XKCD: It's more than a comic

I wonder how many people, myself included, had to do a double- or triple-take to figure this one out?

Syntactic ambiguity of superscripts ftw!

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I spent a good bit of time wondering where the ¹ was.

I'm very, very confident that the What If?s didn't have alt text before. Hovered over the images for a good amount of time waiting for something to show up, but got nothing.

This must be a relatively recent development, hence why I didn't know about it either.

Moon◊

The what-if pictures have actual alt= text, rather than a title= text. Therefore, they only show in the picture properties or if the pictures aren't displayed, rather than as a tooltip.

After checking, it's title= all right. I would've sworn...

edited 11th Mar '13 9:29:58 AM by Medinoc

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

Except they have title text now, too. Seriously, go try it.

Moon◊

Weird, they've been showing up as tooltips for me.

Also, having checked every picture in all the What-Ifs (side note, every individual planetary shot here has its own), the earliest ones use the alt text as a picture description - you know, the way it's actually supposed to be used. The main comic-esque alt text doesn't come up regularly until a few pages down.

edited 11th Mar '13 9:26:48 AM by CapedLuigisYoshi

a.k.a. Cly, that one girl who doesn't post here much anymore Something something YI = SMW 2 = SMB 5.

I just noticed the what-if title texts a few days ago too. The individual planetary bodies title-texts was pretty good.

And today's comic did confuse me for quite a while. "That's not dimensionally consistent-oh wait-wha?"

edited 11th Mar '13 9:57:20 AM by ashnazg

Looking over the title text in all the What If?s, it seems they start getting "funny" either in 13 (lighting up the moon) or 14 (short answer section #1). Before that, it's pretty much purely descriptive of the image itself.

Moon◊

I spent a while thinking that the superscript 2 wasn't a footnote attached to the r, but a symbol that itself meant "the radius of the circle" according to the key at the bottom. Which turns the meaning from r-squared to r-to-the-power-of-r, which makes even less sense.

edited 11th Mar '13 3:07:22 PM by Desertopa

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

Hm. Is there a term used to refer to the process of raising a variable to the power of itself?

edited 11th Mar '13 4:16:42 PM by KylerThatch

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

I think it's called tetration. Something like ²x = x^x.

"I've come to the conclusion that this is a very stupid idea."

Ah, that's what I was looking for. Thanks.

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

Yay, I got the joke. One week in Engineering is already paying off!

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

So, where's the "What If?" for this week?

Anyone who assigns themselves loads of character tropes is someone to be worried about.

Here: "Cornstarch"

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

The world didn't end!

Although it's probably equally boring to just say "your sink gets clogged" taken to a mild extreme. What exactly did the asker expect to happen?

The scenario was boring, but the pictures amused me.

...I don't get the latest one. Like, isn't that math basics. Is there a joke in there somewhere?

the statement above is false

It's funny to imagine someone cheerfully pouring stuff down their clogged sink until their house explodes?

I think it's the common joke you see in a lot of What-Ifs: Take the parameters of the original question, turn it up to 11, and watch the spectacle. Bonus points for causing destruction on at least a nationwide scale.

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

The joke is that the 2 looks like you're squaring the r, but it's actually a footnote. Helps if you remember that you don't square the radius when measuring the circumference.

edited 12th Mar '13 10:23:20 AM by stingerbrg

Circumference is 2*pi*r; area is pi*r^2.

The joke was the footnote 2

gets confused easily with an exponent.

Do you highlight everything looking for secret messages?

I think I'm preferring the questions which are patently absurd to begin with. I mean, pitching at 0.9c? A storm that deposits all its water in one drop? The three wise men following the northern star at all times and orbiting the South Pole? Things like that.

Moon◊

Clarste: Mere amusement isn't laughter.

That wasn't what I was responding to. Actually, I misread the post between ours to be talking about the what-if rather than the previous comic. Well, it still made sense calculating the rate of house-filling seems like pretty basic math too.