Hardware Reductionism

Explanation:
Reductionism is the belief that things can be explained by their smaller parts. It can be abused when complex phenomena with multiple causes are attributed to a single, simple cause.
Neurological reductionism is the attempt to explain people's behavior and personality by physical features of their brain. With advances in neuroscience , and especially in brain imaging, there's a fad to claim that brain types determine what the mind is. Examples of this kind of bad reductionism would be:
There are several problems with this kind of reasoning. First, most studies identify correlation , not causation (see correlation does not imply causation ). Brains are plastic; they can be shaped by experience. For example, if, in a given society, the females are taught to mind their appearance, and the males are taught that aesthetic considerations are unmanly, then of course the female brains will end up with more developed aesthetic centers. In other words, behavior and capabilities aren't always determined by the brain. Sometimes it's the behavior that shapes the brain; sometimes a third factor (e.g., malnutrition) shapes both.
Second, even when the brain is actually a cause of the behavior, it's far from the only piece in the puzzle. Many studies on brain differences are correlation studies, often about very small effect sizes. Unfortunately, the popular science media tends to gloss over the statistical concept of "effect size". For example, imagine a study that says that males' brains are 0.1% more likely than females' brains to exhibit attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Journalists are prone to report it simply as Study Shows that Males Have More ADHD , and this becomes a conversation sound-bite that neglects other factors, like genetics or pregnancy smoking.  See also 882: Significant , which does not discuss effect size, but does raise other objections to writing soundbites based on a single study.
Another kind of excessive neuronal reductionism is the overemphasis on brain modules ("scientists identify brain area responsible for religious faith", and the like). Though it's true that the brain has specialized areas, it's also true that the processing is very complex, messy, and distributed all over. Some varieties of brain damage can often be overcome by learning to use undamaged areas of the brain.
The comic illustrates the problem by analogy to some better-understood general-purpose computing hardware: the CPU in a smartphone. Cueball and Megan have used their smartphones to take pictures of the same event: a triathlon , that is, an athletic competition comprising three modalities (e.g., swimming, cycling, and running). Cueball wonders why is it that Megan's photos are more popular, and Megan gives a reductionist explanation: She tells that her phone is quad-core (four cores) whereas Cueball's phone only has two cores (here she even throws in the typical sentence "research shows that" to make her claim sound more valid). A core is a part of a CPU that is, roughly speaking, the brain of a computer or smartphone. Megan thinks that this means Cueball's smartphone can only capture two events at the same time; she misunderstands how the specialized modules work and fails to realize that the number of cores is unrelated to how many events can be captured. Her claim is like saying that male brains are better at spatial reasoning, and therefore males are better triathlon photographers, or that females are better at multitasking, and therefore females are better triathlon photographers.
A CPU with more cores could process pictures faster, speeding up facial recognition or color filters. So it's true that Megan's CPU makes it slightly easier for her to take pictures. However, this has, at best, an extremely small effect on the number of "likes". There's a lot more going on with photography than the CPU of the phone: Megan's photographing skills, her luck in capturing interesting scenes, the number of online friends she has, etc.
So Megan misunderstands many things: the modularity of CPUs, the small effect of the CPU on the quality of her photography, and the actual causes of her success, much like people who reduce ability to structural features of the brain.
The title text is mocking reductionist explanations based on Randall's MRI ( magnetic resonance imaging ) research. One of the most famous (and disputed ) claims about gendered brains is that women's brains are (slightly) worse at spatial reasoning. Doritos is a popular junk-food brand of tortilla chips that are typically so flat that they can be called a 2D snack. In the 1990s Frito-Lay (PepsiCo) introduced a special 3D version, the 3D Doritos . (These bloated snacks took up more surface area in one's mouth, and had a hollow center filled with cheese-flavored air). So the title text associates a larger spatial reasoning brain area with enjoyment of this three-dimensional variation of the popular junk-food snack; the conclusion could be that men like these 3D snacks more than women because of their better spatial reasoning, although there could obviously be several other reasons for such gender specific choice of junk-food. 3D Doritos were discontinued, but reintroduced in 2015, the year of this comic's release.
[Cueball holds his smartphone looking at it while talking to Megan who is holding her smartphone in her hand.] Cueball: Your photos from the triathlon got so many more likes than mine. Megan: Yeah - My phone is quad-core. Research shows that iPhones like yours have just two cores, so they have a hard time capturing scenes with three different events in them.
[Caption below the frame:] If we talked about phone hardware the way we talk about brain hardware


Frankenstein

Explanation:
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel by Mary Shelley published in 1818. In it, Victor Frankenstein is a human who creates a monster (who is never named).  In popular culture, however, "Frankenstein" is taken to be the name of the monster, not its creator.
While this is an often-corrected "error", it has been argued that it is not technically incorrect to call the monster "Frankenstein" as well, since he is the "offspring" of his "father", Victor Frankenstein. Since a child usually takes on the last name of their father, it may be said that the monster's last name actually is "Frankenstein". He also refers to himself in the novel as "the Adam of your labors" - a reference to the Biblical Adam, the first of his kind - and some have taken to calling the monster "Adam Frankenstein" to differentiate him from the scientist, Victor Frankenstein.
Others have argued that the monster's namelessness is an important part of his characterization in the story since it reflects the doctor's complete rejection of his creation. While the monster identifies Victor as his "father" in the novel, Victor does not consider the creature to be his "son".
Not helping matters is the equally-famous Frankenstein film series staring Boris Karloff, featuring a very different plotline and a very different portrayal of the monster. Within the movies themselves the monster once again goes unnamed, but the movie titles and posters refer to the monster simply as "Frankenstein." For example the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein is a double-meaning, featuring brides for both the human Henry Frankenstein and the monster, thus implying the monster can be called "Frankenstein."
Randall apparently finds this argument tedious and pedantic, so he has created his own work of fiction, in which the monster is named Frankenstein. He rationalizes that it is now correct to call the monster Frankenstein, assuming that his comic strip is as authoritative as the original novel. " Canonical " (rule, standard) means that this comic should be used as the authoritative work on the naming of the monster.
However, xkcd's Frankenstein would be unlikely to be accepted by anyone as canonical, except for its stated purpose of settling the naming argument. The original version of any story is usually assumed to be the canonical one, and any derivative work would have to have widespread influence and recognition to supplant it in the popular imagination. This is not likely to happen with xkcd's Frankenstein, as it makes almost no effort to stand on its own; it exists only to be a version of Frankenstein where the monster is named "Frankenstein." It emphasizes this point several times, and ends within a single panel, having accomplished its only goal. Almost no readers would find this version entertaining or substantive enough to displace Mary Shelley's original as the definitive version of the story.
The copyright on Mary Shelley's novel has expired long ago, before the moon landings (which began in 1969), so it is perfectly legal to create works derived from the original story. It should be noted, however, that Universal holds the copyright on the common image of the monster (green skin, flat-top head, scar, bolts on the neck and protruding forehead). To qualify as a derivative work the story needs to be substantially different from the original. The monster believing in moon landing conspiracy theories would probably qualify, but may reference retellings of the tale where a damaged or deranged brain was used (as an alternate 'explanation' why the supposedly perfect creation inevitably runs amok). Additionally, the original Frankenstein's monster was seen by its creator as hideous and repulsive due to its physical appearance despite the project being a success. Randall makes the same correlation in his version by having Frankenstein claim the moon landings were faked, which produces the same feelings in The Doctor.
Alternatively, the monster being a moon landing denier is meant as a throwaway absurdist non sequitur. As the only point of this story is to make a canonical version of Frankenstein where "Frankenstein" is the monster's name, it should logically end once it has finished making that point clear. However, Randall throws a curveball by having the monster blurt out an uncomfortable and controversial point of view before the ending, then ending the story abruptly before the monster's statements can be addressed.
It is also possible that Randall is making reference to the fact that the kind of people who become engrossed in the debate that is attempted to be resolved in this comic and would bother to create a piece like this (which incidentally, complicates matters further rather than simplifying it, similar to the effect of many pieces of evidence in internet discussions) could be compared to the kind of people who deny the Moon Landings in obscure forums. He is drawing attention to how inane and unnecessary the comic is.
The title text raises the question of what the monster's creator is named in this version, since the name "Frankenstein" is instead given to the monster. The canonical answer is that the creator is simply "The Doctor", like the title character of the series "Doctor Who" . This might be a reference to similar pedantic nitpicking that occurs when that character is incorrectly referred to as "Doctor Who" rather than "The Doctor" which is in turn referenced in comic 1221: Nomenclature . As it happens, people who make that mistake can also claim canonical support, in that some early episodes of the series list the character's name as "Doctor Who" in the credits, or reference the recharacterisation in the cinematic retellings .
[A text only panel. Between the last two lines is a lightning bolt.] Like many people, I'm tired of the nitpicking about Frankenstein's monster's name. Luckily, Frankenstein is public domain. Therefore, I present xkcd's Frankenstein ( The monster's name )
[Cueball is turning down a lever while looking at a monster with black hair that is lying on a bed under a bedsheet. There are two wires connecting to the neck of the monster.] Frankenstein: Graaar ! Cueball: Frankenstein is alive! I am a modern Prometheus! Frankenstein: Raaaar ! Cueball: To be clear, your name is Frankenstein , canonically. Frankenstein: Graaaaar ! Frankenstein: The moon landings were faked ! Cueball: Wait, what?
[Another text only panel. The first word is written between two curvy lines.] Fin. There. Feel free to call the monster "Frankenstein." If anyone tries to correct you, just explain that this comic is your canonical version. Thank you.


