ISS Solar Transit

Explanation:
This is the first comic in a two comic series , released during the same week on Monday and Friday. This comic continues in 1830: ISS Solar Transit 2 .
Cueball is trying to take a photograph of the International Space Station moving in front of the sun ( example ). He has his camera with a long lens set up with a fixed setting to keep it still while he contemplates the best way to get the photographs he wants.
A normal camera is not able to take a photograph of the sun due to the extreme brightness. This is why Cueball is using a solar filter , which makes the sun look orange instead of white, as shown in the second panel.
Digital cameras need to determine the color temperature of a photograph to correctly display colors. This is done using the white balance setting. The joke here is that Cueball selects the "direct sunlight" option, as he feels it is the option that best suits his unusual situation of directly photographing the sun, even though the "direct sunlight" setting is intended to be used for photographing objects directly illuminated by the sun and not for the sun itself.
The light from an object illuminated by "direct sunlight" is, in fact, indirect sunlight when it reaches the camera sensor; so when photographing the sun itself, the camera receives sunlight that is even more direct than "direct".
The use of a solar filter influences the color temperature, so "custom" would probably be the correct option here. A camera using the "custom" option usually requires you to focus on a white or gray object first to determine the correct setting. Most high-end cameras, like the superzoom camera that is likely depicted here, are able to capture in raw image format , allowing the user to adjust the white balance afterwards in software.
The title text is pointing out that the sunlit side of the moon is also in direct sunlight, which is why we are able to see it, and so "direct sunlight" would actually be the correct setting in this case.
It is the second comic within a week where Cueball is using a camera, similar to the one he used in 1719: Superzoom . The previous comic was 1826: Birdwatching , two comics before this one.
[Cueball is kneeling in front of a small platform while operating a camera with a very long objective. The camera is angled sharply upward toward the sky as it is attached to a tripod standing on the platform. An off-panel voice calls out to him.] Off-panel voice: What's going on? Cueball: ISS solar transit. From this spot, the space station should briefly line up with the sun. Cueball: I got a sun filter and I'm trying to take a picture of it crossing.
[Two half height panels above each others follow. The first shows an image of the very orange sun on a black background, as seen through the camera.]
[The second of the two half height panels shows Cueball making further adjustments to the camera, as in the first panel.] Cueball: Perfect. Hmm, I should set the white balance.
[Once gain there are two panels above each other. The top is black with white text and icons from the white balance menu. It has the following options shown after each of the icons as mentioned below in the square brackets:] [Shining light bulb]: Incandescent [Shining fluorescent lamp]: Fluorescent [Shining sun]: Direct sunlight [Lightning]: Flash [Cloud]: Cloudy [A house that cast a shade]: Shade [Two triangles with a circle between them]: Custom
[In the panel below Cueball still operates the camera as before]
[A frame-less but full height panel follows where Cueball leans back from the camera with his hands on his thighs.]
[The last two panels are again above each other. It is almost the same panels as before the frame-less panels, except that the direct sunlight option has been selected as shown with a blue selection band across that option.] Incandescent Fluorescent Direct sunlight Flash Cloudy Shade Custom
[In the bottom panel Cueball again operates the camera.]


Geochronology

Explanation:
Ponytail is describing the origin of some rock formations to Megan and Cueball . She apparently forgot the names of the microplates and the age when the subduction occurred, so she substituties them with names of dog breeds ( Dalmatian , Laika and Pomeranian ) to seem knowledgeable and impress her audience.
Although no microplates or geological ages with these names exist, this is not obvious for people outside of the field, as dog breeds are often named after geographic regions.  For example Dalmatia is the name of a region in Croatia , and a microplate named after it could exist (possibly as a fragment of the former Adriatic Plate ). Likewise, a Laika Plate could be named after the Laika Island in Vanuatu ; however, the name is unrelated to the island and originates from the Russian word лайка (lit. "barker", a generic name for several breeds of hunting dogs and also the given name of the first dog in space on Sputnik 2 ). Geological ages are often named after place where the first rocks dating from the age were found e.g. the Devonian is named after the English ceremonial county of Devon (aka Devonshire), while the Permian is named after the Russian city of Perm . Thus, a Pomeranian Age named after Pomerania , a region on the Baltic Sea split between Poland and Germany , might reasonably exist.
So the comic concludes in the caption with one of Randall's many tips , this time a geology tip, about how it is possible to pretend to be more knowledgeable regarding geology (and to bluff others not educated in the science) by just inserting dog breeds names instead of real names as no one remembers the names of all the microplates. An actual geologist, unlike Ponytail, would not be fooled.
The title text continues the situation until Ponytail starts to run out of dog breeds. Her audience catches on... until one of them chimes in that her "explanation" did name two real geological features: the dog breeds Labrador and Newfoundland are named after the two Canadian regions of Labrador and Newfoundland respectively. Geologically, Labrador is the easternmost section of the Canadian Shield , the ancient core of the North American continent. In contrast, Newfoundland (especially western Newfoundland) was formed from terranes , the remnants of a series of plates that collided with - and subducted beneath - North America. Some geologists have assigned the name "Newfoundland Plate" to one of these former microplates that Newfoundland now comprises. However, the title text explanation is not likely to be entirely accurate, because the most significant mountains in Newfoundland are the Long Range Mountains , which are the northernmost of the Appalachian Mountains , created when Africa and North America collided to form Pangaea ; no mountain range is identified as being the result of the collision of the Newfoundland Plate with North America.
Subduction was featured in a previous comic 1388: Subduction License .
[Ponytail is gesturing toward some rock formations in a grass field while addressing Megan and Cueball who are looking down at the rocks, Cueball with a hand to his chin.] Ponytail: This bedrock likely formed as the Dalmatian microplate subducted under East Laika during the Upper Pomeranian. Cueball: Ah, yes.
[Caption below the panel:] Geology Tip: There are so many microplates and ages that no one remembers them all, so in a pinch you can bluff with dog breeds.


ISS Solar Transit 2

Explanation:
This Friday comic is a continuation of the Monday comic from the same week, 1828: ISS Solar Transit , where Cueball was preparing his camera in order to capture the transit of the International Space Station (ISS) across the Sun . The comic is also made in the same special way using split panels. As noted in the first comic in the ISS series the white balance is still not set properly, because the sun looks orange instead of white/yellow.
However, instead of transiting across the face of the sun, the ISS crashes into the Sun. In reality, of course, this can never happen, because the ISS orbits Earth at an altitude of between 330 and 435 km, while the Earth orbits the Sun at an altitude of about 149.60 million kilometers or 1 astronomical unit . This means the minimum distance between the ISS and the Sun is only slightly less than 1 AU. Also, due to parallax , only people in a very localized region on earth are able to see the ISS "hit" the sun. For all others the ISS would travel past the sun.
Additionally, even if the ISS would somehow impact the sun, it would not make a noticeable splash, due to being incredibly tiny compared to the sun. It would get vaporized before reaching it. (See the what if? Tungsten Countertop ). And it would make no "Fwoosh" sound to be heard on Earth, primarily because there's a lot of empty space between Earth and the Sun [ citation needed ] , and sound cannot propagate in empty space.
The title text plays on the event in the comic, by saying that a new space station is being launched every few weeks as the event in the comic keeps happening, with a continual series of ISSs being destroyed by crashing into the Sun on a regular basis. This is clearly implausible, as it has taken many years to build up the ISS, and there are at least three astronauts on board that would get killed a couple of times a month in that case.
It's possible that the comic is a play on conspiracy theories about space exploration, such as the moon landing being faked. In these situations, while the government may be trying to cover up or show something different from what actually happened, amateur photographers/astronomers/radio enthusiasts (such as Cueball in this comic) claim to observe the event independently of government or commercial sources, and see what really happened. In this case, the conspiracy theory would be that the ISS actually does crash into the sun every few weeks, but we're made to believe that it orbits the earth without crashing, while Cueball is able to observe what really happens with his camera. It further bears certain resemblance to the beliefs of the Flat Earth Society, which is that the Sun and Moon are only 3000 miles away from the earth, with the rest of the cosmos being only 100 miles further way. Were that the case, such a collision would be far less unlikely; as it is, such a collision is patently ridiculous.
[Every panel is split into two half-height panels arranged vertically.]
[The first top panel shows an image of an orange sun on a black background with a white dot labeled in light-blue letter at the top right corner. The dot is in a light-blue cross-hair and a light-blue dotted trail is behind it as indicating movement towards the sun.] ISS
[In the bottom panel Cueball is kneeling in front of a small platform while operating a camera with a very long objective while holding a smartphone. The camera is angled sharply upward toward the sky as it is attached to a tripod standing on the platform.] Cueball: Perfect! Transit in three... two...
[The upper image is the same but the dot has halved the distance to the sun.] ISS
[Cueball sits in the panel below.] Cueball: ...one...
[In the upper panel the dotted line enters the Sun and the white dot has plunged into the sun making a flare "splash" out from the surface of the Sun. This makes a sound written in orange letters.] Fwoosh
[Cueball sits silent in the panel below.]


