XKCD: It's more than a comic

What if you made an earth-sized bowling ball?

I got 14000 points, because "WELCOME TO KETCHIKAN, FIRST CITY OF ALASKA".

I keep mixing up New Mexico/Arizona/Nevade and Australia, also Spain with Brazil.

I think you meant Western Russia? Here's a map of the population density of Russia.◊ Only about 30 million Russians - less than a quarter of the population of Russia - live East of the Ural mountains (i.e. in Siberia.) Siberia is well over 2/3 of Russia's vast land area, but almost 80% of Russians live in European Russia (i.e. West of the Urals.)

I rather like this What-If. It was thought-provoking.

I'm not entirely sure that "smoothness" was ever a property of the Earth that we were idealizing.

edited 21st May '13 8:47:19 AM by Fighteer

Either way, it's a vehicle for a billion The Big Lebowski jokes, which is fine by me.

Best Of: Yeah, my bad. I meant Western Russia. The plains area is practically uninhabited.

Today's update

is kind of poignant. And depressing.

'But words will hurt forever.'

Nah, I dont feel it...

Heh, I've visited the Parthenon in Nashville.

It ain't much.

They say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is.

New one.

I'm not really sure that's a true statement, since guns tend to work best on things that are macroscopic. A microwave oven, however, now that I'm certain would kill all the cancer cells in your petri dish (and possibly the dish itself).

I'm pretty sure petri dishes can't be killed. You know, on account of being not alive.

Not so sure about this. I discovered by accident recently that ants can endure at least a minute of being microwaved with no apparent ill effects.

That depends on the amount of water the ant (or the cancer cells) has inside compared to the total amount of water in the microwave.

My definition of "killing" a dish is to either crack it if it's glass/etc or (partially) melt it if it's plastic. I would expect any container that wasn't specifically designed to be microwavable to react badly if you cook it long enough.

My assumption on the dish was that it's the only thing in there, and that the cells are probably suspended in either some kind of nutrient heaven or an approximation of the environment within the body. Either of which includes at least a bit of moisture.

That thing about the ants... wow. I honestly wouldn't have expected that. But then I guess I'm so used to microwaving either one thing at a time or several similar dishes that my intuition doesn't try to visualize what happens to two very different items unless I'm reminded to. Without details on your accident I'm going to go ahead and assume that there was also some food in there at the same time which they'd been attracted to and which you were actually trying to cook. If so, it probably had a lot more volume of water than a couple ant bodies.

Ah, that kind of killing.

Well, heat and kinetic shock from the bullet should be enough to rupture cell membrane, killing the cell *biology student mode*

edited 27th May '13 12:00:18 AM by 3of4

...Any relation to He-Man? :P

I have no idea what you are talking about!

...*mutters over tablet and forum browser*

That reminds me of an experiment we did at uni, splitting He La cancer cells so we could see the unusual chromatids inside. Splitting them involved dropping the cell solution onto slides from a metre up. Low-tech, but it works.

Eradicating He La cells entirely is phenomenonally difficult, apparently - it's a common contaminant in many labs.

Once again I've read Time up to the current strip. They found some kind of plantation, but I can't identify the fruit (or berry or vegetable) that grows there. I wonder what it is...

It's still going?

Yes.