I Shouldn't Complain

Explanation:
Humans have a tendency to re-calibrate their mental scales to place their actual experience in the center. Cueball, who has never experienced being trapped for hours with stinging insects, rates this in comparison to not being trapped at all. Megan, however, rates it in comparison to other uncomfortable places a person could be stuck.
The title text explains how Megan came into such a mess. A tennis ball used in a clothes dryer got stuck in the exhaust vent, and was shot out of the house through the exhaust vents hole in the wall. Then it hit the wasp nest and ricocheted over on Megan knocking her off the ladder she was standing on. Since she was close to the nest, she may actually have been up on the ladder in order to see if she could remove the nest. The fall from the ladder made her end up in the trash can where she could not get out. The angry wasps began stinging her legs. This continued for two hours.
In the title text, Megan continues to downplay her experience even though it was very painful. She says that the wasp nest was of the type bald-faced hornets .
The Schmidt sting pain index is a scale developed by entomologist Justin O. Schmidt to rank the relative pain caused by different stinging insects. This scale ranges from 0 (for stings that are completely ineffective) to 4, which denotes torturous and nearly incapacitating pain (originally, Schmidt only classed one species as a 4, but two additional species have since been added at this level).  Megan says her stings were a 2 on the scale , which denotes "familiar" pain, comparable to that of the common Western Honey Bee . Most people would find that experience incredibly painful, particularly since she endured multiple stings over a long period of time, but Megan points out that there exist insects with more painful stings.
Megan concludes that she'd been lucky, based on the argument that she theoretically could have endured something worse than she did. The joke, of course, is that by almost any subjective standard, her experience was deeply unluckly.
She also further downplays the situation by focusing attention on the sting pain index instead of the sting lethal capacity, described by the author of the pain index . The two are not necessarily equivalent. Let's assume that all insects in the colony affected stung Megan at least once over her two hour ordeal. A colony capable of sustaining an attack over two hours would probably be at least as large as the typical maximum size for a bald-faced hornet nest . Such an attack might (depending on number of attackers and the species of wasp) deliver enough venom to kill 84 kg (185 pounds) worth of mice (or human?). Given such an attack, Megan would probably not be standing around in routine conversation, casually discussing the incident. She would far more likely be in a hospital bed, and in a gruesome fight for her life .
[Cueball and Megan are standing together. Cueball has his hands on his chin, shocked.] Cueball: I can't believe you fell headfirst into a garbage can and were stuck there for two hours while wasps stung your exposed legs! Megan: I shouldn't complain! Lots of people have been stuck for longer in worse places. Megan: Really, I'm lucky.
[Caption below the panel:] The more unpleasant someone's experience is, the more they apologize for complaining because it could be worse.


Qua

Explanation:
Saying something is "X qua X" (e.g. "entertainment qua entertainment") means when X is being viewed in its most typical capacity (eg, entertainment as something that entertains, rather than as a business, a form of propaganda, or whatever).
For example, "A copy, qua copy, can never be the equal of the exemplar, and it may be much its inferior." [1]
Cueball claims that people only use qua to "sound pretentious" without properly understanding its meaning. Thus, people do not use "qua qua qua", or "qua for the sake of qua". However, Megan one-ups this with a series of seven qua s: she compliments Cueball's successful use of "qua qua qua qua qua qua qua", or "the phrase 'qua qua qua' for its correct meaning".
The joke is that, for the reader, the conversation has likely dissolved into gibberish because of unfamiliar terminology and semantic satiation . This is similar to other complex sentences such as "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" , "That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is" , and "James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher" . Following this trend, you can create a grammatically correct sentence that includes 'qua' a consecutive number of times equal to (2 n -1), where n is a natural number.
The title text goes further with this, using a Latin phrase sine qua non (meaning literally "without which not"), commonly rendered as "that which is absolutely necessary" or "essential". Thus, the title text says that "the word 'qua' in its real meaning is essential to the phrase 'sine qua non' used correctly".
However, the **qua** in title text phrase is a demonstrative pronoun ("which"), unlike the other **qua** which is an adverb, so the similarity is only coincidental.
[Cueball and Megan are speaking to each other.] Cueball: People mostly use "qua" to sound pretentious. You rarely hear qua qua qua. Megan: Nice use of qua qua qua qua qua qua qua.


False Dichotomy

Explanation:
A dichotomy is two alternatives which are normally mutually exclusive (such as the dichotomy between a flat Earth and non-flat Earth). A false dichotomy is a logical fallacy based on an incorrect perception of limited options (for example: if the page background isn't white, it is black).
Cueball has apparently made one such error and is being called out by White Hat for it. Upon having this pointed out to him, Cueball says that we must embrace false dichotomies, because the only other option is cannibalism . This statement is another false dichotomy, as presenting false dichotomies is not the only alternative to cannibalism [ citation needed ] . The reverse (that cannibalism is incompatible with expressing false dichotomies) is also not potentially true, as eating people may eventually result in having nobody you need to present false dichotomies to.
Cueball has thus created another false dichotomy to excuse his first.
The false dichotomy Cueball appears to be referring to is the notion that those identified as human must not be eaten, but even closely related animals are not human and can be eaten, i.e. species can be divided clearly between "human" and "food".  If this dichotomy is not accepted, then consuming any species that shares, for instance, any significant percentage of DNA with humans could be considered a measure of cannibalism.
The title text states that there are two kinds of dichotomies, making a dichotomy in itself. Due to three types of dichotomy being mentioned, and only two being foreshadowed, this statement is itself a surprise trichotomy, or three-parted choice. The title text is a variation of the "Two kinds of People" joke.  The classic math nerd variant is "There are three kinds of people in the world, those who can count, and those who can't."  Alternatively, it may refer to a variation about binary . The original joke usually goes something like this: "There are 10 types of people: those who know binary, and those who don't." The variation is usually something like the following: "There are 10 types of people: those who know binary, and those who don't, and those who weren't expecting a ternary joke." Another version of this kind of joke is "there are two kinds of people: those who can extrapolate from an incomplete data set,"
The word trichotomy is a relative neologism, to be understood as to mean "divided into (or amongst) three parts", having replaced the original prefix "di-" (a factor of two, either doubled or, by context, halved) with that of "tri-" (similarly tripled/thirded). Strictly, though, dichotomy more directly stems from Greek elements that say "apart, I cut", with "apart" being represented by the "dicho-" (itself being roughly "into two", or to separate) which does not have a direct "tricho-" equivalent, although it does ultimately derive from "duo", Greek for "two". This is the kind of linguistic nuance that Randall clearly enjoys, yet may also happily or carelessly (mis)use without compunction.
[White Hat and Cueball are talking to each other. White Hat has his arms spread outwards in exasperation, while Cueball gestures assertively with his pointer finger.] White Hat: That's a false dichotomy! Cueball: Yes, but we have to embrace false dichotomies, because the only alternative is cannibalism.


Deviled Eggs

Explanation:
A deviled egg is a dish created by cutting a hard-boiled egg into halves and replacing the yolk with a paste frequently made using the yolk itself, additional ingredients such as mustard and mayonaise , and topped with a red spice (usually paprika ). Importantly, the paste has a larger volume than the original yolk because of the added ingredients (and probably some air) into the originally homogeneous yolk substances. Randall Munroe parodies the dish by creating several alternative versions of the dish for other professions using word plays on the name of the dish.
Chef - Deviled egg
The original dish with the excess paste piled above the egg white.
Landscaper - Leveled egg
Many landscaping projects involve leveling irregular ground surfaces. [ citation needed ] A landscaper may prefer to serve their deviled egg with a leveled flat surface. (This happens to resemble a normal hard-boiled egg cut in half.)
Designer - Beveled egg
Bevels are a design pattern of creating non-perpendicular surfaces between adjacent edges. A designer may prefer to serve their egg with the edge of the white beveled to give their eggs a more modern, aesthetically pleasing look.
Physicist - Demon egg
This deviled egg is designed to look like the Demon Core which was a sub-critical plutonium sphere manufactured during the Manhattan Project to investigate the properties of criticality . The Demon Core consisted of three parts: two plutonium-gallium hemispheres and a ring designed to keep neutron flux from "jetting" out of the joined surface between the hemispheres during implosion. The set of plutonium pieces got their name from the 2 criticality incidents that occurred when scientists were investigating this property. The first accident resulted in the death of Harry Daghlian . In the second incident, experimenters covered the core with two neutron reflecting shells separated only by a handheld screwdriver. (No, really.) The screwdriver slipped, causing the core to become completely covered by the neutron reflecting shell, bringing the core past its criticality limit. A large amount of radiation caused the subsequent death of physicist Louis Slotin . The dome of the boiled egg and the toothpick resemble the configuration of the experiment.
The demon core was also referred to in 1242: Scary Names .
The title texts refers to ionized-air glow , a blue light emitted by air submitted to an energy flux from radiation and seen during the incidents involving the demon core .
For a detailed explanation of the Demon Core, Kyle Hill produced an Youtube Documentary regarding the Demon Core.
[The comic consists of four variations of deviled eggs.]
[A typical deviled egg, with half of the white part of a hard-boiled egg and a paste of yolk in a rough cone. The paste is speckled with red dots.] Chef Deviled egg
[A deviled egg, except the paste has been flattened to be level with the white.] Landscaper Leveled egg
[A deviled egg, except the edge of the white has bevels.] Designer Beveled egg
[A deviled egg, except the paste is now two hemispheres, one set in (and level with) the white and the other on top with a toothpick wedged between the two hemispheres at the left egg keeping them separated. The toothpick has a small piece of blue foil wrapped around the edge of the toothpick.] Physicist Demon egg


