xkcd

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da Doctah wrote:I find it amusing that the current presidents of the US and Russia both have surnames that so readily lend themselves to fart jokes.

As someone who occasionally glances at French newspapers, it amuses me to no end that the French spell the Russian president's last name "Poutine."

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This nomenclature should be extended even further.

Planeplane:

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Actually, the obsession with named logical fallacies is way more troubling than any particular linguistic pet peeve. I see some arguments online consist solely of trying to name the fallacies used by the opponent and suggesting they "look it up." Oh god yes. In particular, I cringe every ...

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To do this properly you need Cantonese. https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/29512256_1502849993157077_1429751131823326588_n.png?_nc_cat=0&oh=1da30e0c52342bfa612527de7f0e3124&oe=5C2EE846 I guess if you live in a culture with strong extended families, where people tend to have speci...

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Also, just because a fight will probably be lost doesn't mean it's not worth fighting. What could possibly be the value of this fight? If losing or surrendering means they're going to rape you to death, eat your flesh and sew your skins into their clothes, and if you're lucky they'll do it in that ...

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most important equation? My vote is for: U+2205 U+2260 U+2205 If you want that in a prose form... "everything can be divided into two categories - those things that can be divided into two categories, and those that can't". watch for inappropriate binaries. aljohnso So, ∅ ≠ ∅ My prose int...

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There is neither dark matter nor dark energy; our model of spacetime is simply incorrect on intergalactic scales because we mistakenly assume the speed of light is constant for all observers. In actuality, the speed of light simply appears to change as you get further away. That may work as a way t...

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From today's RL crossword: Vessels of the Royal Navy in America (4). "Royal Navy" is used for the letters "RN", America (in this case) is "US". RN in US would be "URNS", which are… vessels. I'm sorry, but that's just infuriatingly and disgustingly obtuse. (No...

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And the best-paid civil engineers have been designing nuclear reactors and skyscrapers for the possibility of "accidental" small- or medium plane crashes for a while now. Ever since the 1940's, I think. The Twin Towers could have been a lot worse, really. Definitely. When I look at 9/11 I...

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I was under the impression that people still defended constructivism today. Are they just crazy or are there legitimate arguments still ongoing? I couldn't say about number theory. Maybe someone will come up with a scheme that can construct all the transcendental numbers? Although I suspect that th...

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Are there any interesting features of transcendental numbers, other than the fact that they are hard to write down? No. Unless you're a mathematician. Maybe they don't seem special to me because I never really cared about fractions, and the details of "Fill in the gaps" to get real number...

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Real numbers are also out there as soon as you start trying to deal with anything continuous... The real numbers were always out there, of course, but it took a long time before anyone started to realize that not all non-integers are rational, i.e. that irrational numbers exist, and it took even lo...

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Of course, another is the idea of negative numbers. Once you have negative numbers, complex numbers are a fairly small step... Yeah ... negative numbers have to be introduced in order for all linear equations to have solutions. Complex numbers are needed for quadratics to have solutions, but weirdl...

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edo wrote:Are scientists and engineers too cool for regular quaternions?

Absolutely. The really cool kids are into octonions.

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Sableagle wrote:Alternatively, you could go with the helicopter pilot's approximation: if it's close enough for you to hear the thunder, it's close enough for you to get hit by the lightning.

Considering how loud helicopters are, being able to hear the thunder over that racket must mean being very close!

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The whole point is to make working out the correct change easier . I thought the whole point was to make giving the correct change easier. Paying $20.10 when the charge is $10.10 means that they can give you back a large bill, which they usually have plenty of, rather than singles and a bunch of co...

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How about the concept of the GUI instead of command line. That was a beautiful and powerful idea that has since been bastardized by GUIs that are difficult to use and interface. Think MS Word. I don't get command-line fetishism / GUI bashing. MS Word is hard to use? What alternatives have similar c...

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Everyone I know has a "coin jar" where coins are summarily tossed when returning from the store, etc. Huh! I just make exact change whenever I can. I have a wallet with a built-in coin compartment, which no one in America seems to have, but is perfectly normal in Europe. Makes it really e...

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cellocgw wrote:
Ken_g6 wrote:Gzip was too big to be practical. So were bzip2 and xz.

Strangely enough, I can zip 200TB of "9" into a rather smaller file.

How? Don't zip and gzip use the same compression algorithm?

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Over on Reddit, it's a running joke that everything you can possibly imagine, and most of the things you can't, have their own subreddits. To the point where the running joke itself has its own subreddit just for posting links to the weirdest ones you've found . My point is, this is the first time ...

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Agreed... and Mr. Munroe doesn't abide by nonsensical Biblical creationist concepts of Earth/time like Mr. Schultz did. I acknowledge that Schulz was not a stranger to the Bible, albeit nowhere remotely as heavy-handed as the likes of Johnny Hart. Nonetheless, I assumed 4,000 was an arbitrary numbe...

