Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

xkcd and Time

Long time readers will know of my love for Randall Munroe's web comic xkcd. Not only has it moments of pure silliness, math, physics and computer jokes, but how the heck does he manage to create poignant stick figures with emotions? Then there are his amazing tour de forces, which can be massive drawings or fascinating infographs. Great stuff and you should read him every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Since the start of yesterday's (Monday 25 March 2013) post, the xkcd forum has been going nuts. The comic is called "Time" and the mouseover ALT-text reads "Wait for it." Since I was in the middle of running some backups, I couldn't wait, but figured things would be happening later. And oh, were they ever. Even though it was taking hours for anything to become clear as the comic evolved slowly, one panel at a time every half hour. One poster on the forum called in sick to follow updates. Naturally, given the coding community, there were all sorts of attempts to suss out Randall's file name hashing to try to see ahead -- very funny stuff. And before the sandcastle appeared, people worried about whether the comic would be dark or not.

As of 12:30pm EDT, the Wikipedia entry describes:

Comic no. 1190 ("Time") began publication on March 25, 2013, with the comic's image updating every 30 minutes since midnight on that date. The images appear to constitute frames of a story, with characters moving (either slightly or not) from image to image. The mouseover text reads "Wait for it.", and the scene depicts a male and female character apparently building a sandcastle complex on a beach. No purpose or explanation of this comic has been made available.

We still don't know where this is going. There has been speculation about time and tides. About April 1st next week. How long it will run. I don't know.

But I'll be checking back.

One version of the whole thing animated, updating as needed, can be found here.

UPDATE 3/28Th: A faster slower animated version is here.

Four days running and still there has been amazing changes...

Dr. Phil

Once Again XKCD Proves Itself Exactly Right

How many times have I run into this on so many university and college websites?



This.

Dr. Phil

How Can Simple Stick Figures Be So Realistic?

Yesterday I posted about a brilliant xkcd web comic. Today I was lurking around the Internet and accidentally found this entry from Chris Robertson which contains a video homage to xkcd number 442, which itself is a homage to a Discovery Channel commercial "I Love The World". (whew!)

Noam Raby animates a song by Olga Nunes with images and lyrics from an XKCD strip by Randall Munroe, and the result is awesomeness.

I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.

This is so meta I can hardly stand it. (huge grin)

Dr. Phil

Oh Good Grief

After yesterday scoring one for the good guys about the heads-up on the thirty cent jump in gasoline prices, I had to turn away from the "Rick and Scott Show" on WOOD-AM radio this morning, as they started to talk crazy about the initial operations starting up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN on the Swiss-French border. What they were saying was so science ignorant, it hurt. As I was driving to work, and running a bit late because I had to go to the post office this morning, I couldn't justify taking the time to pull over and call in to the show.

Now... I do have to say that there's been some mileage in making fun of the LHC and the particles it might create and blaming it for every little thing, but these aren't serious. Unfortunately, others are all hepped up about it, including someone in Hawaii suing everyone to stop the LHC.

Here's The Thing

Any microscopic black holes or other weird things created at LHC are likely to be unstable and short-lived. Why? Because otherwise we'd have already seen them. (grin)

Oh, but Dr. Phil, didn't you use the weasel word "likely" in the previous paragraph? Sure. This is how scientists speak. Because this is why we do experiments -- to find out. That doesn't mean we've let the barn door open for Sudden Black Hole Death Syndrome.

But Just In Case You Think It's Smart To Be Dumb

Here's one of numerous articles pointing out the obvious about the micro-black holes which might be created at LHC. Naturally occurring cosmic rays of the same energy level as the LHC hit the Earth all the time. I don't recall the Earth being devoured by a micro black hole previously.

I, for one, am not going to lose any sleep over LHC.

No Doubt I'm Part Of The Problem

I wrote a SF short story a couple of years ago about a laid-off adjunct Physics professor who accidentally created a black hole or wormhole or something in his basement -- "Boxes", 3rd Place winner, published in CrossTIME Anthology Vol. V (2006), pp. 132-147. Hopefully this science fiction short story isn't the source of inspiration for any of the science whackos loose right now. Besides, in my story Jessie Martin is sure the tiny thing sucking in the air isn't really a black hole, as it doesn't have the right characteristics. It is, as I freely admit, just a story.

And the guys on WOOD-AM radio this morning were trying to describe the LHC as "science fiction". Uh, no. I don't think that terms means what you think it means. I'm pretty sure that $8 billion bought a lot of hardware and stuff.

Humor Is Our Only Refuge

Though I don't advocate either binge drinking or even drinking, I always enjoy reading the rules of a good drinking game. The CERN LHC Drinking Game.

Then there's my inspiration from the genius which is xkcd:

and


Finally, on NPR's Morning Edition this morning they mentioned there's a website, something about "Has the LHC devoured the Earth?", and when you go there, it says "No". Anybody have a link for this? Google didn't find anything right off the bat for me.

UPDATE: Quality Goblin author Jim C. Hines has provided the link: http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
See the comments below for more discussion. (grin)

UPDATE2: Another webcomic... with bunnies?

Dr. Phil