Consensus Time

Explanation:
Randall , jumping on this topic, proposes a system that allows everybody to say when it "feels" like 9 am, and then the median 9 am will become the real 9 am. This happens every day. As the title text points out, this would be chaotic and, to put it bluntly, awful. [ citation needed ]
Presumably the times indicated on this diagram are as the clocks in this time zone would indicate, as opposed to an "ordinary" reference time.
The graph of points seems to follow a normal distribution, with a large number of votes being clustered around a given time, and giving a median of soon after 11AM. There are some extreme outliers, some before 6AM and some after 6PM, indicating some users being outside the normal range but no information on whether it's a malicious attempt.
Although the hours between midnight and 9 am are labelled as "longer" (which we can assume means each would take longer than an hour of ordinary time to pass) the effect on the remaining hours is left unstated. If we assume that the remaining hours pass at the usual rate then this would suggest that midnight would come sooner or later than normal and hence the next vote would occur sooner or later respectively. This implies the time in this time zone could drift further than a day (or even multiple days) from existing time-zones which could be what is meant by "feedback", "chaos" and the effect on weekdays mentioned in the title text.
Proposal: Consensus Time
Every day, anyone in the time zone can press a button when they feel like it's 9 AM. The next day, clocks slow down or speed up to match the median choice from the previous day.
[A diagram representing the hours of two days with tick marks, with some of the tick marks longer than others and/or in boldface, and some of them labeled as follows:]
Midnight 6AM 9AM today Median Noon 6PM Midnight 6AM 9AM tomorrow Noon 6PM Midnight
[A brace connects the period from the second "Midnight" to "9AM tomorrow". It is labeled:] Longer hours
[A scatterplot of 57 dots appears below the hashmarks, indicating the distribution of when participants pushed the "9 AM" button. The most extreme outliers are at roughly 3AM and 9PM, but they most densely cluster around a vertical dotted line labelled "Median" at approximately 11:15AM, interrupted as it passes through the main mass of dots at roughly the position of the 29th plotted dot from either end.]
[Megan, facing to the left, and Cueball, facing to the right, each hold a handheld device. The devices are too small to see clearly but are making sounds, implying that each of them has just pressed the "9 AM" button.] Beep Beep
A working version has been created.


Advanced Techniques

Explanation:
In typical Miss Lenhart fashion, she is teaching a mathematics class where she outlines a process by which a mathematical result is achieved through steps which sound suspiciously like magical RPG logic. She includes both a dragon and arrows to slay it.
One of her students asks if this is a metaphor for the technique, but her rather tetchy reply "Does this look like English class?!" seems to imply that she literally means that dragons and arrows will be employed in the resolution of the problem. It is also clear from the slide she is pointing at that she has drawn a dragon and a man with a bow that is aiming an arrow at the dragon. Whilst metaphor is an important part of many languages, and so is definitely taught in language classes, it is not usually used in math classes.
The caption beneath the comic states that this approach describes "All advanced math techniques." This could be a reference to the now-common approach in higher mathematics in which a problem is transformed into another domain where it is easier to solve, then transformed back. For instance, in Fourier analysis , commonly used for analyzing the behavior of signals or dynamical systems, a problem can be transformed from the time domain to the frequency domain, solved, and then transformed back again. A (much) more complex example is Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem , which uses modularity lifting to transform the problem. Here Miss Lenhart says she will transform a math problem into an actual dragon, slay it, and transform the corpse back into mathematics.
An alternative view is that Randall is referring to Arthur C. Clarke 's third law that Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic , as re-framed for mathematics. What Randall would be implying is that all advanced math techniques look like magic to non-mathematicians. (Another advanced and somewhat magical math technique is deployed by Miss Lenhart in 1724: Proofs .)
Invocations are a common classification for spoken or vocalized types of spell. In the logic Miss Lenhart used, 'invoking' Gauss's operator may refer to casting a magical spell with verbal components (such as True Polymorph ). The operator is presumably named after the famous German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss . There is nothing on Wikipedia called Gauss's operator, but there is both Gauss's law and the Gauss–Kuzmin–Wirsing operator . As neither can transform an equation into a dragon, [ citation needed ] it's clear Randall is making a joke.
Slaying the dragon with Hilbert's arrow indicates that the arrow has some magical properties. The arrow is presumably named after David Hilbert , known for many mathematical developments including Hilbert's problems and Hilbert spaces . A Hilbert space converts subsets of an infinite vector space into a complete metric space, allowing the use of linear algebra and calculus methods which might otherwise be applicable only to finite Euclidean spaces. Vectors could be compared with an arrow. Magical arrows are frequently used to slay dragons in myth and role-playing games. Magical items in RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons are often named after a creator or famous user; hence, a magical "Arrow of Hilbert" might traverse infinite spaces or affect targets for which one or more stats are effectively infinite.
There is in fact a class of Dragon curves , which do have the sort of S-shape shown on the whiteboard, but they have no connection to Gauss's operator, and are not actual dragons that need slaying.
The title text contains two puns and a reference. The phrase " Cutlass of Variations" is a pun on the mathematical technique called " Calculus of variations ". The word "Noetherworld" is a pun on " netherworld ". The reference is to the mathematician Emmy Noether , a giant in the field of abstract algebra which, through more of Ms. Lenhart’s questionable transformations, may become an actual giant in a field of abstract algae bras. Furthermore, Noether's Theorem is used in the Calculus of Variations. She was previously referenced as one of many important women in science back in 896: Marie Curie .
[Miss Lenhart is using a stick to point at a whiteboard behind her while facing, presumably, a crowd of off-panel students. The white board has a drawing of a snake-shaped dragon with wings, flying with it's body in an S-shape. An archer is pointing an arrow up at the dragon above him. Above the drawings there are three and below two rows of unreadable text and equations.] Miss Lenhart: To solve this equation, we invoke Gauss's operator to transform it into a dragon. Miss Lenhart: Then we slay the dragon with Hilbert's Arrow, and transform its corpse back into the solution. Off-panel voice: Just to be clear, this is a metaphor, right? Miss Lenhart: Does this look like English class?!
[Caption below the panel:] All advanced math techniques


Galaxies

Explanation:
This is another comic with a Fact , the second in a row of these fact comics to use an Astronomy fact.
Our best approximation of the number of galaxies in the observable universe is about 200 billion (2 × 10 11 ). That's a lot of galaxies, [ citation needed ] and here Randall exemplifies this by showing a small circle and estimating that when the comic's picture is viewed at a typical arm's length, expanded to full screen on your typical smartphone, the circle contains roughly 50,000 galaxies (that means of course not the small circle itself, but the volume defined by the viewer's eye, that circle, and an onward conical extension into deep space — and simultaneously back in time — to the respective limits of the observable universe). Most of those far-away galaxies are undetectable by even our most powerful astronomical instruments today, and comparatively few could be seen (let alone positively identified as such) by the naked eye. For example, in the Hubble Deep Field , an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, about 3,000 visible galaxies can be identified.
Measuring in the mid-point of the lines, the circle is about one fortieth of the width of the frame of the comic. The absolute circle size depends on the display resolution, size and mode, but it can reasonably be taken to be 1mm diameter, or 0.5mm radius, giving a total area π r 2 or about π/4 square millimeters. You're probably holding the phone about a half a meter away from your eye. The surface area of a sphere is 4 π r 2 . With a radius of one-half meter, that comes out to be π square meters. Thus, the area of the circle is about 1/4000000 of the area of the sphere, 200 billion galaxies divided by 4 million is the 50,000 average mentioned in the cartoon. A similar mathematics was used for the comic 1276: Angular Size , in which the projective sphere was at the Earth's own radius and cross-sectional areas of objects were compared, rather than an approximate count of objects within a given angular spread.
While galaxies usually are between 3,000 to 300,000 light-years across and contain between 10^8 (100 million) and 10^14 (100 trillion) stars, most are so far away from the Earth (upwards of billions of light-years) that they are invisible to the naked eye, or even through most telescopes. When magnified across such vast distances, even something as small as a pinhole expands to huge sizes, easily able to fit tens of thousands of galaxies.
The premise of this comic is that although galaxies are giant, space is unimaginably big and contains a vast number of things. Randall is apparently overwhelmed by this, as shown in the caption: Astronomy Fact: There are too many galaxies .
The title text is Randall reassuring his readers why not to worry of this overwhelming fact. He states that most galaxies only have few stars and probably no planets. However, as mentioned above each galaxy contains a huge amount of stars, and as evident from all his own comics about exoplanets , it is now clear that many of the stars in a galaxy also have planets orbiting them. Thus the number of stars and planets in that small circle is much more mind-bogglingly large, than the number of galaxies, and thus the reassurance is sarcasm.
In 975: Occulting Telescope Cueball expresses a similar sentiment about the number of stars.
[An almost white panel with a caption at the top. Then a small circle, much smaller than for instance the letter O in the text is in the center of the panel. A bending arrow points to the circle and beneath the arrow is a caption.] Open this picture fullscreen on your phone and hold it at arm's length. There are 50,000 galaxies in this circle.
[Caption below the panel:] Astronomy Fact: There are too many galaxies.


