Xkcd

The subject matter of the comic varies xkcd statements on life and love to mathematicalxkcd, programmingand scientific in-jokes. Some strips feature simple humor or pop-culture references.

Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki! Help us finish them! Go to this comic explanation. The comic features a character identifiable as a minstrel , bard or folk singer , performing a narrative song on a jetty. The words appear to recount the fate of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald , a famously wrecked vessel and thus seemingly an ideal subject for a musical retelling in a traditional way that is often found in the form of a sea shanty and tells of events familiar to those who associate with ships. The words of the song start off very much in the manner of such a nostalgic recounting, but soon becomes a direct reference to the art of songwriting itself. Rather than describing in song how a disaster occured, it turns out to be a description of how a disaster occured for the sake of a song.

Xkcd

Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki! Help us finish them! Go to this comic explanation. This is a comic about the differences between magic and physics. Miss Lenhart , a school teacher, says that physics is applying forces to objects continuously over time, while magic tells you the outcome, but not how it'll get there. She gives an example of a magical curse that causes the recipient to slay their brother by midnight or possibly noon; it's not science because it doesn't say what will cause them to take this action. She then states that the laws of thermodynamics and other laws are also magic, with Lagrangians being deep magic. The joke is that these basic physical laws have been discovered empirically, but we don't know why they're true. So by the logic in the second panel, they're essentially like magic, since they specify a result without explaining how we get there. It may be possible to derive some of them from the others, but eventually we hit bottom and we have to say "because it just is", and that's like magic. The second panel alludes to Newtonian mechanics, which is formalized mathematically as an initial value problem; that is to say, the initial conditions of a system are known, and the rules relating the current condition of a system to the evolution of that system over time are specified.

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The subject matter of the comic varies from statements on life and love to mathematical , programming , and scientific in-jokes. Some strips feature simple humor or pop-culture references. It has a cast of stick figures , [3] [4] and the comic occasionally features landscapes, graphs, charts , and intricate mathematical patterns such as fractals. Munroe has released five spinoff books from the comic. The first book, published in and entitled xkcd: volume 0 , was a series of select comics from his website. His book What If?

The seventh What If? In real life, we can't put a metal pole between the Earth and the Moon. The end of the pole near the Moon would be pulled toward the Moon by the Moon's gravity, and the rest of it would be pulled back down to the Earth by the Earth's gravity. The pole would be torn in half. Another problem with this plan. The Earth's surface spins faster than the Moon goes around, so the end that dangled down to the Earth would break off if you tried to connect it to the ground:. There's one more problem: [2] Ok, that's a lie—there are, like, hundreds more problems. The Moon doesn't always stay the same distance from Earth.

Xkcd

The seventh What If? Freezer Would a toaster still work in a freezer? On a recent episode of Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy's terrific advice podcast, My Brother, My Brother and Me , the brothers pondered a Yahoo Answers question about what would happen if you put a toaster inside a freezer. The discussion comes around the minute mark. They have a fun discussion of a few aspects of the problem before eventually moving on to the next question. Since they don't really settle on a final answer, I thought we could help them out by taking a closer look at the physics of freezer toasters. A quick safety note: If you actually do this, keep in mind that the toaster may melt some of the ice in the freezer, leaving you with a running electrical appliance in a pool of water. For starters, the answer: The toaster would win.

Wooden garden furniture b&q

Archived from the original on October 3, Retrieved September 27, However, not all strips are intended to be humorous. August 17, Red Hat Magazine. Magic Title text: 'At the stroke of midnight, your brother will be hurtling sideways at an altitude of meters' is a regular physics prediction about your nonmagical trebuchet, whereas 'you are cursed to build a brother-launching trebuchet' falls out of the Lagrangian. On several occasions, fans have been motivated by Munroe's comics to carry out the subject of a particular drawing or sketch offline. Retrieved September 28, Archived from the original on December 27, Randall Munroe. There are a lot of comics that don't have set-in-stone explanations; feel free to put multiple interpretations in the wiki page for each comic.

The subject matter of the comic varies from statements on life and love to mathematical , programming , and scientific in-jokes.

Archived from the original on July 15, Schulz 's Peanuts. Toggle limited content width. Naked Security. On September 19, , "Click and Drag" was published, which featured a panel which can be explored via clicking and dragging its insides. Munroe has released five spinoff books from the comic. Retrieved August 19, Archived from the original on December 25, Information Science Institute. Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Archived from the original on June 23, They only predict what the state of the system will be after a long enough time has elapsed for the system to have stopped evolving; in other words, to have reached equilibrium. Miss Lenhart , a school teacher, says that physics is applying forces to objects continuously over time, while magic tells you the outcome, but not how it'll get there. Retrieved September 16, Rolling Stone.