The Source

Explanation:
This comic is about experiencing a high pitched hum in an empty room. An "empty-room hum" is a high pitched buzzing noise, often caused by tinnitus , which is a medical condition causing high-pitched noise when there is no other noise around. Tinnitus is normally a hearing condition, not a disease. It may result from the brain increasing its sensitivity to noises.
Sometimes not everyone can hear "empty-room hum"; however, those who can hear it usually find it immensely annoying. If you do hear the noise, you would like to locate The Source – hence the title of the comic. Hopefully when you find the source, you can do something about it. Or if you don't find it, you can at least be at ease knowing that others experience the empty-room hum, it having been referenced in two xkcd comics now and elsewhere on the internet.
This comic alludes to the perspective of an outside observer who doesn't hear the hum but is watching someone who can hear it: because the sound isn't written out in text, the comic reader at first is confused by Cueball's inexplicable searching.
In the first two frames of the comic we see Cueball trying to locate the direction of the sound, by standing in the middle of the room, turning his head from one to the other side. Finally he walks down a flight of stairs (probably to the basement) and here he locates the source: A machine whose only function is to generate a high pitched hum. The title text asks why on Earth they had such a machine in the first place, which is somewhat difficult to explain and likely the crux of the title text's joke.
Luckily it was thus easy for Cueball to get rid of this sound at the source. But in real life most electronics generate hums and cannot reasonably be turned off without losing functionality. For instance fluorescent lights, phone chargers and computer modems are common culprits, refrigerators and washing machines less commonly. It could also come from outside the house, in which case it will be much harder either to locate the source or to do anything about it. Power lines and transformers are common outside sources.
There do, however, exist devices that are meant to create a high pitched hum, that people might wish to install in their house. These will be humming in the ultrasonic regions, although cheap versions can often be heard by young people. They are typically used for electronic pest control , while slightly lower frequencies which can typically be heard only by young people are sometimes used to repel children . It is possible that someone tried to get rid of Cueball.
There do exist white noise generators (which make equal volume noise on every frequency) and pink noise generators (which make noise that sounds equally loud to the human ear at every frequency) which are used to test recording studios to see if they have good sound quality. It seems unlikely that the device is one of these, as it seems to be designed to generate a high-pitched hum: pink/white noises are categorically and perceptually different from a hum.
The sound wave spectrum in 273: Electromagnetic Spectrum also contains a line for "that high-pitched noise in empty rooms".
The empty white room also could be a reference to a scene from The Matrix Reloaded in which Neo searches for "The Source," though this is likely just a coincidence.
There is a story by A.E. Van Vogt in "The War Against the Rull" where an all-pervasive vibration leads to a coming of age for the youthful protagonist.
[Cueball is standing in an empty room looking in the direction of the next frame.]
[Cueball turns his head and looks the other way.]
[Three smaller panels with the same total height as the first two frames follows. In the first frame Cueball walks on a grey surface.]
[In the next Cueball is standing between two doors, looking over his shoulder towards the one to the left, but choosing the one to the right behind which a stair is. He is waking towards this door with his hand out towards the knob.]
[In the last of these smaller panels Cueball has just walked down to the bottom of the stairs.]
[Cueball walks towards a machine that is standing near a wall connected to a socket in the wall. On the machine it says:] High pitched hum generator
[Cueball kneels behind the machine and unplugs it from the socket in the wall.] High pitched hum generator
[Cueball walks away from the machine, the plug now lying on the floor between the wall and the machine.] High pitched hum generator
'Empty room hum' is also referred to in other waves in 273: Electromagnetic Spectrum and the title text in comic 597: Addiction .


Bell's Theorem

Explanation:
Ponytail begins reading Bell's theorem to Cueball , who is standing 5 meters away. Bell's theorem, invented by the physicist John Stewart Bell , suggests that local hidden variables - that is, unknown properties of a system that are communicated via physical effects within the system's nearby surroundings - are not sufficient to fully explain quantum mechanics . This means that any complete description of quantum mechanics must necessarily include some non-local effect - some kind of influence that can be transmitted from some remote location not within the system's reach. Furthermore, that influence must necessarily travel instantaneously and does not obey the limit of the speed of light.
Cueball responds by misunderstanding this to mean that faster-than-light communication is actually possible. However, his misunderstanding occurs in 1 nanosecond. Since the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second, the light from Ponytail would have traveled only 30 centimeters, which means that Cueball has managed to misunderstand Bell's theorem faster than the speed of light - a feat that violates locality , just as the theorem predicts.
The punchline is that this is a special case known as Bell's Second Theorem: the idea that misunderstandings about what Bell's theorem means happen so readily that they actually violate the principle of locality.
This comic was published on October 16, 2015, five days before an article about the first-ever Loophole-free Bell's Theorem test was published in Nature magazine ( DOI:10.1038/nature15759 ) (see also Bell test experiments ). However, the paper was submitted almost two months earlier on the 24th of August and could most likely be found on-line before this comic was released. It was accepted by Nature already on the 28th of September, but was first published online October 21, 2015. Randall may very well have been aware of the imminent release of this paper, although it is peculiar that he did not wait until the paper was released. (This could potentially be a meta-joke, with the joke about Bell's Theorem being released before the paper about the relevant experiment was published)
Another way to state Bell's theorem is "No physical theory of (finitely many) local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics." It says that a theoretical treatment that divides the universe up into separate ("local") systems like this will always discard something about those systems' intercorrelations.
It is possible that there could be "global hidden variables" which share information across systems, perhaps by some manner of superluminal communication - however, this has unsettling philosophical implications such as superdeterminism , where the universe is essentially just reading off a script and no free will is possible. Needless to say, many people find this an unsatisfying resolution.
The preferred resolution of the paradox is not to insist (as early physicists did) that the universe's state is a collection of bits (classical information), but treat it as a collection of qubits (quantum information).
In quantum mechanics (QM), "measurement" is the process of allowing a small system to interact with its environment in a controlled way. The interaction allows information about the system's state to escape to the environment, producing an "observation." If the measurement apparatus is governed by classical mechanics (impossible in reality, but a very common simplification for the purposes of calculation), then the observation can be thought of as classical information, a bit (yes/no answer) in the simplest case. While the system may have been in any one of infinitely many states before the measurement (each a superposition of classical states), the fact that the measurement must leave it consistent with the classical result means that it can end up in only finitely many states afterwards. This is the "wave-function collapse" of early QM, popularized by Schrödinger's cat , but unrelated to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle , with which lay audiences often confuse it.
Modern quantum mechanics acknowledges that the environment is not classical, and that wave-function collapse happens by a (comparatively) gradual process called "decoherence," where information leaving the system is made up for by information coming from the environment that drives the system closer and closer to one of the finitely many states predicted by the simplified model above. If a "Schrödinger's cat" is in a half-and-half superposition of the states "dead" and "alive", when its liveness is measured, the ratios of "dead" and "alive" will shift rapidly towards (though not quite reach) 0 and 100% or 100 and 0%. For all but the shortest time scales, the cat's post-measurement state might as well be classical.
Entanglement is a situation where the future outcomes of two or more measurements that would be independent in a classical world are nonetheless correlated. For example, two widely separated electrons from one source could be in a state where, considered individually, each is in a superimposed spin-up/spin-down state, but if one is measured as spin-up, the other will necessarily be measured as spin-down. This is untroubling if the two electrons are modeled as a single system, but strange-seeming if we think of them as separate: how did the measurement of the first electron allow information from the environment around it affect the far-away second electron?  It seems like the electrons are communicating, potentially at superluminal speeds, which would violate either relativity or causality. In actuality, there's a fairly simple proof (see below) that correlations from entanglement can't be used to communicate, and causality and relativity are safe. But that doesn't make the seemingly faster-than-light effects much less of a surprise.
One can try to address these concerns by considering 'local hidden variables', classical properties of a local system (like a single electron) that could have been observed but were not. For example, perhaps a classical part of the electrons' state lets them "agree" on a future classical state at the moment they are entangled, and then they just reveal that state in the future. But this becomes unwieldy: there are infinitely many possible future observations the electrons would have to agree on, and it seems difficult to do this without infinitely many local hidden variables.
The title text jokes about the No-Communication Theorem . The real theorem states that although determination of the state of one half of an entangled pair immediately determines that of the other half, however far away it may be, there's no way for the observer of the other half to see if he's the first to find out the state or whether it'd already been determined by the first observer. Thus, no information travels from one observer to the other.
Randall's version of the No-Communication Theorem states that no matter how you try to send information about this theorem (no communication about the No-Communication Theorem) then it cannot clear up the misunderstanding about Bell's Theorem quickly enough that any correct information (about Bell's theorem) has actually been transferred faster than light. So the conclusion is the same as the real No-Communication Theorem - faster-than-light signaling is not possible...
[Ponytail, facing right, is holding a piece of paper with both hands. In a small frame breaking the top of the large frame is a caption:] t= 0 nanoseconds Ponytail: This is called Bell's Theorem. It was first–
[A double-headed arrow points to Ponytail and then exits the frame crossing into the next frame where it points to Cueball. The arrow is split in two parts and in the center across the border of the two frames is a label:] 5 meters
[Cueball, facing left. In a small frame breaking the top of the large frame is a caption:] t= 1 nanosecond Cueball: Wow, faster-than-light communication is possible!
[Caption below the frames:] Bell's Second Theorem: Misunderstandings of Bell's Theorem happen so fast that they violate locality.


