XKCD: It's more than a comic

It's a force of nature! Well, not nature, but whatever the equivalent is on the internet. A force of code? A force of tubes?

Anyways, today, Munroe added another unique accomplishment to his resume by cleaning up Wikipedia nonsense remotely—all he had to do was mention it in the right context, and within hours the regulars were climbing over each other to change it for him. Just take a look at the page history for proof.

To Randall Munroe, creator of XKCD: I tip my hat to you yet again.

Uh, from the page history the nonsense was edited in by some XKCD fans after the comic posted so that the page would fit the comic. XKCD is one of my favorite comics, but this is a bad leadoff example.

It was? Huh, I didn't realize. . . whoever did that were jerks.

Okay, today's strip is awesome. Especially because I recently started reading House of Leaves.

I know what you, the lurker, is thinking. How could Mr. Brickman measure XKCD in Comics? The answer is non-standard systems of measurement!

Here is the classic conversion chart◊ just to define our terms.

All one has to do is find the amount of information in 1 issue of MAD # 26, define that as one Comic, and extrapolate exactly how much XKCD is in Comics. That MAD was at that point a magazine and not a comic as is predicted by Sod's Lemma of Stigler's law.

You may now continue your regularly scheduled forum.

edited Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:27:10 by CTrombley

Superrcollider? I 'ardly know 'er!

Did anyone notice You Tube's newest feature?

No clue what you're talking about. Spell it out for me.

You Tube now features Audio Preview as a function.

I liked the height and depth strips, I learned a bit from them.

Also, the eudio preview sounds fun.

Wow, audio previews. Obviously not perfect (it took a slash to be denote some messed-up double word and tried to pronounce it as one word), and doesn't sound like a human, but for humor's sake. . .

Also, I thought the height one was a barrel of laughs, but the depth one was warmed over funny and was missing most of the zing it should have had.

http://xkcd.com/487/

/0

I was kinda expecting an Imaginary Numbers joke.

http://xkcd.com/488/

That's a pretty radical point to take so publically. Also, might the title be a refrence to the Abbie Hoffman book?

Keep in mind that it's coming from Black Hat. Munroe isn't advocating piracy, his jerkass evil character is just trying to lure people into a life of crime.

Or maybe Randy is taking Refuge In Villainy: By putting his own opinions into the mouth of his Jerkass character, he can get his message out there yet maintain plausible deniability à la what Brickman said.

Either way, I'm not going to take the advice of a guy who doesn't even remember it's possible to buy physical copies. Scratch that, this is specifically about buying files, not buying music in general. But I'm still sticking with physical copies.

edited Mon, 13 Oct 2008 06:10:18 by MetaFour

Dayum this most recent one was epic. Simulating the universe in an infinite desert of rocks and sand? I now know what I'd do if I were immortal. (One of the things, at least.)

Personally, if I were immortal, I'd try to find something, anything more efficient than rocks and sand for making my computer.

I thought the opposite way. If a person was immortal they'd be compelled to simulate the physical universe - because the units of time they spent alive would become a model of the universe. Kurt Godel showed that natural numbers can be used to represent mathematical theorems and since an absolutely immortal person would be compelled to exist for every possible number of units...

I've been thinking thinking about the different kinds of infinities a lot with Desert Guy's predicament. About Supertasks. Even though he has an infinite amount of time and material, there seem to still be limits on what he can do.

Desert Guy is my new god.

Probably my new favourite xkcd.

Quoth Irregular Webcomic "Well, that didn't work, let's try it with 30 sticks of dynamite"

Also, i liked the previous one, I love the confused look on the guy in the last panel. Wait, what? Indeed.

I like the Alt Text. How great would it be if the way the LHC destroys the world is through inspiring the Myth Busters?

What kind of "greatness" scale are we talking about here?

I'm just glad that the new version of Firefox lets you read all of the Alt Text without having to go into the page code.

For me, alt text was one of the three or four things I kept IE around for, until they added it for version 3 (and since 3 is so much faster/more efficient it pretty much negated the only other one I can think of).