XKCD: It's more than a comic

@stevebat "Steve" wouldn't be affected because the "v" is pronounced at the end - the final "e" is silent. "Steven" would change, though.

I know too many Stevens and Stephans, it's already confusing enough keeping track of them all.

edited 22nd Jun '16 10:43:59 AM by stevebat

I hope it doesn't mean there's going to be more of those text-substitution things about.

It isn't a change in spelling, it's a change in pronunciation. Common, too, like how in American English, unstressed vowels almost always turn into a schwa. We pronounce the first and third vowels of "American" as schwas, but we still write them as "a" and "i".

Ah yes, the schwa. The bane of spelling bee contestants everywhere. The schwa sound can be any vowel, including y. The only way to figure out which vowel it is through analyzing the language of origin

edited 23rd Jun '16 8:09:29 AM by Cailleach

It occurs to me that the theft of the Tinyurl domain could cause more economic harm than an actual nuclear exchange.

How?

There are a tremendous number of tinyurl links that obfuscate where they actually go. Imagine if a single percent of them were redirected to phishing, scam, or virus sites... and what's more, it can be done retroactively so what was a safe link is now an unsafe one without the need to hijack more than one server.

But how much is tinyurl used exactly, especially for important applications?

I don't trust URL shorteners anyway. Should they use https, though, it would be much harder to just steal them.

Local woman gets tangled in spacetime That reads like an Onion headline.

edited 27th Jun '16 8:38:04 AM by Cailleach

Now I really want to look up "tachyonic antitelephone".

Knock yourself out.

#1700: New Bug

Now, I know exactly what's being talked about here, and I find it very amusing, but the part of me that is a programmer wonders why any of those bugs would be system-killing, since they should be relatively straightforward fixes. (The fact that they fix each other by accident is, of course, the joke.)

1701: Speed and Danger.

In what world is Formula I slow?

In the world of rockets.

I liked the alt text for this one. XD

Yeah, the joke is that the legends of the X-axis is probably extremely compressed, with 1 centimetre representing something like 300 kph^note or 1 inch for 500 mph if you prefer and if I did not screw up with the conversion and a speed of 0 at the leftmost point of the axis.

edited 1st Jul '16 8:11:09 AM by C105

So Formula One has a better speed/safety ratio than Nascar? While I know Nascar is infamous for its terrible crashes and F1 is not, it seems odd to me. My first guess would be that you are safer in a bigger vehicle at the same speed, and Nascar cars are bigger than F1 ones.

This isn't about safety records, it's about the pure physics of being smashed into something at high speeds. I'm sure rockets are significantly safer than cars, statistically.

In a scenario that perfectly captures all the factors involved in these risks, the frequency with which the action is performed by members of the casual public greatly increases its overall risk: driving has a far greater ratio of fatalities to miles traveled than airplanes, which have a far greater ratio than space travel. However, this is because we spend orders of magnitude more care on preventing mishaps with the latter.

Most car crashes are survived. All rocket crashes are fatal.

edited 2nd Jul '16 6:26:47 AM by Fighteer

What I mean is that in this diagram F1 is drawn (not counting rockets) significantly faster than Nascar but only a little bit more dangerous. What I'm wondering is what's the reason for this.

Are you sure that statistically (people died in accidents/total people flought) space flight is safer than airplanes? I think that if you count only the two space shuttle disasters then we are still much worse. Consider it: each year there is about 10 plane crashes, while there are several hundreds of flights each day. Compared to that, there were how many people in space? 100? Less?

536, with 18 fatalities.

So that's... ~3% chance of fatality. A hell of a lot higher than both airplanes and cars.

Astronauts have balls of titanium alloy.