Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).
BTC 1FhCLQK2ZXtCUQDtG98p6fVH7S6mxAsEey
We did not invent the algorithm. The algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The algorithm killed Jeeves.
The algorithm is banned in China. The algorithm is from Jersey. The algorithm constantly finds Jesus.
This is not the algorithm. This is close.
This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details .
Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).
BTC 1FhCLQK2ZXtCUQDtG98p6fVH7S6mxAsEey
We did not invent the algorithm. The algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The algorithm killed Jeeves.
The algorithm is banned in China. The algorithm is from Jersey. The algorithm constantly finds Jesus.
This is not the algorithm. This is close.
This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details .
Facebook of the Dead
When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones?
Emily Dunham
Either the 2060s or the 2130s.
There are not a lot of dead people on Facebook. The main reasons for this is that Facebook—and its users—are young. The average Facebook user has gotten older over the last few years, but the site is still used at a much higher rate by the young than by the old. [1] There are a zillion surveys confirming this, such as this one from eMarketer.
Based on the site's growth rate, and the age breakdown of their users over time, [2] You can get user counts for each age group from Facebook's create-an-ad tool. although you may want to try to account for the fact that Facebook's age limits cause some people to lie about their ages. there are probably 10 to 20 million people who created Facebook profiles who have since died.
These people are, at the moment, spread out pretty evenly across the age spectrum. Young people have a much lower death rate than people in their sixties or seventies, but they make up a substantial share of the dead on Facebook simply because there have been so many of them using it.
About 290,000 US Facebook users will die (or have died) in 2013. The worldwide total for 2013 is likely several million. [3] Note: In some of these projections, I used US age/usage data extrapolated to the Facebook userbase as a whole, because it's easier to find US census and actuarial numbers than to assemble the country-by-country for the whole Facebook-using world. The US isn't a perfect model of the world, but the basic dynamics—young people's Facebook adoption determines the site's success or failure while population growth continues for a while and then levels off—will probably hold approximately true. If we assume a rapid Facebook saturation in the developing world, which currently has a faster-growing and younger population, it shifts many of the landmarks by a handful of years, but doesn't change the overall picture as much as you might expect. In just seven years, this death rate will double, and in seven more years it will double again.
Even if Facebook closes registration tomorrow, the number of deaths per year will continue to grow for many decades, as the generation who was in college between 2000 and 2020 grows old.
The deciding factor in when the dead will outnumber the living is whether Facebook adds new living users—ideally, young ones—fast enough to outrun this tide of death for a while.
Facebook 2100:
This brings us to the question of Facebook's future.
We don't have enough experience with social networks to say with any kind of certainty how long Facebook will last. Most websites have flared up and then gradually declined in popularity, so it's reasonable to assume Facebook will follow that pattern. [4] I'm assuming, in these cases, that no data is ever deleted. So far, that's been a reasonable assumption; if you've made a Facebook profile, that data probably still exists, and most people who stop using a service don't bother to delete their profile. If that behavior changes, or if Facebook performs a mass purging of their archives, the balance could change rapidly and unpredictably.
In that scenario, where Facebook starts losing market share later this decade and never recovers, Facebook's crossover date—the date when the dead outnumber the living—will come sometime around 2065.
But maybe it won't. Maybe it will take on a role like the TCP protocol, where it becomes a piece of infrastructure on which other things are built, and has the inertia of consensus.
If Facebook is with us for generations, then the crossover date could be as late as the mid-2100s.
That seems unlikely. Nothing lasts forever, and rapid change has been the norm for anything built on computer technology. The ground is littered with the bones of websites and technologies that seemed like permanent institutions ten years ago.
It's possible the reality could be somewhere in between. [5] Of course, if there's a sudden rapid increase in the death rate of Facebook users—possibly one that includes humans in general—the crossover could happen tomorrow. We'll just have to wait and find out.
The fate of our accounts:
Facebook can afford to keep all our pages and data indefinitely. Living users will always generate more data than dead ones, and the accounts for active users are the ones that will need to be easily accessible. Even if accounts for dead (or inactive) people make up a majority of their users, it will probably never add up to a large part of their overall infrastructure budget.
More important will be our decisions. What do we want for those pages? Unless we demand that Facebook deletes them, they will presumably, by default, keep copies of everything forever. Even if they don't, other data-vacuuming organizations will.
Right now, next-of-kin can convert a dead person's Facebook profile into a memorial page. But there are a lot of questions surrounding passwords and access to private data that we haven't yet developed social norms for. Should accounts remain accessible? What should be made private? Should next-of-kin have the right to access email? Should memorial pages have comments? How do we handle trolling and vandalism? Should people be allowed to interact with dead user accounts? What lists of friends should they show up on?