Salary Negotiation

Explanation:
Ponytail 's company would like to hire Cueball for a job, and she is telling him that their offer for his starting salary is $55,000.
When offered a new job, it is common to negotiate on aspects of the offer such as salary, and employers may offer below the market rate initially in the expectation that the final negotiated amount will be higher. Given that the bedrock of one's future income depends on the outcome of a one-time process requiring skills unrelated to the job one is hired for, it is advisable to take one's time and do as much research as possible.
Cueball has clearly done some research, but perhaps too much as he is flummoxed by this high-stakes situation and starts to ramble with decreasing coherence. First he gets completely confused about the numbers. He says he won't have a penny over $50,000, thus cutting $5000 of the initial offer, and saying he will not have more than that. He realizes this was completely wrong, and corrects to "under", but is still 5000 lower. He then fumbles his words, asking for $60, then $600, then adding "thousand" for $600,000.
Realizing that he is completely off, he asks for a "15% cut of the salary". Here, Cueball seems to confuse salary and commission. "X% cut of the salary" seems like what a recruiter/headhunter may get from their employer as a commission if they successfully make their person hired.
The next word he says is "Raise". This could make sense if he already had a job, and wished to negotiate for a pay raise. After this, he begins to think of raise as in a card game and starts rambling off mainly poker related terms, like "raise", "fold" and "pass". He throws in "double down" in between. This can also be a card game term, as in blackjack where double down means to double a bet after seeing one's initial cards, with the requirement that one additional card be drawn. Lastly, he randomly mentions "fill it up with regular", which could be a request to a gas station attendant to fill a vehicle with "regular" (compared to higher octane) gasoline.
Ponytail tries to ask him something, but Cueball interrupts her, saying he is sorry and that he would like to start over. At this time he takes out several sheets of paper and looks at some charts. He asks if he can borrow a calculator and then asks what's 20% of $55,000. (This would be $11,000.) He eventually settles on a number, $61,333. 3 He even states that the decimals of 3 should be repeating, as in forever. This is exactly $61,333⅓. He clearly states he will not take the job for less than that. A 2016 Harvard Business School study found that avoiding round numbers is a remarkably effective negotiation tactic.
Since this is not that much more than the starting offer Ponytail is ready to accept this and says "Sure, $61,333 is fine." But Cueball interrupts her because what she just offered him was 33⅓ cents less than he asked for.
In the title text it shows that this is not good enough. Cueball has now confused himself to the point he will only accept exactly what he asked for, the bizarre amount $61,333⅓. Ponytail tries to explain to him that the point 3 repeating cannot be paid in whole cents, and tries to let him know that their payroll software only can handle whole cents, and he thus can get either 0.33 or 0.34 (the latter actually being more than he asks for). Alas, Cueball, either out of panic or a love of mathematics, shouts "No deal!" and lets the job slip out of his hands, because he has completely misunderstood the concept of negotiation.
For more interview-related xkcd comics, see for instance Category:Job interviews .
This could also be taken in series with Cueball (possibly as a stand in for Randall) misunderstanding classically "adult" ideas, see for instance 616: Lease , 905: Homeownership , 1674: Adult and 1894: Real Estate .
[Ponytail sits in an office chair at her desk, with Cueball sitting in a similar chair on the other side with his hands on his knees. Ponytails has her hands on the desk and in front of her, there is a slim thing standing up. It could be a very small screen, but there seems to be no keyboard in front of her. Maybe it is a small tablet with a support for letting is stand up. Behind that there are what appears to be two piles of papers of different sizes.] Ponytail: We'd like to extend an offer! The starting salary is $55,000. Cueball: Wow. I guess I'm inside a negotiation! Ponytail: I... Weird to phrase it like that, but- Cueball: I can do this.
[Zoom in on Cueball's upper half.] Cueball: I won't accept a penny over $50,000. Sorry, I mean under. Under $60. I mean, $600. Thousand. $600,000. I want a 15% cut of the salary. Raise. Double down. Fold. Pass. Fill it up with regular.
[The same shot, except Cueball is now holding three pieces of paper, and he is looking down on them. Ponytail is talking to him from off-panel.] Ponytail (off-panel): Are you- Cueball: Sorry, sorry. Let me start over. Cueball: OK, my chart says... Cueball: ...Can I borrow a calculator? What's 20% of $55,000?
[Back to the scene from the first panel. Ponytail has taken one hand down to her knee, with the other still on the desk. Cueball has put the papers on his lap and has raised his hand in the air holding one finger up. In his other hand he holds either a borrowed calculator or his own smartphone.] Ponytail: Listen, if you need to- Cueball: I won't take this job for less than $61,333 point 3 repeating! Ponytail: Sure, $61,333 is fine. That's actually- Cueball: Point 3 repeating or I walk!


Graphic Designers

Explanation:
Being presented with visual information that is just not quite right is known to cause feelings of unease and revulsion, particularly when presented with CGI human faces, a concept known as the uncanny valley .
In the title text, it mentions a contingency against the designer managing to actually overcome this disgust. In this case, Cueball sets up a second way to troll his graphic designer friend using some picture frames, a level , and a protractor that can measure increments of less than a degree. Cueball can then skew his picture frames by an extremely small amount, noticeable only to the designer friend, to disgust him even further — similar to the effect of bad kerning . This could thus be applied like the use of crosses or garlic , which vampires are famously repulsed by.
Although the window ledges are slightly inclined, falling subtly from left to right, it is unlikely this is a deliberate aspect of the room so much as a side-effect of Randall's imprecise stick-figure drawing style.
True to the comic's joke, Randall has actually colored each segment of the comic differently to each other, even though normal persons would just perceive all walls as slightly gray (off-white).
The hexadecimal color codes are:
Whilst this subtle difference may be undetectable to humans without a graphic design qualification, it can be made clearer by increasing the saturation value of the image, as shown in this rendering with an exaggerated color saturation .
[Cueball stands in a lightly adorned room of a house, facing an open doorway. Each surface is painted an almost imperceptibly different shade of off-white, except the floor which is white. There is a rug, a couch with a pillow (white) and a book. There are two windows, in the right there is a potted plant. Knit Cap stands in the open doorway, as if about to enter the house, one foot at the threshold, but not on the floor inside. Cueball is reaching towards the doorway, inviting Knit Cap to enter.] Cueball: Come on in! We just repainted. Knit Cap: I... can't.
[Caption below the panel:] If you want to set up a vampire-style barrier to keep graphic designers from entering your house, just paint every surface a slightly different shade of off-white.


Spacecraft Debris Odds Ratio

Explanation:
This comic is a misunderstanding of statistics very similar to that of 1252: Increased Risk . It explains that going outside for more than 5 hours per day significantly increases your risk of head injury from falling spacecraft, and advises to limit outside activity to avoid this risk.
However, since the odds of being hit in the head by (any part of) a falling spacecraft are astronomically low to begin with , quadrupling it or more still results in a negligible probability. The horizontal error bars for times greater than 4 hours are marked with asterisks to indicate they are significantly different from the reference value at 0 hours, as indeed those error bars don't overlap the vertical line for the 0-hours reference value.
Error bars are graphical representations of the variability of data and used on graphs to indicate the error or uncertainty in a reported measurement.
Presenting the data by hour brackets hides the data distribution inside each bracket. If the data were presented hour by hour, and not by groups of hours, they may show a different threshold of increased risk or no threshold (odds ratio could be linear).
The graph and error bars are based on a Monte Carlo simulation , a type of computational algorithm that uses repeated random sampling to obtain the likelihood of a range of results of occurring; see, for instance, this article about Monte Carlo simulations . Additionally, this may indicate that the entire study was conducted via a Monte Carlo simulation and that no real data was collected adding to the absurdity of the claim that more time spent outside could lead to an increased risk of head injuries due to falling space craft.  Indeed, it is so rare for humans to be struck by spacecraft debris that a simulation is probably the only way to study the risk; an absurdly large sample size, involving tens of millions of participants over several decades, would be necessary to obtain significant experimental data.
The specific reference to falling spacecraft is likely inspired by events happening around the time of this comics release (March 2022).  Around a month before this was posted, the head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos , warned that sanctions against Russia (mostly those over the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine ) could result in the International Space Station crashing.  Since the Russian section of the space station is the one that provides propulsion (although it is built to rely on the power generated by the other sections), this was taken seriously and as of when this was posted, NASA was trying to come up with alternative stabilization strategies in case the situation worsened. There was also a recent report of some 600 kg space rocket debris found in Brazil.
The title text makes a similar joke. While the increase in chances of death by a bear attack are greater when going outside than the decrease in chances of death by cardiovascular disease, by getting out to exercise, it is incorrect to combine them in this way, since cardiovascular disease has a much higher starting chance of death, and reducing it by 30% has a much more significant effect on overall life expectancy than quadrupling the very very small chance of death by bear attack.  At least for the majority of us who don't live in or near wild bears' natural habitats.
The "280% increase" of the title text is also an error, though perhaps not for reasons that are obvious at first (for instance, the correct calculation is not "300% − 30% = 270%"). To "increase by 300%" means multiplying the probability by (1 + 3.0) = 4.0, while to "decrease by 30%" means multiplying by (1 − 0.3) = 0.7. Combining these means multiplying by both, for an overall change of 4.0 × 0.7 = 2.8, or 280%. However, this result means the risk has increased to 280% of its old value, not by 280%. And in any case, it is still not valid to simply combine two changes in wildly different risks like this.
The odds of an event is the probability that it happens divided by the probability that it doesn't happen. People often express odds as a ratio (e.g. the odds of rolling a 6 on a 6-sided dice might be expressed as 0.16777... : 0.83333..., or equivalently as 1:5), but it is important to note that such ratios are not odds ratios (it would be fitting to call this a "probability ratio", but this terminology is not standard).
An odds ratio is the odds of event O happening, given that some other event E has occurred, divided by the odds of O given that E has not occurred. O is sometimes called an "outcome" and E is sometimes called an "exposure", because people are often interested in comparing things like the odds of getting lung cancer (O) given that you smoke (E) to the odds of getting lung cancer given that you don't smoke, as a way of measuring the extent to which exposure to E influences outcome O. In the case of the comic, the outcome variable O is the event of getting a head injury from falling spacecraft debris, and the exposure variable E is the event of spending H hours per day outside, for various values of H. The comic appears to be saying that for each value of H, there are two options for E: either you spend H hours per day outside or you never go outside.
So for small values of H (e.g. 1 hour per day), the comic is saying that the event of being hit by spacecraft debris is more or less independent of the event of spending H hours per day outside, which is to say that the odds of being hit is more or less the same regardless of the choice you make between spending H hours per day outside and never going outside. Hence the dot on the 1-hour bar is close to 1, because the two odds are more or less equal (the dot appears to represent an average estimate of the odds ratio).
Note that when calculating the odds ratios for this comic, the odds in the denominators are always the same, as they are the odds of being hit given that you never go outside, which does not depend on H. So when the comic says that the odds ratio is above 3 for H={11+ hours per day}, it is effectively saying that the odds of being hit when you spend this much time outside is a bit more than 3 times the odds of being hit when you spend 1 hour per day outside.
Suppose the probability of being hit is: P when you spend 1 hour per day outside, and Q when you spend 11+ hours per day outside. The odds of being hit under these two exposures are P/(1-P) and Q/(1-Q) respectively, and because the odds ratios have equal denominators, the comic is saying that Q/(1-Q) = kP/(1-P), where k is a bit more than 3. If we rearrange this to get an expression for Q, we get:
As P is negligibly small, 1-P is very close to 1, and P+(1-P)/k is very close to 1/k. Thus Q is very close to kP (i.e. a bit more than 3 times P), meaning that the probability of being hit when you spend 11+ hours per day outside is still negligibly small. Thus, the comic's suggestion that we spend 4 hours or less outside based on the estimated odds ratios is extremely misguided.
[A chart is shown. Above the chart there is a heading, with a subheading below it:] Odds ratio for head injuries from falling spacecraft debris (Monte Carlo Simulation)
[The chart is rectangular with the X-axis labels above the chart with numbers from 1 to 5. These are places over vertical lines. The first at 1 is black, the other four are light gray. There are three smaller light gray ticks between each set of lines, and one on either side of the first and last. The distance between lines gets smaller and smaller towards the right, probably logarithmic.] X-axis: 1 2 3 4 5
[The Y-axis is not scaled; there are no ticks or lines. Instead it just gives five labels from top to bottom. Above those labels there is an arrow pointing to the top one with a label above explaning the axis.] Hours spent outdoors per day Y-axis: 0 (ref) 1 2-4 5-10 11+
[Aligned with each of these five divisions of the Y-axis there is a dot. The top one is placed on the solid line under 1 as a reference point. The other four dots all have long error bars, with the dots at the center of these. The second dot is a bit to the left of the solid line, with the error bar going almost to the left edge of the graph and halfway to the first light gray line to the right. The third dot is located halfway between the solid and the first light gray line with the error bar just crossing the solid line, and almost reaching the gray line. The fourth dot is about a third way between the first and second of the gray lines, with the error bar crossing both these lines. The fifth and last dot is just past the second gray line, with the error bar crossing both that, going more than half toward the first gray line, and also just past the third gray line. On the same height as the two bottom dots, there are asterisks just right of the edge of the graph.] * *
[Below the panel there is a caption:] Our new study suggests that spending more than 5 hours outside significantly increases your risk of head injury from spacecraft debris, so try to limit outdoor activities to 4 hours or less.


