XKCD: It's more than a comic

I was going to do a Sailor Moon / Ranma One Half Crossover where Ranma and Ryoga were reincarnations of Captain Solar and Lord Oort respectively.

Exoplanet Neighborhood

When I first saw this around noon or so, the Alt Text was just the URL for the larger version, which wasn't otherwise linked to. I see that's been fixed on both counts (proper hyperlink, proper Alt Text).

Anybody understand what the scale and x vs y axes represent?

It says the thing is "constructed from statistical data on typical planet sizes and orbits" and that that it represents a sphere that extends 60 light-years in every direction from Earth, and that only "Goldilocks" planets are included.

I guess the size of the image is just defined by how big it had to be to fit the correct number of planets.

Soda Planet

I like the idea that I'm drinking water that has been drunk, in the past, by a dinosaur. I'll share it with my son tonight.

More to the point, we humans keep having this inflated view of our own significance to the planet, and in many ways we have made a significant impact, but in terms of raw numbers we are puny, puny, puny.

edited 3rd Dec '13 8:47:16 AM by Fighteer

In terms of polluting the world's water supply, we are getting more significant...

Times have changed all right.

I don't agree with that chart. After the '50's, "I don't own a TV" has never been neutral again. It's been embarrassing or smug but nowhere in between. There should be a jump in that graph.

The Alt Text made me chuckle. (If you don't get it, the negative second derivative of a sinusoidal curve, like the graph is, is equal to the original curve.)

You can interpret it as an average. The point where it reaches 0 is when the same amount of people felt smug as embarrassing.

Back when I didnt own a TV, I definately felt smug about it.

I don't own a working tv. I was not aware that I was required to feel anything about this. I am a smug person by default, though, so I wouldn't mind feeling smug about that.

I wonder if it counts having a TV slaved as secondary output to a computer.

Even if I had a TV I wouldn't be watching it.

The numbers for how much water has been drunk by humans in Soda Planet seem wrong. He gives a figure of about 100 trillion liters, but the figures going into that are 110 billion people drinking an average of a liter per day for an average of 40 years each. Multiplying those numbers should give us about 1.6 quadrillion liters, greater than the total volume of all lakes and rivers on Earth.

The new one for the day: Galilean Moons.

Huh? I don't get it.

MOOOOO Ns are always escaping.

Pretty sure it's referencing orbital resonance, Europa and Ganymede are in 2:1 and 4:1 resonances respectively see:[1]◊. Callisto however is not in a resonance and as the furthest out of the Galilean moons would be the most likely to be stolen if another planet got too close to Jupiter.

Not sure about what they're saying but going by their size and position;

Io: "Hi."

Europa: "What's your name."

Ganymede: "MOOOOOON."

edited 6th Dec '13 8:31:13 PM by jaustin89

New comic.

Personally, I'd say that ".exe" is the least trustworthy extension of them all.

He's having too much fun with the link to the store

I liked "I probably won't send you a bobcat"

before that it was "No bobcats", but I guess he changed his mind.

It would be great to get one. Can you imagine the resale value on a bobcat sent by Randall Munroe?

I don't think it would be particularly high, actually. Bobcats aren't that well suited to be shipped multiple times.