Suckville
by Jeff
Image text: Suckville is considered by the Census Bureau to be part of the Detroit metropolitan statistical area, despite not being located anywhere near Detroit.
Ok, so Megan and Cueball are playing a card game, that I am not able to identify from simply the piles (anyone know what game it looks like?) and Megan whips out one of the oldest insults in the book, a play on the word "suck" and adds a typical city name to the end of it. Other variations are: "losertown", "lameville", etc.
The phrase is originally based on the ubiquitous signage you see along roads that say "Welcome to Town X - Population Y". Really, it is just some creative smack talk that basically says "You suck".
Then, since Cueball one-ups Megan by indicating there is a city by that name, she can only resign herself to the fact that her smack talk did not work.
Also, she has a strange number of legs and arms in the 3rd frame. I'm not sure if that is supposed to be showing motion, or what. Either way, it is not working for me, she just looks like a spider on a laptop, which is completely terrifying.
Map Projections
by Jeff
Image text: What's that? You think I don't like the Peters map because I'm uncomfortable with having my cultural assumptions challenged? Are you sure you're not ... ::puts on sunglasses:: ... projecting?
This comic is takes all the different map projections, which is the way that the sphere that is the Earth is placed into a flat map, and makes assumptions on what type of person prefers that type of map projections. Not much to explain here as the different types of map projections are laid out and all the text below the map projections are jokes.
In the image text, the joke here goes to the familiar meme from CSI:Miami, in which the star, David Caruso starts on sentence, then puts on his sunglasses and then ends it with a corny pun. Naturally, there is a youtube video that has collected all of these one liners. This internet meme has been mentioned previously by xkcd in comic 626 and possibly others.
Hurricane Names
by Jeff
Image text: After exhausting the OED, we started numbering them. When overlapping hurricanes formed at all points on the Earth's surface, and our scheme was foiled by Cantor diagonalization, we just decided to name them all "Steve". Your local forecast tomorrow is "Steve". Good luck.
This comic is a response to Hurricane Irene, which hit the East Coast of the United States over the weekend. In the picture in the comic is the southeastern United States, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
Additionally, this comic is correct in that they have a list of names every year. Here is a list of the names for 2011-2016 from the National Weather Service. Also, this comic is correct in that they follow that list of names with the Greek letters. From the NWS again:
In the event that more than 21 named tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic basin in a season, additional storms will take names from the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on.
This comic postulates what would happen if they went through the Greek Alphabet as well. The comic, as a joke says that they will use random word generators, which is how they came up with "Eggbeater".
In the image text, the Cantor diagonalization is (from wikipedia) "was published in 1891 by Georg Cantor as a mathematical proof that there are infinite sets which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the infinite set of natural numbers. Such sets are now known as uncountable sets"
So, in this comic, because there were so many hurricanes, the National Weather Service went from Names, the Greek letters, to numbers, but when there were infinite hurricanes, they had to start calling everything "Steve".
Number Line
by Jeff
Image text: The Wikipedia page "List of Numbers" opens with "This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it."
Click on the image to see it larger.
Alright, here we go. Left to right, please feel free to correct me/add your ideas in the comments.
Negative numbers are just wanna be positive numbers or a some joke of that nature.
0.99.... is basically equal to 1 because there is no number between 0.99.... and 1. I'm not sure why he puts that it is less than 1 unless he wants to start a battle in every math forum on Earth.
The Golden Ratio is the length to width of rectangles that are most pleasing to the eye. The number which is about 1.61803, is the numeric value is called "phi", named for the Greek sculptor Phidias. The Parthenon is a perfect rectangle in size. I'm not sure where the Sunflowers thing comes from frankly, must be a joke.
Forbidden Region and Unexplored are both map jokes.
e is Euler's number is 2.71828 and pi is 3.14...
2.9299372 is a President's Day reference because it is the average of e and pi just as the American President's Day is always observed on a random day between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln's birthdays in February. (For non-US residents, those were the 1st and 16th Presidents of the USA.)
I'm going to have to plead ignorance on this one, I don't know and was unable to figure this one out. Anyone? Commentors?
Site of the Battle of 4.108 is not a reference to anything I think it is another map joke.
You do see often on TV and in the media that "It has been 7 years..." or "In the last 7 years..." etc. I think 7 is just a good looking number.
8 is not the largest even prime. 2 is. I'm sure this is like the 0.99... entry above, Randall is trying to start internet battles over the subject. Here are all the prime numbers on the chart above: 2, 3, 5, 7
The last entry seems to be a reference to Discrete Math, which rarely deals with numbers higher than 9. Randall again is trying to incite a internet flame war with Mathematicians who study other forms of math.
Here's the List of Numbers Wikipedia for those who are interested.
World According to Americans
by Jeff
Image text: It's not our fault we caught a group on their way home from a geography bee. And they taught us that Uzbekistan is one of the world's two doubly-landlocked countries!
Click the image to see the big version. This group of Americans is remarkably well informed. This is no "Jay Leno" man on the street ridiculousness.
Sorry for the very late post, but you did not need to much help on this one.