mast, such as you sometimes hear over unassociated audio equipment, at pretty much any time it pleases.
[A horizontal timeline spanning between the years 1875 and 2022. Every year is indicated by a tick below the line, and labeled every 5 years. There is a gap between 1883 and 1989 with jagged lines to indicate a jump in time. 7 sections are labeled on the chart, each with a border except for the first and last:]
[1875, with no border:] Telephone ringer invented
[1878-1883:] Normal ringing sounds
[Gap and jagged lines to indicate jump in time from 1883 to 1989]
[1989-1996:] Normal ringing sounds
[1996-2003:] Cool space beeps
[2003-2009:] Song and novelty ringtones
[2009-2013:] Cool space beeps
[2013-2019:] Normal ringing sounds
[2020, with no border:] Everyone sets their phones to vibrate
[Caption below the panel:] After 140 years, humanity is finally on the verge of winning the war against ringtones.


Truck Proximity

Explanation:
This comic is a graph showing the relationship between time spent in proximity to trucks and level of knowledge about different types of trucks. For the general populace the two tend to go together: people who do not spend much time around trucks are less likely to have knowledge about trucks, and people who spend more time around trucks are more likely to have knowledge about trucks. People with jobs or hobbies involving trucks spend a lot of time with them and must know how they work, so they fit this trend but at a higher level on both axes.
The outlier group presented here are parents of small children.  Small children think trucks are cool and learn a lot about them, and then share this knowledge with their parents. The children themselves might be counted into the "people with truck-related hobbies" but parents won't and are unlikely to go near any truck. They might also try to keep their children away from them, which is why they have less proximity to trucks than most normal people.
The title text presumes that this graph could also be made about dinosaurs and farm animals. Randall confidently states that children like dinosaurs and farms and trucks, and so there must be multimedia featuring all three at once. In fact, books about dinosaurs driving tractors on farms do exist ( Dinosaur Farm! and Dinosaur Farm are two examples), as are books about them driving trucks ( Dinosaur Rescue! ) as well as TV shows about dinosaurs that ARE trucks ( Dinotrux ). Not all three together so far , apparently trucks and farms do not mix very well.
[A chart is shown with two axes. Each axis has a label with an arrow pointing from the label towards higher values. No values are shown.] X-axis: Knowledge of different types of trucks Y-axis: Proximity to trucks in daily life
[Three sections are marked on the chart with dotted lines, drawn in imperfect ellipses. The first two circumscribe areas along the diagonal X=Y. A large one takes up about two thirds of the length starting from the origin, and a smaller one is separated a bit from the first one, but continuing the trend of X=Y. This takes up less than a third at the top right. Below this, close to the X-axis is a third even smaller section, its outer edge is as far to the right at the one at the top. Each of these three sections has a label written inside. From largest to smallest these are:] Normal people People with truck related jobs or hobbies Parents of children age 2-5