Rejected Question Categories

Explanation:
This comic shows the categories of questions he claims to have received, but rejected to use in his book, giving an example question for each category. In typical xkcd fashion, these begin out by being plausible, although often unlikely to have been submitted as a what if? question, moving in to more and more absurd types of questions, especially with the last question, that appears to be a combination of all previous categories and is therefore marked "?????"
The title text refers to the launch date of the book September 13, rendered in the American style 9/13. This format can be confusing to non-Americans, although usually not when the date is larger than 12, since it would then appear to reference the 9th day of the 13th month. This "13th month" was, however, referenced in the first comic about the book: 2575: What If? 2 . See also Randall's take on the date format, ISO 8601 , in 1179: ISO 8601 .
Randall then continues the title text by referencing the second to last category with vague ominous questions. The example question here asks if there is need to worry about spiders after Tuesday. So Randall notes that the release date, 5.5 months after the release of this comic, is of course assuming anyone will survive past next Tuesday (2022-04-05).
Tuesday has been notably referenced in 277: Long Light , 564: Crossbows , 1099: Tuesdays and most notably in 1245: 10-Day Forecast , where it seems that the last day ever will be a Tuesday. Tuesday is the second day of the week, and notably, the Tuesday of the week following the publication of this cartoon (April 5th, 2022) was the Day of the Spiders.
In What If? 2 (xkcd.com/whatif2), I answer ridiculous questions sent in by readers about everything from volcanoes to spaceships to soup.
Here are a few of the common types of question that I did not answer:
[In separate boxes for each category]
[In row 1:]
People cheating on homework: What if I made a pendulum by hanging a rock on a 2.75 meter string? What would its period be in seconds? (Show your work!)
Medical advice: What if you got a scratch and the next day your hand looks like this [ 📎 attachment ]? Should you see a doctor or what?
Personal: Why don't the squirrels in my yard like me???
[In row 2:]
Spam: Do you want to meet lonely singles in your area tonight?
Phishing: Have you recently been the victim of phishing? To check, log in to your account by clicking here .
Requests for help with a crime: Using modern science, what would be the fastest way to get through this bank vault door? [ 📎 blueprints]
[In row 3:]
Unanswerable: Why am I me and not someone else
Vague: What is going to happen? (Be specific)
Vague+Ominous: Will I have to start worrying about spiders after Tuesday?
?????: Hi, we're lonely singles in your area, and we're wondering what would happen if we shot a nuclear bomb into a volcano! [partially cut off horizontally:] Click here to log in and tell us


Instructions

Explanation:
This is the 12th April fools' comic released by Randall . The previous April fools' comic was 2445: Checkbox , which was released on Thursday, April 1st, 2021.
When loading the comic just a small dot is shown, a radio button (or option button). Usually, there would be more than one to give the user options. Once it has been selected it cannot be deselected. Once pressed the button turns blue and this starts the real part of this April fool's comic.
The comic consists of an audio file . The speech is a mix of facts about turtles and coding instructions in LOGO .  When executed, the instructions draw an xkcd comic. The audio file is 9 hours and 7 minutes long.
Once the voice begins to describe the instructions (hence the title) it is possible to mute the audio by pressing a muted button at the bottom right of the screen. This fades into view when the radio button is pushed. Pressing it will change the button to a non muted loudspeaker . These were the same buttons that were in the previous April fool's comic 2445: Checkbox . That was the first xkcd comic with audio , and thus these were two April fools' comics with audio in a row, and these are the only comics with audio. In the Checkbox comic, the mute buttons meaning are reversed, so the sound is on when the loudspeaker is shown and muted when the mute button is shown. It could be another layer to the April fool's joke or just an error by Randall.
The image originally displayed on this page was of a small turtle crawling in the center where the radio button is in the real comic. That was the image that would be downloaded by web crawlers like explain xkcd's bot, as it is what was placed here on xkcd: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/instructions_2x.png . This is of course not the real comic, which cannot be downloaded in that manner.
The "turtle" is a key concept in Logo, a programming language especially designed to teach programming to children in an easy way. The turtle in the logo is the cursor. Programming commands move the turtle, drawing a line as it goes. Of course, listening to hours of instructions, including the speech-synthesized reading of source code, is not an easy way to code or draw a picture. [ citation needed ]
In addition, at the end of the audio the voice says:
The title text alludes to Bob Ross 's catchphrase "happy little trees" in The Joy of Painting , a PBS TV show in which Ross leads the viewer through the painting of a nature scene.  The audio file itself is also presented in the style of The Joy of Painting ; it begins with greeting the viewer and introducing the color palette to be used (just one color, in this case, as Logo and all computer monitors of the time were monochrome).  The speaker then reads out some helper functions to be used in programming the scene, which is more analogous to Ross's palette of paints (titanium white, carmine red, etc.) along with words of encouragement as each is completed.  The functions are DIST, to calculate the Euclidean distance between two points, LERP, to perform linear interpolation , MIX to average two numbers (with LERP), and CUBIC to draw cubic Hermite splines .  From there, the speaker alternates between sketching parts of the scene and offering more words of encouragement, mixed in with turtle facts.
Transcribing the audio into text was organized as a project on github .
This is not the first time that Randall made an interactive comic where turtles played a big part, see 1416: Pixels . In this, he jokes with the idea of turtles all the way down, which is also mentioned in the audio file. He also made a comic simply called 889: Turtles .
This comic has a unique header text , see the details here . The header is:
"Today's comic was created with Patrick , Amber , @chromakode , Michael , Kat , Conor , @zigdon ,  and Benjamin Staffin ."
The header had not changed since the promotion of the new what if? 2 book.
[The comic consists of one radio button, a small circle in the center of a large white panel. It is interactive. When pressing the radio button (selecting it), it turns blue. The second the radio button is pressed a more than 9-hour long audio file of coding instructions begins to play, and a mute button appears in the bottom right corner. It fades slowly into full opacity. Pressing this button will change it to a loudspeaker. It toggles whether there is sound playing or not. It is not possible to shut down the audio by pressing the radio button. Once selected it cannot be deselected as there is only this one option.]
[Covered by the radio button is an image of a turtle crawling from left to right, with a dotted line trailing behind it, indicating its movement. This image can only be seen by looking in the place where images for xkcd are usually placed on xkcd.]
[To read a transcript of the audio file go here: 2601: Instructions/Audio Transcript .]

