- Harsher in Hindsight:
- The post "Pressure Cooker,"
which described exploding pressure cookers among other things, came six days before somebody used a pair of pressure cookers filled with shrapnel to bomb the Boston Marathon
. - "Common Cold" in the book asks if rhinoviruses could be eradicated if every human lived in isolation for five weeks, resembling the social distancing measures enacted globally a few years later due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Randall points out that it would be theoretically possible to do this, but the economic impact would be extreme. COVID-19 caused a global slowdown in economic activity that threatens to turn into a recession, particularly in the United Statesnote .
- The post "Pressure Cooker,"
- Hilarious in Hindsight: "Space Jetta
" in January 2016, about the effects of a car re-entering that atmosphere, had one comic panel that jokes about SpaceX sending Teslas into space by accident. A bit over two years later, they did it on purpose
. - Memetic Mutation: The line "You would just stop being biology and start being physics" from the Sunbeam post have become a recurring phrase among those interested in science, usually used in cases of extremely fast and grisly deaths.
- Nausea Fuel: The "mole of moles", which turns into a planet-sized mass of boiling meat slurry.
- Unintentional Period Piece: "All The Money
" in September 2014 mentions the penny being in circulation in the US, with the US Mint still making new pennies despite efforts to kill it, and the blog even links to a (now expired) website dedicated to the cause. The US treasury would finally stop minting the penny on February 9th, 2025
on the orders of President Trump. This also applies to the video version
, though to a lesser degree, as, while the video doesn't mention that the US wastes money minting pennies like in the blog post, it still implies the US hadn't stopped yet, as the visuals and allusions to the situation are still present via the US having the most pennies in the world, and also mentioning that Canada got rid of their pennies recently; the unsaid implication is that the US hadn't stopped minting the penny yet, despite doing so a few months earlier.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Ymmv/WhatIfXKCD
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