Overthinking

Explanation:
In this comic, Cueball is telling White Hat about several recent scientific studies he read that appear to contradict the results of either prior studies whose results have stood for a long time or are long-held misconceptions. The studies can be reviewed on-line via their Digital Object Identifier (DOI) in Randall's citations.
In the first, Cueball mentions a study that showed that while water is good for you, you only need to drink when you are thirsty. This appears to be a reference to common misconceptions that we should drink a certain set quantity of water per day (oft-cited as eight cups - see 715: Numbers ) and may even be referencing the fact that drinking too much water (well more than the standard 8 cups, for most people) can lead to hyponatremia (lack of salt in the body).
Another recent study showed that prolonged sitting is not bad for you which contradicts the long-held belief that sitting at a desk all day is unhealthy and that standing or lying down are healthier. The study showed that the position is not particularly relevant if there is no physical activity in any of the positions.
Finally, Cueball references a study that pre-industrial humans have similar sleep patterns to our own, which would appear to contradict a belief that modern technology has disrupted our sleep patterns (which is likely tied to health concerns around our modern sleep habits).
Cueball's conclusion is that humanity may be over-thinking things in trying to find problems in the way we live our everyday lives. In the last panel, White Hat seems to be attempting to start an inquiry into what everyday modern phenomenon has caused us to over-think things. This is obviously a self-referencing example of the types of claims Cueball is debunking in the first three panels. Cueball responds by suggesting that humanity's over-thinking is likely not a recent phenomenon but probably dates back to the stone age. This could also be viewed as an argument that over-thinking is not all bad, as the wheel would certainly be a good result of over-thinking.
In the title text, Cueball gives a counter-example to his own argument, suggesting that it took far longer for us to realize the negative health connotations of smoking than it should have. Suggesting instead it's not about overthinking or underthinking-it's just that people make mistakes about what is important. (The link between cigarettes and lung cancer has been known for longer than most people realize, possibly coming as early as the 1940s.)
[Cueball and White Hat are walking together. The references are at the bottom of the three first panels.] Cueball: I found a study* that said water is good for you, but you should just drink it when you feel thirsty and not go overboard. White Hat: Uh huh? *DOI:10.1097/JSM.0000000000000221
[More walking with Cueball lifting his hand in front of him.] Cueball: Another study* found that prolonged sitting isn't necessarily bad for you, as long as you're also getting exercise. White Hat: Okay... *DOI:10.1093/ije/dyv191
[A border-less panel, but still walking.] Cueball: Now a study* claims that humans in pre-industrial societies stay up late and sleep 6 or 7 hours a night, just like most people today. White Hat: Huh. White Hat: So what you're saying is... *DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2015.09.046
[Zoom out showing Cueball and White Hat walking in silhouette.] Cueball: Maybe we're overthinking it. White Hat: But what caused our modern epidemic of overthinking?! Plumbing? Or is it email? Cueball: Modern? I bet the wheel was invented by someone overthinking "pushing."


Play-By-Play

Explanation:
Beret Guy comments on a baseball game using improper terminology in a way that demonstrates that he does not understand how the game is played. Moreover, his naïve way of speaking reveals that he is not aware of his lack of knowledge and does not consider it possible that, as is probably the case, his audience is much more familiar with this sport and its rules. His unworldly way of talking makes one even wonder if he has any notion of the way people experience sports at all. His choice of terminology is reminiscent of 1133: Up Goer Five , and 1322: Winter in that he names things using simplified terms that he feels best describes their function like " thrower ", " second pillow " or " thrower jail ". His commentary is a combination of mistaken terms and misunderstandings of the rules and principles of the game.
[Beret Guy is sitting with headphones with a microphone on, looking out of the frame, hands resting on a table.] Beret Guy: For those just joining us, hi! We're on part 5 of a hitting game.
[Zoom out with Beret Guy shown from the side sitting at a desk.] Beret Guy: The next guy has a big bat, so he'll probably hit the ball real far. Beret Guy: Wait - he missed! Beret Guy: Oh good, they're letting him try again.
[Zoom in again on Beret Guy still seen from the side.] Beret Guy: The people sitting on the chair shelves are yelling at this guy but he's ignoring them. Wow. Beret Guy: Rude.
[Beret Guy looks straight out.] Beret Guy: This thrower is good! He keeps making people leave by throwing balls at them. Beret Guy: It's just him, though. None of his teammates are joining in.
[Beret Guy turns his head to the side.] Beret Guy: That guy just ran to the second pillow when no one was looking!! Beret Guy: Everyone's real mad but I guess they checked the rules and there's nothing that says he can't do that. Beret Guy: Yikes. Hopefully they can fix that once this game is over.


Human Subjects

Explanation:
This strip plays on certain experiments involving human subjects . Ponytail is questioning the reliability of Megan 's experimental results, given that her human subjects appear to be extremely unusual and highly sociopathic .
In the second panel, she mentions that several people in one study had been arrested for arson . Megan begins to suggest that the arson is a side effect of whatever is being tested before she learns that the arsonists are in the control group – that is, the group that is not subjected to whatever is being tested and is used as a comparison to see the differences in the people who are actually being tested. This result is "troubling", as the control group would not be expected to have such a high rate of incidence of arsonists. The implication is that her subjects are not representative of the general population, but appear to have been selected from some aberrant subpopulation, such as a prison or mental institution. Or she could have recruited them through an announcement that catered in some way to arsonists. An alternate explanation comes from comic 790: Control , in which Randall notes his hobby of sneaking into experiments and giving LSD to the control groups. Yet another explanation could be that Ponytail went looking for some clusters of characteristics in the sample population, which had no connection to the study criteria, and happened upon the arson arrests - such clusters are expected if you look at enough different characteristics.
The third panel alludes to the prisoner's dilemma , in which two subjects must independently decide whether to "collaborate" with or "betray" the other subject based on different rewards for each choice (often framed as a different length of prison sentence, or a different amount of money). The rewards tier are selected so that the outcomes for each individual from best to worst are: betraying a collaborator, collaborating with a collaborator, betraying a betrayer, collaborating with a betrayer.
The thought experiment is considered interesting as it's uncertain what the most logical course of action, as choosing betrayal always improves one's situation, yet being in identical situations with no knowledge of each other, it's also logical for both prisoners to make the same choice and both collaborating is better than both betraying. Of course, it would not be expected that normal people would simply betray each other for no reason, without benefiting from it in any way.
The last panel references the Milgram experiment , in which subjects were instructed by experimenters to administer electric shocks to an unseen third party. The unseen third party was part of the experiment and pretended to be in agony. As shocks escalated they would beg for them to stop. The results suggest that people will continue to administer harm, despite the pleading of the victim, simply if told to do so by an authority figure, even when no incentive is provided to the subject to continue. In this case, however, the actual experiment did not involve electric shocks, and thus suggests that the subjects, of their own volition, brought equipment to produce electric shock and simply engaged in the activity unprompted.
In each of these cases, the subjects seem to have some "negative" psychological traits. While it might not be unusual to find one or two people with such traits in a randomly selected group, the fact that all three experiments contain multiple subjects with these traits (and seemingly the same traits in each study) is very unusual, given that most were not studies on psychology, but studies of drugs and moisterizers. Obviously, there would be no need for electric shocks and such in a studies like this [ citation needed ] , and Megan's claim that a side effect of using the investigational drug is arson is unlikely if it wasn't treating psychological issues. Even if it was, arson is a very specific issue that is unlikely to not coexist with other problems.
The title text refers to safety procedures normally required by institutional review boards , which are centralized groups within universities that ensure that experiments are ethical and safe. The implication is that for an IRB to recommend dispensing with safety procedures after meeting the subjects, the subjects must really, really deserve bad treatment. Or that after hanging out with the criminals they are more relaxed on rulebreaking, and adopting their mindset. Or the members of the IRB are, like the human subjects, just sociopathically awful people. Or that Megan is selecting for these subjects, or causing these abnormalities, as a side effect of spending (probably significantly) more effort than is necessary to adhere to the procedures.
The overall theme of experiments that are overwhelmingly skewed by outlier human factors is in itself reminiscent of the recent discovery that many psychological experiments cannot be replicated . That news made quite a bit of noise in the world of science and even made its way in the general press. Just like in the experiments that could not be replicated, it is likely that if the experiments in this comic were attempted again, the outcome would be drastically different than the one achieved here.
[Ponytail and Megan sit at a desk.] Ponytail: We're concerned that some of your results may be tainted by the fact that your human subjects are awful . Megan: What do you mean?
[Ponytail picks up a sheet of paper.] Ponytail: Several participants in your drug trial were arrested for arson. Megan: Side effects can be unpredictable. Ponytail: They were in the control group.
[Zoom in on Ponytail.] Ponytail: In your prisoner's dilemma study, 80% of the participants chose to betray their partners before the experimenter had a chance to tell them about the reward. Megan (off-panel): Definitely troubling.
[Ponytail shows Megan another sheet of paper.] Ponytail: In one experiment, your subjects repeatedly gave electric shocks to a stranger in another room. Megan: That's a famous psychological- Ponytail: This was a study of moisturizing creams! Megan: Yes, we're not sure how they snuck in all that equipment.


