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https://www.xkcd.com/1807/

Actually I would say this XKCD fits Linux better as I'd say that is 90% of the distros out there, just reinventing the wheel and making just enough changes to make them incompatible with each other and break shit.

The really sad part? If you could get all those devs to quit wasting their energy making yet another minor variation of the same OS and instead were to pour all their energy into one distro? You'd have an OS that would curbstomp anything out there in just a couple of years...but it will never happen, instead they will just keep cranking out distros until all the OEMs quietly adopt secureboot and all that is left to run Linux on is high priced workstations and cheapo ARM maker boards.

Choice is good, so more choice must always be better, right? Nope, that's a fallacy. Instead, too much choice becomes a confusopoly and that isn't good. And accidentally creating a confusopoly without even having a profit motive, but instead just out of sheer "not invented here" syndrome, is even worse!

Don't get me wrong: having too much choice is still way better than having too little. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that making every new Linux user choose between dozens or hundreds of distros can't have negative practical consequences just because choice is theoretically good.

whoops, screwed up the link: "correct horse battery staple"

oblig
https://xkcd.com/1758/

Google doesn't want to draw attention to the flawed nature of their product.

I don't think there is something wrong with postulating stuff to make our observations match our predictions. This is how science advances. Try explaining the observations of particle accelerators without postulating the existence of quarks, electrons, protons, neutrons, or atoms for that matter.

The real criterion is whether the stuff you postulate has simple properties or it behaves like fairy dust, magically explaining everything by having several arbitrary properties. I think dark matter falls clearly in the former category, as it can interact only through gravity, greatly restricting what it can do.

Also, obligatory XKCD.

Oblig: https://xkcd.com/1807/

Relevant xkcd

Obligatory etc.

Here. Anybody going there ?

Yeah, but the extension cord limits range to a few hundred yards.

I've got two extension cords. Twice the range! At this rate I'll have a flying car with a range that covers the city after just a few hundred dollars at the hardware store!

many people own the hybrids as pets; some people own wolves as pets.

The number of people killed (often including the owners) by these "domesticated" wolves likely exceeds the number killed by wild wolves. Keeping a wolf as a pet is a really bad idea. In a wild wolf pack, only the alpha male and female reproduce. So a wolf has a genetic imperative to eventually challenge the alpha, and take over the pack. If you own a wolf, you are the alpha, and one day, possibly when you are sick or injured and the wolf senses your weakness, your "pet" is going turn on you.

"Domesticated" wolves will seek opportunities to escape, and since they don't have the hunting skills of wild wolves they may be driven by hunger and lack of fear to hunt humans. Some "pet" wolves have killed dozens of people.

Good advice on wolves from XKCD.

Tardigrades are incredibly durable, and it's good not to just go shitting all over other planetary bodies, but I was wondering how overly cautious they're being. So I decided to try to figure it out, but I'm missing how much gamma radiation they'd be exposed to in ten years.

For anyone else curious:

Tardigrades don't thrive in extreme environments so they wouldn't be breeding like crazy. They do go into hibernation without water or oxygen and can last in that state for at least a hundred years

Median lethal doses of for tardigrades was 4400 Gy gamma radiation outside of water over 48 hours, though over 1000 gys made them sterile.

Humans will die despite medical treatment after 8 sv of radiation. I found that solar flares could produce 60 sv to an astronaut in a space suit. But after half an hour of searching, I couldn't find how much radiation a tardigrade would be exposed to over 10 years in whatever shielding is available on the probe.

There were thousands of articles on "how much radiation are you puny humans exposed to in the cushy ISS before NASA makes you come back down a few months later" and even more articles along the lines of "Human astronauts incompetent to undergo cryptobiosis, again in their nice space ships, would get too much radiation on just a little hop to mars." BUT NO FUCKING NUMBERS! Ugh, so unscientific AND anthropocentric!

Regal's big ass glasses tends to not work at the start

Are the glasses only supplied and/or needed for those with big asses, or do you get different sizes for those with smaller behinds?

How are ass glasses supposed to work anyway?!

Oh... anyway, obligatory XKCD.

"OK, Self. Open the refrigerator and grab me a beer."

Works every damn time.

Obligatory XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/149/

https://xkcd.com/1576/

Since I'm sure you will be trolled to death here, let me chime in and agree with you completely. Furthermore, let me add that the products -- and I mean all of them, papers, data, methods, etc. -- produced by government funded research should ALL be available freely to ALL Americans, and (because of the difficulty of a citizenship-based distribution system) to ALL of humanity. It is work done for hire that we paid for and don't need to pay for again. Time to end paywalled science altogether and re-open the scientific publication process to realize its full potential. If that forces us to re-evaluate how to publish and referee in the first place, well hey, even 340 (or so) year old traditions may actually have to give way before the advent of the Internet and instant global communications. Non-reproducibility, confirmation bias, and the enormous pressure to get positive, not null, results are also an open suppurating wound on the entire scientific community and are negatively impacting every aspect of science ESPECIALLY medical science.