The image drawn by the Logo program is a depiction of Bob Ross standing in front of a canvas, on which he has painted "a happy little tree, holding up a happy little world".  However, unlike his usual "happy little trees", the tree depicted is not a small pine, but rather a gargantuan World Tree growing from the back of a giant World Turtle , on which a Flat Earth rests.  (The "happy little world" does bear several small pines more typical of his style.)
Near the middle of the world, a Cueball sits while listening to the radio, perhaps tuning in to the same transmission that generated the image.  Closer to the reader, a turtle is shown walking around, leaving dotted-line tracks behind it, suggestive of the Logo turtle. The dotted-line tracks spell out "TY", shorthand for "thank you".
At the far left of the image, a robot and human are drawn next to a turtle which has flipped onto its back.  The robot declares, "Poor thing!" while the human says "I'll help".  This is a reference to the "empathy tests" employed to distinguish humans from androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its film adaptation Blade Runner .  As part of the test, the listener is asked to imagine being in the desert, flipping a tortoise onto its back, and refusing to turn it back over, while their eyes are monitored for signs of emotional response (or lack thereof).  In this case, the robot expresses sympathy for the turtle and the human declares that he will turn it back over.  (Although the robot is very clearly distinguishable from a human being.)
[A man with large hair and a beard is holding an artist's palette with five patches of paint in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. He looks upon his canvas, where he has painted a large painting.] Painter: A Happy little tree Painter: Holding up a happy little world.
[The painting contains lots of stuff. Among others, is a robot that sees Cueball bending down to lift a turtle that is on its back. They talk:] Robot: Poor thing" Cueball: I'll help
[In the top right corner, there is a dotted line forming a semi-circle around the corner. Inside this are the words:] Vacuum decay
[There are no other words in the image. The image includes:]
In the sky:
On top of the tree:
Under the tree:
[The rest just needs to be written out in detail...]


Linguistics Degree

Explanation:
Hairbun hands Megan a linguistics degree, and informs her she is now "in charge of" the word ' bassoon .' Watching this, Ponytail and Cueball compare the words they were assigned when they got their linguistics degrees, ' jackalope ' and ' slurp ' respectively. Ponytail thinks bassoon is a cool word but thinks her own is better, whereas Cueball is not satisfied with his word. A bassoon is a woodwind musical instrument with a double reed, while a jackalope is a mythical creature, a jackrabbit crossed with an antelope .
It is never clarified what being "in charge of" a word entails. It could mean being in charge of keeping track of the word, or having actual authority over the use of the word, which is unlikely as normally language use cannot be dictated by a single person . Also, no specific university has control over all of linguistics as far as we know, so it would require every university capable of giving people linguistics degrees to co-operate, so nobody is assigned the same word.  Any well-educated member of the linguistic community will know what is being suggested is impossible hence why they are the only ones aware of how important it is.
The title text merely furthers how seemingly random the entire situation is. The word "linguistics" was assigned to a "random student in Ohio who barely graduated and then went into automotive marketing", who we can assume isn't very important to the field of linguistics. [ citation needed ] But this means that no one is actually taking care of this important word, since it must be assumed that the student is no longer interested in linguistics.
The idea of individuals having a guardianship of an idea or concept has appeared in science fiction.  For example, in Fahrenheit 451 characters have memorised books to save them from book-burning and... spoiler-stuff.
It also exists in reality. Members of the Royal Spanish Academy , the institution that defines the official dictionary of the Spanish language, are symbolically put in charge of one letter of the dictionary each to take care of it.
[Megan, who is wearing a graduation cap, receives a degree which is handed to her by Hairbun. They are standing on a podium with Ponytail and Cueball standing below as onlookers.] Hairbun: Congratulations on the degree! Your word is "Bassoon." Ponytail: Oh nice! Not as cool as my "Jackalope," but still not bad. Cueball: You all are lucky. I'm stuck with "Slurp."
[Caption below panel:] Every linguistics degree comes with one word that you're put in charge of.


Childhood Toys

Explanation:
This comic shows various objects, ranked by how practical they would be for long-distance transportation. The objects are described as childhood toys.
The "Practical" panel shows objects designed for convenient transportation, namely bicycles and electric scooters . Most people know how to ride a bicycle, and can easily go several miles on it. Scooters (shown in the comic panel) are also relatively easy to use, and may have a motor allowing them to be used for significant distances — the one shown has the appearance of one with a battery unit rather than being 'leg-propelled', and is named as such in the list for which it has been depicted. These are not considered "toys" at adult size as they are widely used for transport, but children's bikes and scooters (particularly unpowered scooters) not used for transport would generally be considered toys. The practicality of bicycles and e-scooters tends to depend more on local infrastructure and amenities (i.e., the presence of a safe cycle route and the destination being within a sensible distance) than on the equipment itself. Bicycles can carry substantial loads . In some countries e-scooters are legally restricted or prohibited on public roads which may make commuting on them unviable.
The "Less Practical" panel has objects designed for transportation, but which may be harder to use than the first panel. Skateboards and roller skates , while designed for transportation, don't work great over long distances or when carrying objects, and Big Wheels and unicycles (shown in the panel) are simply less practical bikes.
In the "Impractical" panel are objects that are designed for transportation, but are very much not designed for convenience, especially over long distances. Stilts are long poles that one stands on to extend their legs; while they increase the user's stride length, it takes quite a bit of practice to use them, especially if they're very long. A jump rope is a rope that the user swings around their body while they jump over it whenever the rope passes below their feet; it doesn't actually provide any transportation by itself, the user is simply hopping to their destination, which is a very tiring way to travel (but very good exercise if you can do it). A wagon has no propulsion of its own, it has to be pulled by the user; parents sometimes use it to transport their children short distances (such as to a playground). Larger wagons are used commercially. A Pogo stick is a pole with a spring at the bottom and a platform for standing on, which can be used to bounce; while fun for bouncing a few yards (as shown in the panel), like the jump rope it would be tiring for long distances.
The "Very Impractical" panel has objects that may be used for transportation, but to an incredibly limited degree. Slip 'N Slides (shown in the panel) only work (effectively) downhill, and only where they are placed down. Trampolines and Tire swings could let you go somewhere, but you'd need to set up multiple in a row leading to your destination beforehand. Hot Wheels cars could be put onto the bottom of shoes to create extremely ill-advised [ citation needed ] improvised rollerskates, but the car on its own has effectively no merit for transportation.
The title text refers to tetherball , a game found in many playgrounds where a ball is attached to a pole by a long rope. This is also very impractical, as the rope just winds around a stationary pole. It's possible that he is swinging from the rope and letting go (which would explain the bruises and scrapes, as well as the torn rope), but there is no remotely practical way to use this to commute. [ citation needed ] Nevertheless, if you were able to swing quickly enough and cut the rope at exactly the right moment, you might be able to achieve a short commute to a nearby target. This method may have been inspired by NASA purchasing a launch via the SpinLaunch rocket system the same week as the comic appeared.
[Title:] Childhood Toys [Subtitle:] By Practicality for Commuting
[Caption of the first box:] Practical
[Cueball, wearing a helmet, drives by on an electric scooter, passing another Cueball and Hairbun, who is holding a briefcase.] Scooter Cueball: Hi, boss!
[Caption of the second box:] Less Practical
[Ponytail rides by White Hat on a unicycle.] Ponytail: Good Morning!
[Caption of the third box:] Impractical
[Cueball bounces past Megan on a pogo stick.] Pogo Stick: Boing boing Cueball: How's it going?
[Caption of the fourth box:] Very Impractical
[Cueball slides past Hairy(?) on a Slip 'N Slide.] Cueball: Wheeeee Cueball: Hi Boss!


Frankenstein Captcha

Explanation:
This comic strip is a play on the meanings (and misunderstanding) of the name "Frankenstein". Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel by Mary Shelley about a medical student named Victor Frankenstein who creates an artificial life-form. The man he creates once describes himself as "the Adam of [Frankenstein's] labour" in the book, and strictly speaking is properly known as "Frankenstein's monster " (or perhaps "creation" or "son"), but is often erroneously called "Frankenstein" himself. This has been fertile ground for many, many debates about whether the monster could also properly be called "Frankenstein," either as a family name, an honorific, or simply because it's more recognizable and convenient. Randall has weighed in on the debate himself in a previous comic, 1589: Frankenstein .
The CAPTCHA shown in the comic instructs the user to select all tiles containing Frankenstein. The tiles include both a reanimated corpse resembling Frankenstein's monster and a scientist yelling, "It's alive!” who is clearly intended to be Victor Frankenstein. The problem arises from the contrast between various definitions of the term Frankenstein. Going just off the book's text, the monster has no name, so the correct answer to the CAPTCHA is just the left square of the third row.  However, the character depicted there is clearly Henry Frankenstein from the famous 1931 film adaptation (Victor Frankenstein never said the words "it's alive!" in the book), and likewise the creature depicted is clearly inspired by Boris Karloff 's iconic portrayal in that film and its sequels.  If the images are captured from that film, then all four of them could be said to be "containing (a subset of) Frankenstein (the 1931 film)".
Some CAPTCHAs - especially Google's widely spread reCAPTCHA - nowadays serve a dual purpose: (1) to separate human users from bots by way of intelligent interaction, and (2) to train a neural network, hence the "correct answer" to image recognition CAPTCHAs is not known ahead of time and is merely based on the most commonly-chosen tiles. Thus, a user who knows that "Frankenstein" refers only to the scientist would face this CAPTCHA with dread, uttering "Oh No" as they realize that they must select the tiles containing the monster, and possibly not even be allowed to select the tile containing the actual scientist Victor Frankenstein if they want to pass the CAPTCHA.
Alternatively, this comic strip with its "Oh No" caption could be referencing 1897 , which would imply that someone had actually created a Frankenstein's monster which needs to be located as soon as possible.
Many of the other tiles appear to be pictures of entities that inspire similar pedantry. For example, there is a picture of a turtle (or possibly a tortoise, or a reference to the Voight-Kampff test used in a manner analogous to CAPTCHA), a ship (or possibly a boat), Link (the name given to each of several protagonists that appear across generations and timelines, throughout the Legend of Zelda video games, who many erroneously refer to as Zelda), a pond (or possibly a lake, a puddle, or a mirage ), a squash or pumpkin (often subject to the fruit or vegetable debate), an erupting volcano (with lava, or is it magma?), and the planet Pluto (or is it a dwarf planet?). Other tiles seem to be inspired by images that commonly occur in actual captchas, like the STOP sign or the traffic light. However, at least some of these may also be meant to fall into the category of entities that inspire pedantry, for example: because traffic lights can also be called traffic signals or stoplights; many people thinking that the shape of a stop sign is a hexagon, not an octagon; and the definition of a sandwich (previously discussed as a “random semi-ironic obsession” in 1835 ).
The title text refers to one of the methods used to distinguish a ship from a boat. When making a turn, if the vessel leans towards the inside of the turn circle then it is considered a boat, whereas if the vessel leans away from the turn circle it is considered a ship [1] . Since the vessel generates a wake as it moves, checking whether it is a boat or a ship can be done while it is literally drawing a line on the water (the wake). The phrase "a line drawn in water" is also an idiom for something ephemeral. Ironically, it has persisted for a long time and dates back at least to the early Buddhists. (e.g. AN 3.132 & AN 7.74 ). The distinction between a ship and a boat is also unclear, having changed over time, with no universally accepted rule to distinguish between the two . The title text is also a pun on the common idiom "drawing a line in the sand." The title text could also be referencing the image of a boat or ship that appears as one of the CAPTCHA tiles in the comic, where Randall has drawn a squiggly line often used in crude drawings to represent a waterline.
[A captcha design, with a header and four rows of four pictures each below it. The header, in white lettering on a blue background, reads:] To continue, please click All squares containing Frankenstein
[The pictures, all with gray backgrounds, are as follows, from left to right in each row:]
Row 1
Monster: GRRR
Row 2
Row 3
Frankenstein: It's alive!
Girl: Monster!
Row 4
[Caption below the panel]: Oh no.