Here to Help

Explanation:
This comic is a satire of computer programmers, who sometimes forget that not everything can be solved with an algorithm , or of the tendency to think computers are the answer to everything. In the first panel, Megan talks about how the field that she and Hairy work in has a difficult problem that many people have been working on. Cueball , believing that algorithms can solve their problem, tries to help. In the next panel, Megan and Hairy silently watch Cueball working on the problem on his laptop. Finally, six months later, Cueball concedes, and an exasperated Megan retorts sarcastically, pointing out that she had explained its difficulty six months ago within the timeline.
The title text furthers Cueball's apparent arrogance by showing a dialogue. Megan or Hairy says, "We TOLD you it was hard," referring to the first panel, but Cueball, still confident in his own ability's superiority, says, "Yeah, but now that I'VE tried, we KNOW it's hard." The joke is that Cueball believes that, even though he has just failed, it was his attempt which proved the difficulty, and not Megan and Hairy's work for years. The dialog references an exchange from the film The Imitation Game , in which Alan Turing's superior claims, "The Americans, the Russians, the French, the Germans, everyone thinks Enigma is unbreakable," and Turing replies, "Good. Let me try and we'll know for sure, won't we?"
The satire, however, applies far beyond computer programmers.  It can be read as a political commentary, as in nobody knew health care could be so complicated. It is what we'd all like to see when well-meaning advice givers provide the "simple" solution to all our problems, or management provides glib advice from ten thousand feet.  It is a commentary on the universal tendency to see problems as simple because we don't know what makes them hard.
This comic calls back to 793: Physicists and possibly 1570: Engineer Syllogism in central theme.
[Megan, standing next to Hairy, is addressing the reader holding her arms out. Cueball walks in from the right.] Megan: Our field has been struggling with this problem for years.
[Cueball holds his laptop high up in one arm above Megan's head while holding his other arm out as well. Megan has turned to look at him.] Cueball: Struggle no more! I'm here to solve it with algorithms!
[In a frame-less panel Cueball sits on a chair at a desk with his laptop working on it, while Hairy and Megan looks on from behind.]
[Cueball, still sitting at his laptop, points at the screen. Megan raises her arms and four small lines above her head, on either side of her speech line, indicate her annoyance with Cueball.] Six months later: Cueball: Wow, this problem is really hard. Megan: You don't say.


Photo Library Management

Explanation:
The comic is about the results of how many photos one takes. It is a graph showing multiple areas corresponding to the number of photos taken per day by a user and the total time spent reviewing them.
The comic is split into 6 sectors as described below:
As Randall goes through more photos, he finds more bad ones, erases them and more storage becomes available. This allows taking more photos and still don't exceed the limits of the quota. This is why the "secondary" lines (e.g between the different storage types) are not completely vertical but tilted to the right at the top.
The title text states "A good lifehack is to use messy and unstable systems to organize your photos. That way, every five years or so it becomes obsolete and/or collapses, and you have to open it up and pick only your favorite pictures to salvage." If you know that you will lose everything, that knowledge will encourage you to save what you want the most and leave everything else. It will also help decrease how many photos you have through the same awareness.
[A line graph is shown. The x-axis is labeled "Photos taken per day" and the y-axis is labeled "Time spent going through photos per day". The content is divided into six sections:]
[Section 1: Few photos taken per day, no limit to time spent:] "No problems" [Section 2: Some photos taken per day, a limited amount of time spent going through:] "Photo library fits on most devices as long as they're not too old" [Section 3: More photos taken per day, less time spent going through:] "Need cloud storage, external hard drive, or frequent upgrades" [Section 4: A lot of photos taken per day, and even less time spent going through:] "Photo library grows faster than Moore's Law" [Section 5: Above line increasing where more time is spent as more photos are taken:] "Can't find the good photos among the thousands of bad ones" [Section 6: Below line of negative gradient, as number of photos increases and time decreases:] "Can't sleep, too busy sifting through photos to find the best one"


Code Quality 3

Explanation:
This comic is the third in the Code Quality series:
In the first panel, Ponytail references query strings , which store information, such as search queries or page numbers, relevant to the URL. Query strings are not meant to be especially human-readable (eg. "&sxsrf=APq-WBvn82l8oTeNNzZeCkI7B9nM5nxoVg%3A1647235405067"), so a song based on one would likely not be a good one. [ citation needed ]
A tactical flashlight is a light that can be mounted on a gun for use in low-light scenarios. They tend to be very durable and very bright. Different models have different features and capabilities, so they are given cool-sounding model numbers. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a subset of JavaScript used, by many programming languages, as a convenient way of recording structured data. It's not clear what else would be in the table (tables typically have more than one column) and JSON technically has arrays and objects (dictionaries) but not tables, but a JSON array of objects of these model numbers would look something like:
Alan Turing was a British theoretical computer scientist, often considered the father of the field. His 1936 paper outlined Turing machines, a theoretical model for computing, as well as computability and the halting problem. Theoretical computer science is very different from practical coding; understanding the contents of the paper would not at all help a coder to understand today's algorithms, design patterns, and best practices. This is not helped by a page of JavaScript example code. JavaScript is a popular programming language which makes web pages responsive to user inputs, and while JavaScript arguably solves the problem in a practical manner (as opposed to Turing's very theoretical work), it does get a lot of criticism - for instance it is nearly untyped , which allows the programmer to do very interesting things, like JSFuck . Then, example code is used to explain a concept in programming or demonstrate how a program works, but it does not actually run on any computer. "Guessing everything in between" would involve attempting to write code using skills that could range anywhere from the most basic programming to Turing's extremely advanced ideas.
In the final panel, Ponytail references leet-speak , in which symbols are replaced with similar-looking symbols, and a manifesto , a statement of a person or group's beliefs and intentions. A manifesto from a survivalist cult leader might be nonsensical, even before being translated to leet-speak. Memory allocation is a low-level computer programming concept; most modern languages have features that take care of memory allocation for the programmer, possibly implying that Cueball does not know how to use these features.
At this point Cueball, quickly becoming impatient with Ponytail's sass in what is supposed to be a formal code review, retorts that if she can't start giving him the constructive criticism that he's looking for, he can always find someone else to replace her. Ponytail smugly responds that nobody else would be able to stomach his code for more than one sitting, and that she's the only one he's got.
Forth is an old programming language that tends to be difficult to read. It is stack-based, meaning that values to be operated on are moved on a stack before the operation to be performed is given. Using stacks can be considered different from programming languages that resemble natural human language (e.g. COBOL ). While stack-based computing makes some problems very simple (for example, it is relatively simple to design a Forth compiler, or reversing the order of an array) and uses less computing resources, such programming languages are not easy to learn.  Since Forth allows the programmer to rewrite the language, or define their own language, and it does not enforce restrictions like data types, it may be especially easy for novices to write cryptic code.
A cryptogram is a cipher puzzle, generally one easy enough to be solved manually. The title text implies that the code is so bad that it looks like unreadable Forth code that is missing random characters.
[Ponytail sitting in front of a computer screen typing. Cueball speaks only off-panel, but since this is a direct continuation of comic 1513 and 1695: Code Quality and Code Quality 2 where Cueball is shown, there can be no doubt it is him.] Ponytail: Your code looks like song lyrics written using only the stuff that comes after the question mark in a URL. Cueball (off-panel): Sorry. [Zoom in on Ponytail's upper body.] Ponytail: It's like a JSON table of model numbers for flashlights with "tactical" in their names. [Zoom back out again. Ponytail has lifted her hands off the table and is slightly leaning back against the chair.] Ponytail: Like you read Turing's 1936 paper on computing and a page of JavaScript example code and guessed at everything in between. [Zoom in again on Ponytail's face.] Ponytail: It's like a leet-speak translation of a manifesto by a survivalist cult leader who's for some reason obsessed with memory allocation. Cueball (off-panel): I can get someone else to review my code. Ponytail: Not more than once, I bet.


Lunch Order

Explanation:
The comic plays on the similarity of the words "launch" and "lunch," and the fact that both "Lunch order" and "Launch order" are common phrases in their respective environments.  A "lunch order" is common in many work places, where a person may be asked to go pick up lunches for multiple coworkers so they don't all need to leave to get their lunches -- they would typically give their lunch order to the person making the run so they would know what to order.  A "launch order" would only apply to a place capable of launching missiles , such as military installation housing launch-able missiles.  So while a "lunch order" is pretty benign and could certainly apply to such a place, a "launch order" of a nuclear warhead is a much more drastic command, meaning that the principle of deterrence has failed and mutually assured destruction is imminent.  By receiving an order for "Lunch" instead of to "Launch," nuclear conflict was avoided.
Autocorrect is a feature in many software text-entry applications (such as smartphone "keyboards") that will make changes to entered text that it identifies as misspelled in order to quickly increase legibility of the final text. While this process typically makes text entry quicker and easier for users, sometimes the automatically corrected text will not match what the user intended to send, which can lead to miscommunication.
In most circumstances, military units charged with the maintenance of active nuclear weapons will receive their orders to employ those weapons based on direct communication from a commanding authority, these forces in the United States are commanded by the United States Strategic Command. The majority of modern nuclear weapons are prepared to be deployed by rocket launch.
The joke does not depict an actual historic event. To our knowledge, the last time the United States almost launched nuclear missiles at a hostile power was June 1980 , while the function we know today as Autocorrect would not enter development until the 1990's . That said, the country still maintains a large nuclear arsenal ready to launch on short notice.  The comic might be playing off recent fears involving hostilities between the United States and North Korea ; if any l(a)unch preparations have been taken in 2017, they were not declassified by the time this comic was published.
The title text plays on the similarity between two phrases: "GO FOR LAUNCH" is the standard way to express the Launch status check for a rocket (and means that all checks have passed and launch can proceed), whereas "GO FOR LUNCH" expresses the more mundane act of simply beginning one's lunch break. Despite the repetition (which is intended to reduce the chance of a miscommunication), the autocorrect still managed to distort the message a further two times.
A previous comic also explain the 898: Chain of Command and who's responsible of the red button. Missile launch systems and inaccurate alteration of text also figure in the later comic 2099: Missal of Silos .
[Three Hairy's are between two control panels, one is sitting at the panel on the right, the two others are standing and talking in the middle.] Hairy 1: Sir - Strategic command has sent us a lunch order. Hairy 2: Don't they have anything better to do?
[Caption below the panel:] Everyone complains about autocorrect, but we forget about the time it prevented a nuclear war.


