XKCD: It's more than a comic

That reminds me in turn of the quest in Skyward Sword where you need an Ancient Flower to repair Gondo's robot, he dismisses the whole idea and reacts in astonishment when you hand one over—even if you've found some in the desert and possibly even given them to him to upgrade your equipment already.

Hm another bit like that comes to mind if Minecraft and Villagers. Their reputation system is built with incentives for the player to be helpful to them and save them from misfortune but players instead purposefully trigger the trouble to get the rewards. With high end bein essentially torture chambers of infinite gratitude or infinite terror depending on what you're doing.

Call My Cell.

I'm used to Black Hat's dickery being more creative.

We all have our off days.

Sometimes you have to be more direct.

Is he just selecting "send to voicemail", or is his phone recognizing "ugh, it's this guy" as a voice command to dismiss the call? That would be a cool thing to test.

Geographic Qualifiers

It takes Overly Narrow Superlative to new heights.

Well, there's always Madagascar.

"You are the most talented employee in this company... in the continental United States."

Ice Core.

That's gotta be really thin.

Not quite as thin as you think. For a few decades ago, that layer would still be clearly visible and distinctive.

Here, ~petersohn, I'm doing to do it properly for you. Watch closely.

Would a Submarine Work as a Spaceship?

Randall continues the animated What If? series with this oldie but goodie. As we've discussed in other threads recently ^note (albeit not about submarines in particular), the main problem that a submarine would have in space isn't air or pressure, but heat. Without water convection to remove heat rapidly, its nuclear reactor generates enough power to warm the interior to unsurvivable temperatures in a matter of minutes, assuming it doesn't melt down first.

The submarine would also have a little difficultly getting back down, since it has no propulsion... except for all those nuclear missiles. It turns out that firing them backwards in their launch tubes would provide just enough delta-V to deorbit. But then you have the problem that a submarine isn't designed to survive reentry, and everyone dies when it breaks up.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 5th 2024 at 1:08:53 PM

…huh, that’s counterintuitive to me because I thought of space as cold. But lack of conductivity also means lack of cooling.

Yes. It's especially fun if nearby things like the Earth, or indeed the Sun, are dumping heat into your spacecraft on one side while the darkness of the void is trying to suck it out on the other.

#2903: Earth/Venus Venn Diagram

Someone in the X comments pointed out that this joke would work nearly as well with an Earth-Theia-Moon Venn diagram.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 6th 2024 at 6:22:59 AM

Sure, our famous Space Is Cold trope has a nice overview in the description, even before you get to the Analysis page. Especially relevant is the bit about how real spacecraft are built to radiate as much heat as possible, so that they would get unreasonably cold if all the powered equipment was turned off.

On Reddit, a submariner pointed out that the air seals on submarines are designed to keep pressure out, rather than in, and therefore would probably leak.

Randall discusses that, but notes that the rate of leakage would be low enough that it wouldn't be the primary factor in the crew's inevitable death.

So are black holes physics or magic?

By the definition the comic uses, magic, I think.

Aren't thermodynamics relatively simple compared to other hard subjects? Stuff moves and it wants to calm down is kind of a gross oversimplification.

"Simulate it on a supercomputer" is the black magic of our age.