Taylor Series

Explanation:
In mathematics, a Taylor series expansion is a polynomial power series approximation of a function [1] around a given point, composed of an infinite sum of the function's derivatives , each both divided by successive factorials and multiplied by the incrementally increasing power of the distance from the given point. Such expansions usually continue without end. Beyond approximation of functions, Taylor series are also useful for deriving numerical approximations of irrational values, such as π , as well as symbolic forms to make functions easier to integrate or otherwise manipulate with calculus. [2] However, because they involve difficult calculus operations, and can be annoyingly tedious to calculate by hand , they are often not loved by math students. [3]
Miss Lenhart appears to be teaching a class about how to use a Taylor series. She presumes her students want to keep learning about the series, in that they, "wish it would never end." She then says "Good news!" because the series does not end. The cartoon's humor is based on the contrast between wishing the series won't end, ordinarily desired of sequences of enjoyable events, and the infinite nature of the Taylor series, which is less likely appreciated by her students struggling to understand why the sums converge to their resulting value.
The title text is a reference to the common practice among physicists and engineers of abbreviating the Taylor series to only the first few terms, typically one or two, in order to simplify the mathematics of their models. The title text is also a pun on the use of the word "series" to refer to a television program. It symbolizes the terms of the mathematical series as a metaphor with a television season, suggesting that only the first term is useful. It makes fun of the common sentiment against bad screenwriting of a series by saying that, "The series should have been cancelled after the first season," replacing "season" with "term." (Notably, both "term" and "season" are used to refer to a stretch of time during which a program is airing—generally, a television or scholastic program, respectively.) Also note that US President Zachary Taylor died during his first term. In a way, his presidency was cancelled during his first term.
[Miss Lenhart pointing a stick at a whiteboard, which has some scribbled text written on it and one line is circled.] Miss Lenhart: At this point, you're probably thinking, "I love this equation and wish it would never end!" Miss Lenhart: Well, good news!
[Caption below the panel:] Taylor series expansion is the worst.


Weird Unicode Math Symbols

Explanation:
This comic proposes joke explanations for various unicode symbols with obscure or no known uses.
This comic may have been inspired by this blog post , which went viral (in a limited sense) the same day the comic was published.
Weird Unicode Math Symbols
And their meanings


Geiger Counter

Explanation:
This comic is a simple pun . Cueball and Ponytail are standing in what looks to be a desert, and Cueball is holding a Geiger counter in his hand. Cueball remarks that he did not understand why he was asked to carry a Geiger counter, but that it then "clicked" with him.
Geiger counters are devices used to measure the amount of radiation in an area. When a particle of ionizing radiation hits the sensor of a Geiger counter, it will give off a distinct "clicking" noise. "Click" can also be a slang term for the Eureka effect , a sudden moment of understanding. The pun in this comic insinuates that Cueball realized why he was asked to bring the Geiger counter when it clicked, indicating radiation nearby. In radioactive areas, it is usually a good idea to carry around some sort of radiation detector for safety reasons . [ citation needed ]
This is likely a parody of a fairly well-known pun that takes advantage of a similar double meaning: "I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me." Just as that pun uses "hit me" to mean both the action of the ball and to understand, this comic uses the "clicking" to mean both the action of the Geiger counter and to understand. A related variety of pun, told in the third person , is the Tom Swifty .
The title text is also a pun, with the implication being the narrator "understood" once they "stood under" the birds that were perched on the wire (who may have then pooped on the narrator to bring them to their understanding [in the "realization" sense]).
[Cueball and Ponytail are wearing hard hats and standing in what looks to be some sort of desert or rocky area. Cueball is holding a Geiger counter in his hands. Ponytail is holding a clipboard.] Cueball: At first I was confused about why they wanted me to carry a Geiger counter here, but then it clicked.


Family Reunion

Explanation:
Because all humans are descended from a common ancestor , every human is, at some point, related to every other human, albeit distantly. Similarly, all life forms on Earth are presumed (with good reasons) to be descended from a single even more distant relative whose ultimate lineage became more relevant than any from its own 'cousins' at the time, and thus all life forms are distantly related. This makes every interaction with another life-form, technically, a family reunion, if not in the traditional sense.
The general English definition of a cousin , which is a person sharing an ancestor who is not a direct parent of either party, can be qualified by two numbers. There is the n th-ness of the relationship (the fewest generations you need to go beyond one's parentage, "a first cousin" implies that a grandparent is the key link) - for example, this Cueball's relation to White Hat is via a great-grandparent, whilst that with Hairbun is through a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent. A "removed" number is any difference in this number between the two individuals, such that a child of a direct cousin invokes a "once removed" relationship between the two (without individually qualifying who is the 'senior' generation, from whom the 'nth' count is determined). You would normally only qualify "first cousin" if this fact is considered important, and "zero times removed" would also be considered implicit.
As pointed out in the title text, cat lifespans (or, more importantly, inter-generational breeding cycles) are somewhat different from those of humans. Although they would have still been very similar immediately after the divergence from the appropriate most recent common ancestor (MRCA), the differences will have built up to a generational-count displacement of a similarly extreme nature. i.e. that while the shared ancestor is Cueball's 17-million-or-so-Great Grandparent, the cat is in turn the 31-million-or-so-Great Grandchild. Exactly how accurate, or even precise, Randall considers these numbers is unknown, but it is the kind of fact that we know he likes to research and use expert opinion for.
According to this Quora page , there have been about 13,000 generations of modern humans, so the people at this party would be quite closely related, all things considered.
The Evogeneao Tree of Life diagram indicates that humans and cats diverged around 90 million years ago and humans and plants diverged around 1.8 billion years ago.
If we presume that generations of humans (including proto-humans, pre-humans, etc) since the divergence from cathood (including proto-cats, pre-cats, and the rest, back to the common ancestral form) have averaged around 5 years, then a 17 millionth cousin may be about right. Many of our (and cats') early ancestors will have necessarily been small burrowing mammals — to have been amongst the ones who survived the asteroid around 66 million years ago that killed off most of the dinosaurs — with contemporary equivalents having breeding cycles in terms of a year at the most. But we currently have a large feasible range of generational cycle (15-50 years, very roughly, with or without technical/social help or hinderances), that may have started to drag our long-term average upwards since at least the age of the early hominids, if not the age of our primate forebears or earlier.
To get a 50 billionth cousin from the potted plant, then the generations of (eventually) humans since we were of the same form as that time's ancestral plants (or vice-versa) would need to average two weeks. This is possible, but difficult to be precise about due to the lack of much of the required evidence in the known fossilized remains.  Any reasonable estimate, however, should be heavily weighted towards generation spans common for unicellular eukaryotes, rather than the longer generations common for multicellular eukaryotes: the general consensus on the most recent common ancestor for of animals and plants identifies it as a unicellular eukaryote.
Given the above analysis of eukaryotes as cousins one wonders why Randal Monroe didn't include that every lack of gathering is also a family reunion.
[Megan, White Hat, Cueball, Hairy, Danish, a white cat with black patches on its back, Hairbun, a chair with a half-full wine-glass on the seat, and a potted plant on a cabinet are "standing" in a line. White Hat is holding a glass and Hairy has his hands to the side in a "shrug" position. Megan and Cueball are facing right and everything/one else is facing left (except for the potted plant, which is not facing any direction). There are arrows pointing to each of the living creatures.]
14th cousin [Megan] 2nd cousin [White Hat] Me [Cueball] 12th cousin [Hairy] 35th cousin [Danish] 17,000,000th cousin [cat] 9th cousin [Hairbun] 50,000,000,000th cousin [potted plant]
[Caption below the panel:] Really, every gathering is a family reunion.