Random Obsessions

Explanation:
This comic is formatted as a graph showing various Internet trends over the years according to Google Trends . The caption states that these "random obsessions," as stated in the title, have 9-10 year cycles, and so predicts that the sandwich debate will be over by around 2024.
Discussions about the definition of "sandwich" are surprisingly common on the web, such as "Is hot dog a sandwich?" (See this discussion on Reddit)
The title text is a joke based on the debate over the definition of a sandwich. The speaker, presumably Randall , starts out with the fairly reasonable stance that open-faced sandwiches are not true sandwiches, but then veers off into the absurd by claiming that literally every other physical object in the universe is a sandwich. We can only hope that Randall does not extend this view to human beings .  (On the other hand, Randall may simply be defining a sandwich in an unusual way without implying that all other items are edible, or that all objects "sandwiched" between two of the same thing (such as air, vacuum, laptops, or slices of bread) constitute a "sandwiched item" which is not necessarily edible.  Such strange definitions have been seen before, in the title text of 1405: Meteor .)
The other obsessions mentioned are, in order: robot monkeys, pirates vs ninjas, zombies, and bacon.
"Robot Monkeys" likely refers to people being obsessed with a movie or robots of some kind. It may specifically refer to the American/Japanese animated TV series, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! , which aired from September 18, 2004 to December 16, 2006. It is possible that, based on this, that the trend curve does not actually begin in 2001, but does actually begin in 2004 as shown.
"Pirates vs Ninjas" refers to a longstanding internet meme, popular in roughly the years shown on the chart, that held that ninjas and Caribbean pirates were arch-enemies.
"Zombies" refers to the recent occurrence of zombie themed television shows (The Walking Dead) and movies (World War Z etc).
Though the trend is dying out, as seen by the fact the graph is past the peak, there has been an explosion in bacon flavored/scented products as well as items of clothing and decor that look like bacon. The YouTube channel Epic Meal Time was also part of the bacon fad, as adding large quantities of bacon to the meal being prepared was one of the running gags of the channel.
[The comic shows curves plotted in an (x,y)-plane. The x-axis shows years from 2004 to 2017, with every even year labeled. The y-axis is labeled "popularity relative to peak (based on google trends)". There are five vaguely bell-shaped curves, each stretching over 9-10 years. It is implied that they rise from a value close to zero, to which they also return.]
The curve labeled "robot monkeys" peaks in early 2005 and ends near the x-axis in late 2011. The curve labeled "pirates vs ninjas" peaks in late 2008 and ends in late 2014. [The remaining three curves all end in mid 2017, the comic release date. ] The curve labeled "zombies" starts in late 2007 and peaks in early 2013. By 2017 it has fallen to about 30% of its peak value. The curve labeled "bacon" starts in late 2009 and peaks in mid-2015. By 2017 it shows a value of about 90% of its peak value. The curve labeled "definition of a sandwich" starts in late 2013 and in 2017 it has reached approximately half its peak value.
[Text below the panel:] Judging from Google Trends, these random semi-ironic obsessions seem to last about nine or ten years, so we should be done with the sandwich thing by 2024.


Okeanos

Explanation:
The NOAAS Okeanos Explorer , named after the Greek (and Roman) personification of the sea Okeanos , is a vessel that is currently exploring the Central Pacific Basin. It livestreams the video feed [1] of its deep sea exploration online.
This comic seems to be a representation of the livestream on YouTube [2] ; see the table below for details.
The chat section for the actual livestream is disabled, but the comic adds some humorous examples of what the chat section would look like.  Several of the examples are the product of commenters falsely believing the livestream is that of a game, probably since most livestreams on YouTube are of people playing games; Randall is joking about the viewers of said streams in particular not being able to tell the difference, as well as YouTube commenters in general. Randall has mentioned the ridiculousness of comments on YouTube before in both 202: YouTube and 481: Listen to Yourself . One of the comments seems to refer to Minecraft or a similar game, since one of the comments asks why nothing is being crafted (crafting is a mechanic in many games, used to make items).
In the caption below Randall states that he likes to view the stream and commends them on disabling the chat section, for the reasons given in the comic above.
The title text is yet another comment by someone who dropped their phone from a boat, and now wants to use Okeanos' resources to find it, which is of course impossible; if the boat was anywhere near Okeanos, the phone would have swiftly been hidden in the silt on the bottom. And even if not, the chance of finding anything dropped in the Pacific Ocean , the largest Ocean on the Earth, is all but zero. Also, the Central Pacific Basin, where Okeanos was at the time of this comic's release, is 6500 meters deep; at that depth the water pressure is approximately 4454.863 kilopascals, or roughly 646 PSI. This is probably enough to irrevocably damage something as breakable as a cell phone. Even if the phone were of the so-called "waterproof" variety, that rating is usually only applicable to a few meters of depth rather than thousands of meters.  Needless to say, retrieving one's phone from the bottom of the Central Pacific Basin would be a challenging and pointless endeavor.
[The comic takes place during a typical YouTube livestream. The livestream video titled "Camera 1: Exploring the Central Pacific Basin" is provided by the channel "OceanExplorerGov" and recorded from Okeanos Explorer exploratory vessel. On the left hand side, the live video feed is playing, showing a jellyfish in the ocean's depths. On the right hand side, the live chat is displayed.]
User #1: Fake User #2: Who else is watching this in 2017? User #3: Is this prerendered or will this be in the game? User #4: That squid is a neoliberal User #5: Why do the McElroys never talk User #6: Stop messing around and eat the fish already User #7: This is why Trump won User #8: Why do u never craft anything User #9: This is just a distraction User #10: Something is wrong with that baby giraffe
[Caption below the panel:] I love watching the Okeanos Ocean Exploration livestream, but it's probably for the best that they don't enable chat.


Rental Car

Explanation:
In this comic the couple Megan and Cueball want to rent a car. The Cueball-like guy from the car rental agency tells them they only have two vehicles available:
Megan believes she can ignore this and accepts the less lethal car. The comic suggests that driving with a GPS that tries to guide you to a different destination than that which you wish to visit—so it is always recalculating and asking you to do U-turns—is incredibly annoying. So annoying that given the choice between the persistent low-level annoyance of the GPS on one hand, and the ("low") probability of being murdered on the other, most people will choose the latter option. After all, they might survive murderous ghosts but they feel they will not survive long having to listen to the broken GPS.
According to the title text, the murderous ghosts haunt both cars, but as soon as the car starts driving and the GPS begins to drone on, even the ghost cannot stand listening to the broken GPS and stops possessing it.
Apart from the joke about GPS, this is also a subtle joke on the horrible cars one might get at a car rental service.
It is also possible that the car rental service is trying to drive people away from the haunted car, which we can assume is just a normal car, to get more profit when people come back and take the "haunted" car when their GPS is broken.
[A Cueball-like guy standing behind a desk looking at a computer screen services Megan and Cueball on the other side of the desk.] Guy: We have two rental cars left. Guy: One is the murder car. But don't let the name scare you! Guy: It's definitely haunted. But most drivers don't get murdered. Guy: Maybe one in six.
[The guy lifts his hand and looks at Megan and Cueball.] Guy: The other is a regular sedan. Guy: But it has a GPS that's stuck trying to navigate to Seattle, and you can’t turn it off. Megan: ...I can ignore it, right? That's fine.
[In a frame-less panel Megan and Cueball drive in the sedan.] GPS: Turn left GPS: Recalculating GPS: Make a U-turn GPS: Recalculating GPS: Turn right GPS: Make a U-turn GPS: Recalculating
[Megan and Cueball walk back into the agency with the guy behind his desk. Megan holds out the car keys in one hand.] Guy: Back already? Megan: We'll take the murder car. Guy: Popular choice.


Machine Learning

Explanation:
Machine learning is a method employed in automation of complex tasks. It usually involves creation of algorithms that deal with statistical analysis of data and pattern recognition to generate output. The validity/accuracy of the output can be used to give feedback to make changes to the system, usually making future results statistically better.
Cueball stands next to what looks like a pile of garbage (or compost), with a Cueball-like friend standing atop it. The pile has a funnel (labelled "data") at one end and a box labelled "answers" at the other. Here and there mathematical matrices stick out of the pile. As the friend explains to the incredulous Cueball, data enters through the funnel, undergoes an incomprehensible process of linear algebra , and comes out as answers. The friend appears to be a functional part of this system himself, as he stands atop the pile stirring it with a paddle. His machine learning system is probably very inefficient, as he is integral to both the mechanical part (repeated stirring) and the learning part (making the answers look "right").
The main joke is that, despite this description being too vague and giving no intuition or details into the system, it is close to the level of understanding most machine learning experts have of the many techniques in machine learning. 'Machine learning' algorithms that can be reasonably described as pouring data into linear algebra and stirring until the output looks right include support vector machines , linear regressors , logistic regressors , and neural networks . Major recent advances in machine learning often amount to 'stacking' the linear algebra up differently, or varying stirring techniques for the compost.
This comic compares a machine learning system to a compost pile. Composting is the process of taking organic matter, such as food and yard waste, and allowing it to decompose into a form that serves as fertilizer. A common method of composting is to mound the organic matter in a pile with a certain amount of moisture, then "stirring" the pile occasionally to move the less-decomposed material from the top to the interior of the pile, where it will decompose faster.
In large-scale composting operations, the raw organic matter added to the pile is referred to as "input". This cartoon implies a play on the term "input", comparing a compost input to a data input.
A recurrent neural network is a neural network where the nodes affect one another in cycles, creating feedback loops in the network that allow it to change over time. To put it another way, the neural network has 'state', with the results of previous inputs affecting how each successive input is processed. In the title text, Randall is saying that the machine learning system is technically recurrent because it "changes" (i.e. gets mushy) over time.
[Cueball Prime holds a canoe paddle at his side and stands on top of a "big pile of linear algebra" containing a funnel labeled "data" and box labeled "answers". Cueball II stands to the left side of the panel.)]
Cueball II: This is your machine learning system?
Cueball Prime: Yup! You pour the data into this big pile of linear algebra, then collect the answers on the other side.
Cueball II: What if the answers are wrong?
Cueball Prime: Just stir the pile until they start looking right.


