Search found 156 matches
- Thu Feb 21, 2019 1:25 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2108: "Carbonated Beverage Language Map"
- Replies: 56
- Views: 2685
Re: 2108: "Carbonated Beverage Language Map"
But if food can't be verbed, can "feed" be popularized in the intransitive/reflexive sense? It's noon here, so I'm about to feed anyway. "Feed" in that sense is an established usage, although usually used referring to animals. See https://www.dictionary.com/browse/feed sense #11.
- Mon Feb 18, 2019 3:31 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2112: "Night Shift"
- Replies: 33
- Views: 1516
Re: 2112: "Night Shift"
Also, water doesn't get blown across from one ocean to the other just anywhere. This is only a significant effect where the land it's being blown across is narrow, i.e. Central America... and that's in the tropics, where prevailing winds blow east to west.
- Sat Feb 16, 2019 12:11 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2112: "Night Shift"
- Replies: 33
- Views: 1516
Re: 2112: "Night Shift"
Since prime numbers are usually understood to be real numbers, i can't be prime in the usual sense. It's also not a Gaussian Prime. Rather, it is one of the four units in the ring of Gaussian Integers (complex numbers where the real and imaginary parts are both integers). Fun fact: 2 is also not a G...
- Thu Feb 07, 2019 12:19 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2108: "Carbonated Beverage Language Map"
- Replies: 56
- Views: 2685
Re: 2108: "Carbonated Beverage Language Map"
toni2068 wrote:DavidSh wrote:The real map would be mostly "Soda" or "Pop", with small enclaves of "Coke" and "Sodapop", I would presume.
Soft drink.
Doesn't "soft drink" include non-carbonated drinks?
- Thu Jan 31, 2019 12:06 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2105: "Modern OSI Model"
- Replies: 21
- Views: 2095
Re: 2105: "Modern OSI Model"
Is OSI Jenga a thing? Can you try removing different components until the entire system collapses? Kind of: going by the 7-layer OSI model and the ubiquity of HTTP/HTTPS traffic, you can safely take out layers 5 and 6. Because for some reason everything from encrypting a connection to request/respo...
- Thu Jan 10, 2019 1:10 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2096: "Mattresses"
- Replies: 35
- Views: 3841
Re: 2096: "Mattresses"
A lot of podcasts are sponsored by mattress companies. I have no idea why. But there's a burgeoning industry of a whole bunch of different online-storefront mattress retailers, and they all advertise heavily on podcasts. Interesting. I don't listen to podcasts, but I still have a newspaper subscrip...
- Tue Jan 08, 2019 9:59 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2095: "Marsiforming"
- Replies: 31
- Views: 2882
Re: 2095: "Marsiforming"
mixing Latin and Greek is always a bad idea It could be worse. Consider, for example, " megatsunami ". :) If you follow that link and then use the language switcher thingy to jump to the equivalent Japanese page, you find 巨大津波, pronounced "kyodai tsunami," meaning: "giganti...
- Thu Jan 03, 2019 4:35 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2093: "Reminders"
- Replies: 10
- Views: 1660
Re: 2093: "Reminders"
The birthday thing was solved ages ago. I still know people who have birthday calendars in their bathrooms. All it takes is one glance whenever you're sitting down to do your business, and you'll be reminded of all upcoming birthdays. Are these things going out of style? I have to admit I don't hav...
- Wed Jan 02, 2019 4:11 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2093: "Reminders"
- Replies: 10
- Views: 1660
2093: "Reminders"
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/reminders.png Title text: The good news is that if the number of work and friend relationships you have exceeds your willingness to do the bare minimum to keep up with everyone's life events and stuff, one way or another that problem eventually solves itself. The birthd...
- Tue Jan 01, 2019 4:50 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2091: "Million, Billion, Trillion"
- Replies: 31
- Views: 3326
Re: 2091: "Million, Billion, Trillion"
But if metric units are involved, you can just use prefixes properly and say "the Earth is 150 gigameters from the Sun" instead of nonsense like "million kilometers" How would you express the volume of the observable universe in metric units using prefixes properly? Four hundred...
- Tue Jan 01, 2019 4:37 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2092: "Consensus New Year"
- Replies: 28
- Views: 2915
Re: 2092: "Consensus New Year"
Showing timezones in a graph and not labeling the time axis in UTC? That's a paddlin' Randall chose the time zone he himself lives in. As someone who lives in that time zone as well, I feel that this is an entirely reasonable choice. :D Speaking of time zones, the third largest jump in the graph, a...
- Tue Jan 01, 2019 3:54 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2092: "Consensus New Year"
- Replies: 28
- Views: 2915
Re: 2092: "Consensus New Year"
I also keep forgetting that most of South America is farther east than most of North America, so even in the Eastern U.S., we're really pretty late to the party.