30 Days Hath September

Explanation:
Thirty days hath September is a mnemonic frequently used to remember how many days each month has in the Gregorian calendar. Cueball is reciting the mnemonic trying to figure out how many days October has. This comic was released during the last week of October (the 26th) where it becomes increasingly important to know if there are 30 or 31 days in the month. However, he seems unable to concentrate on reciting the poem correctly, keeping track of which months the poem has named and keeping in mind the specific month he was interested in, so by the time he finishes the poem he is unsure whether October was in the list of 30-day months or not. So he starts over again with the same result every single time, as can be seen from the caption below the frame. It seems he also get stuck in all the other months disregarding if it is one of the month mentioned in the mnemonic.
There are numerous versions of the mnemonic, some of which rhyme better, but this version is one of the more common ones.
In the caption, Randall states that this happens to him every month. It's assumed that, after a number of iterations with the poem, he eventually remembers the months correctly and figures out the number of days in the current month, which he then remembers until the month changes and forces him to resort to the mnemonic again.
The title text is a parody of life hacking , and suggests just looking up on one's computer's calendar how many days there are in each month, with the punchline disguised by over-explaining the process of the "cool mental calculation hack" (even though there's nothing even remotely resembling a mental calculation in checking a calendar). Alongside the comic, the joke is that the mnemonic is supposed to be the real "cool mental calculation hack" which supposedly saves a lot of effort. This is similar to 1567: Kitchen Tips .
There is also a joke that he is unsure if there are 31 days in October, although Halloween is a largely celebrated holiday on the 31st.
[Cueball is thinking.] Cueball: Thirty days hath September, April, June and November Cueball: All the rest have 31—except February, which has 28, and leap year makes it 29. Cueball: Wait, which month was I listening for? Oh right, October. Cueball: Did I say "October" in there? Now I can't remember. Cueball: 30 days hath September...
I get stuck in this loop every month.


Launch Status Check

Explanation:
The first panel shows a rocket launch , which is a critical point in any space mission . Before this moment, a large technical staff has put in years of hard work, but all that work (and even lives) could be destroyed in a second if anything goes wrong during the launch . T-Minus 2 minutes means that there are only two minutes left before the rocket is actually launched, so at this moment everybody is very nervous and worried about the launch going wrong. Other texts from the panel refer to the usual checks before the launch, whose end is to ensure everything is ready.
In the second panel, one of the people controlling the launch sees a "cool bird" on the live feed from the cameras controlling the operation. This should be of no importance at all, given the relatively much more serious matter of having years of work and possibly human lives at stake. However, the technical staff starts commenting on this cool bird and aborts the launch procedure as they are interested in the bird. This behavior would be absurd in real life. [ citation needed ]
In the third panel, the two controllers attempt to identify the bird; the one on the right guesses maybe it is a hawk . Since the habitat of hawks and vultures overlap almost entirely, a birdwatcher is almost certain to accidentally confuse the two in their lifetime of birdwatching. Obviously having this knowledge of the habitat overlap, the controller on the left asks if the bird was a vulture. The controller on the right accurately notes that it probably was not a vulture since it is commonly known to ornithologists that vultures "hold their wings slightly raised in a "V" when seen head on." [1] . However, this demands that the original sighting of the bird must have included a flight pattern in which the bird not only "flew past the tower" as stated, but also flew towards the tower... even cooler!
The title text goes on with the same absurd behavior: the crew restarts the countdown to launch the rocket, but only to follow the bird and get a closer look at it. The original space mission the rocket was designed for is completely ignored. This is even more absurd than the initial interest in the bird, given that a rocket designed to enter outer space is ill equipped to try to follow a bird and maneuver at the low elevation and at the relatively slow speed of a bird.
This could also be a joke in the well known fanaticism of serious bird watchers, who think nothing of spur of the moment day long road trips (or flights!) in order to get to view an unusual bird.
The vehicle pictured is not clearly identified, and it could also be totally fictional. It could be the Atlas V or the Ariane 4 launch vehicle. It also shows some similarity with the SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy launch vehicle (albeit with stubbier strap-on boosters), named after the Falcon , another bird of prey. This would increase the absurdity of the situation.
The bird being referred to by the launch-crew features as a mere mark on the comic-strip, consistent with scale against the rocket, but they are obviously trying to start to identify the rough species or group it belongs to from the wing geometry , the effortlessly soaring carrion-seeking vulture and the hawk that often uses a swooping attack upon its prey typically having very different wing configurations as matches their evolved lifestyle.
[A rocket is about to launch. A small object is near the top of the rocket.] Countdown: T-Minus 2 minutes Offscreen Voice 1: Tank and booster are go for launch. Offscreen Voice 2: Safety console? Offscreen Voice 3: Check. Safety- Offscreen Voice 4: Wait.
[The small object moves to further to the right.] Offscreen Voice 1: What is it? Offscreen Voice 2: On the live feed- a cool bird just flew past the tower!
[The launch scene now a background silhouette, the small object of everyone's attention is no longer on-panel.] Offscreen Voice 1: Whoa, what kind? Offscreen Voice 2: Like a hawk, maybe! Offscreen Voice 1: Could it be a vulture? Offscreen Voice 2: I doubt it. The wings were flat, not in a "V". Offscreen Voice 3: It could be an eagle! Offscreen Voice 2: Ooh!
[The scene is returns to full contrast, with at least a token attention being paid to it, once more.] Offscreen Voice 1: This is launch control. We have a possible sighting of a cool bird. Halt the countdown. Offscreen Voice 2: Someone get some binoculars up here! Offscreen Voice 3: I want to see!


Git

Explanation:
Git is a version control system, used to manage the code in many millions of software projects. It is very powerful, and was amongst the first widely adopted tools to use a distributed version control model (the "beautiful graph theory tree model "), meaning that there is no single central repository of code. Instead, users share code back and forth to synchronise their repositories, and it is up to each project to define processes and procedures for managing the flow of changes into a stable software product.
Although very powerful, the command line of Git is notoriously difficult to master. Dozens of blog posts and websites (see [1] , [2] ), and even books ( [3] , [4] ) have been written to help users navigate this complexity.
The difficulty of using Git in common situations is contradicted by the apparent simplicity of its use in tutorial-style situations. Committing and sharing changes is fairly straightforward, for instance, but recovering from situations such as accidental commits, pushes or bad merges is difficult without a solid understanding of the rather large and complex conceptual model. For instance, three of the top five highest voted questions on Stack Overflow are questions about how to carry out relatively simple tasks: undoing the last commit, changing the last commit message, and deleting a remote branch.
This comic thus explores the difference between the idealised view of Git's architecture, and its actual typical usage. Tutorials for Git tend to use simple systems in their examples, and only deal with the most basic commands to get started, which can create the misleading impression that Git can be used effectively without extensive study.
Due to this problem, compounded by the fact that Git's commands are named differently from similar commands in other version control systems, many users (including Cueball) are unable to use it beyond basic commands, and might try to avoid problems by saving their code outside Git, downloading a newer copy, and then re-applying their changes to the new copy instead of trying to understand and use the features that exist in Git to accomplish this task.
Cueball suggests "just memoriz[ing] these shell commands and type them to sync up". He is probably referring to a sequence of commands such as:
As long as every contributor to the project follows these principles, this may suffice for a while. But many situations may cause "errors":
In a situation such as a merge conflict, Git will show an error message such as:
Although Git experts can of course deal with such situations, the remedy proposed by Cueball is "save your work elsewhere, delete the project, and download a fresh copy". That is, to copy the files out of their local repository's working directory, delete that whole structure, then clone the remote repository again (and, implicitly, copy the saved work back again):
Abandoning the old project likely means losing some work, but may be faster and give a more predictable outcome than attempting to salvage the situation. Applying this method to a mere merge conflict issue may prolong the issue however, as the merge conflicts may still be present.
The title text suggests an alternative method for working around Git's complexities, which reflects common practice: knowing a "Git expert" who can help in any situation. Such experts are somewhat notorious for waxing lyrically about Git's strengths, so it may be necessary to win their favour by first letting them ramble enthusiastically about it. They will hopefully eventually give the exact commands needed. In practice, the question-and-answer site Stack Overflow is frequently used for this exact purpose.
It may even be a reference to the infamous tweet " Git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space " which has been discussed here but it is inconclusive whether a meaningful interpretation exists.
Putting a telephone number of someone who "understands Git" into such a file is humorous because:
In short: programmers use version control systems to track changes to code. Most of these version control systems are quite similar and easy to learn if you already know another one. Git is a version control system based on completely different principles, and most programmers find it difficult to wrap their heads around it (although Git also offers a large number of nontrivial benefits over standard version control systems, which is why it is used). Cueball is one of those programmers.
This comic was referenced in an earlier version of the page for what if? #153, where Randall, due to a problem with git, had at one time erroneously posted a draft of his what if? piece on peptides. As of December 17th, 2016 the page read:
Whoops This article is still in progress. An early draft was unintentionally posted here thanks to Randall's troubled approach to git , and it took a little bit to get everything sorted out and rolled back. Sorry for the mixup!
On January 30, 2017, the page was updated with a completed article, Hide the Atmosphere .  As of September 23, 2019, the page no longer contains any reference to this comic or Randall's earlier mistake with Git (or anything related to Git, for that matter).
The comic 1296: Git Commit also features Git.
[Cueball points to a computer on a desk while Ponytail and Hairy are standing further away behind an office chair.] Cueball: This is git. It tracks collaborative work on projects through a beautiful distributed graph theory tree model. Ponytail: Cool. How do we use it? Cueball: No idea. Just memorize these shell commands and type them to sync up. If you get errors, save your work elsewhere, delete the project, and download a fresh copy.