These are issues that we're currently in the process of sorting out by trial and error. Death has always been a big, difficult, and emotionally charged subject, and every society finds different ways to handle it.
The basic pieces that make up a human life don't change. We've always eaten, learned, grown, fallen in love, fought, and died. In every place, culture, and technological landscape, we develop a different set of behaviors around these same activites.
Like every group that came before us, we're learning how to play those same games on our particular playing field. We're developing, through sometimes messy trial and error, a new set of social norms for dating, arguing, learning, and growing on the internet. Sooner or later, we'll figure out how to mourn.
Short Answer Section
In today’s article, I give short answers to several reader questions.
How long would the Sun last if a giant water hose were focused upon it? My sixth grade brother, Adam, asked me this.
—Austin Dickey
Your brother might be surprised to learn that the water would actually make the Sun hotter!
Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, which is fuel for the Sun’s fusion. But more importantly, the extra mass also makes the Sun heavier. This crushes it together more tightly and makes fusion happen faster. This means it will burn more brightly and run through its fuel more quickly.
As you keep adding water, the Sun will go through a lot of wacky fusion phases. (During one phase, called a helium flash . the reaction rate is proportional to the 40th power of the temperature—which is probably the largest exponent I’ve ever seen in a physics equation!)
But one way or another, eventually the whole thing will collapse in on itself, blow off its outer layers, and become a black hole. This black hole will keep soaking up water, spraying off X-rays in the process, until finally the municipal water department notices what you’ve been doing and shuts off your service.
What if you shined a flashlight (or a laser) into a sphere made of one-way mirror glass?
—Chase Montgomery
Believe it or not, you’ve been lied to all your life—there’s no such thing as one-way mirror glass.
Glass either lets light through or reflects it, but there’s no glass that lets light through one way and reflects it the other way. The glass in police shows is partially reflective (on both sides). The key is that the room on the prisoner’s side is brightly lit, so the reflection washes out the small amount of light from the observers’ side.
If Michael Phelps could hold his breath indefinitely, how long would it take for him to reach the lowest point in the ocean and back if he swam straight down and then straight back up?
—Jimmy Morey
He’d most likely black out and die somewhere between 100 and 400 meters.
The human body handles pressure remarkably well. With the right preparation, we can survive pressures over a dozen atmospheres. Different body systems break down at different depths, but one of the trickiest limits is created by High Pressure Nervous Syndrome. Below about 100 meters, divers become jittery and excitable (especially if the pressure increase is rapid), and at the same time begin slipping in and out of sleep. The reason may be direct pressure on the brain .
But let’s suppose Michael Phelps were immune to all those things. In that case, it simply becomes a question of speed.
There aren’t very many records for underwater swimming, but based on how quickly this guy completed the 50m backstroke, it would probably take Michael about.
… to make the trip.
In the first Superman movie, Superman flies around Earth so fast that it begins turning in the opposite direction. This somehow turns back time [. ] How much energy would someone flying around the Earth have to exert in order to reverse the Earth's rotation?
—Aidan Blake
Someone recently blew my mind by telling me I’d been misinterpreting that scene all my life. I like their take on it way better:
Superman wasn't exerting a force on the Earth. He was just flying fast enough to go back in time. (Faster than light, I guess? Comic book physics.) The Earth changed direction because we were watching time run backward as he traveled. It didn't actually have anything to do with the direction he was flying.
Now that I see it, it makes a lot more sense. I mean, as much sense as a red-cape-and-outside-underwear time traveler can make.
A discussion of the reversal of the Earth’s spin—and what that even means—will have to wait for another article.
How fast would you have to go in your car to run a red light claiming that it appeared green to you due to the Doppler Effect?
—Yitzi Turniansky
What would happen if you opened a portal between Boston (sea level) and Mexico City (elev. 8000+ feet)?
—Jake G.
Bernoulli’s principle gives us this estimate of the air flow rate:
That’s fast enough to strip up the pavement from a parking lot. I suggest we put it in Kendall Square—the MIT folks are probably used to dealing with this kind of thing.
When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. During this lovely dinner I was forced to liberate a small portion of wind and was relieved that I managed to do so very discretely. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced.
—R. D.
This. isn’t actually a question.
But thank you for sharing!
xkcd
This submission is currently being researched & evaluated!
You can help confirm this entry by contributing facts, media, and other evidence of notability and mutation.
About
XKCD is a webcomic created by Randall Munroe, an ex - NASA robotics expert and programmer. The series’ main subject matter revolves around math, science and Internet culture and features characters drawn as stick figures. All comics published on the site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. [2]
History
The domain xkcd. com was registered on January 25th, 2003. In an interview with redhat [3]. Munroe revealed that the domain name was taken from an instant messenger online handle.
