XKCD: It's more than a comic

The important question is "is the spider red?" ;)

I like to keep my audience riveted.

"The BDLPSWDKS Effect"

Uh

Moon◊

I have no idea what that meant.

I like to keep my audience riveted.

When there's an Explain XKCD of this I'll look it up because I can't be bothered to start putting all of those names into Wikipedia right now. I get the joke, though; and even without checking I assume Munroe bothered to correlate the circumstances in the "effect" he describes with the names of the scientists he mentioned. (If he did go that trouble the comic is better in my opinion; but even if the scenario is completely arbitrary the joke is still a good one.)

EDIT: Alright, so right after saying I wouldn't Google/Wikipedia those names I did Google them. I discovered that I had already known most of them previously, but forgotten what they were called. To save everyone else the trouble of Googling them:

• Bernoulli's principle states that if the rate of a liquid's flow changes there must be a corresponding change to its potential energy or pressure. I'm not quite sure but I think this is supposed to be the source of the lift on the fire engine.

• The Doppler effect occurs when the source of a continuous sound moves toward or away from the observer. If the source of the sound approaches the observer it'll be heard as rising in pitch, while the converse will happen if the source is moving away. The same effect happens with light; it is called the Hubble effect or simply blue shift or red shift. (If the source of light is moving towards the observer its colour will be perceived as shifting towards the blue end of the spectrum; but Hubble famously discovered that far-away objects are actually becoming more red, indicating that they're moving away form us and thus that the universe is expanding.)

Back to Doppler: the example people usually use to explain the Doppler effect to children is a firetruck driving past with its sirens sounding. That's why the vehicle in this comic is a firetruck. The more salient reference to the Doppler effect occurs when the tonality of the driver's language is taken into account. In a non-tonal language it won't matter if the yell rises in pitch because of the Doppler effect; but if the language is tonal the meaning of the word yelled might change because the pitch rises.

• The Leidenfrost Effect is what happens when you drop a ... drop of water on a very hot stove. The water in contact with the stove's surface boils into a vapour that isolates the rest of the drop from the stove, so you have a ball of water floating above the stove until it's vapourised entirely. That's why there a superheated gas in the scenario.

• The Peltzman effect has to do with risk analysis. People naturally compensate for risk, and Peltzman argues that if you increase regulation to improve safety the positive effect will be negated by a corresponding adjustment in peoples' behaviour. They believe they're safer because of the regulation so they feel at liberty to take more risks. (According to Wikipedia Peltzman overstated the magnitude of this phenomenon when he proposed it in relation to road safety regulation; increasing regulations actually did make the roads safer even though some people actually did increase risk taking.)

There's a famous example of this: if you're wearing a bicycle helmet, drivers around you will take more risks around you than they would if you weren't wearing a helmet. The thinking - subconscious, obviously, and quite terrifying - is that if you're not wearing a helmet they're afraid they'll hurt you, but once they see you're wearing a helmet they'll care less about the possibility of causing an accident involving you.

Again, I'm not entirely sure why this effect is included in the scenario described in the comic.

• Sapir and Worf (among others) suggested that the model of our environment used by our consciousness is built from linguistic elements; and that particular features of our language actually directly influence how we experience the world around us. In this comic this phenomenon is reflected by the condition that a person who speaks a language with a word for "firefighter" has a faster reaction time to the truck, presumably because it is easier for such a person to make sense of the situation or at least the connotations of the firetruck and the colour associated with it.

• The Dunning-Kruger effect is one of those things everyone should know. Basically, when evaluating one's skills in a given field, people with more knowledge of that field will tend to rate their expertise as lower than people who actually have less knowledge of that field. This is both very understandable and very frustrating. In this comic this phenomenon is reflected with the reference to the subject's perceived fluency in the language the fireman is yelling in.

• Finally, the Stroop Effect. If you're shown the name of a colour written in another colour it'll take you longer to understand the word than it would if the colour of the ink and the colour the word refers to were the same.