- Sat Dec 29, 2018 3:00 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2091: "Million, Billion, Trillion"
- Replies: 31
- Views: 3326
Re: 2091: "Million, Billion, Trillion"
jeanrenaud wrote:This is why we begin to see "M$, G$" in some publications. With the computer era, most people will understand these terms and their signification is the same in every language.
Except in financial jargon, M means thousand and MM means million...
- Thu Dec 27, 2018 11:39 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2090: "Feathered Dinosaur Venn Diagram"
- Replies: 33
- Views: 3546
Re: 2090: "Feathered Dinosaur Venn Diagram"
I don't remember ever hearing of this kind of operation back home in the Netherlands. Maybe because I lived in a more densely populated area there? There definitely were geese out and about, but I never heard of any efforts to chase them away. Maybe because they were more easygoing, being feral des...
- Thu Dec 27, 2018 5:31 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2090: "Feathered Dinosaur Venn Diagram"
- Replies: 33
- Views: 3546
Re: 2090: "Feathered Dinosaur Venn Diagram"
I've read that sometimes specially trained dogs are used to chase geese away; I have trouble picturing that It's definitely a thing . I used to work in an office park in New Jersey where I'd sometimes see signs saying "Border Collies at work," though I have never actually seen the dogs. T...
- Wed Dec 26, 2018 1:10 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2089: "Christmas Eve Eve"
- Replies: 37
- Views: 3738
Re: 2089: "Christmas Eve Eve"
xtifr wrote:Anyone who disagrees is welcome to explain why they no longer write or speak like the author of Beowulf.
That's easy: because everyone sucks at English nowadays.
Also, Italy is a country full of people who speak really, really terrible Latin.

- Fri Dec 21, 2018 6:31 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2086: "History Department"
- Replies: 23
- Views: 3488
Re: 2086: "History Department"
when the thing that you were 99.9999% sure was going to happen, happens, that's not news. Dog bites man, and all that. It's News if Her Maj decides to sod the speech and goes down the pub instead. True, but if you're setting aside 30 minutes a day for broadcasting the news, and there is no news, yo...
- Wed Dec 19, 2018 1:16 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2086: "History Department"
- Replies: 23
- Views: 3488
Re: 2086: "History Department"
LtPowers wrote:May 16, 2001, was fairly uneventful, but it must have taken some extensive research to prove that definitively.
Powers &8^]
Mulholland Drive premiered at the Cannes Film Festival? Sorry, that was clearly not an uneventful day. Try again.

- Thu Dec 06, 2018 11:06 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2081: Middle Latitudes
- Replies: 27
- Views: 3914
Re: 2081: Middle Latitudes
I've often thought middle latitudes were the best. You get actual seasons, and you don't have to deal with 24 hours of daylight or 24 hours of sunlight. I tend to agree, but this time of year, when the trees have mostly shed their leaves and winter is about to begin in earnest, does get a lot of pe...
- Tue Dec 04, 2018 10:14 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2080: "Cohort and Age Effects"
- Replies: 19
- Views: 3459
Re: 2080: "Cohort and Age Effects"
I hear people born in the 2010s have smaller feet than the national average in their home country. on a related note: I have more than the average number of legs (and I will guess that most of you reading this do too) Everyone has either more or fewer than the average number of legs. That depends o...
- Wed Nov 28, 2018 8:24 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2077: "Heist"
- Replies: 40
- Views: 5213
Re: 2077: "Heist"
Wow and LOL! My job is *literally* going to a customer support counter with a tool trolley and asking "hello, where's the staff entrance?", and being shown to it, and there asking "hello, where's the server room, I'm here to replace the routers" and being shown to it *and* *left...
- Mon Nov 26, 2018 8:00 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2076: "Horror Movies 2"
- Replies: 41
- Views: 6513
Re: 2076: "Horror Movies 2"
Lately I've found myself watching sports movies, despite having no interest whatsoever in any sports, and I find some of the stories pretty engaging aside from the sports angle. In that case, take a look at Bull Durham , if you haven't already. I found it highly enjoyable, despite not giving a fig ...
- Sat Nov 24, 2018 6:02 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2076: "Horror Movies 2"
- Replies: 41
- Views: 6513
Re: 2076: "Horror Movies 2"
Meh, literature awards have nothing to do with how entertaining the story is and everything to do with whatever the literary critics consider to be “high art”. Sometimes they get it right. Example: one birthday many years ago, a relative gave me One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márqu...
- Tue Nov 20, 2018 9:59 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2073: "Kilogram"
- Replies: 97
- Views: 12201
Re: 2073: "Kilogram"
I've honestly always been annoyed that kg is the SI unit for mass. Shouldn't the Gram be the unit we're defining with our arbitrary nonsense? The cgs system was tried for a while, but that of course has the same problem with centimetre. As normal human activities go, m and kg fit a wider range of a...
