Today’s xkcd raises the bar for what is already a superb “comic” (or should I call it graphic art?). I’ve put a screenshot below, but you really need to go to the original site, for the words flash lighter or darker at the frequency with which the event they depict takes place.
Check out the ninth one down in the fourth column—amazing.
h/t: Grania
amazing.
A beautifully random selection of metrics. “A member of the UK parliament flushes a toilet” is my favourite.
There are some interesting juxtapositions.
Compare the rates in the first two columns in row seven about production and recycling of plastic bottles.
The differences in columns two and three in the first row is also ominous.
Sorry, this was supposed to be a stand alone comment, it has nothing to do with Jonathan Dore’s copmment
I find it amusing that the parliament flush follows the magnitude 4 earthquake in that row.
The difference between row 1 column 2 and row 1 column 3 is not sustainable.
Likewise (row,type) 7,1 vs 7,2 ; 7,5.
And quite why 5,5 compared with 10,3 ?
Randall Monroe, if I recall his name correctly, has a history of doing weird stuff with his images. But this time he’s KISS-ed it : just a table filled with GIFs (a “jraphics interchange format”, to keep Matthews pants un-twisted, like a Moebius strip). And they have “issues” with decades-long loops.
I liked “Someone in Denver orders a pizza “. I wonder how that frequency has changed since the legalization of marijuana.
Hmm, contemplating existence on the stream beds of the Rookies with a tummy full of pizza and ganja eyes. There has to be a correlation.
Please post a warning at the top of this post – “Make sure you are not eating or drinking anything while reading this.”
I just got done cleaning my breakfast off the computer.
Looks like plastic bottle recycling is about 1:3, which is better than I wouldda thought, anyway.
It would have been nice to have seen, “Someone becomes an atheist.” And is that really the average heartbeat…wow I beat that by a lot, of course I just woke up and coffee is not in my blood.
My favorite xkcd, passwords: http://xkcd.com/936/. It will serve people well.
And the password generator based on it:
http://preshing.com/20110811/xkcd-password-generator/
Careful…trusting somebody else to generate your passwords for you is generally not such a bright idea.
This should work on any reasonably Unix-like system.
for i in `jot 4`; do perl -e 'srand; rand($.) < 1 && ($line = $_) while <>; print $line;' < /usr/share/dict/words; done
Change the first integer to the number of words you want.
Cheers,
b&
Good point, but then should I also trust your code? I feel a conundrum building.
Oh, my code is easy enough to verify. It’s straight out of the Perl Cookbook, for that matter.
http://oreilly.com/catalog/cookbook/chapter/ch08.html
Cheers,
b&
Yeah, but I just heard that the guy who wrote that book now controls the planet because he knows everyone’s passwords.
Not Tom Christiansen — not even Larry Wall.
You’re thinking of Ken Thompson
Cheers,
b&
Another nice one.
http://xkcd.com/388/
That is a good one. I did not agree with the placement of everything there, but it was still brilliant.
I agree that some of the placements are a little off but it perfectly captures the essence of the grapefruit.
Millisecond pulsars, now comics stuff! Who would’a thought it?
When I hear or read about crap such as ghosts or homeopathy or any other nonsense I get solace from thinking about millisecond pulsars. In the spirit of Tim Minchim I think, ‘Isn’t THIS enough? Just.. this.. world? Just this.. beautiful, complex. Wonderfully unfathomable.. natural.. world?’.
Alright, I couldn’t remember the exact quote so I looked it up but you get the idea.
Wow amazing. My heart beats twice as fast as that one though, especially now that I’m having coffee. 🙂
Oh.
For a second there, I thought you were saying your heart beats twice as fast as the pulsar mentioned in Torbjörn’s comment above yours. I expect that 716 Hz X 2 X 60 sec/min = 85,920 bpm would be too fast to be diagnosed as fibrillation.
Someone has already updated the wiki page for PSR J1748-2446ad to include the xkcd reference.
From Ben’s link below, we see that the viscosity of pitch is estimated as 100 billion times more viscous than water. More than 83 years for 9 drops to form.
There is something very special about the mind of Randall Munroe.
Those dog & cat adoptions need to go up!!
Especially the cats! 🙁
…and the spay and neuter rates….
b&
How many cats can one own before being classed as a crazy cat person? I would love to have more than the two I have already adopted but as I travel for work occasionally it costs me $110 per week each for boarding and there is also the strain on them from not being at home.
Randall Munroe: the only cartoonist who understands Bonferrroni’s correction: https://xkcd.com/882/ and https://xkcd.com/628/ .
The rollover message is mysterious. What is the ‘pitch drop experiment’?
http://smp.uq.edu.au/content/pitch-drop-experiment
b&
Doh! Of course!
Darn, I was just gonna post that link. Anyway–what a cool experiment!
Reblogged this on CancerEvo.
It would have been funny if next to “A DOG BITES SOMEONE IN THE US” he had shown “A DOG BITES SOMEONE IN THE ASS”
But maybe that’s just me.
No you’re right, ass would’ve kicked it up a notch!
I was pretty sure that the ninth one down in the fourth column was going to be the adopt a cat one. But i was wrong. 🙂
-Florian
So each piece of text is a separate GIF with its own repeat frequency. Obvious when you know how. BUT – it takes some really cool thinking to come up with the idea.
Really cool thinking is something Munroe has shown himself capable of, over and over again, including a facility for using coding in his images.
Not enough people are buying vibrators.