XKCD: It's more than a comic

Hey! You got your existentialist angst in my stock sci-fi action blockbuster!

We amuse ourselves until we die...

That kind of talk is silly anyway. Our planet and our lifetime may both be incredibly small on a cosmic scale, but they are also incredibly significant and special on account of being the place and time we are in. The fact that there's a vast gulf of emptiness out there only makes our little bright spot even more significant.

edited 22nd Feb '13 7:53:09 AM by EdwardsGrizzly

Eh, never mind. Doesn't matter.

edited 22nd Feb '13 8:31:59 AM by Arha

I find this strip funny because I like to remind people that "it won't matter when we all wither away".

It's black humor!

Wheeeee, humor!

Wheeee...?

I like this plan. :D

edited 24th Feb '13 11:47:47 PM by Zersk

New comic: http://www.xkcd.com/1178/

Randall's views on pickup artists never fail to give me joy.

And the "Friend Zone" sounds like a great place to go! Where is it?

edited 25th Feb '13 5:23:14 PM by WarriorEowyn

Today's What if is about tweeting and how long before we run out of things to say.

Spoiler alert, it will take a long while.

Freefall had something similar where one of the robots, Dvorak I think, had decided to create a compilation of all possible written works and release them to the public domain so as to render null and void literary copyright and Florence managed to convince him to stick with Tweets with the idea that it was a more possible goal, albeit still really pie in the sky.

I am perhaps more interested in the work being done to analyze the semantic content of the English language. 1.1 bits of information per letter, huh? That's a good argument for a much more streamlined form of language.

I bet "ptikobj" is a variable name that someone actually used in a program.

why, that obviously stands for "pthread iteration count object"

@Fighteer: Note that "important" words in a language tend to end up as the shorter ones; "no", "the", "it", "die", etc.

That said, ~1 bit per letter is not all that bad- consider that we are encoding a spoken language. You need padding room for error-correction in the noisy environments speech occurs over, and written English is a (increasingly rough) encoding of the spoken language.

Ideographic writing could potentially be denser than phonic, but then you have greater difficulty typing and lose the ability to sound out new words from writing alone. So there's a trade-off.

edited 26th Feb '13 10:34:48 AM by Tangent128

Who said that efficiency of the encoding is automatically a good thing? Chinese, with literally thousands of "letters" (if they can be called that), has an incredibly high information density relative to English. It is also a written language which, if I recall my historical anecdotes corretly (and I probably do not), was intentionally designed to be difficult to learn to make sure that only the rich and noble could ever pull off such a feat. And when I googled how many Kanji there are in the Japanese language I didn't even get a number; I got a number that it's recommended that you learn (and that number is four digits).

By comparison, English uses up more paper to say the same thing, but I am fairly certain that as a second-grader I could have pronounced, out loud, literally any intelligible combination of English words.

Oh, and of course, machine code is considerably more information-dense than most programming languages, even if you're counting total information (including comments) as opposed to comparing how densely they pack the computer's instructions. How many people program with it?

New comic of 27/02/13 02/27/13 2013-02-27.

Amen.

That Alt Text

THAT ALT TEXT

I've always written my dates year first, month second, day last. It makes for logical progression if you pair it with a time at the end.

In Hungary, the normal way of writing dates is year-month-day (even if they sometimes use a different separator than in the ISO standard). But as long as you keep the 4-digit year, 2-digit month and day, in that order and with a consistent separator, you'll at least get the advantage of being able to sort it correctly without your computer needing to understand that it's a date.

While I was with the US government (Do D / Air Force), we were told to do all of our dates as year, month, day. I got in the habit and it does indeed work very well for sorting. Drives my wife up the wall, but that's half the fun.

@Brickman: Indeed, one of the things that (I feel, at least) made Chinese and Japanese such a pain for me to learn was the fact that speaking and writing the language have quite a disjunction between them. It's hard to predict from the form of the word how it should be pronounced (an educated guess is usually possible, but that's still wrong like half the time), and doing the opposite is nigh-impossible.

I use year-month-day when I'm generating filenames, as it makes the system automatically sort them correctly.

Yeah, year-month-day is definitely the easiest computationally.

It's generally pretty easy to tell which one's the year. But I can't understand why anyone uses the month-day-year or year-day-month formats. It's just...why??

Only when the year uses four digits. Otherwise, how do you tell what 12/09/13 means?

I often end up using month-day-year on paper simply out of longstanding habit, but whenever I'm given occasion to actually think about writing a date I use year-month-day. Particularly in filenames or other applications where sorting is useful.

My usual parsing algorithm is that if it's nn/nn/nn I assume month/day/year, that being most common in the US. If it's nn/nn/nnnn or nnnn/nn/nn, of course, it's obvious.

edited 27th Feb '13 6:50:06 AM by alethiophile

M/D/YYYY is pretty standard in the United States in general communication. You'd confuse the hell out of most people if you switched to D/M/YYYY format — the opposite tends to be true in other parts of the world, which creates all sorts of wacky fun times when talking "across the pond".

I use YYYY-MM-DD format in programming, but M/D/YYYY when writing, just because that's how people expect to see it.

I never use YY (two-digit year) formatting. That's just horrible.

edited 27th Feb '13 6:58:14 AM by Fighteer