Entwives

Explanation:
In The Lord of the Rings , the Ents are a species of tree-like humanoids, such as the one depicted in this comic. The comic shows an Ent, presumably Treebeard , meeting with some of the nine from the Fellowship of the Ring . The image is inaccurate inasmuch as it shows three hobbits : during the Ents' interactions with the Fellowship, two of the four hobbits ( Frodo and Sam ) were elsewhere in Middle Earth , so it was only Merry and Pippin who met the ents. The other three in the image are the human Aragorn , the Dwarf Gimli and the Elf Legolas . The last two of the nine, not depicted, were the wizard Gandalf and the human Boromir .
Part of the backstory of the Ents is that all the females of their species (the Entwives that this comic is named for) had disappeared thousands of years before during Sauron 's war of the second age . The Ents and the Entwives lived in separate locations, and eventually, when the Ents went to visit the Entwives, the latter were seemingly nowhere to be found. The Ents have been searching for their lost mates ever since. The loneliness of the Ents' all-male society is considered a great tragedy in their culture. It is several thousands years ago in the time of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Ents have all but forgotten how the Entwives even looked. They live for many thousands of years.
This comic uses that backstory to satirically comment on the extreme gender imbalance of the protagonists of Lord of the Rings; when presented with the all-male Fellowship, the Ent assumes that they must come from a race afflicted by a similar tragedy. In a broader sense, this can be read as a commentary on how few female characters there are in the trilogy overall. In reality, the general lore presents, or at least mentions, the existence of at least multiple (if not numerous) female characters of almost all races that make up the fellowship (dwarf, man, elf, hobbit), and does not suggest that what happened with the Ents and their Entwives happened to any other race.
The clickable link on the image leads to the satirical video Lord of the Rings Trilogy but it's EVERY scene where two female characters interact . The creator claims that this shows all the scenes from the trilogy where two female characters interact (but later admits in the Youtube comments that there are indeed a few more). There is only one 3 second long scene, which only emphasizes how few female characters there are in the trilogy. The inclusion of this clip may be a reference to the Bechdel test , a baseline indicator of the representation of women in a piece of media that requires two women to have a conversation about something other than a man. Whether this three-and-a-half-word exchange is sufficient to pass the test is debatable. Later versions of the test suggest that the two women should be named (i.e. not just two incidental characters that have very few lines), whereas this scene is between Éowyn and an unnamed girl. There is debate as to if there are other scenes with women speaking with women, and if we are only talking about human women, or if other races females would also count. There are at least three important female characters, but they do not meet/speak much if at all. But they have several scenes where they talk, even a long monologue... But if they speak to someone it is male characters.
The title text most likely refers to the character of Arwen , an elf woman and, later, wife of Aragorn; while somewhat important to the story, she is nowhere near as significant as the males of the Fellowship, despite being used more prominently in the movies than in the books. Even if she were part of the Fellowship, a single important woman wouldn't counterbalance the heavily male-centric storytelling.
The way that the title text is phrased is a reference to the proverbial (and implicitly imaginary) " Girlfriend in Canada ," a trope in which a single American character claims to have a girlfriend that their friends wouldn't know "because she lives in Canada" (or some other sufficient separation such as "goes to another school"), when in reality the reason that nobody else has met her is because she doesn't exist (with an implication that the character is either a closeted gay or an incel ). Canada is one of only two countries with which the United States has land borders, making it a potentially plausible place for some American's long-distance girlfriend to live, and presumably the Fellowship consider the Elf kingdom of Rivendell to be sufficiently distant to allow the Ent to accept the plausibility of the statement without any further delving into potentially awkward details.
[A large treelike person (an Ent, maybe Treebeard) is holding one of his arms out towards six characters that are all looking at him. A man (Aragorn) with beard stubble and long hair, a dwarf (Gimli) with a helmet and a very large beard, an elf (Legolas) with long blonde hair (holding a bow down), and three short persons, hobbits, two with dark hair, and the middle one with blonde hair.] Ent: Alas, there are no Ent women. The Entwives all vanished in the second age, during Sauron's war. Aragorn: I'm so sorry. Ent: And what about you all? Same story, I assume? Aragorn: Huh? No, what do you mean?


Assigning Numbers

Explanation:
This explanation is by mathematical necessity either incomplete or incorrect.
Cueball is falling into a common trap, because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Faced with some sort of information, of an unknown kind but seemingly not intrinsically mathematical in nature, he has decided that one possible way to proceed is to somehow translate everything into values which can be combined and compared numerically.
This is a very common thing to do, in fields as diverse as computational linguistics or sports analytics , and can be a powerful tool for understanding and learning new things about a subject as Data science tries to extract knowledge and insights from potentially noisy and disordered facts. But it is also used to implement bad science by using incorrect or misguided ideas about how to represent the source material. While it's possible to casually assign numeric values to random pieces of data, these numbers are generally not meaningful enough to compute with and draw any useful inferences from. It is generally possible to perform statistical analysis only on actual measurements, not on what may effectively be arbitrarily-assigned values.
Machine learning algorithms, which are commonly used by data scientists, typically require all their inputs to be numerical. However, most datasets contains categorical features (e.g. the description of a piece of furniture: chair, table, ...). Data scientists therefore use encoding techniques to convert these categorical features to a numerical form so they can be used as inputs to a machine learning model. For instance, label encoding consists of arbitrarily assigning an integer to a category (chair=0, table=1, ...) which may appear meaningless to most observers. In various cases, they may be right.
So, as well as being the mechanism that underlies one of the most profound theorems of 20th century mathematics, it can be mis-used for all kinds of bad or misguided science. From Cueball's attitude, it is far from clear that his attempt will reliably translate his project into a numerical system, nor that his attempt to "do math on it!" will be any more competent.
One of the major characters who looked at the concept is Kurt Gödel. He introduced the idea of Gödel numbering with his landmark incompleteness theorems . In it a unique natural number is assigned to each axiom, statement, and proof, which might otherwise be difficult to accurately process in any other kind of approach. Instead, it is now possible to create metamathematical statements in the language of mathematics.
This allowed Gödel to make the statement "This statement cannot be proven based on the axioms provided" in a mathematically rigorous way. A simple proof by contradiction shows that the statement cannot be false, and therefore (in most logical systems) must be true. The proof goes as follows: 1. Assume that "This statement cannot be proven from the axioms" (Call this statement G) is false. [1] 2. Therefore G can be proven from the axioms. [2] 3. The axioms exist. [3] 4. Therefore, G is true. [4] 5. Therefore, G and also not G. [5] 6.  This is a contradiction, and therefore A (that is, 'not G') or B (ZFC) must be wrong. We are not willing to sacrifice assumption B, so we must conclude that A is false, given B. [6] 7.  Therefore, G.
Notice that the truth of Gödel's statement does not depend on any particular set of axioms, and adding axioms (such as "Gödel's particular statement is true") only opens up new iterations of the statement which cannot be proven based on the expanded set of axioms (A statement such as "All statements of a similar nature to Gödel's particular statement" is not precise enough to serve as an axiom.).  As such, with a little more legwork, it can be proven that any logical system robust enough to accommodate arithmetic must necessarily contain facts that are true within the system but cannot be proven or disproven within the system.  The importance of this result cannot be understated, as it upended the entire philosophy of mathematics. David Hilbert 's famous proclamation "We must know, we will know" is simply incorrect. ... Either that, or (ironically) Gödel used an "inconsistent" or "incomplete" system to produce his result.
The title text suggests that Gödel should perform such an analysis on different branches of mathematics, by calculating the average of all the fields' theorems' Gödel numbers. This is nonsensical for a number of reasons:
1) Gödel is long dead, and dead people can't write articles; [ dubious ] - see 599: Apocalypse 2) Gödel numbers grow very large very quickly, and depend heavily on the specific values assigned to each logical operator. Therefore the results could be manipulated simply by changing the numbering order of each operator; 3) It may be very hard to gather all theorems in a field, or even a representative sample; 4) Different fields of science, like biology or human behaviour, may not be able to write their theorems in the mathematical language of Gödel's incompleteness theorem
If anyone were to attempt this form of analysis, it would be an example of the bad data science described in the caption.
[Cueball holds a hand up to his chin while he ponders the contents of what may be a whiteboard. There are five general lines of unreadable scribbling on the board, and between the two bottom lines, there is a square frame to the right with another scribble to the left. Cueball's thoughts are shown above him in a large thought bubble.] Cueball's thinking: If I assign numbers to each of these things, then it becomes data , and I can do math on it!
[Caption  beneath the panel:] The same basic idea underlies Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and all bad data science.


