XKCD: It's more than a comic

Magic specifies the outcome but not the intermediate steps?

Hmm, this makes nonlinear dynamic equations the most non-magic thing in existence.

Edited by DeMarquis on Mar 10th 2024 at 8:40:18 AM

A cartoon based on math jokes? Who ever heard of such a thing? It Will Never Catch On!

#2905: Supergroup

Yay, more nerdy math jokes!

I know enough of the references to at least get what the joke is, so that's something more than I can say for some strips.

I got practically none of the references, except two from the alt text. Some I've heard of the others, but not enough to connect the lines.

I think I'm at about 40% - definitely enough to get the joke. I did get all three references from the alt text though.

I’m trying to think of more musicians to pile on the stage. So far I just have For Fighting.

I'll suggest the addition of (One) OK Rock.

Totally over my head.

Had to check explainxkcd for that one. Turns out I simply didn't know enough of the groups to get it.

I totally got the "musical groups with numbers at the start of their names" thing, but was trying to figure out some relationship among the numbers themselves and gave up. Also, there's a pun on set theory going on, but I feel like there are even deeper layers.

Edit: Ohhhhhh. I get it now. The joke is that 176 is the sum of all the numbers. I should have tried that immediately. So it's not just a set theory joke, but a grammar joke.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 13th 2024 at 9:14:23 AM

2906: Earth

For a change, the Facebook page posted the new comic before I saw it here. The comments helped me understand what's going on.

Oh, that one I got immediately. Love it. Everyone's giving Carl shit for a trivial mistake like pointing the engines in the wrong direction for the deorbit burn.

Sounds like the opposite of when he made Carl Sagan a superhero.

Schwa

I have no idea how he's pronouncing 'obstruction' there.

Me neither, this seems to be a bit of a stretch to me.

Well it clearly has to be "ub-struct-chun".

Oh, another one of those comics that makes me realise that I actually lack the slightest clue about the rules of English pronunciation.

That's because English pronunciation doesn't have rules^note yes, I'm half joking here. At least not as strict ones as, say, French or German. Worse, the same word can be pronounced differently in British and American.

Edited by petersohn on Mar 16th 2024 at 3:09:56 PM

^_^ I feel like I wind up mentioning this fairly often in my life, but English got there due to a combination of extreme democracy, colonialism, and occasional misguided rigidity. Basically, English borrowed every word it could from other languages, and sometimes kept the exact spelling, sometimes the exact pronunciation, and sometimes adapted it to what made sense to whatever the common folk or etymologists were saying at the time. So you get words that started from entirely disparate languages which converged to the same spelling and pronunciation like "cleave" and "cleave", but you also get a bunch of oddities like "doubt" having the "b" because obviously English came from Latin, so we need to pattern it after "dubiter" despite us actually having grabbed it from the French "doter", or the enforcement of Latin grammar rules on English resulting in things like anger over split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition.

Well, and then there's things like no gendered endings due to them "compromising" to the languages around them which had opposite ideas of the gender of nouns, or the elimination of the familiar you due to being excessively formal and polite...

As a native English speaker, I totally get why people have trouble with it, but I sometimes love just how weird the language is and how much of the problems basically stem from people being unwilling to bend the words of other languages to the existing model.

To be fair, most peoples, when meeting a word or concept that they have no word for in their own language, will take the word from the language they just met because it already exists, so might as well use it.

For example, in Japanese, chocolate is translated to chokoreto.

Much like how in English, xocolatl is chocolate.

Practically all languages have words that were borrowed from another language with spelling and pronunciation adapted to their own language, such as the ones mentioned previously. English also has words that kept their original spelling and pronunciation despite them making no sense in English. For example, "café", as there is no such thing as "é" in the English alphabet, but the word kept the French spelling for some reason.

The Irish word seanad is an interesting one. It means senate, and is a loanword from English.

The English word comes from the Latin senātus, meaning council of elders, which itself comes from the Latin sen, for old (which is also the root of senior and the Spanish señor).

The Irish word for old is sean (not to ne confused with Seán, which is Irish for John); this evidently shares an origin with sen, since the Italic and Celtic languages didn't diverge until after the Germanic languages split off. This means that seanad preserves the council of elders meaning in a way that senate does not; as such, while seanad is a loanword from English, it ends up also being a calque from Latin.