Doctor Visit

Explanation:
Cueball is visiting his doctor Ponytail , apparently for a general medical checkup.
While there is nothing wrong with him medically, the doctor wonders why he has continued to work for many years despite his body parts' individual fragility. Compared to man-made structures - like the USB cables mentioned by Ponytail, which quickly begin to fray - it's surprising that the body can survive for so long while sustaining so much wear and tear. Actually the body gets stronger and more fit the more it is used (an example of antifragility ), in contrast to USB cables, which tend to wear out with use.
Ponytail specifically mentions his eyes which are so fragile and exposed. Yet most people go through a whole life with both eyes intact, although the vision itself may be impaired. The human reflexes and the shape of the skull around the eyes has a lot to do with the fact that it is possible to protect such fragile structures for a lifetime.
Ponytail also remarks that the body is composed of high pressure fluids (particularly blood, intracellular and extracellular fluids) and intricate parts (like the nervous system and the heart). If the fluids stopped flowing or the intricate parts stopped working, the entire body would fail, killing Cueball.
It should be noted that the human body is constantly replacing dead/injured cells and proteins. In a young human body, everything in the body is continually refurbished, and nothing is able to become old enough to deteriorate unintentionally; this requires a constant supply of energy and nutrients to keep this process going. As the body ages, these self-repair mechanisms eventually slow and can no longer keep up with the required repairs; this manifests as the various symptoms of old age (wrinkled skin, graying and balding hair, worsening eyesight and hearing, etc.) and eventual death.
USB cables are built to withstand far more wear and tear than the human body. But while this makes them tougher than blood vessels on the outset, they inevitably fray and fail faster than blood vessels because they lack the self-repair mechanisms of organic material.
The doctor's final remark is that Cueball is mainly made from dissolved bread, which is true from the perspective that the food (bread) he eats is digested in his alimentary system, absorbed into his bloodstream and used as nutrients for growth and repair. Paleontologists use a method called isotopic analysis to determine the diets of ancient people from elements preserved in teeth and bones. Ponytail could have ordered a similar test on Cueball.
This is taken further in the title text, where she states that the blood tests reveal he is 30% breakfast cereal . This likely comes from the widely-cited but not entirely accurate factoid that the human body is 70% water. The other 30% would then be flesh and other organic matter, or the dissolved bread the doctor described. Breakfast cereal and bread are both products of cereal , the edible part of a grain, making the comparison apt.
All things taken into consideration, we don't actually have any confirmation that Ponytail is a real doctor . As Randall has stated before, anybody can just buy a lab coat . Although Ponytail's answer in the final panel lacks the usual "I have no idea" or equivalent non-answer , it's still somewhat possible she's a real doctor having an existential episode.
[Cueball is seated on an medical examination table while Ponytail stands dressed in a doctor's coat holding a file in her right hand.] Cueball: Everything look good? Ponytail: I don't get how your body has been moving around for years and still works at all. My USB cables fray after like a month.
Ponytail: Your heart has been pumping for decades without pausing for even a few minutes. Ponytail: And your eyes! They're so fragile and exposed!
[Zoom in on Cueball gazing at his palms.] Ponytail (off-panel): You're full of all these high-pressure fluids and intricate parts that could kill you in seconds if they stopped working!
[Zoom out again to the entire scene.] Cueball: ...can you just tell me whether I'm healthy? Ponytail: Yeah, you're fine. Ponytail: Which is weird, given that your body is basically made from dissolved bread.
Later Doctor Ponytail offers these thoughts again as an internal monologue in 2057: Internal Monologues .


Genetic Testing Results

Explanation:
Ponytail continues Cueball 's medical checkup with a genetic test. Genetic tests show people genetic diseases that they might be at risk for and/or give them insight into their ancestry. In this case, the genetic results are extremely obvious: His genes are part of a long line of genes stretching back to some of the earliest life forms to have genes. This information is universally true - every known organism has such a genetic history - which makes it so vague as to be useless for either medicine or ancestry.
In epidemiology, a risk factor is a variable associated with an increased risk of disease or infection. The title text says that this is a risk factor because being a living organism is, trivially, associated with every disease that exists.
[Cueball is seated on an medical examination table while Ponytail stands dressed in a doctor's coat holding a file in her right hand.] Ponytail: Your genetic test results are back. Apparently you're part of an unbroken lineage stretching back billions of years to the early Earth!


Who?

Explanation:
Cueball and Hairy are walking while Hairy is talking about going to a wedding by sharing a ride. He names three people: the groom; a friend with whom he's sharing the ride; and another person he hopes to meet on the way, perhaps another guest at the wedding. The ellipsis at the beginning indicates he's been talking beforehand, and Cueball has listened to all of it.
Cueball at first replies with an "it's cool" sentence, apparently expressing interest, satisfaction or approval at the idea of Hairy meeting the people he mentioned. This usually happens when two people are talking about something they have in common, like meeting with friends at a social gathering.
However, Cueball suddenly expresses that he's been lying about knowing them, and he doesn't have any intentions of preserving such lie. Note that he didn't need to explicitly acknowledge to be those people's acquaintance, he might just have nodded or said expressions like "it's cool".
Part of a social need for inclusion, or as a way to continue a conversation, people sometimes agree with the person they are talking to, or feign knowledge of the people, things or topics that were mentioned.
The title text suddenly changes the situation by stating that it's possible Hairy has been talking to someone else using a Bluetooth earphone set . This hands-free device is used to communicate via phone call and is small in nature and only visible from one side of the face, so anyone who comes across someone using this device can at first wonder whether they're actually talking to them, because no phone can be seen. This situation could mean that Cueball has been hearing and / or talking to this person, who might not even be his acquaintance, given that he knows people that Cueball doesn't seem to know about, and that he might not actually be his friend. This is a hilarious exaggeration of people with some attention problems.
The title text is an allusion to 476: One-Sided , where Randall doesn't realize who the other person is talking to.
In 302: Names Cueball also has difficulty with names.
The problems with bluetooth headsets' inconspicuousness is a key point in 736: Cemetery .
Another example of not knowing someone is talking on the phone: [1]
[Cueball is walking from left to right while Hairy follows him.] Hairy: ...I'm getting a ride with Katie to Adam's wedding. Hoping to see Brian on the way! Cueball: Oh, that's cool! Cueball: ...I can't keep living this lie, so I'm just gonna come out and admit it: I have no idea who any of the people you keep mentioning are.


Anti-Drone Eagles

Explanation:
Law enforcement and security agencies often use birds of prey to combat drones flying unlawfully over restricted sites. This is often more cost effective than using technological means (such as scramblers and counter-drones) and safer for the public than using conventional weaponry (such as shotguns).
Eagles, being predators, have natural tendencies to attack the central components of drones while avoiding the sharp and spinny bits.
Cueball argues that this is unethical as it forces rare animals to put their lives at risk, and compares it to using police dogs for traffic control, which people would generally frown upon.
Effectiveness depends upon the conditions of use. Obviously eagles can't be used everywhere that drones are restricted, but they are often effectively used where ground security is also present to identify and arrest those that might be unlawfully flying the drones, so they can't indefinitely replenish their hardware. The first paragraph has links to real life examples. Not only would it be unethical, but also ineffective. The supply of Eagles is rather limited, and there are biological limits to how fast it can be replenished, whereas more drones can be created very quickly to replace those that are destroyed.  Traffic control dogs would be similarly ineffective, as dogs would struggle to run as fast as a speeding motorcycle, and would be powerless to stop the motorcycle even if they could.
Megan thinks both ideas (eagles and dogs) sound cool, but she understands the ethical argument against using them for traffic control.
Black Hat , on the other hand, goes a step further and says that he has created a drone that hunts the eagles, flipping the premise from “anti-drone eagles” to “anti-eagle drones”. In the title text, he continues that is ethical because they (only the title text mentions that there are several of such drones) only target the most populous species first, although they will eventually eradicate the endangered ones once they bring down the number of all birds of prey (note that this implies that he wants to make all birds of prey extinct or endangered). He seems to miss the point that it is not merely the relative number of birds that creates the ethical problem, but the fact that animals' lives are being put at direct risk by humans. His construction of the anti-eagle drone may be simply for the point of making the eagles' goals not only dangerous, but also entirely ineffective. This is probably not an opposition to privacy but merely his trademark classholery in action.
Nevertheless, Black Hat raises a crucial point in ecology : There are generalist and specialist predators (as well as herbivores). A specialist hunts or eats only one species (e.g. the koala eats only eucalyptus ), while a generalist hunts or eats the most available food. Thus, a generalist often spares species that have become rare due to overhunting, disease or famine. A generalist predator (or herbivore) thus manages the wildlife, and a healthy population of generalists is almost always beneficial. Now, if Black Hat creates a drone that hunts the most available species, he gets the right idea (a food generalist manages wildlife), but gets the other one seriously wrong: Eagles are already doing their job as generalists, and as predatory birds are not so abundant, a generalist that feeds on predatory birds would need to have a very large territory. And as drones cannot reproduce yet and do not need to hunt as an energy source, releasing a drone to fulfil an ecological role would not make any sense. How does the drone know it has hunted enough eagles? Does the eagle-hunting drone feel hunger and decide to hunt elsewhere after reducing the number of local eagles, or does it just hibernate?
[Black Hat, Cueball and Megan are standing and talking.] Cueball: Everyone loves these eagles that take down drones, but... I dunno. Megan: You gotta admit, it's pretty cool.
[Close-up of Cueball.] Cueball: Yeah, but... training rare animals to hurl themselves at whirling machinery can only get us so far, you know?
[In a frame-less panel the setting is back to that of the first panel.] Cueball: At some point, it's like releasing police dogs onto freeways to attack speeding motorcycles. Megan: Also cool, but I see your point.
[Black Hat lifts his hand and Cueball turns his face towards him.] Black Hat: Plus, I just finished my autonomous drone that hunts eagles. Cueball: Man, you are an entirely separate class of problem.