I'm not quite sure if this scenario actually includes all of these effects, but at least I learned something and got a laugh out of it. That's what you expect from XKCD.

edited 28th May '15 11:56:36 PM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Impressive work, thanks. The comic was fun enough on its own (I had fun imagining the experimental procedures to obtain this result) but now I learned a few things as well.

Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.

I think because you're deciding whether you need to jump away from the firetruck. Or maybe because firefighters are an embodiment of regulated risk which unburdens you of responsibility?

I think because they're shouting "Red" meaning "Go" when we're trained to consider red=stop.

edited 29th May '15 12:13:21 AM by Luthen

You must agree, my plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity! My Tumblr

To me, it's more related to the fact that fire trucks are usually red (so they'll reach the emergency faster).

edited 29th May '15 12:31:24 AM by Medinoc

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

The best case scenario has the firefighter yelling "RED" in a language that the potential victim (I'll just say "victim" from now on) will understand even if the pitch of the yell appears to be rising due to the Doppler effect. Because the language has a word for "firefighter" the victim understands that a firefighter's instructions are to be followed immediately. The word "red" is associated with stopping; but because a warning is essentially a form of regulation the victim will overcompensate for the added security by disobeying the regulation and moving out of the way.

The worst case scenario has the firefighter yelling "GREEN" in a tonal language; so the word's meaning may be changed by the rising pitch resulting from the Doppler effect. The victim thinks they understand that language but actually don't, so there's a high probability of a misunderstanding. "GREEN" means "go" but this message will probably be lost on the victim due to the language barrier and their overconfidence. Because the language doesn't have a word for "firefighter" the victim presumably isn't primed to automatically obey a firefighter's orders.

In both of these cases I've made the most extreme possible interpretation of the given scenario.

edited 29th May '15 1:14:45 AM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

This comic is pretty funny in itself, but you'll probably need spoilers to fully understand it (unless you are a genius). Anyway, Explain XKCD has a pretty good, but still short description about why these effects are relevant to the comic.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

The only reference to Bernoulli's Principle seems to be the lift caused by differences in pressure. I take it he's more familiar with its application in Aerodynamics (while I saw it in the context of Hydraulic engineering, so I associate it with water flow more than anything)

Also, these seem to be effects, while Bernoulli's is a "principle". Odd.

edited 29th May '15 5:35:53 AM by JonnasN

Thanks for doing all the research, Best!

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

And of course, the BDLPSWDKS-Placebo Effect states that all of this may happen even if the fire truck isn't there in the first place, so long as the driver yells at you.

Either way, have something a little more readily approachable: David Bowie's classic track, "Space Weird Thing".

Moon◊

Even just a recording of the yelling is enough.

I'm reading this because it's interesting. I think. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over.

I find it weird that "weird" is one of the most common 1000 words, but "nine" is not. Also, "weird" is a weird in itself with its "ei", while most other words are spelled with "ie".

OK, now I used "weird" enough so that I can more easily believe that it's in the most common 1000.

I guess it depends on what source you get the most common words though, because when Up Goer Five came out, I googled the most common 1000 words, and "thousand" was among them, while Randall specifically used "ten hundred".

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

There are more examples of English words that do not observe "i before e except after c or sounding ay as in neighbor and weigh" than words that do.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

Another way to interpret the comic is that the BDLPSWDKS Effect represents the research value of the average doctoral thesis. Or if not the average, at least mine.

Astronomy prank. XD

I like to keep my audience riveted.

I'd much prefer it if New Horizons got to Pluto and figured out that Charon was actually a ball of ice covering something that looked like a giant space gun...

They do have medals for almost, and they're called silver!

Simak wrote a short story about an expedition getting to Pluto and finding the blueprints for the solar system left by whatever construction crew built it. They got it completely wrong.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

Time to send an expedition to Mars' pole...

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

We'd be a hundred years ahead of schedule. Just in time to watch Rakhana die, and well before first contact with the Yahg.

They do have medals for almost, and they're called silver!

Antique Factory

This one gets a chuckle from me because it reminds me of a road sign that I would drive by in central Virginia: "Antique Chairs Made Daily".

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Hehe.

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.