- Fri Nov 16, 2018 7:17 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2073: "Kilogram"
- Replies: 97
- Views: 12201
Re: 2073: "Kilogram"
The_Alchemist wrote:I keep thinking it would be nice to redefine the second so that there are 10 hours/day, 100 minutes/hour and 100 seconds/min.
Small is small, right? What could possibly go wrong?
It's been tried. Didn't catch on.
- Fri Nov 16, 2018 4:49 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2072: "Evaluating Tech Things"
- Replies: 35
- Views: 5441
Re: 2072: "Evaluating Tech Things"
Assuming the turbulence and wind shear around the tornado doesn't destroy the drone before its gets inside the funnel, it probably wouldn't see anything. Those funnels are usually opaque, which suggests that inside, visibility is going to be close to zero. That's certainly what it looks like in this...
- Wed Nov 14, 2018 12:53 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2071: "Indirect Detection"
- Replies: 29
- Views: 5980
Re: 2071: "Indirect Detection"
Two of my friends on Facebook frequently post self-affirming memes about how other people can't tear you down and cut those people out of your life and you're better than all those drama queens. One of them, I know the other side all too well. I know that SHE is the drama in everyone else's life, a...
- Fri Oct 05, 2018 12:59 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2051: "Bad Opinions"
- Replies: 46
- Views: 7536
Re: 2051: "Bad Opinions"
This entire post boils down to "it's OK because the private sector does it worse." Given that I was replying to your post, which boiled down to "the private sector always does everything better," that shouldn't come as a huge surprise. If I had agreed with that point, I wouldn't...
- Wed Oct 03, 2018 6:38 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2051: "Bad Opinions"
- Replies: 46
- Views: 7536
Re: 2051: "Bad Opinions"
but there are also a vast number of things that the government does with absurd inefficiency, and the root of that is in the bureaucracy rather than the legislative branch. Government just isn't good at most of what it tries to do and it has a natural tendency to grow. If there really is such a &qu...
- Mon Oct 01, 2018 1:23 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2051: "Bad Opinions"
- Replies: 46
- Views: 7536
Re: 2051: "Bad Opinions"
Libertarianism, or, I suppose, anti-Statism, comes from a distrust of government in general, not the dysfunction of a particular branch. Paranoia appears to be a wide-spread condition, but as a basis for rational discourse, I rather prefer evidence. Some people are pretty reactionary and have more ...
- Sat Sep 29, 2018 6:26 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2051: "Bad Opinions"
- Replies: 46
- Views: 7536
Re: 2051: "Bad Opinions"
The thing you're ignoring there is that if the Free Market, or the Wisdom Of The Crowd, or whatever other Invisible Hand, were effective at dealing with issues like the ones mentioned in that Pelosi quite, there wouldn't be so much support for government activity on those issues. Of course politicia...
- Thu Sep 27, 2018 10:28 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2051: "Bad Opinions"
- Replies: 46
- Views: 7536
Re: 2051: "Bad Opinions"
This strip is funny to me because I just did that today. I read about the distinction between "strong" and "weak" emergence, and I immediately thought, "Strong emergence = denial of material reductionism". Denial of material reductionism is done by people who want to c...
- Mon Sep 24, 2018 10:18 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2046: "Trum-"
- Replies: 38
- Views: 6114
Re: 2046: "Trum-"
There’s also an amount of linguistic snobbery in refusing to use phonetic conventions from outside of the language being spoken. Remember, French is a language that has its own official institute for the preservation of linguistic purity, dedicated to the prevention of the adoption of foreign-isms....
- Sat Sep 22, 2018 10:40 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2046: "Trum-"
- Replies: 38
- Views: 6114
Re: 2046: "Trum-"
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." The reason for this is that, if it were spelled Putin, it would be pronounced like 'putain', which is french for whore. Calling him Poutine i...
- Sun Sep 16, 2018 8:57 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2046: "Trum-"
- Replies: 38
- Views: 6114
Re: 2046: "Trum-"
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."
- Sat Sep 08, 2018 1:10 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2043: Boathouses and Houseboats
- Replies: 47
- Views: 8352
Re: 2043: Boathouses and Houseboats
This nomenclature should be extended even further.
Planeplane:

Planeplane:

- Tue Sep 04, 2018 2:00 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2039: "Begging the Question"
- Replies: 145
- Views: 19025
Re: 2039: "Begging the Question"
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 ...
- Mon Sep 03, 2018 6:39 am UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2040: Sibling-in-law
- Replies: 52
- Views: 8718
Re: 2040: Sibling-in-law
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...
- Fri Aug 31, 2018 8:38 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2039: "Begging the Question"
- Replies: 145
- Views: 19025
Re: 2039: "Begging the Question"
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 ...
- Fri Aug 24, 2018 9:33 pm UTC
- Forum: Individual XKCD Comic Threads
- Topic: 2034: "Equations"
- Replies: 30
- Views: 6283
Re: 2034: "Equations"
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...