Opening Crawl

Explanation:
Each episodic Star Wars film begins with an " opening crawl " giving the audience some of the backstory, which often reads like the prologue of a novel.
Randall wants to reverse this by projecting the text of a Star Wars novel and see how long this can be continued before viewers realize it is a prank. The text in the opening scroll is actually from the beginning of the final book of the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn.
The title text compares different Star Wars novels' style, remarking on how well suited they would be for this prank.
Timothy Zahn is a science fiction writer who has written and contributed to many novels and comics in the Star Wars expanded universe . The text in the comic is the first five paragraphs from the book The Last Command . The characters mentioned are Grand Admiral Thrawn , the primary antagonist of the Thrawn Trilogy , and Gilad Pellaeon , who serves as a Dr. Watson -type companion to Thrawn throughout much of the trilogy.
Splinter of the Mind's Eye was an early Star Wars novel written before the original film was expanded to a trilogy (and then expanded some more), so it contains multiple aborted subplots which can make it very confusing for a fan who has seen the later works.
The term "EU" refers to "Expanded Universe", which was the term for the corpus of non-cinematic Star Wars content before Star Wars was acquired by Disney . Not wanting to be constrained by previous canon, Disney declared all "Expanded Universe" content to be non-canonical to all future movies, and re-branded the EU as "Legends" to take place in its own alternate continuity.
For a very long time, fans believed that the Thrawn Trilogy would have constituted Star Wars VII to IX should the movie have been made and thus "before they figure out there's no movie coming after it" refers to both the mistaken belief of fans and the novelisation as delivered through the opening crawl.
[On a black background with many stars is five blocks of yellow text that recedes towards a black section at the back of the panel. The last block cannot be read, but it is (almost) possible to read the second block of text at the back. The bottom line of the last text block is cut off through the middle of the letters.]
"All systems show battle ready, Admiral," the comm officer reported from the portside crew pit. "The task force is beginning to check in."
"Very good, Lieutenant," Grand Admiral Thrawn nodded. "Inform me when all have done so. Captain Pellaeon?"
"Sir?" Pellaeon said, searching his superior's face for the stress the Grand Admiral must be feeling. The stress he himself was certainly feeling. This was not just another tactical strike against the Rebellion, after all—not a minor shipping raid or even a complex but straightforward hit-and-fade against some insignificant planetary base. After nearly a month of frenzied preparations, Thrawn's master campaign for the Empire's final victory was about to be launched.
But if the Grand Admiral was feeling any tension, he was keeping it to himself. "Begin the countdown," he told [Cut off through the middle and at the end]: Pellaeon, his voice as calm as if he were ordering
[Caption beneath the panel:] Movie theater projection booth prank: see how many pages of a Star Wars novel you can get people to read before they figure out there's no movie coming after it.


Voting Systems

Explanation:
This comic is about types of single-winner voting systems:
Arrow's impossibility theorem gives a list of criteria for ranked voting systems and states that no system can satisfy all of them at once, despite that for each of them it may seem "obvious" that an electoral system ought to satisfy it. Some voting theorists (such as Cueball) dislike IRV because it fails more of the criteria than Condorcet does.
The primary joke in the comic is the premise that people who are pedantic or knowledgeable enough to find Arrow's theorem to be relevant will self-fulfill the theorem by being inclined to disagree on any effort to change the voting system. This is illustrated by Cueball's voting system preference that is contingent on the preferences of other people, which defeats their effort to produce a community-wide ranking.
A secondary joke in the comic is that often voters don't pick their favorite choice in a vote. Instead, they vote for a less favorable, but more likely electable, person as a way to prevent their least favorite choice from being elected. This is commonly called "spoiler effect"; in Arrow's parlance it is a form of IIA criterion failure . Cueball's strategic vote switch implies that they may be using FPTP (which they dislike) to make the decision, as FPTP is the only system to involve a potential "spoiler effect" (note, however, that certain vote distributions in systems such as IRV can produce a similarly problematic and illogical effect on the outcome).
A third joke is the recursive self-referencing inherent in voting to choose a voting system.
The title text stipulates that Cueball has no fixed ranking of preference for human candidates, but makes this choice dependent on which voting system is favoured by the group. This exceeds strategic voting considerations as the ranking should have full information, whom Cueball prefers in each situation. Therefore Arrow's impossibility theorem and the analysis behind it assume the ranked preferences of an individual voter as a fixed given. To make them dependent on the voting system makes assessing the efficacy of the voting systems absurd or at least much more complicated to do as a general assessment. That is given as the reason why Arrow would wholeheartedly hate him.
[White Hat and Ponytail are standing on either side of Cueball who is talking while lifting one hand.] Cueball: I prefer approval voting, but if we're seriously considering instant runoff, then I'll argue for a Condorcet method instead.
[Caption beneath the panel:] Strong Arrow's theorem: The people who find Arrow's theorem significant will never agree on anything anyway.


State Word Map

Explanation:
This is another of the many comics where Randall used a map of the United States for his joke (see below for examples).
Similar in spirit to 1138: Heatmap , this comic pokes fun at many maps that attempt to use data to discern unique characteristics about various sub-regions, in this case American states . This map may have been inspired by this map posted on Twitter by Google Trends the day before the comic was posted. Many web companies use maps like this in viral marketing, but the methodology behind them is pretty weak. The random noise in the data will mean that there will be variations between states even if there is no underlying pattern - and this can be further boosted by statistical tricks. A common one is to show the "most characteristic" or "most distinctive" term for each state. For instance, the most common cause of death is heart disease or cancer in every US state, but this makes for a boring map. Looking at the most distinctive cause of death produces a more interesting map, but it highlights very minor trends - Lousiana is marked as having syphilis as its most distinctive cause of death, even though only 15 Louisianans in every 100,000 have the disease and there were only 22 syphilis deaths in the state over a whole decade. These maps can give a misleading impression of huge variation between states that doesn't really exist.
This map does not include real data, but says (when read left to right/west to east):
You can make these maps say whatever you want by adjusting the methodology. Half of the time you're just amplifying random noise because the underlying data doesn't vary that much from one state to another. But whatever. Nobody checks this stuff. Just pick whatever normalization lets you make fun of Florida.
The primary joke is that the likelihood of these being the words used most often by the inhabitants of each state is low, rather than accurately representing the most used words Randall has just done exactly what he says he can do (make fun of Florida by putting whatever he wants). He also has not obtained the data from anywhere, just 'Something Something'.
The joke about Florida is that the most used word in Florida is "Florida", which would make people in Florida very self-centered.
The comic continues to make fun of Florida in the title text by saying that Florida searches for sex porn instead of porn , which is not needed since porn means images and film of people having sex. This is also probably a reference to PornHub's data-farming exercises, where they have periodically released the most frequently searched term by state.
Florida is often the butt of many jokes, including the Florida Man meme and many mocking jibes regarding its messy electoral history . For more information on why Florida itself seems eager to play into this stereotype, check out the "Only in Florida" phenomenon
Randall previously used a map of the United States as the basis for his comics in 1767: US State Names , 1653: United States Map , 1509: Scenery Cheat Sheet and in 1079: United Shapes .
[Caption above the map, with sub caption:] Most-Used Word in Each State Based on Something Something Search Data
[Beneath the captions are a colorful map of the United States of America. Each state has one color, but the colors do not change from state to state, but rather between rows of states. The top "row" is purple, the second row is gray-blue, but only goes half across. Where it stops a pink row of states begins. Beneath this runs a yellow row, except it does not take California with it, since it belongs to the next purple line beneath this yellow line. Finally the two states not in the contiguous states as well as the southern states from Texas to Florida are again pink. Inside each state is written one, and only one word (or for small states the word is outside and if needed a line indicates which state it belongs to). The words size depends on the size of the state and the word. If it can fit inside the state it will be written in a font large enough to fill the entire state if possible (in one case a hyphen is used). So a short word, like "lets" in huge Texas becomes huge, but a word like "noise" which has been fitted inside small Massachusetts becomes small.]
[Here are the 50 words written in lines resembling the colors on the map (from left to right). Purple, gray-blue, pink, yellow, purple and pink:] You can make these maps say whatever you want by adjusting the methodology. Half the time you're just amplifying random noise. Because the underlying data doesn't vary that much from one state to another. But whatever. Nobody checks this stuff. Just pick whatever normal-ization lets you make fun of Florida.