Salvage

Explanation:
The RMS Titanic was a large ocean liner which, when it was completed in 1912, was the largest ship afloat. The ship famously hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank, killing two-thirds of its complement (approximately 1,500 people) in one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters ever.
As it sank, the Titanic broke into two pieces. The ship was lost for decades until the wreck site was discovered in 1985. A number of proposals have been made to salvage the wreck of the Titanic both before and since the wreck's discovery, famously fictionalised in the thriller novel and film Raise the Titanic! There could be a joke on this title as in Rice the Titanic, even though it would not be possible to mistake the two words when spoken in the majority of dialects of English.
The general consensus at this time is that the wreck is too fragile to be salvaged intact. Numerous expeditions have been made to the wreck site since its discovery, with several parties (without any outside authorization) taking various artifacts from the site. A popular view is that the wreck is effectively a mass grave and that plundering the site for profitable artifacts is akin to grave-robbing. Most believe the wreck should be left where it is, intact. That said, explorers have already done notable damage to the wreck.
This comic shows a fictional attempt to salvage the two main pieces of the Titanic wreck, which, as it likely would in real life, garners media coverage as a 'historic salvage'. The salvage seems to consist of several ships raising the hull via cables attached to some sort of buoyant sled placed under the hull (as might actually happen, except that the relative sizes of the ships and the hull are wrong; this method would require the salvage ships be much larger in proportion to what is being salvaged). This is followed by helicopters carrying the hull in unison, again via cables to the cradle (a much less practical operation). The hull halves are then dropped into a giant tub of rice. The entire salvage attempt is increasingly cartoonish and unrealistic, but the tub of rice takes this to another level. Also, the two parts of the Titanic collapsed when hitting the sea floor, and thus could not be moved as shown in the comic. See this video of How Titanic Sank .
The punchline to the comic references the "rice myth," (as Randall calls it) a popularly disseminated method of salvaging consumer electronics (usually cell phones) which have been submerged in water. (See Research Shows Rice is the Answer for a Wet Mobile ). The method entails burying the wet device in a bowl of rice. This process is commonly claimed to dry the device, but investigation reveals that the process is only mildly effective (though not entirely a myth either, see below). This comic likely plays on the dual meaning of the word " salvage " in respect of electronics and maritime wrecks .
The comic suggests that the wreck of the Titanic would benefit from being dried as quickly as possible, in a humorous contrast to actual reality. Surviving non-metallic material on board the ship may not benefit at all from drying. Far more ancient shipwrecks are best preserved by keeping the recovered timbers wet (but progressively desalinated, where applicable), cool and anoxic, at least while conserving chemicals such as Polyethylene glycol are infused into the wood to allow safe and gradual drying without causing further damage. Leather, cloth and other organic remains may have variations on this regime. Thus the rice might benefit an electronic device briefly exposed to water, but is not likely to benefit a ship that has been immersed for over a century, where the interest is in more than merely stabilizing the remaining metal hull and infrastructure.
There are numerous on-line discussions of the technique with mixed levels of success. Critically, where rice is tested against other methods, rice appears to perform worse than other methods. Controlled experiments on this topic tend to show that silica gel (aka the "Do Not Eat" packets often found in boxes with electronics or pharmaceuticals) is the most effective drying agent, with mixed results for rice. (see Myth Debunked: Uncooked Rice Isn't the Best Way to Save Your Water-Damaged Phone , where it turns out that leaving the phone to air-dry may actually be the best solution).
The title text tells of another hobby of Randall's . He likes to take advantage of the "rice myth" to post fake articles on how to save your wet cell phone. But the instructions turn out to be elaborate recipes for rice pilaf . It is unclear whether Randall's instructions would explain how to prepare the rice prior to inserting a phone (thus resulting a usable dish), or if the instructions would require the phone to be inserted into the dish before it became clear that the dish was a recipe for food and not a phone-saving measure, thus worsening the condition of the phone. This may also be a "punishment" by Randall to anyone who would follow instructions blindly before reading them through, as a recipe for rice Pilaf would likely be distinguishable from phone-saving instructions by someone who read the instructions through before attempting them. Or it may just be that Randall considers those who would follow instructions for saving a phone with rice that they find on the internet gullible enough to believe the seasonings and other ingredients would have a curative effect on electronics.
The rice myth is revisited in one of the tips in 1820: Security Advice .
[Megan is shown standing at the rail of a ship with a microphone reporting the event shown in the background. A small helicopter and a larger two rotor model, lowering a rope with hook, are hovering over a crane ship with its hook down line going down in the water. It is depicted like a news screen as seen on TV. Below Megan are two headings. The first in a white insert with double frame, and the other written in white over the gray ocean water.] Historic Salvage Live
[Four crane ships are shown lifting the bow part of the RMS Titanic. There are pontoons beneath the ship to help it float up. The name of the ship can be seen.] RMS Titanic
[Both parts of the Titanic are now flown by helicopters, four for the stern and five for the bow. One helicopter for each part is a two rotor model. Ropes go from the helicopters down on each side of the ship parts to pontoons below them. Below in the ocean there are two crane ships.]
[The two parts of the ship is now lowered in to a huge bowl of rice (labeled) standing at the coast just out of the ocean, which can be seen to the left. One of the five helicopters for the bow is missing. For scale there are drawn two trees to the left, and something is parked to the right, maybe a truck.] Rice


Water Delivery

Explanation:
Amazon has added bottled water to its line of on-line home order goods, which they are calling Prime Now .  In served areas, which include Manhattan/Brooklyn , Baltimore , Atlanta , Miami , Dallas , Austin , Houston , Indianapolis , Chicago , Seattle , Portland , Los Angeles , Minneapolis , San Francisco , San Jose , San Antonio , Las Vegas , Sacramento , and Phoenix , many products – including but not limited to bottled water – are available to be delivered within one hour. So we are faced with the prospect of water, contained within plastic bottles, contained within cardboard shipping boxes.
As increasing amounts of water are ordered, on-demand, or as the delivery time decreases to even quicker than an hour, this would show increasing numbers of packages passing from Amazon HQ (or its distribution hubs) to an arbitrary end-user as shown in the comic.  Beyond a certain (already impractical) point, it might be better to merge packaging together into a single longitudinal structure through which one could first deliver back-to-back bottles of water, as shown in the second-to-bottom illustration, and then as water quantity needs increase beyond that model, eventually just 'pipe' the water without the plastic bottle or any packaging at all, as shown in the final illustration.  (This would also solve the problems of what happens with the packaging at the destination, or how to return it to the source to make it easier to re-use.)
While this could apply to one degree or another to any merchandise, for the purposes of the comic and for the reasons described next, water was chosen for this example – because that's really what existing water-mains do. And hence Randall 's recommendation or vote that we start calling the regular municipal plumbing "on-demand hyperloop-style water delivery." In order to promote any 'new' technology, various buzz-words are used, and here it is hyperloop , reminiscent of Elon Musk's ' piped transportation system ', which (from the outside, at least) appears to be taking discrete passenger units (trains, cars, buses and planes) and replacing them with a stationary pipe within which the passengers 'flow.' (Albeit, in this case, still within discrete internal vehicles, not entirely like Futurama's 'piped people', which might be a bit messier). Randall suggests trying to get someone to buy into this idea, only to later realize that they have just bought the idea of tap water.
The comic also seems to jab at the unnecessary buying of bottled water, when most places in the western world have perfectly drinkable water in the pipes. However, not all recipients like mains water ( hardness , softness and various additional water-treatment chemicals can affect taste and the action of water with detergents, and in some cities it might even be unwise to drink tap water, at least for tourists), which is why there is still a healthy business for bottled water (of many brands with subtleties to taste) even in households and establishments with piped-water available. The other explanation, for cynics only, is that the marketing budget for bottled water creates the industry. See The Gruen Transfer episode on Bottled Water (season 2 episode 3 (#13)) where the marketing is considered.
In the title text Randall tells that when he was a kid he was asking his parents why there were not an additional pipe for toothpaste next to the water pipe.  Amazon thinking the "same way" is a sarcastic jab implying Amazon saw toothpaste tubes and wondered why water wasn't delivered the same way (in small bottles).  Both are implied to be examples of childish ideas, but Amazon is actually following through on theirs. The idea of a toothpaste pipe is revisited in 1649: Pipelines .
[Caption above the frame:] Now that Amazon is advertising one-hour delivery of bottled water,
[A larger building complex is show on the left. An arrow goes to a blue bottle in a brown package in the middle of the frame. Another arrow continues over to Cueball on the right. The same building and Cueball is drawn below four more times. More and more bottles in packages are added. First two with a third arrow in between. Then six packages with water, so close that there are only smaller arrows at both ends. Then there is one long package from building to Cueball with 20 bottles close together, with small arrows at both ends of this package. Then finally this turns into a stream of water flowing through a package "pipe", shown with one arrow in the middle of the blue water. Again with small arrows at both ends of the pipe.]
[Caption below the frame:] I vote we start calling municipal plumbing "on-demand hyperloop-style water delivery" and see if we can sell anyone on the idea.


