xkcd – Page 4 – Moe Lane

There ought to be a word for this xkcd concept.

This one:

Continue reading There ought to be a word for this xkcd concept.

Did JFK own one?

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.’

This would have worked, before the Internet.

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:…

xkcd gets it wrong.

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.

There’s a SF story in this.

Working with the below in terms of an artificial structure:

…such as a ringworld or an Alderson disk suggests one heck of a setting. Although working out the oddities of atmosphere, sunlight, and how much of that structure is habitable for anything resembling terrestrial life would be a: very complicated and b: far too easy to get wrong. I get the feeling that this sort of thing was a lot easier to pull off in the days of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I’d watch this.

If it had sufficient pyrotechnics, of course. Maybe an exploding Mercury. And ninja!

OK, that’s just plain wrong.

I refuse to screenshot this xkcd front page for posterity, too. Posterity doesn’t need to know about this.

I’d have to disagree with this xkcd comic.

The argument – that an alien species would interact with the universe in ways that we would not think to look for – kind of falls down on its face with the hypothetical. A sentient ant colony would notice right away that large sections of their observed universe would contain a near-infinite number of objects and activities that were not explainable as natural phenomena but could be explained as the result of conscious, artificial action: the buildings alone would give the game away. It’d be like us working on SETI and not noticing that Alpha Centauri happened to have a Dyson sphere.

At least, that’s my first take. No doubt people will pop by to tell me why I’m wrong.

This trick would never work on my wife.

She would immediately insist on seeing whether I was able to replicate the effect.

I suppose that it’d probably work in a dorm environment, though – especially if everybody on your floor is a liberals art major.

xkcd calls it on Idiocracy.

I watched about half of it, all the while muttering You could have at least referenced “The Marching Morons,” until I more or less lost interest. I think that this comic has helped me understand why.

It’s because the movie was smugly smoking crack, that’s why. And, absent the social insight, well… Idiocracy just ain’t all that as a film.

Moe Lane

PS: xkcd is indirectly referencing something called the “Flynn Effect,” which basically indicates that average IQ scores have been going up since we started using IQ tests. For some reason, the most obvious answer as to why – better infant and child nutrition worldwide means less brain damage – is being resisted by some; ach, well, it’s not like this is my field of study anyway, so I have no skin in the game.