Drone Problems

Explanation:
Megan is frustrated because people are flying drones too close to her, so she builds a system to shoot them down. She shows it to Cueball , who is also excited about the idea and helps spot the drones. However, each of the drones gets accidentally destroyed by its pilot because of their inability to fly the drones before Megan can destroy them herself.
After three hours of unsuccessful drone hunting, a frustrated Megan complains about people unable to fly the drones, which prevents her (and Cueball) from having fun shooting them down. The joke is that she created the system to get rid of the drones, so the lack of drones should be the desired output - and now she wants the drones nearby (even if only temporarily).
This comic is a follow up on 1842: Anti-Drone Eagles , and confirms that Cueball prefers technological air-defense systems to biological measures.
The title text refers to the fact that from the pilots' perspective, the system is successful at keeping all the drones away from the house, even though in reality the system has not had a chance to be successful yet.
While Megan attributes the repeated drone crashes to poor pilot skill, a possible source for the drones' sudden loss of control is hinted at in panel two, in which the target drone crashes immediately after Megan's device (equipped with a miniature parabolic dish) attempts to "lock on" to the drone in question. While a small and fast-moving drone may be difficult to hit, the control system that directs its movements is easily interfered with (either by overwhelming the RF signal controlling it or by using microwaves to induce short circuits in sensitive electronics). The irony here is that the targeting system for Megan's anti-drone device unintentionally appears to be more effective than the actual weapon it is designed to guide, disabling the drones so quickly that the "real" weapon is unable to be tested.
It may also be a reference to the May 30, 2017 FTG-15 test of the United States GMD missile defense system, where an interceptor kill vehicle destroyed a test ICBM . From the perspective of a US adversary, such as North Korea (whose missiles the system is allegedly targeted at), "as far as they know, the system is working perfectly," as the test was declared to be a success. But substantial controversy has dogged the missile defense system for decades, as critics have alleged it is vulnerable to trivial countermeasures . But "as far as they know" strongly implies that the text following it is not true, i.e. the system does not work perfectly.
Another possible secondary joke is that the drones were flying near her because the pilots can't fly properly. Yet another possible take on the joke is that Megan's system is actually effective, but Megan is not aware it's been activated.
Megan had previously suggested in 1586: Keyboard Problems , that robots (and thus also drones) getting near Cueball's house ( and possibly Cueball's general vicinity ) would unexpectedly crash.
Megan previously had a laser cannon to shoot down squirrels in 382: Trebuchet , so this is not the first time she has built a device for shooting things down.
[Megan is sitting on her knees at the porch in front of a house with a smartphone in one hand and operating with her other hand a dish-antenna pointing into the sky. Cueball comes walking up towards the stairs up to the porch while he is looking back and up over his shoulder and pointing into the air.] Megan: People in the park keep flying drones near me, so I've built a system to shoot them down. Cueball: Cool! Oh yeah, there's one now. Megan: Time for a test!
[Zoom in on Megan with the device on the porch with Cueball still at the bottom of the stairs leading down. She is operating her phone, which can be seen to be connected with a wire to the dish-antenna device. Cueball is looking away from her and down.] Megan: Okay, locking on… Cueball: Wait, it just crashed. Megan: Damn.
[Cueball has walked up the stairs and are standing behind Megan at the door. Megan is now looking up into the sky while still sitting with her phone in front of the device.] Cueball: Here comes another one! Aim for… nope, it got stuck in a tree.
[Cueball is now sitting on the porch with a half-full drinking glass in one hand leaning back on the other hand. Megan is gesturing at her device while holding her phone down. Above the top part of the frame, there is another smaller frame overlaid with a caption:] Three hours later… Cueball: Finally, two more just— no, one crashed and the other is hurtling sideways toward the lake. Megan: Will you people learn to fly these things?!


Dubious Study

Explanation:
This comic alludes to the growing industry in disreputable academic journals , many of whom accept articles of dubious merit for publication without rigorous peer review upon payment of a fee.  In an attempt to sound legitimate (and thus attract submissions), many such publishers publish journals whose names sound intentionally similar to (if not identical to) established titles.  Here, the National Academy of Proceedings is a meaningless title that sounds similar to the highly regarded academic title Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA .
In the caption, Randall points out that even he is sometimes fooled into believing a study is serious because it is well-formatted and looks professional, at least at first. Even though he eventually realizes the study is dubious, sometimes it's only after reading a significant portion of the paper. A possible unstated concern Randall may have is that some readers might never realize this and end up believing whatever results and conclusions are included in the paper, thereby leading to a belief in false or misleading information among some portion of the population.
The title text implies that this (at present) fictional journal has a dubious online presence in the faded internet site MySpace , where the publishers make claims that may be true but are misleading: "peer-viewed" sounds similar to " peer-reviewed ", the community-led process of establishing a paper's scientific integrity prior to publication, but in fact means only that scientists have viewed the content (as Cueball is now).  Likewise, some journals might be "published biannually", whereas "downloaded biannually" implies that the journal is read only twice each year. Single articles in high-profile journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences would expect to receive hundreds to thousands of views in their first year of publication.  The fictional journal publisher no doubt hopes that an inexperienced scientist may mistake these claims for meaningful statements of authority, and thus submit a paper (and eventually pay a fee for its publication).
The National Academy of Proceedings in fact sets itself apart from certain predatory journals by ensuring that the claims on its website are in fact factually accurate (if phrased to mislead article authors, particularly those with English as an additional language); some journals are openly dishonest on their websites.
Randall also judges academic content based on superficial details in comic 1301: File Extensions , where he focuses on how the information is formatted (in particular if it is in TeX or with the TeX rendering-style of a scientific publication). Similarly, in 906: Advertising Discovery , Randall muses on how we automatically trust anything formatted in Wikipedia style. (This was later proven in a scientific study. [1] ) And on a different note, prestigious-sounding but meaningless names also appear in the title text for 1068 , where SwiftKey suggests the phrase "Massachusetts Institute of America" to Randall.

[Megan is standing behind Cueball who is sitting at a computer desk using a laptop.] Megan: Are you sure this study is legit? Cueball: Sure, it says it was accepted for publication. Megan: Where? Cueball: Hmm... The National Academy of Proceedings .
[Caption below the panel:] If something is formatted like a serious scientific paper, it can take me a while to realize it isn't one.


Glacial Erratic

Explanation:
Ponytail and Megan are walking along when they come across an erratic rock (which differs from the surrounding geology and is brought there by glacial action ). Not wishing to bow down to the forces of nature, Megan tries to take it back to its rightful place, obviously in vain.
Megan is annoyed with the glacier for just littering the place up with rocks. She wishes to put it back in place, just like picking up a piece of litter and putting it in the trash bin where it belongs.
The title text furthers the absurdity by suggesting that Megan is extra annoyed with having to clean up after the glacier, because it will take a long time (and as she put it "Fuck Glaciers"). The problem for Megan is that she is already using her time chiselling out igneous intrusions which is another type of rock formation caused by solidification of magma , which Megan also plans to undo. To soothe her mind she keeps watching the scene from the Superman film where Superman turns back time to prevent an earthquake and thus also create a fault-sealing by reversing the creation of the fault in the first place. He also prevents the destruction of the Hoover Dam and the death of Lois Lane , but it seems like this is not important to Megan. She is only interested in undoing what nature has already done, and if the Superman scene could be made real it would solve her problems.
This may be a play on words based on the word "erratic," as Megan's behavior could be described as such.
Megan's actions here are reminiscent of the ones carried out by Cueball in 1119: Undoing .
[Ponytail and Megan walks up to a large rock, Ponytail points at it.] Ponytail: That rock is a glacial erratic-A glacier broke it off from those hills and placed it here.
[In a frame-less panel they stand and watch the rock.] Megan: What? And just left it here? Megan: And everybody's okay with this?
[Megan tries to lift the rock with two hands.]
[Megan turns her back to the rock and tries to push it with all her might.] Megan: Get... Megan: ...back...
[Ponytail looks on as Megan again has turned around and tries to roll the boulder using both hands.] Ponytail: Why ... Why are you doing that? Megan: Because fuck glaciers!


Decades

Explanation:
This comic shows, by use of a timeline, an interesting phenomenon where music, fashion, movies and culture created between the years 2000 and 2020 are not commonly grouped into the decade in which they were produced like previous decades. The comic asserts the reason for this is the lack of a single clear term to describe these decades, stating that the term " 2000s " is ambiguous (as it could refer to the decade, century or millennium as a whole) and the terms " Aughts " and "Teens" never became the widely accepted terms for these decades.
The time-line in the comic stretches into the future (as of the time of publication) and attempts to name the 2020-2029 decade as the 20s, but does so with an uncertain question mark, presumably because it's (presently) an open question whether this dating convention will be reinstated after a 20-year pause. As the comic points out, common vernacular has managed to operate without clear terms for that grouping for 17 years, and that may have left enough of a mark on our thinking that we'll simply continue to operate in that way. There's an argument to be made grouping culture by decades is fairly arbitrary and not essential in cultural discussions. It should also be considered that that "the twenties" is still occasionally used to refer to the 1920s, and so reusing it to refer to the 2020s could be a source of confusion. It's not impossible that decade-based grouping will fall out of favor altogether in the 21st century.
It should perhaps also be noted that culture (particularly when associated with young people) in the 2000s and 2010s is often termed " millennial culture ", although this term frequently comes with negative connotations.
The title text talks about Randall's local radio station. Until the 90s, they were able to use clear decade groupings to classify music. Once the year 2000 hit, they began saying "today", avoiding aughts or 2000s, which, as Randall says, never gained popular support. Instead of adopting a term for the 2010s, they simply continued to use "today" to refer to everything after the 1990s (this practice has been fairly common on American radio stations). Randall expresses interest in what change they will include in the 2020s (changing to the 20s or continuing their format), but includes a comedic jab at radio, suggesting that the medium might not last that long. The increasing speed and ubiquity of the internet, combined with compact digital music storage, has made radio programming increasingly obsolete in the United States and other wealthy countries. That said the joke is still based on exaggeration to an extent, since commercial radio is unlikely to disappear entirely in the next three years, but is likely to become less and less viable as an industry over time and what remains or springs from the ashes will likely shift radically in its format and delivery.
Twenties were discussed again later in 2249: I Love the 20s .
[A timeline across the top of the box marks decades from 1960 to 2030, the labels are above the line and the ticks marking each decade are below.]
[Label: 1960] 60s Music; 60s Fashion; 60s Movies; 60s Culture
[Label: 1970] 70s Music; 70s Fashion; 70s Movies; 70s Culture
[Label: 1980] 80s Music; 80s Fashion; 80s Movies; 80s Culture
[Label: 1990] 90s Music; 90s Fashion; 90s Movies; 90s Culture
[Label: 2000 and 2010] [Items grouped over two decades.] Fashion; Culture; Music; Movies
[Label: 2020] [The text is in light grey font.] 20s Music?; 20s Fashion?; 20s Movies?; 20s Culture?
[Label: 2030]
[Caption below the panel:] It's weird how for 20 years we stopped grouping our cultural memories by decade because "2000s" is ambiguous and and "Aughts" and "Teens" never really stuck.