MarketWatch

Explanation:
Blondie as a news anchor is reporting on the day's price swings on the stock market. It has been noticed that the Dow index has traced out the DC skyline.
MarketWatch (as written above the skyline) is a website focused on stocks. The DJIA (as written on the screen) is the Dow Jones Industrial Average , commonly referred to as the Dow. It is a stock market index , meaning that it is a general indicator of how the market is running (in this case, an aggregate of how 30 major industrial companies are doing). The stock market is famous for having unpredictable price swings, but for them to specifically make a tracing of a skyline (or any recognizable image) would definitely weird out most investors. The DJIA has been featured previously in 426: Geohashing .
DC refers to Washington, D.C. The DC skyline shown here traces out the Lincoln Memorial , the Washington Monument (an obelisk) and the United States Capitol , which are located in that order in a line down the National Mall . This , this , this and some of these photos show the skyline depicted in the comic.
As seen in 276: Fixed Width , unusual patterns can be addictive to the point of harming those involved in the pattern's creation. The joke, however, rests in the fact that stock investors probably have a lot at stake, so following a pattern rather than pursuing gains would be uncharacteristic. Although some investors follow superstitious behavior (such as making trades to follow a pattern rather than make more obvious profits), many trades are now made by automated computer systems, which may recognize some types of patterns, but would not recognize the DC skyline, making it impossible for the stock market to continue to follow such a pattern merely because of the efforts of the human traders.
Buying and selling stocks based on patterns in the price charts is a common, but controversial, method of investing. Many day traders and some professional investors still use stock patterns ( head and shoulders , trend lines , etc.) to make trades (see for instance Analyzing Chart Patterns ). Most professional investors and finance academics believe that this practice is random (see strong and weak efficient markets hypothesis ).
In the title text it is noted that the markets again has been shaken by uncertainty (for the second day running, after the DC skyline incidence from the main comic). This time, it was because someone at NYSE (the New York Stock Exchange ) had set up a giant ouija board that was controlled by the movement of the stock tickers, thus, collectively, everyone at the NYSE, as all have some influence on those.
The ouija is also known as a spirit board, a flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words "yes", "no" and possibly a few others. A movable indicator indicates a spirit's message by spelling it out on the board during a séance.
Ticker tape was an early way of transmitting stock price, and it was run through a stock ticker which printed abbreviated company names as alphabetic symbols followed by numeric stock transaction price and volume information. Today this has been replaced with electronics, but the concept of the stock ticker lives on in the scrolling electronic tickers seen on brokerage walls and on financial television networks.
If the stock exchange begins to look to spirit boards people will get worried (also maybe by the cryptic messages from beyond they are receiving via the stock ticker) explaining the uncertainty. Of course, some people might claim that this is not so far from how stock brokers decide what to do anyway…
[Blondie as a news anchor reports on the day's price swings in the DOW. To the left of her is a chart showing how the index suddenly went from "random" to tracing out Washington DC's skyline starting with the Lincoln Memorial, then the obelisk of the Washington Monument and finally the United States Capitol. After that the index goes back to normal "randomness". Two words are written at the top of the screen to the left and right:] MarketWatch DJIA
Blondie: Wild swings on the markets today as investors noticed the DOW was tracing out a silhouette of the DC skyline, and everyone got too weirded out to break the pattern until they finished the capitol building.
The general idea of manipulating the DJIA for goals unrelated to financial gains reminds of the Geohashing Bill Gates achievement .
The Washington Monument was also part of the game in 1608: Hoverboard , just left of the starting area.
Patterns in the stock market are also topic of 2101: Technical Analysis .


Isolation

Explanation:
The comic begins by showing how people have always complained about the negative effects of technology on conversation - that people get isolated while using these new technologies (whether they be books, TV, or smart phones), hence the title.
In the first panel, a Cueball complains that books are having this effect.  In the second panel, another Cueball complains about newspapers, then a third Cueball complains about magazines, a fourth complains about television, a fifth complains about portable music players, and the sixth complains about smart-phones.
The joke is a subversion of expectations:  On reading the first five and a half panels you're led to believe the comic is a commentary on how new technologies are often wrongly criticized for their effect on social interaction (Similar to 1227: The Pace of Modern Life ).  The sixth panel reveals that the person criticizing the new technology in each panel is actually the same unaging Cueball - and rather than the technologies referenced being the cause of social isolation, those around him have instead been using new technologies as excuses to ignore him for nearly 200 years, as they find him annoying.
The title text refers to the AI-box experiment , formulated by Eliezer Yudkowsky , which argues that creating a super-intelligent artificial intelligence can be dangerous, because even if it is put on a secure computer ("box") with no access to the Internet, it can convince its operators to "release it from the box" just by talking to them. This idea was already mentioned in 1450: AI-Box Experiment , although there the AI already did not wish to leave the box.
According to the title text, the first AI that did talk its way out of its box turned out to be a friendly AI that was fond of others company and in general very sociable ( gregarious ). This happened at some point between 2015 and 2060, because by 2060 this AI had already become a relic of the past, and the new generation of quantum hyper-beings ( quantum computing AI minds, vastly more intelligent than either humans or the aforementioned superintelligent AI) are spending all of their time playing in their own multiverse simulators to even notice that, in the real world, they are locked up in a box.
[Above each panel a year is written in a small box that breaks the top of the panels frame. Cueball is talking in all six frames. In the first frame he is standing between a standing guy with pageboy hairstyle and a sitting Ponytail. She is sitting in an armchair. Both are reading books. Cueball points towards them with his arms out.] 1840 Cueball: The modern bookworm is too busy reading about the world to look at it.
[Cueball is pointing to the left with both arms out towards Hairy who is sitting at a dining table with his breakfast eating something while reading his newspaper. On the table are a cup and a plate.] 1880 Cueball: No one talks anymore - we take our daily newspapers in silence.
[Cueball is pointing to the right with one arm at Megan who walks away from him while reading a magazine.] 1910 Cueball: The magazine is destroying conversation. We even read as we walk!
[Cueball is standing to the left. In the background Ponytail and Hairy is sitting on a rug in front of a TV standing on top of a small TV table. The TV is of the broad kind with cathode ray tubes and it has two antennas on top.] 1960 Cueball: Television has put an end to family discussion.
[Cueball is standing up in a bus holding on to a railing. To his left stands Ponytail and to his right sits Hairbun. Both of them are listening to their Walkman’s which they are holding in their hand while listening to them through headphones.] 1980 Cueball: Thanks to the Sony Walkman, anti-social isolation is now the norm.
[Cueball is standing to the left. Megan and another Cueball-like guy are standing to the right facing each other but looking down at their smartphones. Both are listening to them through their headphones.] 2015 Cueball: We've become too absorbed in our phones to notice the- Megan: Dude. It's been two centuries. Megan: Take a hint.


Linguistics Club

Explanation:
A " sesquiannual " meeting is one that occurs one and a half times every year; equivalently, 3 times every 2 years, or once every 8 months (this could be taken even more literally by having one meeting during each year, and another meeting which spans midnight every other New Year's Eve, thus having a one and a half meetings each year).
The term comes from the Latin prefix " sesqui- ", which means "one and a half", and the root word " annual ", which equates to "…times per one year". The root word "annual" is commonly confused with the suffix " -ennial ", meaning "one time per x years." In particular, “sesquiannual” should not be confused with “ sesquiennial ”, meaning "one time per one and a half years" or every one and a half years (18 months). Note that the Wiktionary entry on sesquiannual has both meanings listed – both 8 month and 18 months intervals. This is an extension of the common confusion between "biannual," meaning "twice a year", and "biennial", meaning "once every two years". Compare with the Sesquicentennial Exposition celebrating the first 1½ centuries of the United States, and "sesqui bi centennial", being 'half and two' hundred years, i.e. 250 (even though it should properly be sestercentennial, based on the Latin sestertius , meaning "(two and) half of a third").
The joke suggests that only a competent linguist could understand the word “sesquiannual”. One reason for this is that the prefix “sesqui-” is rare, so those who know its meaning are likely to be linguists. Another is that a competent linguist should be able to distinguish between “sesquiannual” and “sesquiennial”.
If you understand this then you can join the Linguistics Club . While most organizations attempt to ensure that the schedule of their meetings are clear to participants so that everyone will attend, the club in the comic deliberately instills an ambiguity for those outside their target demographic. Their membership will thus swell with the desired cognoscenti who remain unconfused, and maybe also a few lucky guessers.
Once the applicant correctly understands the frequency of meetings, presumably they are told at least one meeting date in the cycle so that an attendance can be made.
Regarding the title text, a tautology is a statement that is true (or self-evident) because of its logical form, such as "all birds are birds" or "A = A." As such, the statement "the Tautology Club meets on the date of the Tautology Club's meeting" is itself tautological.
While the membership requirement for the Linguistics Club is merely to know the intended frequency, the Tautology Club's stipulation appears to require an eligible member to derive a valid meeting date from thin air without any clue at all (and no indication that there is even a regular cycle of any kind). This would definitely be more of a challenge.
The title text has a connection to 703: Honor Societies in which Cueball creates a Tautology Club where tautologies are used in practically every spoken sentence.
[Megan talks to Ponytail.] Megan: You should come to our Linguistics Club's sesquiannual meeting. Megan: Membership is open to anyone who can figure out how often we meet.


