XKCD: It's more than a comic

Just not hungry, I guess?

Edit: damn page topper!

edited 13th May '13 10:01:24 AM by Fighteer

Both of them fail as predators, actually.◊
At least Khyber makes a good bed for sleepy chick.

(Technically this is a good thing. I'd hate to have to prohibit the cats from the back yard, they love it out there)

edited 13th May '13 10:06:03 AM by ArcanGenth

I guess your cats are smart enough not to begin hunting dinosaurs.

Did you know that birds are the second-most diverse group of vertebrates (after fish) in the world today? We mammals are still behind dinosaurs in evolving diversity.

Given the difference between e.g. ostriches and hummingbirds? I'd believe it.

So that means that I caught a dinosaur bare-handed that last time, and not just a bird? That makes me pretty cool I guess. (Ok, to be fair that bird WAS kind of dense, or too trusting, but I still caught it with my hand alone)

Also, lol Arcan's cat. The apex predators.

"Time" has had the two characters walking for something like five days now.

Apex predators, assured of their role atop the food chain, don't hunt unless they need to and can coexist quite peaceably with their prey until they get hungry. That's not what's happening here, though.

edited 13th May '13 2:25:02 PM by Fighteer

not sure if anyone else posted, but at this point Time has more panels then there are comics of XKCD.

It's been days - maybe a week - since I last checked Time. The more time passes the less likely I am to check the pages I've missed, but I know I won't skip it completely. Eventually I'll check what's become of it.

If it does end, though, I'd be grateful if someone would mention it here.

EDIT: Motivated by the thought of how long the backlog would be if I let the comic go on without me, I watched it through from where I was (strip 800 or so) to where it is now.

edited 13th May '13 3:30:24 PM by BestOf

I wasn't really thinking they were anything close apex predators, it wasn't a serious remark.

Really? Even if we count placental mammals and marsupials and monotremes together?

What measure of diversity are we using here?

Number of species, maybe? Fish isn't exactly an accurate grouping anymore, though. :/

Buuuuuuut apparently there's about 32,500 species of fish, 10,000 bird species, from what I can find, and about 5,000 species of mammals?

edited 13th May '13 10:20:16 PM by Zersk

The one about Tyrannosaurus rex being more closely related to a sparow is right, but the part about the timeline is somewhat misleading. It assumes a steady, unchanging rate of change in genetics, and while that is somewhat true for certain parts of the genome (Cytochrome C is the most famous example), populations do not change at the same rate and can go for long periods of time without change.

But still, having dinosaurs around is pretty sweet, especially the really smart ones that can eat basically anything, make tools, hold grudges, mimic human speech, and caw in an obnoxious manner.

Genetic diversity depends on what kind of diversity you want. Number of species doesn't necessarily mean a lot of genetic differentiation between said species (Although number of species is probably the best indicator of genetic diversity for me). Also, species are taxonomic distinctions, so they're already pretty murky.

edited 13th May '13 11:18:17 PM by Scardoll

I'd expect genetic diversity to be something like the greatest genetic variation between any two species that are still part of the category. Number of species doesn't seem to mean much if they're all very similar.

Well, a clade with two species that are very different from each other might have a huge difference between their genetics, but I wouldn't think of it as a very diverse clade.

I was talking about "diversity" as in "number of species."

Yeah. For instance, the salmon (I don't care which kind - any salmon) is more closely related to humans than it is to sharks.

I think the time aspect was probably added to surprise the people who hadn't given much thought to the time scales involved. The era of dinosaurs - the way people usually think of dinosaurs, so I'm not including birds even though they are dinosaurs - was so long compared to this current, arguably mammal-dominated one that many fail to realise that the evolution of humans is small potatoes compared to what the dinosaurs went through.

People who are not familiar with the history of life might also be surprised to find out that multicellular life emerged just 1.7 billion years ago (I looked up the figure in Wikipedia.) Life has been around for about 3.5 billion years, so for half of the history of life you didn't even have multicellular organisms.

The Cambrian explosion, which gave us most of the major animal phyla around (I'm basically quoting the article,) happened about 500 million years ago. So life had already been going for about 3 billion years before animals became really relevant. (I'm basing "relevance" on what sort of record the organisms left - so whatever life there was before this era would be declared "irrelevant" if their bodies were too soft to fossilise.) If you divide the history of life on Earth into 500-million-year periods you won't have complex animal life in the first 6 of your 7 periods.

I read that in 500 million years, most plants won't be able to photosynthesize because of the increasing temperature of the sun. I don't remember the details. There's several types of photosynthesis, and the most common kind will be become impossible.

500 million years is a long time. Long enough for adaptations to solve that sort of problem. Plants already utilize a variety of photosynthetic chemicals; this is why leaves change color in the autumn, as the chlorophyll gives way to other pigments that utilize different wavelengths.

Evolution isn't organisms spontaneously developing different traits in response to a change in their environment; it is selection pressure on populations that modifies the survival value of traits that already exist.

edited 14th May '13 6:55:41 AM by Fighteer

I liked the explanation my Anthropology teacher gave us on evolution: He compared it to food in our kitchen.

Say a family buys a lot of stuff, what is going to go first, vegetables or desserts? If there's children, it'll be the desserts, of course assuming a parent doesn't stop them.

The population in the food closet didn't change: it's just that all the cookies got devoured, and the vegetables had the evolutionary advantage of not being delicious for children, so only them remain.

You could go further by comparing different kind of cookies and seeing that some cookies have the advantages of not being delicious so they stay longer. If the mother buys more of those cookies, it's not that the oreos transformed into fudgeos or whatever, it's just that the lame cookies got to "reproduce".

It's kind of a silly example, but it explains the basic idea.

Double post for What-If.

Today, we learn that Chris Hadfield's video is not actually that expensive.

"UNSCHEDULED BURN" was a pretty clever pun.

Dinosaurs :D

A good reason to develop FTL drives.

(see the Alt Text)

...Dayum, he has the unique combination of having a good singing voice, being an astronaut, and actually being able to pull off a mustache that makes him incredibly sexy, to me. >///<

On another note, I love the [citation needed] on the both of them are used for other things comment.

[1] The memesphere, it's spreading! I am amused at Sirius, though it's had two years to get over it.

Also, found a fancier Time viewer: http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/