XKCD: It's more than a comic

Negative A1A1A1 would be 5E5E5F. At least, assuming the first number is in hexadecimal.

edited 31st Jul '13 4:33:11 PM by IrishZombie

Monday's forecast reminds me of these deer-rabbits.

Okay, I don't know why the link's getting messed up. Just take out the -%20 from the middle of the word 'return' in the url.

edited 31st Jul '13 7:17:50 PM by Twiddler

The Forum software doesn't like long URLs so if you have a very long URL you should use a URL shortening service like TinyURL or bit.ly.

couldn't you set it so is automatically removes "-%20" from all urls? it's not very likely that an actual URL would have that in there.

The de-hyphenizing algorithm can be made foolproof by simply using the same algorithm as the hyphenizer, in reverse. No need for heuristics.

Edit: No wait, because it won't add hyphens where there is already one, so we still have to rely on the very low probability of there already being an hyphen and space at this exact place in the URL.

edited 31st Jul '13 10:09:50 PM by Medinoc

The negative of my zip code pops up two cities in Mexico and one in the Netherlands. Sucks to be them I guess?

The new one for today: Pale Blue Dot.

The comic itself is pretty funny, but the alt-text is a bit bleak.

You mean up to the part at the very end where they're suddenly addressing Congress?

I love that. Bleak? The Alt Text is hilarious.

I'm confused though, didn't we already capture all the Ba'als?

Really? I thought we've been farming them for loot in Diablo II: Lord of Destruction :V

I also love that the nihilism is being used as a justification to fund the space program. It's such a non-sequitur that I'm getting Mood Whiplash.

"Time"'s backstory

The raft parts of "Time" is a good time play the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine." :)

While the clues are all interesting, there's not really any more information in that article than I imagine most had already worked out. The fact that it's centered around a Zanclean-alike flood is obvious from the first time it shows the map, and that it's in the future rather than the past can be inferred from the fact that modern humans weren't around when the past Zanclean flood occurred. The bit about Antares was neat.

I wonder how he made Beanish underdecipherable? Did he just write random scribbles ?

We have very little of a corpus of it; it's quite plausible that even a reasonable, self-consistent language would be indecipherable from only that, if it's very different from English. I sure as hell couldn't manage to get Japanese, say, from five or ten sentences.

I'd say there was some new info in that article. For instance, while we did now that the flood was in the future, we didn't know when. Some of you might've read my posts trying to figure out a rough estimate of when this might be taking place. 11 000 years was way shorter than what I thought; as the article mentions, the Mediterranean didn't dry naturally in the Time universe, but the Strait of Gibraltar was closed artificially.

Huh. I always thought that it was some kind of fantasy world where geographical events such as this flood managed to happen in the time of people.

11 000 years from now will probably be well within the era of Homo sapiens sapiens. We've only been around for a couple hundred thousand years, which isn't long for a mammal species, and as I said previously we've only been doing agriculture and civilisation for about 10 000 years or so. Of course I don't know how long the age of civilisation will be, or whether our species will survive the end of that era in any form, but I don't know of a reason to assume that we won't last another 10 000 years.

Well, except that in Time we clearly didn't.

I'd like to know how long after-the-end it takes place. The article linked previously mentions that there probably was a dam blocking the Strait of Gibraltar, and the story's events take place after that dam starts to break (or breaks entirely.) Without a way to know anything about that dam (except an estimate of its dimensions) we can't know how long it'd last after regular maintenance stopped - and thus we can't know how long it's been since there was a technologically advanced settlement near it.

edited 2nd Aug '13 2:23:15 PM by BestOf

Maybe we can estimate how long it would take before we could reach the point where we could engineer a dam like that

I imagine we could make a decent attempt at it now, if we made it a major international project. But as far as I can tell that would have nothing but bad effects on everything, so we probably wouldn't try.

(Seriously, why would you actually build a Gibraltar Dam? It would cut a whole lot of marine travel routes, and I can't think of any benefits.)

^ Europeans wanting their own private swimming pool?

Maybe North Africa and/or Europe ran out of space and decided to dry up the Mediterranean so that they could expand on the new terrain. I suppose it would make good farmland...

Powerplant, and you can probably make some sort of canal or ship passway next to the dam.