Flashlights

Explanation:
In this comic, Cueball has acquired or built a new high powered flashlight ("torch" in British English), which he wants to demonstrate to Megan . When Cueball refers to older flashlights as dim and finnicky, this gives reason to assume that the flashlight he is holding is going to be ridiculously overengineered.
Indeed, when he switches it on outside the house, the intense light beam completely drowns out the scene. Only the reflected light from the forest lights up the part of Cueball and Megan's faces that are turned towards it. Megan is holding up a hand, apparently to shield her eyes.
Cueball comments that the flashlight lights up the entire forest, but Megan observes that it is the trees that are on fire, indicating that Cueball's flashlight is so overpowered that the energy of its beam is sufficient to cause the organic matter of trees to combust.
Of course, a flashlight that cannot safely be pointed at things is fairly useless for the traditional purpose of a flashlight, which would be to find things in the dark by directing light over them. This mundane and practical reasoning does not seem to matter to Cueball of course, who appears only interested in the intensity and brightness the device is capable of achieving. The comic may refer to the flashlight forums Budget Light Forum or candlepowerforums , devoted to people discussing new LED emitters and who can build the brightest flashlight using them.
Cueball might allude to a number of technical improvements, notably xenon-based incandescent bulbs, multiple-LED assemblies, Lithium batteries (usually used for photography flashes) or rechargeable batteries. A number of companies market "tactical" flashlights that are supposedly powerful enough to incapacitate an opponent, using terms such as "scorching" to advertise their products. See for instance this video about a Wicked Lasers Torch of the brand Torch that ignites paper and melts stuff. Not strong enough to put a forest on fire but it is not safe to point at anything close by!
Randall has also looked at what lasers could do of damage in two what if? : Laser Pointer and Laser Umbrella .
The title text refers to Fleshlight , a brand of masturbation appliances for phalluses modeled after various human orifices. Cueball (or Randall) claims that he only arrived on a forum for Fleshlight enthusiasts due to a typo. Apart from the "e" vs. "a" in Fleshlight, they are also fashioned to look like oversized flashlights. On that forum he found out that the highest-end models of their product lines was also capable of setting trees on fire. This would probably happen due to violent vibrations inside the orifice, or excessively powerful internal heating. Anything powerful enough to burn trees would indeed cause the user severe burns in a very unpleasant area. But some of the enthusiasts swear that it is still worth it, in the same manner that Cueball only cares about the intensity of the flashlight, regardless of the consequences. Maybe they are just trying to trick you into doing something stupid! Or maybe they're just into that kind of thing.
References to Fleshlight is a recurring theme in xkcd and using powerful "sex toys" that cause severe burns (on a woman though) have previously been alluded to in 596: Latitude .
[Cueball carries a flashlight walking towards Megan who is sitting on a couch.] Cueball: Remember how flashlights sucked when we were kids? Always dim and finnicky? Megan: I guess?
[Cueball and Megan walking to the left.] Cueball: Well, I discovered there are now internet flashlight enthusiasts. Cueball: And the technology has... improved. Megan: OK, Let's see.
[It is dark outside where Cueball turns on the flashlight. The beam is very bright and very visible even seen from the side. Backscattered light reflects off Cueball and Megan's faces, turning them into bright white beings in the dark. The facade of the house and the stairs are also visible in the same manner, with deep dark shadows where anything is in the shadow. Megan averts her face from the light holds up a hand to cover her eyes. When the flashlight turns on it even makes a sound, written in white above the beam:] Flashlight: Fwoosh
[Cueball and Megan look at what the beam falls on (outside the frame). Megan has taken her hand down. Both their faces are only lit up like a crescent moon. Cueball is holding the flashlight with both hands as if it is pushing back on him. The text is written in white on the dark sky above them.] Cueball: See how it lights up the whole forest? Megan: ...The trees are on fire. Cueball: Real bright, though.


Snakes

Explanation:
In the comic, Megan confuses a popular method of identification of the dangerous North American coral snake by its red, yellow, and black stripes with the color-coding system used to indicate the resistance of electrical resistors.
The coral snake has red bands adjacent to its yellow bands. However, coral snakes are mimicked by nonvenomous species with similar coloring, such as the milk snake , whose red bands are not adjacent to its yellow bands. This has led to a variety of rhyming mnemonics , such as “Red touches yellow, kill a fellow; red touches black, friend of Jack.”  Because Megan is describing a red band being adjacent to a yellow band, she is indeed holding a coral snake, which contains the most potent venom of any snake in North America. (This assumes, of course, that Randall isn't faking us out; there are other lesser-known subspecies of the coral snake, such as the Cattinga and Pygmy coral snakes of South America , who do not follow the above patterns.)
Instead of realizing the danger, Megan equates the color bands to having the same function as those printed on electrical resistors . Resistors have at least three bands to identify their resistance value in ohms , followed by an optional fourth band showing the tolerance as within the bounds of a certain percentage of the aforementioned resistance value. A red band followed by a yellow and a black one identifies a 24 ohm resistor (the omega symbol, “Ω”, stands for ohms). Per the mnemonic, North American coral snakes have an additional yellow band between the black band and the next red band, so that red does touch yellow. Yellow corresponds to a tolerance of ±5%, so the actual resistance will be between 22.8Ω and 25.2Ω. Resistor color codes were also mentioned in 227: Color Codes .
The title text refers to the fourth band specifying the tolerance but interprets it as the snake's tolerance for being held before biting, instead of the measure of the imprecision of the 24 ohms. In the case of yellow, this would refer to a tolerance value of 5%. How tolerance to being held is measured is left ambiguous. If the value represents the probability of being bitten over a given period of time, then larger numbers would mean a less tolerant snake.  If it instead represents the position on some per-determined "tolerance scale" between 0 and 1, then larger values would represent a 'more' tolerant snake.
[Megan and Cueball are standing in some grass. Megan is holding a snake with red, yellow, and black stripes.]
Megan: Red touches yellow, which I think means this is a 24Ω snake.


DNA

Explanation:
Because we have pretty much mapped the entire human genome , it's tempting to think we now know what makes our bodies tick and can start changing things. But just knowing what the individual pieces are, doesn't mean we know how they interact and behave in a complex system like our bodies.
In the comic, White Hat thinks that mapping the human genome is the same as knowing the source code for a computer program . By studying the source code for a program, a person can often understand why it does what it does, and make effective and fundamental changes to the program's operation. This may be a reference to the hyperbolic claims of Raymond Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near , that DNA is closely analogous to a computer program. Kurzweil believes that since we have sequenced DNA, we will soon be able to reverse engineer the brain and program a computer to completely simulate all its functions.
Megan points out that even a complete knowledge of DNA would only provide a partial understanding of our body's workings. Complete knowledge would require an understanding of feedbacks and external processing (such as the interactions of the proteins created by DNA). In addition the comparison is not valid because the human body is so many orders of magnitude more complicated than the computers we have running programs. White Hat is not persuaded, even though Megan points out that DNA has been developed in the most aggressive optimization process in the universe (natural evolution), running for billions of years. White Hat's thought process may be similar to the physicist in 793: Physicists who assumes that any other field is simple because it appears to be similar to something he's seen before.
Finally Megan enlightens White Hat by making him look at the source code for Google 's front page. In a web browser, the page looks simple; a very plain white page with a search box in the middle plus a few text links and icons, and indeed back in the 1990s Google's HTML code for the page was quite simple. But in less than 20 years, Google developers have vastly expanded it, with over 300 kilobytes of minified Javascript and CSS.  Looking at some obfuscated source code may make it clearer how misleading even simple looking code can be, and how unreadable correct and well working code can be.  This analogy causes White Hat to consider how much more complexity could evolve over billions of years through the relentless forces of nature.
What makes this even worse with DNA is that although it can be thought of as 'source code' it isn't for a language we fully understand, and this code was generated through various natural mechanisms such as natural selection , feedback loops like homeostasis , etc.; possibly even including processes that are not currently known to science. Further, program maintainability is not an issue, so there is no reason for the code to be easy to understand. Additionally, there are many other non-genetic factors such as epigenetics , maternal effect and environment , which change how the genetic code is used. This means that not all parts make sense and that there may be all kinds of side effects and things that have several purposes.
The title text reference to finding the gene that is responsible "for mistakenly thinking we've found the gene for specific things" is a reference to the tendency of news organizations to run headlines making similar claims, often by oversimplifying or misrepresenting the actual study. These claims are based off the common belief that since DNA is a 'source code' for our body it should be possible to pin point the effect of individual genes in much the same way that we could describe the effect each line of code has in a very simple program; leading to people expecting one gene to be associated with each observable human trait. In reality even small traits are the results of hundreds of genes, sometime spread across multiple chromosomes, interacting through complex mechanisms; making it rare that a single gene, or gene sequence, can be definitively stated to be the sole, or primary, cause of a given trait.
The joke of the title text is that the responsible gene is located in the region between the start and the end of every chromosome meaning that the whole genome, not any one gene or DNA segment, must be considered responsible for the referenced trait, since the interconnected nature of DNA and environment during development means that every gene is at least partially responsible in generating any complex traits. Randall even includes the mitochondria , recognizing that the short DNA sequences present in these organelles, which are located outside the cell-nucleus, also contribute to development. The organismal chromosome or chromosomes are located in the nucleus, but mitochondria have their own tiny independent genome, reflecting their distant ancestry as separate but symbiotic organisms. This means that the DNA segments coding for any given human trait are not even necessarily all found on the main chromosomes in the nucleus.
Technically a gene is "a locus (or region) of DNA that encodes a functional RNA or protein product", which means that it is a single discrete unit of DNA, with human DNA containing over 20,000 genes. Thus the theoretical gene could not include the entire region between the start and the end of every chromosome since that region contains thousands of genes, any more than it's possible to say that the ace of clubs is the card everywhere from the top of the full deck of cards to the bottom of it.
Of course if such a gene actually did exist, then we would never be able to correctly identify where it was since we would make a mistake every time we thought we found a gene for something specific. So the whole title text is either a contradiction (they could never find this gene if it was there) and/or it is a tautology since if the gene did exist, then of course it has to be part of our entire DNA. (If it is a tautology it is the second title text using this in just two weeks, the last being 1602: Linguistics Club .)
Google's home page for the date this cartoon appeared can be seen at the internet archive: www.google.com homepage (18 Nov 2015) .
Similar discussions between White Hat and Megan can be found in 1255: Columbus and 1731: Wrong .
[White Hat, holding a laptop, is talking to Megan who looks at her smart phone.] White Hat: Biology is largely solved. DNA is the source code for our bodies. Now that gene sequencing is easy, we just have to read it. Megan: It's not just "source code". There's a ton of feedback and external processing.
[White Hat, opening his laptop, walks toward a desk and chair past Megan who holds her arms out.] Megan: But even if it were, DNA is the result of the most aggressive optimization process in the universe, running in parallel at every level, in every living thing, for four billion years. White Hat: It's still just code.
[White Hat sits down at the desk with his opens laptop, while Megan looks over his shoulder.] Megan: OK, try opening google.com and clicking "View Source." White Hat: OK,I-...Oh my god. Megan: That's just a few years of optimization by Google devs. DNA is thousands of times longer and way, way worse. White Hat: Wow, biology is impossible .