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Agreed... and Mr. Munroe doesn't abide by nonsensical Biblical creationist concepts of Earth/time like Mr. Schultz did. I acknowledge that Schulz was not a stranger to the Bible, albeit nowhere remotely as heavy-handed as the likes of Johnny Hart. Nonetheless, I assumed 4,000 was an arbitrary numbe...

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"Mý fone ïs çaeñsoaring wat eye taip. My Brave 'Mobile Pro 3' is like something from a wholly New World. " Wonder which of those three methods would work? Unicode, fonetik substitoosion, or thinly veiled references? The first can be defeated by stripping accents before analyzing the text....

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JPatten wrote:[Are you arguing that] the idea of a limited Federal Government is solely the result of caving to southern slave owners

Well, duh.

JPatten wrote:and that Real freedom can only be found in a Strong Central Government that can assume any power it deems necessary?

False dichotomy alert!

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Given this is (presumedly) the US, those weird local sales taxes you have (and the even weirder final figure) must already be in the initial value (minus the things previously normally paid for by semi-involuntary participation in data-scraping anyway , giving $20.45?)… I think what's weird about s...

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I like that in this comic, the phrase "just saying" is followed by an actual statement. Although it makes me a bit meta-sad that this makes me happy, sort of like when I see "as far as" and there actually is an "is concerned" or at least "goes" at the end of t...

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Time to necrothread... Is it wrong for me to want to edit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuBisCO to put a "References in popular culture" section, linking it to the xkcd? I believe there's a specific Wikipedia policy that tells you to not add xkcd references to "popular culture" ...

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... if there's something strange in you neighborhood, who you gonna call? GB! Is that George Bush senior or junior? Oh, and what is the number. It used to be 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Perhaps now it's Pennsylvania 6500 ! Could be. Several years ago, a relative of mine visited New York City, and whe...

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Not sure about what I' m arguing here, though, I just thought the quote quoted (in the midst of a hilking big wall of text) didn't quite ring true and needed investigation. Obviously you'd get different results in Cuba to those in Monte Carlo or Bahrain, and I don't know where the US strictly lies ...

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What, you mean people in the US don't have to take a mandated number of driving lessons even before being allowed to take a driving exam? When I got my driver's license in the Netherlands, in 1984, there was no mandated minimum number of lessons, as far as I recall. However, the driving test was pr...

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To add a descriptive angle to the heretofore prescriptive gif vs. jif debate: Before coming to America in 1998, I had never heard anyone say "gif" in English; I'd only heard it in Dutch, where it is pronounced just like the Dutch word "gif" (which means "poison," but th...

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I don't know in what language 'ÿ' is pronounced /o/, but in Greek (at least Ancient Greek, not sure about modern) 'Y' was pronounced like German 'ö', and that's the reason that sound is represented in IPA as /ʏ/ No, the German vowel that sounds like Ancient Greek υ is the ü. Incidentally, the Germa...

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I've also heard of people pronounce JPEG as, "jay-peg," like Joint Potographic Experts Group. Are you saying there are people who don't pronounce JPEG as "jay-peg"? :shock: SMH (and for that matter ‘fam’) make the speaker sound like an obnoxious kid to me What's "fam"?

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I managed to get a tall bathroom cupboard home from IKEA in Croydon once, via tram, train, bus and on foot (for the first and last 200m or so). It started off seeming quite do-able, but by the end, I was having to put it down every 10 metres to rest my hands. I tried renting a van a couple of times...

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But then as far as American beer goes, the trick is to ignore all products of the multi-headed monopoly that dominates the market and get pretty much literally anything else from any smaller brewery in the country. There's some damn good beer here, InBev just doesn't want you to know about it. So t...

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(I do hope I'm not boring you!) Not at all! I was able to watch BBC TV in the Netherlands only between when it first became available on cable in my area, in the mid-'80s, and when I moved to America, less than 15 years later, so I have a rather timeless memory of what BBC weather forecasts were li...

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who got to predict GOF, sunshine at night and hurricanes not happening. "GOF"? http://www.tvcream.co.uk/bric-a-brac/a-m-bric-a-brac/m-is-for-bric-a-brac/magnetic-weather-maps-on-the-bbc/ Srettel eht esrever: tnih! Ah, I see. :) I don't remember that kind of, um, interactive weather map on...

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Soupspoon wrote:who got to predict GOF, sunshine at night and hurricanes not happening.

"GOF"?

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The thing that irks me though, is that devices nowadays do not permit local sync. Sure, you can sync to the computer that is right next to you, but you have to use an app, and go through the internet, where the app authors can collect the info for their own purposes and sell their conclusions to an...

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Rising home prices don't help the homeowners at all, or their descendants. If houses cost $10k when Mom & Pop bought theirs, and $100k when their kids inherit their paid-off house, then their two kids each inherit half the value of a house and have to pay the other half of their own houses off ...

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