Cutest-Sounding Scientific Effects

Explanation:
Randall has compiled yet another single-elimination tournament bracket for a knock-out competition, by public vote, between 16 different scientific effect names that he seems to consider worthy of being cute-sounding.
As of the release day, he is determining the result in a series of Twitter polls . These results are shown here .
See below for explanations for what each of the 16 effects are.
Several unrelated scientific effects were previously combined in 1531: The BDLPSWDKS Effect , which also included the Stroop effect (the last S).
In the title text, Randall coins the term "Stroop-YORP number" as a count of how many 'casual' references a future publication can sneak into it from the 16 finalist names for cutest effect. It specifies that it should be without the word effect after the words (sans 'effect').
Tongue-in-cheek 'counting scores' are familiar in the likes of the Erdős and Bacon numbers, both of which are referenced by 599: Apocalypse (the latter only in the title text). In these cases the ideal is to get the lowest number, whereas here higher is better. The cross-field hybrid Erdős–Bacon number is one in which the desired score is the lowest sum of both values (neither being undefinable) by dint of having participated in both arenas of respective achievement, but not necessarily (or practically) in a single combined presentation.
For instance the Stroop-YORP number could be high for a wildlife paper. That could possibly use "butterfly" and "rabbit" (possibly needing the latter to be specifically 'cutaneous', to count), which may both be found in "little parks" with some "popcorn" seen littered around without too much "oddity"; and of course a (Dr.?) "fox" could be in the area, getting a score of 6. But other words may be a stretch, with an imaginative reference to a "woozle" possibly easier to employ than to evoke anything of the "nocebo".
On the other hand, for a space-science paper there may be more obvious (mis)uses for physics-related terms, and mentioning YORP might well be expected. But it may need creative thinking to introduce the rabbit or the more psychological idea of Stroopicity, etc, without reason to discuss the responses of animal or human payloads being sent there.
It is not actually obvious whether Randall intends the score to only be valid if the insertions are off-field and/or undetected, such as when someone is wagered that they can slip unrelated song lyrics or a 'hello' to Jason Isaacs into a public speech without the rest of the audience twigging.
A search of google scholar indicates many articles with a score of 2 (e.g. this paper , which refers to butterfly shaped popcorn), but 3 or more seems to not be attested.
YORP effect The YORP effect is the effect of sunlight on an asteroid with variations of shape and/or albedo, which can increase its rotation rate and/or modify its axis of rotation. It can cause objects to eventually spin apart or drastically change their orbit. It is an acronym of the names Yarkovsky, O’Keefe, Radzievskii and Paddack, who were instrumental in its discovery. More than a century ago, Yarkovsky determined that heat applied to a symmetrical rotating body would be asymmetrically re-emitted and apply a small but continuous thrust, and this was added to by considering the forces to non-symmetrical bodies. Nocebo effect An effect in which a recipient of medication who believes that it will have negative side-effects is more likely to experience those negative side-effects, whether they can be really caused by the medication or not. Opposite of the placebo effect , which focuses on positive side-effects that arise beyond the true efficacy of a given treatment. Nocēbō is Latin for “I shall harm”, coined to oppose placēbō , “I shall please”. Woozle effect If a study gets repeatedly cited and otherwise disseminated, then people will start to believe it regardless of whether it has any evidence behind it. And if there is not  any evidence, it becomes an urban myth. Named after a Winnie-the-Pooh story in which Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet try to catch an imaginary animal called a woozle, and accidentally follow their own tracks in circles. A similar effect was discussed in 978: Citogenesis , wherein a sourceless statement on Wikipedia can become apparently credible via simple repetition. Stroop effect The Stroop effect (referenced in 1531: The BDLPSWDKS Effect ) is a psychological phenomenon in which it is easier to name the visual color of a word when the word refers to its own color, than when the word refers to a different color; i.e. the fact that saying that Red is red is easier than to say that Blue is green. Named after John Ridley Stroop . Pockels effect A phenomenon where an electric field passed through a medium can cause the medium's refractive index to depend upon the polarization and propagation direction of the refracted light, a property known as birefringence . Named after Friedrich Carl Alwin Pockels . Cheerios effect A phenomenon where objects floating in a liquid appear to attract or repel each other. Named after the cereal Cheerios, which are an everyday demonstration of this phenomenon because many eat Cheerios in a bowl of milk. Hot chocolate effect A phenomenon where the sound created by tapping a cup of hot liquid rises in pitch as a soluble powder is added. Perky effect An experiment in which participants were asked to visualize an object while staring at a screen on which the outline of that object was subtly projected. Participants believed the projected shape to be only a product of their imaginations. Named after Cheves Perky . Bouba/kiki effect An observation that people, despite different native languages, will relatively consistently assign names with certain sounds to blobby or spiky shapes, suggesting the association of sound and shape is non-arbitrary. Bouba and kiki were two of the words used in the experiment. Cutaneous rabbit effect A phenomenon where, when tapped on one part of the body in rapid succession and then switching to another, the subject feels the tapping at locations in between the two. For example, if rapidly tapping the wrist then switching to the elbow, the subject will subjectively feel as if they are being tapped at progressive intervals between the wrist and elbow, when they are not. Small firm effect An economic theory that small firms usually perform better than larger ones Little–Parks effect A phenomenon where a fluctuating magnetic field passed through a superconductor can slightly suppress its superconductivity, inducing small fluctuations in its electrical resistance. When juxtaposed against the "small firm effect", as in the bracket, one might get the impression that it is somehow related to urban architecture or civil engineering. Dr. Fox effect A disputed theory that student evaluations of their teachers are likely unreliable, because they are largely based on the teacher's charisma instead of the quality of their content. Oddity effect A theory that when fish assemble in shoals (large social groups), any that stand out appearance-wise will be attacked by a predator, explaining why shoals tend to have similar-looking members. Butterfly effect The butterfly effect is the sensitivity of chaotic systems to small changes in initial conditions. The weather system of Earth is chaotic, and so an arbitrarily small change in air patterns (such as could be caused by the flapping of a butterfly's wing) could ultimately change the weather for the whole world. Popcorn effect A phenomenon exhibited by crushed ore placed on a vibrating screen for separation in mineral processing, in which larger particles tend to bounce higher than smaller particles.
[A tournament bracket tree is shown with 16 scientific effect names, with 8 on the left and 8 on the right side. From both sides toward the middle the brackets reduce from eight to four, to two, then to one line where the latter join to a rectangle in the middle for the winners name of the final match. Above the bracket there is a title:] Cutest-Sounding Scientific Effects
[Left side:] YORP effect Nocebo effect
Woozle effect Stroop effect
Pockels effect Cheerios effect
Hot chocolate effect Perky effect
[Right side:] Bouba/kiki effect Cutaneous rabbit effect
Small firm effect Little Parks effect
Dr. Fox effect Oddity effect
Butterfly effect Popcorn effect
The first wave ran from April 25, 2022 at 5:19pm ET to the next day at 5:42pm ET.
The second wave started on April 26, 2022 at 5:56pm ET and ended around 11:56am ET.
The third wave started on April 27, 2022 at 6:54pm ET and ended around 12:54pm ET.
The fourth wave started on April 28, 2022 at 4:30pm ET and ended around 10:30pm ET.


Lightsabers

[Two Cueball like Jedi are engaging each other in a duel using lightsabers over 12 panels of equal size, with sound effects as the only sound. In the first panel the left Jedi has his lightsaber extended holding it in both hand pointing towards the other, who at this time is just turning his lightsaber on.] Tssssss Click
[Almost same position of the Jedi, but the right Jedi's lightsaber has now extended, making a sound. He is holding it up near his head in both hands] Tsss
[Then they run towards each other and swing their lightsabers towards each other, two small arcs indicating the swing of the lightsabers.]
[The two beams hit each other and connects at the middle in a big bloop of light, with drops of "light" jumping off both above and below the connected lightsabers. Both Jedi still holds on to their handles with both hands. A loud sound comes out of the connection:] Bloop
[The Jedi stands still holding their handles. The beam is now forming a bow between the two handles.]
[The left Jedi violently shakes his handle causing a wave to travel down the beam towards the right Jedi.] Shake shake
[The right Jedi shakes his handle and well and another wave travels the opposite direction towards the left Jedi.] Shake shake
[Back to the bow of light between them, but the beam is visibly still shaking, but no wave is traveling any longer.]
[Same setting but the shaking has stopped. The right Jedi turns his lightsaber off on his handle with a sound:] Click
[The beam of light is retracted quickly into the handle of the Jedi turning his lightsaber off. So quickly that the two Jedi, still holding on to their handles are pulled up in the air and towards each other as the sound of the beam turning off is heard. Lines indicate their movement and shadows on the ground beneath them indicate they are in the air.] Zhhhiiiip
[When the beam is completely retracted the two handles collide and so do the heads of the two Jedi with a loud sound. They still hold on to their handles with both hands. They still hang in the air with shadows on the ground beneath them.] Bonk
[In the final panel the two Jedi lie unconscious on the ground with their heads towards each other and with their arms stretched out towards each other. The connected handles lie between them.]


Bad Map Projection Madagascator

Explanation:
This is the fifth comic in the series of Bad Map Projections displaying Bad Map Projection #248: Madagascator. It came about 10 months after the fourth 2489: Bad Map Projection: The Greenland Special (#299).
This time, Randall used the classic Mercator projection but instead of placing the North Pole on top and the South Pole on the bottom it is oriented so that the top is the island of Mahé .  The map projection is technically a Oblique Mercator projection , with an unusual choice of the cylinder's axis.  Since the Mercator projection tends to visually distort areas near the top and bottom of the resulting map, this gives some areas, notably Madagascar, very unusual shapes, hence the name the Madagascator — a portmanteau of "Madagascar" and "Mercator"!
The Mercator projection became the standard projection for world maps during the 1800s, because a straight line (or rhumb line ) in a Mercator map represents a constant bearing relative to true north. Historically, when navigation was performed by compass, this was a very valuable feature, since one (adjusting for the differences between true and magnetic north) could plot a constant-bearing course between two locations by simply looking at their relative direction on the map.
However, in the mid-20th century, the Mercator was criticized because it causes distortion near the north and south poles of the map, giving an inaccurate impression of relative sizes. The most commonly given example of this is the size of Greenland — although on the Mercator it appears to be larger than Africa in area, Africa in reality covers an area 14 times that of Greenland.
Randall turns this example on its head by making Madagascar, rather than Greenland, appear larger in the Madagascator than in reality. By contrast with Greenland, the world's largest non-continent island, Madagascar is only the fourth-largest island in the world, behind Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo.
To accomplish this, instead of placing the north pole of the map at the geographic North Pole, Randall places the north pole of the map on the island of Mahé in Seychelles. As Madagascar is relatively close to Mahé (around 650 mi (1050 km) distant), placing the north pole of the Mercator projection at Mahé significantly distorts the size of Madagascar, making it appear comparable in size to Europe on the map.
But this distortion is even more pronounced when it comes to the island of Mahé itself, as Randall notes in the title text.
Although Mahé, the largest island in Seychelles with an area of 60.7 square mi (157.2 square km), is minuscule even compared to Madagascar, the claim in the title text that it appears "larger than the rest of the Earth's land area combined" is an understatement.
No part of Mahé is visible in the comic, but clicking on the actual comic will open a website that displays Mercator projections with a pole in any chosen location, with the location of the one opened set to Mahé. The chosen pole is (infinitely far to) the right of the screen, while its antipode is on the left. With this, it is possible to see that the island is indeed larger than the rest of the map's land area combined. A single national park within the island rivals Africa in size, and the narrow dirt road closest to the pole appears thicker than Panama. This also reveals that the location of the map's north pole (the "small lake" mentioned by Randall) is the lake impounded by the Rochon Dam, a popular tourist location in Mahé.
Unlike previous Bad Map Projections, Morocco and Western Sahara are drawn as one unlabelled country.
Bad map projection #248: Madagascator
Mercator projection but with the North Pole in the Indian Ocean so it exaggerates the size of Madagascar instead of Greenland. Various countries and oceans are labeled, and country borders are shown.