I was calling for this almost a decade ago, and the issue needs to be addressed quite independent of partisan politics. Science should never be done on a "trust me" basis, especially not when there are special interests, corporate interests, political interests, commercial interests, and even personal interests galore that hinge on the results. It's not like we didn't just spend the last 40 years being told dietary cholesterol was the Devil Himself as far as coronary artery disease, in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary (such as drugs like Zetia that dropped cholesterol but had NO EFFECT on coronary artery disease rates) before the entire medical community finally got its act together and issued a mind-numbing "never mind, eat all the cholesterol you want" announcement a few years ago. Its not like the sugar lobby, the tobacco lobby, the all-drugs-are-evil lobby haven't successfully biased the course of government funded research for decades as well.

Science -- and really, everything and not just science -- should be conducted in the open light of day. It gains its strength FROM the fact that it is nominally reproducible and absolutely open to criticism and contradiction by further work. Nothing in the legislation is going to overturn HIPAA or require the release of patient names or personal data, and these are typically redacted anyway in any publication. What it WILL hopefully prevent is cherrypicking patient data (absolutely rampant), data dredging by idiots who have never heard of Bonferroni (see https://xkcd.com/882/), debacles such as the recent Arizona release of what amounts to synthetic pot by a company that has lobbied hard in that state to prevent its legalization, and yeah, the use in climate science of data without pedigree (something that is not so common anymore anyway since NASA already obeys the rules of this legislation but which once was a real problem). Will this affect "our" access and use of private satellite data? Possibly. But there are simple legislative and economic solutions to that as well, and we should be pursuing them.

I have to ask why anyone would want a special exception to the general rules of science to be made for the EPA, or NASA, or DOE, or NSF, or NIH funded research. "Black Box" data has no place in science. If I can't look at your apparatus, your methods, and your actual data and see what you did and how you did it, reproducibility is impossible. Assessing the probability that your result (in and of itself) is correct and reasonable becomes difficult. Without this, there is nothing to prevent people from just making up a spreadsheet of data with some made up error bars and publishing it to (say) get tenure and keep your job, and don't tell me that this never happens or I'll cite you a dozen cases where it happened and EVENTUALLY, the person who did it was caught. But nothing as spectacular as the cholesterol debacle. That one illustrates how a made up res

Nerd sniping. You don't ever need a smartphone!

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/619/. Interpret that how you will.

https://xkcd.com/1810/

https://xkcd.com/927/

They all come from the factory with a bomb.

https://xkcd.com/651/

5 years huh?
Relevant xkcd.
https://xkcd.com/678/

No, it was hacked together with perl.

This one is more relevant: https://xkcd.com/1709/

In some jurisdictions you are to treat a blinking green like a yield to pedestrian sign, where you have to slow down and look. Don't forget violet.

As alluded to in this xkcd https://xkcd.com/937/. The problem with that kind of aggregation is that it assumes the majorly opinion is relevant to your scenario.

This is particularly relevant if the film has a target audience otehr than "lowest common denominator" as a well executed film with a small target audience can get a low score that may cause people who would be in that target audience to assume the film is poorly executed when it's actually about the choice to target a small audience over the masses.

https://xkcd.com/1813/

If your car is that fast, I think you will have more pressing matters to attend to, like staying on the planet.

Actually given the amount of air resistance and therefore friction at that speed the large plasma fireball which will surround you will make you very detectable, although not really identifiable, and your immediate problem will be avoiding instant cremation, not staying on the planet.

The xkcd, What If: Relativistic Baseball

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

Not sure where your 8 C came from. It took about 11,000 years for the temp to rise 4 C. By contrast, we're up 1 C in just 100 years, and that's the issue. Nobody's saying the climate doesn't change naturally, just that this extremely rapid change is caused by humans.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

"It's just a flimsy excuse by the lib-left for bigger government."

No, it's just reality. How about, instead of denying reality you come up with a solution that doesn't require government to grow. I'll be all for it.

You're not wrong about the past glacial extent. And no, the glaciers didn't disappear because of humanity, they receded well in advance of the first permanent human settlements (roughly the dawn of civilization, though humans were around well before that). And interestingly enough, global temperatures were in a (slow) cooling trend from about 7000BCE onward.

But that stopped around 1900, and the global temperature average has begun to swing sharply, at a rate that ought to be alarming, because as the graph shows, it is quite literally without precedent, in terms of the speed of the change, and shows no signs of stopping unless we take action to affect it:
https://xkcd.com/1732/

Somewhere between about 150-300 mph, the flat earth won't save you - Depending on the car, you might start heading up. And don't hit a speed bump.

Ostensibly, yes.

you cannot get a temperature that is higher than the filament in the bulb

... as explained here: Fire from Moonlight

10 years you say?

Let me consult the chart.

Removing features simply because they're not used by everyone every single day never made sense to me. Even if it is something only a very small percentage of users use, so what?

Because a lot of people get confused by too much information and too many options. And contrary to nerds they won't simply dismiss what they don't need they tend to avoid it saying it's too difficult. I'm not surprised if Google has analyzed that they'll lose 0.1% tech savvy users and gain 0.2% computer newbies instead. A case study: My online bank.

