XKCD: It's more than a comic

What-If #67: Expanding Earth

This is a fairly neat one; it's rather astonishing how little change we'd notice at first from a slow expansion of the planet.

Yay, it's been a long time since we had a doomsday scenario.

Speaking of weird science, Black Hat Man is at it again.

IIRC, "my hobby" guy and the Classhole are two different characters.

I thought there were multiple 'my hobby' guys.

I thought Randall himself was the "My Hobby" guy, and he just used random characters to demonstrate said hobby for him.

Yeah, that's true. Messing with the laws of nature like that seems like something Black Hat Man would do, though.

edited 16th Oct '13 8:31:29 AM by Demetrios

It's a Running Gag about Randall's "hobbies", most of which involve trolling various types of scientific or engineering professionals.

Or average Joes. You know, the ones who talk about various sweet ass-things.

Oh, thanks :P

-rimshot-

Is that one alt text on the pic of Earth having rings a Shakira reference?

Beyonce, actually.

The new one for the day.

The logic on this one is a bit torturous. Let me see if I get it. So, if my name is John Smith, and I had the email address "jsmith@hotmail.com", I imagine I'd get more than a few emails intended for some other John Smith. I could possibly use the information in those emails to conduct identity theft on the persons for whom they were actually meant.

?

I think the idea is that a much older, much less tech-savvy John Smith started putting jsmith@gmail.com into various online things.

He thinks his email address is something other than it is? ... Okay.

That's why you make three e-mail: one for online stuff, one for meatspace stuff, and one for stupidly shady stuff online.

I just have the one (well, technically two, but I don't use my work email for personal stuff). Remembering lots of email addresses is far more trouble than it's worth.

I suppose that if I ever were to get involved with illegal stuff online, I'd use a different address, but that presumes that I would do such a thing to begin with.

I technically have 5, if counting my work's e-mail and my g-mail I hardly aknowledge.

And really, I mostly use one, while the meatspace one is limited to stuff where people know my name anyway while the "shady" e-mail practically isn't used, but it's there if I need it.

I can relate to the email. I've received invitations to exclusive events, car registration papers, personal pictures, all because someone out there thinks my email address is theirs. More frustrating for me, there's some little girl who keeps listing my email for her guardians on websites, and the laws regarding children signing up to such sites means they can't even contact her to say she's got the wrong address.

Now that is bizarre.

Actually seems like it's an extension of the "wrong number" occurrences you get with phones. Only rather than just being due to a misremembering or misdial, it's can also be due to a misunderstanding in how email works.

And, funnily enough, I have gotten someone else's phone bill in my email, though the person didn't have the same name as me, and it was in my "stingerbrg" email, not my professional email.

edited 18th Oct '13 9:17:22 AM by stingerbrg

Two email addresses here, but I don't remember why I have the second one. And yeah, took me a minute to get what the comic meant.

I rather think people make up plausible sounding email addresses when they dont want to share the real one (er, not that I have ever done that myself). So you're getting a bill they never intended to receive in the first place.