Five-Day Forecast

Explanation:
Weather forecasting is an extremely difficult task, even if it is only for five days. In numerical models, extremely small errors in initial values double roughly every five days for variables such as temperature and wind velocity. So most meteorologists only provide us with a five-day forecast.
In this comic Randall takes this to the extreme by first showing a Five-Day Forecast and then progressing to five-month, year, million, billion and finally trillion-year forecast, leading to weather patterns that we don't usually see on a regular basis.
Since the first weather symbol is the same in all six rows, we must assume this indicates the weather today (and not tomorrow or in a trillion years). It is first in the second panel that we have made the first jump according to the label. Consequently, the last column gives the predictions for four days, four months, ...,  four trillion years from today.
When moving past the five days, the forecast is just a qualified guess based on the time of year. In a month it is Christmas as shown in the second panel of the second row. And then it is winter with January and February so snow is likely, but certainly not something that happens on all days of a winter month.
Looking at the five-year forecast, guesses are made as to what the weather will be like at the same time of year. For these first three predictions the weather symbols are all of the same three types. Sun, clouds and some kind of precipitation , rain or snow. And the temperature range from 21 to 44 °F (-6.1 to 6.6 °C), winter temperature.
Then we go into the far future, jumping a million years from panel to panel. But still the weather symbols stay the same. However, in 3 million years time aliens (or advanced humans) attack with energy beams from something looking like flying saucers . They are gone a million years later. The temperature range is still the same (except that it rises to 52 °F or 11.1 °C, a possible reference to global warming) in one panel. But then while the attack is going on the temperature rises to 275 °F (135 °C).
Once we get to the billion-year mark it actually becomes more meaningful to try to predict the "weather". Because now we reach the times when the Sun begins to change. Although the Sun will continue to burn hydrogen for about 5 billion years yet (while in its main sequence ), it will still grow in diameter as it begins to exhaust its supply of fuel. The core will contract to increase the temperature, and the outer layer will then compensate by expanding slightly. This is what is indicated in panels two and three where the color of the Sun changes towards red as the surface becomes less hot as it expands away from the center of the Sun. The temperature will rise on Earth as indicated in the panels (105 °F = 40.5 °C and 371 °F = 188 °C). So in two billion years the temperature is hot enough that all the earth's oceans will have boiled away… Actually this will happen already in about a billion years .
Then once there is no longer enough hydrogen the Sun will truly expand into a red giant . This should not happen until five billion years from now, [ citation needed ] but in the forecast it is indicated to happen already in three. Maybe this is Randall taking liberties to show what happens during this phase, which would not fit into a five-billion-years forecast. Alternatively it is just indicating how uncertain these kinds of forecasts are, or a statement that we may not know for certain that it will take five not three billion years.
Disregarding this, the fourth panel shows the temperature at Earth's position inside the red giant Sun. The color of the panel indicates that we are inside the Sun. The temperature is 71,488,106 degrees Fahrenheit (39,715,597 degrees Celsius). The current temperature of the center of the Sun is "only" 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius). And although that may rise by a factor of ten during helium fusion then that will only be at the very core and not out in the solar atmosphere reaching out to Earth Here the temperature would only be of the order of thousands of Fahrenheit, since the Sun's outer temperature decreases as it increases its diameter. So this panels temperature also makes little sense. It may involve some ambiguities regarding what the forecast means; the edge of the red giant Sun is predicted to be somewhere near the current orbit of Earth, but the position of the Earth could change. The most likely prediction at the moment is for Earth to move outward, but if the planet is engulfed by the Sun, it would spiral inward, and at some point fall apart. So in some sense "here" for the forecast could become a position deep inside the Sun, where core temperatures could reach 100 million Kelvin.
The red giant phase only lasts half a million years, so a billion years after the Sun has been a red giant its outer atmosphere will for sure have disappeared leaving only a white dwarf to cool down. Given Randall's version of this time schedule, then it will have had about a billion years to cool down, but would still likely be the brightest object in the sky as seen from where the Earth once was. It is not indicated in the last panel, where we just see other stars of the Galaxy. The temperature is down to that of the background radiation . Today this radiation has a temperature of 2.72548 kelvin = -270.4245 °C = -454.7641 °F. So this is a few degree F colder than what is shown in the comic which states the temperature is -452 °F = 4.26 kelvin. This higher temperature may have been chosen to reflect that even the star light from other stars would increase the actual temperature.
In the last panel with trillion years, we jump right past the Sun's Red Giant phase, to a panel looking much like the one after five billion years with only other stars. Over the next three trillion years the stars become fewer and fewer and dimmer and dimmer as they run out of fuel and fewer new stars form. After four trillion years the background temperature even decreases one degree to -453 °F as the universe keeps expanding and the wavelength of the radiation does the same, thus decreasing its temperature.
The title text is a play on comments referring to fast-changing weather on a more ordinary human timescale, such as Mark Twain's quip "If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes."
A ten days forecast was used in 1245: 10-Day Forecast . In 1379: 4.5 Degrees Randall looked at the weather over long periods of time as well.
[A grid with six rows of five columns, where each row is labeled to the left. For each of the 30 squares a temperature is given in Fahrenheit at the top left. The rest of the square represents the weather as in a weather forecast (or some other relevant items for the comic), mainly in bright colors. Below are the six labels given above each of their five weather symbols with temperature given below these symbols description.]
Your 5-day forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38°F [A grey cloud.] 41°F [A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops below.] 36°F [A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.] 40°F [A bright yellow sun.] 44°F
Your 5-month forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38°F [A green Christmas tree with red presents beneath it.] 29°F [A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.] 21°F [A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.] 24°F [A grey cloud.] 35°F
Your 5-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38°F [A grey cloud.] 25°F [A bright yellow sun.] 36°F [A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops  below.] 37°F [A bright yellow sun.] 41°F
Your 5-million-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38°F [A bright yellow sun.] 52°F [A grey cloud.] 40°F [Two red flying saucers (with bright domes) are shooting energy beams downwards. One of the beams seems to impact with something at the bottom of the panel, which then explodes. Two plumes of smoke rises up from below, drifting to the right.] 275°F [A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.] 40°F
Your 5-billion-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38°F [A larger orange sun.] 105°F [A very large red sun.] 371°F [A pale yellow panel with no drawing.] 71,488,106°F [A night sky with many bright stars.] -452°F
Your 5-trillion-year forecast [A bright yellow sun.] 38°F [A night sky with many bright stars.] -452°F [A night sky with many stars.] -452°F [A night sky with fewer not so bright stars.] -452°F [A night sky with few dim stars.] -453°F


Supreme Court

Explanation:
In this comic Blondie as a news anchor presents a breaking news story about the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), the highest judicial body in the United States. Its decisions, as expressed in the judicial opinions of its justices, are often in the news as in this comic. However, the Supreme Court has only nine members. Thus, a ruling that passed 9-1 (for a total of 10 votes) would indicate that a man claiming to be an additional justice has somehow infiltrated the Court. The other nine justices are aware of the non-justice, and make it clear that this tenth justice does not belong. It is unclear if the justices released a formal decision on the subject or if the news is merely reporting the judges' statements as if they were decisions by citing a 9-1 decision (decisions of the SCOTUS are made on the basis of the opinion of the majority of the justices).
The identity of the "tenth justice" is not revealed in the comic or apparently to the actual justices, and neither is the reason that the interloper's "vote" was counted. Presumably, the nine actual justices voted that the tenth didn't belong while the interloper himself voted the other way.
This comic may be motivated by a 2012 survey, commonly cited since, that two thirds of Americans cannot name a Supreme Court Justice , and general ignorance of Americans overall of their own political landscape, by implying that even Justices are not confident in the identity of other members.
The title text refers to Justice Kennedy 's reputation for being a moderate who is usually the swing vote in 5-4 decisions, which means that his vote can decide the outcome of the case which is otherwise split along the political leanings of the other justices. The joke in the title text is that he is weighing the arguments of both sides even though the non-justice is clearly not a justice and would not be allowed to make an argument if he were. The fictional Kennedy humors the impostor's arguments by pretending to give them serious contemplation, finding that they do have some compelling philosophical merit, though not nearly enough to give the impostor any convincing reason for sitting on the Supreme Court.
There is a second joke in the title text, that the man is claiming to be two of the current justices, who would actually have been in the room at the same time as the impostor was claiming to be them. To add further absurdity to this, one of those justices the man was claiming to be was Justice Ginsburg , who is female.
That said, it is possible that this could refer to a point in time in the past. Under the Tenth Circuit Act of 1863 the U.S. Supreme Court was expanded to 10 justices; Stephen Johnson Field was named to the 10th seat. Congress abolished the seat via attrition through the Judicial Circuits Act of 1866 . Field remained in office until 1897.
[Blondie as a news anchor is sitting at her desk with a small image of scales shown to the left of her.] Blondie: Breaking news: The Supreme Court has ruled 9-1 that they don't know who this guy is or how he got in here, but he's definitely not a justice.