“Actually the domain name came after the instant messenging screen name, which I picked late one night. Five, six, maybe seven years ago, I was tired of having names that meant something. Skywalker4, Animorph7… I wanted to pick a name that I wouldn’t get tired of. That would just always mean me. So I just went down combination of letters that weren’t taken, until I could find one that didn’t have any meaning, didn’t have any pronunciation, and didn’t seem like an obvious acronymn for anything.”
In September 2005, Munroe began to publish scanned copies of his school notebook drawings on xkcd, which became the sole focus of the website.
Features
Characters
Munroe revealed in an interview with Wikinews [9] that the black hat-wearing xkcd figure frequently seen throughout the series was inspired by the character Aram from the webcomic Men in Hats. [27]
I started putting the man in the hat, when I just wanted to say the most absurd thing. A lot of the time, I’m in a real life situation and I think what’s the most hurtful thing, what’s the worst way this can go, and have someone do that gleefully. That’s just a recipe for comedy right there. Then I have the guy in the hat so I’d put all that on him and then say “but that’s not the main guy, he’s much nicer than that” and, and I took that, the black hat symbolizes that for me because Aram from the now ended webcomic Men in Hats also wore a hat.
Other recurring characters include a woman named Megan with short hair, a nihilist that is often paired with an existentialist wearing a beret, and a boy in a barrel, as well as representations of famous people, including blogger Cory Doctorow, free software advocate Richard Stallman, Firefly cast members Summer Glau and Nathan Fillion and zombie versions of Richard Feynman and Marie Curie.
On August 24th, 2010, a collection of Munroe’s comics was released in the book xkcd: volume 0. [23] Published by Breadpig [7]. a company started by Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, under a Creative Commons license, the book sold more than 25,000 copies within 6 months and a total sum of $52,961.78 from the proceeds were donated to the Room to Read [8] charity organization.
Reception
The website Explain xkcd [10] was registered on August 10th, 2009, which provides thorough explanations of the subject matter discussed in each xkcd comic. The editors initially ran their own explanations for each comic strip, but later enabled a commenting system for readers to share their own interpretations as well, which could be then put to a vote by the userbase. In an attempt to explain the origin of the webcomic’s title, Explain xkcd provided an argument that the name is a reference to The Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything from the science fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe .
If you assign each letter a value from 1 to 26, then the sum of the values of X, K, C, and D equals 42. This number is significant as being widely recognized as the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” It was first used by author Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and has since been referenced in numerous other books, movies, and tv shows.
Highlights
The strip “Chess Photo” has prompted many people to stage photographs of themselves on various amusement park rides playing chess, checkers and other games. For more information, see KYMdb – Roller Coaster Chess .
On October 6th, 2011, the day after Apple cofounder Steve Jobs’ death. xkcd published a comic titled “Eternal Flame,” [25] which featured two stick figures observing the “spinning beachball” animated Macintosh operating system icon (shown below).
“Click and Drag” Comic
On September 19th, 2012, xkcd published the comic “Click and Drag,” [11] which featured an illustration of a large, two-dimensional world that the viewer could explore by dragging the comic with the mouse pointer, revealing previously hidden scenarios outside of the frame.
The same day, developer Florian Wesch [14] released a zoomable version of the comic in a web application on Rent-A-Geek. [13] Redditor McKn33 submitted the comic to the /r/comics [15] subreddit, which reached the front page receiving over 8,120 up votes and 745 comments within 16 days. The Internet news blogs Kottke [16] and BoingBoing [17] posted about the comic, citing Twitter user @revdancatt’s estimation that a printed version of the comic would be 46 feet wide:
Ok, so the XKCD map printed at 300dpi is around 46 foot / 14 meters wide, half that at magazine 600dpi quality.
— Rev Dan Catt (@revdancatt) September 19, 2012
The tech news blog Geekosystem [19] published a post titled “Everything You Need to Know About Today’s xkcd Comic, ‘Click and Drag’,” noting that the comic measured to 165,888 ? 79,872 pixels (1.3 terapixels) which would require 4,212 iPad screens to fit on. The tech news blog Mashable [18] published a post titled “30 XKCD Click and Drag Comic Easter Eggs You May Have Missed,” featuring a slideshow of notable segments of the comic (shown below).
On the following day, Redditor SomePostMan submitted a post to the /r/xkcd [20] subreddit, which linked to a gallery on the image-sharing website Imgur [21] containing every denizen within the comic. On September 27th, Wired [22] published an article titled “How Big is the XKCD Click-Drag World?”, which calculated the size of the “Click and Drag” world to be two miles across and two miles high. Many Tumblr [12] users shared their favorite discoveries in the comic under the tag “#click and drag xkcd.”
No comments:
Post a Comment