Air Force Museum

Explanation:
Megan asks Cueball about his day. He tells about his visit to a military aircraft museum at the air force base and lists some of the things he saw. It starts with things you would expect at a typical museum, such as a mix of aircraft from different eras, before revealing the fact that Cueball was able to watch missiles being loaded, which is something that would be out of place and potentially dangerous at a museum. Realizing this, Cueball remarks that he hopes that he was at a museum, and Megan asks him if he hears helicopters. The implication is that Cueball observed the actual military operations at the base; the sound of helicopters might imply Cueball is now being pursued by the military, or may simply be evidence of some military operation potentially related to what Cueball observed.
The mention of "planes from different eras" alludes to the fact that military aircraft are often still in use after a much longer time than they were originally designed for. An example of this are the US Air Force's B-52 bomber, first introduced in 1955 (62 years before the publication of this comic) and expected to serve into the 2040s. Additionally, aircraft museums typically house military aircraft from previous eras, such as from WWII and the Cold War, to show the evolution in aircraft design and to showcase technological advances.
The title text builds on this premise. Randall says that he had fun visiting another Air Force "museum", but he adds that if they don't have a museum (in which case he was trespassing on a military base) then he denies ever having been anywhere near it. Fortunately for Randall, there is in fact an Air Force museum nearby: the Air Mobility Command Museum about half a mile south of the Dover Air Force Base .
[Megan walks from left over to Cueball.] Megan: How was your day? Cueball: I visited the military aircraft museum over at the Air Force base. It was really neat!
[Both walking together to the right.] Cueball: They have planes from different eras, all kinds of cool equipment, and you can even watch missiles being loaded.
[Beat frameless panel. Cueball and Megan walking.]
[Both still walking.] Cueball: ...at least, I hope that was a museum. Megan: Do you hear helicopters?


Magnetohydrodynamics

Explanation:
In this comic, Ponytail explains to Cueball that the Sun's atmosphere is a super hot plasma controlled by " magnetohydrodynamics " (a real word), the study of magnetic properties of electrically conducting fluids. This is true, as plasma is both electrically charged (following the laws of electrodynamics) and a fluid (following the laws of hydrodynamics). However, the combination is so difficult for Cueball that he finds it easier to comprehend any statements containing the word "magnetohydrodynamic" by dropping the central part of the word ("netohydrodynam"). Thus, he pretends that Ponytail instead said "The Sun's atmosphere is a superhot plasma governed by magic forces". If Cueball really thinks that magic is more comprehensible than magnetohydrodynamics, then considering just how vaguely and inconsistently magic is portrayed across fiction, that must mean that magnetohydrodynamics is really, really hard! [ citation needed ]
In the title text, Randall riffs on the sheer difficulty of magnetohydrodynamics, claiming that they are as simple and understandable as Maxwell's equations and the Navier–Stokes equations -- which is to say, not at all. Maxwell's equations require an advanced knowledge of calculus to even be able to interpret the symbols used, and the solutions of Navier–Stokes equations are on the Millennium Problems list . Randall also notes the alarming frequency with which the subject of magnetohydrodynamics is paired with quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity ; he sarcastically quips that physicists must find magnetohydrodynamics so easy to work with, since they're so compelled to spice it up.
[Ponytail holding her hands up is facing Cueball and Megan .] Ponytail: The Sun's atmosphere is a superhot plasma governed by magnetohydrodynamic forces... Cueball: Ah, yes, of course.
[Caption below the panel:] Whenever I hear the word "magnetohydrodynamic" my brain just replaces it with "magic."


Election Map

Explanation:
A wave (e.g. an electromagnetic wave, like light) changes its frequency and wavelength when its source is moving relative to the observer, due to the Doppler effect . In the case of light, increased frequency — indicating movement towards the observer — is called blueshift , while reduced frequency — indicating movement away from the observer — is called redshift . These names apply even if the effect is outside of the visible spectrum (e.g. infrared light that has reduced frequency is called redshifted, even though its frequency is further away from that of visible red light than normally). Red and blue colors are used accordingly to indicate the effect.
The recent advent of the integral field spectrograph allowed astronomers to produce images illustrating how different parts of a galaxy move along our sightline, images that look not very different from the map Cueball shows. If one side of the image is higher redshifted while the other side is less or even blueshifted, the usual interpretation is that the galaxy is rotating with an axis of rotation not completely parallel to our sightline, but other interpretations are also possible. Nevertheless no redshifted object appears in red to the human eye, it's still white. But the spectral lines are shifted. This means all colors used in those scientific images are not real.
The map Cueball shows represents election results. Red regions mark where one of the political parties won, while blue regions indicate another party. (Because Randall lives in the United States, blue most likely corresponds to the Democratic Party , and red to the Republican Party , but this is not stated in the comic.) Cueball, however, analyzes the map as if it showed the magnitude of Doppler effect by the light emitted by the region. This is a very strange interpretation in the context of an election, and is not what the viewers would expect to hear. This is why Cueball was quickly fired from his job, as the caption states.
The title text states that the Green Party did not win any precincts . If the Green Party won, its regions would likely be colored green, which would not fit to Cueball's Doppler effect analysis. Sometimes, however, green is used to indicate lack of movement. And since the center of rotating object isn't moving, green-colored spaces could actually be interpreted according to Doppler analysis - but only if they appeared near the center of the rotation.
The map appears to depict Georgia's 6th congressional district , which was set for a runoff election on June 20, 2017, the day after the comic ran. The map in the comic appears to be broadly similar to both the result maps of the primary ballot of April 18, 2017 and the result map of the runoff election . The April primary had included 5 Democratic candidates, 12 Republican candidates, and 2 independent candidates (who combined for less than 0.1% of the primary vote), with the top two finishers (who were a Democrat and a Republican) advancing to the runoff. The red-and-blue result maps were similar for the primary and runoff elections because the precincts where Democratic or Republican candidates predominated in the April vote also (generally speaking) tended to have the candidate of the same party lead the vote in June.
[On a TV-screen Cueball is seen pointing at a map on the left which is colored in red and blue. There is a header on the map and in the top right corner of the screen the title of the program is shown. Below this at the bottom of the screen text indicate that the program is broad live. Cueball explains the map, with his text shown above the TV.] Header: Results Title: Election Night Live
Cueball: These northern precincts appear red, which probably means they're moving away from us, whereas these bluer regions are approaching us. I believe the district may be rotating in space.
[Caption below the panel:] My career as an election analyst was short-lived.


Once Per Day

Explanation:
Many news reports on health recommend the "best" way to perform the processes, such as eating, drinking, exercising, or sleeping, that are required to live healthy. These reports tend to give such factors as a type of food to consume regularly, the amount of a nutrient to consume, or how long to exercise, in terms of what or how much to do daily. A simple example of this is the proverb, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." Perhaps this kind of advice is overthinking things, but Cueball decides to follow it strictly as explained in the caption.
So when Megan asks Cueball what his plans are, he just lists his routine consisting only of things that the news has told him exactly how often to do.
His list includes the following, which he has to do once per day:
Several obvious problems arise with these "you should do ... daily" tips. They are often based on population studies, but they may be harmful in the case of some individual persons. This health-related advice would be beneficial in, say, 60 or 70% of the population, but may be ineffective in other 20% of the people, and deleterious in 10%. This especially relates to the suggested daily intake of aspirin.
The second problem is the shaky scientific foundation of this advice. There have been studies examining the effects of a daily glass of red wine, for example, but there is certainly no study which has observed the interaction of all ten of these health tips at once. In particular, tannins (which occur in red wine and coffee) are known to absorb certain substances, which may influence the way in which apples and eggs are digested.
Furthermore the scientific basis for these articles are shaky at best. A large number of these studies are just junk science - poor methodology and bias making the study more attention-grabbing, but lacking real substance. Even those studies that are scientifically rigorous are often reported on poorly. "Study proves that dark chocolate helps you lose weight" is a better headline than "Several studies over the last five years hint that chocolate may have certain long term benefits; more research needed"
Of course, if Cueball only does these things, then he can't/doesn't attend to other important matters, such as going to work, which most likely allows him to buy the recommended materials in the first place, or even using the toilet. Also, if Cueball only does these things, he will complete his "daily" schedule in significantly less than a day, probably between 8.5 and 9 hours. This means that he will do his "daily" schedule on average almost three times a day. One consequence is that Cueball will be drinking on average about 19 glasses of wine per week instead of 7 glasses of wine per week if he actually drank one glass of wine per day. While drinking 7 glasses of wine per week won't have any negative consequences as long as they are evenly or about evenly spaced, drinking more than fourteen servings of alcohol (where one glass of wine has one serving of alcohol) per week causes long-term liver damage. Also, it's not clear how Cueball is able to overpower his circadian rhythm in order to sleep for over twenty hours per day. Furthermore, while the routine is theoretically subject to change as soon as Cueball hears another such daily recommendation on the news, this won't happen because he hasn't heard a recommendation to tune in to the news every day, so poor Cueball is trapped in his daily schedule.
In the title text Cueball explains that his daily routine is not completely fixed. It is broken twice a year, since he also follows public information campaigns suggesting the replacement smoke detector batteries twice a year. While the US National Fire Protection Association recommends a replacement at least once per year others suggest every time when the clock changes according to daylight saving time , i.e. twice a year. (All such recommendations will likely become irrelevant as citizens of the United States, starting in California, are encouraged to replace their existing smoke detectors with new models containing irremovable ten-year batteries.) This is just another example for official overdone recommendations nobody follows, in this case since smoke detectors make annoying beeps when their batteries run low and thus rarely need routine replacements before then.
[Megan and Cueball are standing together, facing each other.] Megan: Got any plans for the day? Cueball: I'm going to eat an apple, an egg, one baby aspirin, and a piece of dark chocolate, drink six glasses of water, one glass of red wine, a cup of coffee, and a cup of tea, then do 30 minutes of exercise. Cueball: Then back to sleep for another 8 hours!
[Caption below the panel:] I only do things that news stories have specifically told me to do once per day.