They used to have rather information dense pages and complex filters and dialogs with lots of cross links to related functions. I loved it, you had pretty much everything you wanted to see, do or go to at your fingertips. My parents, well they used it because I used it and having free support was more valuable than trying some other bank. They redesigned, far more simple pages. Far more hierarchies and less directly accessible functions. I hated it, at the time I mostly blamed it on designing for cell phones and tablets not big computer monitors.

But then I saw how my parents liked it much, much better than before. They said it was so much simpler and less confusing to use. Even though they never used but the first two options, it was far simpler to choose from three than eight and the rest hidden under "more options". The transcript page used to have lots of filters, now by default it has account and period, with the period being predefined like "last 30 days" or whole months with custom dates hidden another layer down.

And it turns out, that's all they really use. if they ever wonder if they did pay the power bill of $100 in the first two weeks of January they wouldn't filter by recipient and amount and date. They'd just scan the monthly statements manually. I'm thinking this and this applies, sure they could learn how to make the computer do more but is is worth it? Considering how little they seem to remember of the basics, I'm thinking neither the investment nor the upkeep is worth it.

So I can totally understand why, the question is do you have to only cater to my parents. But when push comes to shove, I'll manage to do five clicks instead of two just fine even though I'm slightly annoyed by it. My parents though, for them it makes a real difference. Unless it's really a professional's tool that you work in many hours a day, I'll always survive doing it the slightly harder way like just X'ing out all the tabs or hitting Ctrl-W repeatedly without being a make-or-break deal. It would be nice if we could have a browser by nerds, for nerds though. Maybe it's time for a new Phoenix?

Removing features simply because they're not used by everyone every single day never made sense to me. Even if it is something only a very small percentage of users use, so what?

Because a lot of people get confused by too much information and too many options. And contrary to nerds they won't simply dismiss what they don't need they tend to avoid it saying it's too difficult. I'm not surprised if Google has analyzed that they'll lose 0.1% tech savvy users and gain 0.2% computer newbies instead. A case study: My online bank.

They used to have rather information dense pages and complex filters and dialogs with lots of cross links to related functions. I loved it, you had pretty much everything you wanted to see, do or go to at your fingertips. My parents, well they used it because I used it and having free support was more valuable than trying some other bank. They redesigned, far more simple pages. Far more hierarchies and less directly accessible functions. I hated it, at the time I mostly blamed it on designing for cell phones and tablets not big computer monitors.

But then I saw how my parents liked it much, much better than before. They said it was so much simpler and less confusing to use. Even though they never used but the first two options, it was far simpler to choose from three than eight and the rest hidden under "more options". The transcript page used to have lots of filters, now by default it has account and period, with the period being predefined like "last 30 days" or whole months with custom dates hidden another layer down.

And it turns out, that's all they really use. if they ever wonder if they did pay the power bill of $100 in the first two weeks of January they wouldn't filter by recipient and amount and date. They'd just scan the monthly statements manually. I'm thinking this and this applies, sure they could learn how to make the computer do more but is is worth it? Considering how little they seem to remember of the basics, I'm thinking neither the investment nor the upkeep is worth it.

So I can totally understand why, the question is do you have to only cater to my parents. But when push comes to shove, I'll manage to do five clicks instead of two just fine even though I'm slightly annoyed by it. My parents though, for them it makes a real difference. Unless it's really a professional's tool that you work in many hours a day, I'll always survive doing it the slightly harder way like just X'ing out all the tabs or hitting Ctrl-W repeatedly without being a make-or-break deal. It would be nice if we could have a browser by nerds, for nerds though. Maybe it's time for a new Phoenix?

No. Butterflies.

In my personal experience, passwords that are > 24 characters, are easily forgettable if unused for a period of time. I struggle with remembering complicated passwords if I haven't used them in over a month. Not sure if it's because they're to complicated or if it's a neurological limit. I also suffer from ADD and have a history of radiation exposure.

That being said, I completely understand how it's possible for someone to forget a password.

Obligatory xkcd - https://xkcd.com/936/

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/538/ XKCD gets it right yet again.

I agree; Mercator's projection is not deliberately designed to minimize Africa. That is incidental. But, nevertheless, it is a side effect. As a kid, I was always puzzled as to why Australia is a continent, but Greenland not, when on the map Greenland is clearly larger.

I'm a fan of the Lambert cylindrical equal-area projection, which seems to be geometrically very clear and straightforward, although it has a odd (pi to 1) aspect ratio.

And, of course, the obligatory xkcd.

https://xkcd.com/977/

Nice find!

But in the end, it's all relate to this : The earth is a globe, and there's no way to represent is on a 2D map without :
1-Tearing the map appart
2-Stretching the map

Personally, I prefer the 3rd option : "Put more globe in your school" like this one : http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fEqw...

Now that is awesome.

https://xkcd.com/977/

https://xkcd.com/977/

Chemistry is applied physics

https://www.xkcd.com/937/

https://xkcd.com/644/

Obligatory xkcd:

https://www.xkcd.com/505/