Moe Lane

There is a problem with this argument:

And it can be summed up as follows: you read newspaper articles online, yes?  And you know full well that the comments sections to said articles are universally filled by crazy people who write like they had to cram to pass the Turing Test, yes?  And so you know to either not read newspaper comment sections, or else simply skim them for particularly good examples of Teh Crazy, yes?

Yes?

…So why are you assuming that you’re unique in all of that? – Because, well, you’re not. (more…)

No markup on those.

Link.

It’s… weird.  I know that Randall Munroe visibly does not care if you hotlink – he invites you to do that, in fact – but it still feels somehow icky to do it.

…and xkcd has me pegged.  Doubly, in fact: I also like the Robinson map.

And if you to were wondering what the big deal is about the Gall-Peters map projection, check it out.  I already knew that cartographers were very, ah, enthusiastic about their craft; but I’m legitimately shocked that this controversy didn’t end with knives in the sewers.

Moe Lane

It’s the alt-text that does it for me.  Although my favorite types of music are still mostly sold via CD.

Still, I forget who, but somebody once mourned the death of vinyl mostly because it also meant the end of the glory days of album covers…

This xkcd cartoon is interesting:

…both for the science behind it (feel free to demonstrate your superior grasp of biomedical research by understanding this better than I do – which is to say, at all) and the commentary about the strip, which ranges from “ZOMG you’re making jokes referencing cancer you bad person” to “ZOMG you have completely gotten wrong three or four arcane bits about biomedical research you bad person” – although admittedly both of those types of responses are being treated with mockery that was more gentle than it could have been.  All I know is, I think that the possibility was first brought up in “Our Neural Chernobyl.”

Hmm.  I should look up the date that that story was supposed to have taken place.

…comes from xkcd.  Hidden in its depths is a Truth about… well, if I have to explain it then it isn’t true Illumination.  Just go look at it. Do not fail to look at it!

You’re welcome.

Sorta via Neil Stevens (I read xkcd religiously myself):

…Yeah. My favorite crazy phenomenon was the 100 mpg carburetor/cars that ran on water/’gas pill’ that the auto/oil companies supposedly suppressed, back in the day. ‘Back in the day’ being the 1970s, when the US Army would have paid any sum that you might have wanted for a truck with four to five times the range of the ones that they were using.

Note, I did not say ‘tank.’  I said ‘truck.’

Moe Lane

*I forget who said that first.

…slightly:

…there’s going to be a dividing line of about 1920 or so; prior to that, they won’t have enough audio/video recorded material to get a good gestalt of the time periods involved. For that matter, I expect linguistic drift to slow down a good deal, now that we increasingly have the ability to hear how our great-grandparents talked.

This one:

(more…)

That’s… a really good question, xkcd.

And check out the alt-text at the link.  He’s right about the Rice speech – although xkcd’s middle alternative sounds like a pretty reasonable thing to do, for given values of ‘reasonable.’

As a method for sucking in people to watch romantic comedies, that is.  Heck, make the first five or fifteen minutes cool enough and you can get people to forgive you the remainder :coughcoughcoughGladiatorcoughcoughcough:…

Doesn’t happen all that often.

…but, really, I find it amazing that xkcd has never heard of Agatha’s Law:

Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!

I mean, the hero of this particular strip is a science-inclined type who’s just been able to personally observe dimensional travel.  Directed dimensional travel, under the control of a human operator.  He needs to get done with mourning the loss of his heroic fantasy adventure vacation and get started with reverse-engineering that shit.