Stargazing 3

Explanation:
This is the third and final comic in the Stargazing series. The first 1644: Stargazing appeared four years earlier and the second 2017: Stargazing 2 one and a half years earlier.
As in the first two comics, Megan is hosting a stargazing event, in which she mixes accurate astronomical information with trivialities, as well as utterly bizarre statements. (See this section from the original Stargazing comic about the host and also the trivia , from the original comic, regarding the gender of the host).
Vega is a star in the constellation of Lyra . It does indeed have magnitude 0.03 and is the brightest star mentioned in this comic. Vega is only the 5th brightest star (outside of the Sun), as Sirius is the brightest visible star.  The phrase It's the brightest star I'm currently talking about is an example of the technically correct but not at all useful information that is typical of the Stargazing series. The phrase is true no matter what, because any star one talks about is the brightest star one is talking about, as any brighter star becomes the one talked about when mentioned. [ citation needed ]
Polaris is indeed the star over the North Pole, and is commonly called the North Star or the Pole Star. It is the brightest star in the constellation Ursa Minor, but there are about fifty other stars that are as bright as it is (magnitude 2), so it's not really remarkable apart from being the pole star, as Megan says. Despite the fact that being the pole star is "all it has going for it," it is nevertheless very important because it is used for navigation, as it appears fixed in the night sky. It hasn't always been and won't always be the pole star, however, as Earth's axis precesses in a 26,000 year cycle.
Comets are comparatively small clumps of rock and ice, seen mostly by the long, lit 'trail' of particles the heat of the sun causes to be ejected, and the solar wind then spreads outward in thin glowing lines that can be larger and more visible even than the constellations they are seen in front of - at least during the brief phase of their closest approach to the sun.  Comets generally have highly elliptical orbits around the Sun and so they are only seen for a brief period of time "every few decades" during their closest aproach. Yelling at comets is believed to be an ineffective way to make them go away [ citation needed ] . Megan may dislike comets because of their history in superstition of being seen as a sign of doom. This provides humor because typically this superstitious fear was caused by a lack of understanding, and it would be expected that a stargazing host would be informed on and therefore unafraid of comets.  No actual astronomers are bothered by comets [ citation needed ] , but some are upset about satellite megaconstellations such as SpaceX's Starlink .  In that case, astronomers are not yelling at the satellites, but at the companies that launch them.
Light pollution is indeed a problem with stargazing. Light pollution is the presence of artificial light in the night sky, which makes it very difficult to see stars. Stargazing in remote locations is remarkably different than in populated cities. Light pollution was previously discussed in 2121: Light Pollution .  Light pollution does not actually make the "sky go away", but it does affect how humans can see stars or other astronomical features in the sky.
Megan advocates an active approach to resolving light pollution—rather than lobbying for reductions in artificial lighting, as the dark-sky movement does, she intends to lead her audience in destroying artificial lights.  Older lightbulbs are usually glass bulbs filled with inert gas (for incandescent bulbs) or high-pressure gases (for e.g. sodium-vapor lamps ) and so are easy to destroy with any blunt impact, thus accounting for Megan's mention of "throwing rocks at them". Modern LED lights, however, are much more robust, which is why she is handing out crossbows to achieve greater projectile energy.  An " astronomy crossbow " is a tool used to measure the angular distance between stars. They cannot shoot real crossbow bolts , but any type of crossbow or other weapon could be used to destroy lights and "preserve" the sky.  (Speaking of astronomy tools that have weapon-related names, there is a type of telescope called a " Sun Gun ", but it is only meant to be used during the day to enable groups of people to view the Sun safely.  It is probably best that Megan's show is taking place at night, or else she might cause even more trouble.)
In the title text Megan mentions that by destroying enough of the lights in the region will make it possible to see more comets. By reducing the light pollution it will in general be possible to see more of any kind of astronomical objects, not just comets. But as Megan has made clear she dislikes comets, and is thus not interested in seeing any of them. But to see more of any of the other astronomical objects out there, she is willing to take the risk of seeing more comets, by lowering the light pollution.
This comic became the last comic not to be related to COVID-19 for more than a month!
[In a dark panel, Megan as a TV host stands in front of a group of people: Science Girl, Ponytail and Cueball. The panel is inverse-colored, i.e. white text and drawings on black] Host: Welcome back to Stargazing. Host: There are no new stars since last time, but you came back for some reason.
[Zoomed out on the same scene, the host is now with Science Girl, Ponytail, Cueball, a Megan-like woman, and White Hat. The host is pointing upwards with her left hand.] Host: That star is Vega. At magnitude 0.03, it's the brightest star I'm currently talking about. Host: That one is Polaris. It's over the North Pole, which is all it has going for it.
[A frame-less white panel, zoomed in on the host, who is now pointing upwards with her right hand.] Host: That's a comet. Some of them come back every few decades, no matter how much I yell at them. Host: But stargazing isn't all fun yelling. We face a problem even worse than comets: light pollution.
[Back to a dark panel, the host now has a big bag of crossbows. The bag has a logo of a crossbow with stars around it. She has taken out one of them and is holding it in her right hand.] Host: The sky is going away because people keep shining lights at it. The new LEDs are even worse - they're too blue, and you can't turn them off by throwing rocks at them like with the old ones. Host: Luckily, I brought these astronomy crossbows. Host: Take one, then let's fan out and look for lamps.