Refresh Types

Explanation:
In this comic Randall presents five different levels of refresh operations for web applications. The first three ( soft refresh , normal refresh , and hard refresh ) are common operations to keep the content in the browser retrieved from the server up to date. The other two ( harder refresh and hardest refresh ) are fictional operations to perform refresh operations on remote resources. The terms are probably adopted from soft and hard reset operations used to restart broken computers or e.g. smartphones.
Soft refresh refers to an operation in a web page, commonly known as Ajax , that requests new information without reloading the entire page. The given example, Gmail , includes a feature that allows users to poll new emails and show it in the inbox interface. It is a command using JavaScript to load new contents from the server in the background and only update necessary components of the page. Since modern web applications do this also automatically in short time intervals those buttons are mostly unnecessary. In Gmail a user will see a new message instantly.
The normal refresh is a browser operation that reloads the complete web page, text and other content that has changed since the original load will be updated. The operation can be triggered by refresh buttons in browsers, though it also can be requested using the common keyboard commands as listed by Randall. Many pages -- like the main page at xkcd.com -- don't have a refresh button. If the page has been opened before a new comic release, pressing F5 afterwards causes reload and the new comic is shown.
What Randall calls hard refresh is a less common browser operation forcing the browser to re-download every part of the web page, ignoring any cached content. Caching is a common way of decreasing web page load times. Browsers save resources such as images or CSS stylesheets on the first visit on a web page and use the local copy on subsequent visits. It allows them to decrease amount of transfer needed to show the web page, but can prevent showing changes made to the resources (for example a web developer changing the stylesheet). In those cases the hard refresh ensures that each part of the website is downloaded in its newest form.
If there is a proxy or a cache (like used for this wiki) in between the browser and the server this type of refreshing may not work. In this case, unless a purge link is available, the user has to wait until the cache entry is expired and a new request to the web server is done. Someone may try to avoid this behavior by including special headers in the HTTP reply to control caching, but not all proxies or clouds follow these instructions.
Harder refresh is a joke that extends the existing naming scheme. The joke is that if a hard refresh resets the browser display and cache, a harder refresh should reset the source of the data by cycling power in the data center. Assuming no damage was done, this would reset the memory on the server, erasing any information that had not been written to disk, and setting the server to the state it was in at launch. This would cause considerable downtime, and would be unlikely to help the user at all.
In orchestrated environment it may indirectly cause some virtual machines in the cloud to be rebooted and assigned to an other web server needing more workload. But a growing workload is caused by hundreds or thousands additional requests and not just a single key combination from one browser. While there are administrative web tools allowing to perform a reboot (physical or virtual server) just by clicking a single button, this is not what is being referred to in the comic. A standard (non-administrative) user rebooting an actual physical server using a common web page is not possible, unless there is a software or operating system bug that will cause exactly this. This would be considered an extremely critical problem and its resolution would be given an extremely high priority by the server owners.
The harder refresh uses six keys, including the non-standard ' HYPER ' key, a feature of the Space cadet keyboard . Hyper could also refer to the Linux modifier key Hyper, similar to Control, Alt, and Super.
The fifth option, hardest refresh , moves beyond resetting the source of the data and resets the entire internet back to ARPANET , an early military network which was a forerunner to the modern internet. The implications of this are not made clear, but it should be noted that it wouldn't help to fix any problems a user is experiencing in-browser, as HTTP , the protocol by which web pages are sent, was not developed until late 1990, the year ARPANET was decommissioned.
The hardest refresh shortcut uses fifteen keys, including non-standard ones such as Ø and ⏏. (The former is a key found on Danish and Norwegian keyboards, the latter is the "eject" key found on Mac keyboards and some laptops.) The shortcut makes amusing comparisons about a shortcut that includes not only the F5 function key, but also the keys for the letter "F" and the digit "5", as well as the similarity in appearance between O, 0, and Ø.
The title text suggests that the inclusion of both the Windows key and Command key in the hardest refresh shortcut is a security measure akin to the Two-man rule , as it would require two keyboards to enter. Normally this would not work in practice as the modifier keys are handled per keyboard and not combined across keyboards for most operating systems allowing more than one keyboard.
[A table with three columns is shown. The header is:] Refresh Type; Example Shortcuts; Effect
[First row:] Soft Refresh [The word refresh has a border to mimic a button:] Gmail REFRESH Button Requests update within JavaScript
[Second row:] Normal Refresh [Two PC shortcuts and the Apple command key followed by an R:] F5, CTRL-R,  ⌘R Refreshes page
[Third row:] Hard Refresh [One PC shortcut, the combination Control plus Shift, and the Apple command key followed by Shift and R:] CTRL-F5, CTRL-⇧,  ⌘⇧R Refreshes page including cached files
[Fourth row:] Harder Refresh [One single combination using Control plus Shift plus Hyper plus Escape plus R plus F5:] CTRL-⇧-HYPER-ESC-R-F5 Remotely cycles power to datacenter
[Fifth row:] Hardest Refresh [One single combination using Control plus the Apple command key plus the Windows key plus Shift plus the hash key plus R plus F5 plus F plus 5 plus Escape plus the letter O plus a slashed zero plus a slashed letter O plus an eject sign plus Scroll Lock:] CTRL-⌘ ⊞ ⇧#-R-F5-F-5-ESC-O-0-Ø-⏏-SCROLL LOCK Internet starts over from ARPANET


Telephoto

Explanation:
This is another one of Randall's Tips , this time a Telephoto Tip.
Telephoto lenses are special lenses for cameras that are physically shorter than their focal length . Using a long-focus lens allows the photographer to magnify a photographic image of an object rather than being physically close to the object. Alternatively one could add " converters " and " extenders " to an existing lens to get a greater focal length for the cost of reduced brightness. The joke is that Cueball did not want to spend the money on buying a new telephoto lens or real converters, and instead achieved the same effect by moving his cheap camera (a standard webcam , in this case) close enough to the subject to obviate the need for magnification.
There are many problems with this. First, the end result is completely impractical to carry around; as shown in the comic, Cueball has to set up two tripods just to support the weight of his hulking behemoth of a camera. Second, if you're an animal photographer like Cueball, you need to be able to see the animal as close up as possible in order to get a good picture; a lens with lots of magnification power accomplishes just that without alerting the animal to the photographer's presence, but Cueball's camera would surely scare off any birds he tried to photograph (except in fanciful proof-of-concept diagrams like this comic).
Perhaps most damning of all, though, is the fact that Cueball's idea involves installing a webcam at the far end to be able to photograph anything. Webcams are not designed to capture high-resolution images, so the resulting image will be of considerably lower quality compared to professional photographers' works, although it could be better than a standard camera setup taking account of the huge achievable zoom levels. But more importantly, the presence of the webcam renders the functionality of the extenders (and the base camera itself!) completely redundant, cementing this idea as a total waste of money and effort. The same could be achieved by mounting the webcam on a long stick; an extraordinary long selfie stick will achieve nearly the same effect, for considerably less cost and set-up than Cueball's behemoth.
The title text continues this by saying he was banned from the Airliners.net photography forum because his new modified lens was so long that it started brushing against planes as they flew by. If Cueball's gargantuan lens is being set up on or near runways or is so long that it potentially damages planes in-flight, then being banned from an online forum should be the least of his worries. [ citation needed ] In-flight damage dealt to planes can cause severe consequences, e.g. causing them to crash. This would possibly put him on the no-fly watchlist, as well as being charged with unintentional damage.
[Cueball stands behind a huge telephoto lens which rests on two tripods, one at the left in front of Cueball, and an other larger one in the middle. The lens is more than five times longer than Cueball is high. In front of the lens is a tree with a bird on top close to the lens. The bird is labeled "Subject". Inside the telephoto lens at the location of the objective lens a small device is shown and labeled "Webcam". From that device a small cable runs through the entire telephoto lens to the eyepiece, where an other device labeled "Camera" is shown.] [Caption below the panel:] Telephoto tip: If you add enough converters and extenders, you don't actually need a fancy lens.