Drinking Fountains
by Jeff
Image text: I've always wondered whether you could drink slowly enough, and eliminate fast enough, that you just sort of peed continuously. But I'm afraid to try because I worry someone might call while I'm doing it and ask what I'm up to, and I won't be able to think of a lie.
Here, we see Cueball, using the restroom, as the image text indicates, he is eliminating the liquid waste from his body, or peeing. (I love the use of the past tense "peed" there. Great word.) Anyway, he says that he avoids the use of the drinking fountain right after peeing, because he is afraid that he will be forced into immediately peeing again. And as in the image above, he would be stuck in a loop. A loop is a computer science term, but also used elsewhere, to indicates going through the same steps over and over again. In this case, the bathroom, drinking fountain loop looks like an endless one.
A few questions however, most people do not have the problem that they immediately have to pee after drinking water. Cueball does not, I guess it is just his fear. Maybe it is the speed of light stick figure metabolism?
Also, what is that stray "Water" doing to the bottom left of the comic? Not sure what it is supposed to mean.
The General Problem
by Jeff
Image text: I find that when someone's taking time to do something right in the present, they're a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, they're a master artisan of great foresight.
So, this comic is not at all about the salt. Crazy, I know! This is a lot about computer science, programming or other ways you can set up systems to do repeatable tasks. In the comic, instead of passing the salt, the person outside of the frame is building a system (mechanically?) to pass any condiment for the future. And as the image text says, they look like a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, but the next time Cueball asks for a condiment and the system immediately passes it, they will look like (from the image text) a master artisan of great foresight.
1 to 10
by Jeff
Image text: If you get an 11/100 on a CS test, but you claim it should be counted as a 'C', they'll probably decide you deserve the upgrade.
This one is a bit confusing, so let me see if I can sort it out. Please let me know if you interpret something else in the comic. Megan says "On a scale of 1 to 10", but if you are using binary numbers that is "On a scale of 1 to 2" because 10 in binary equals 2.
When Cueball answers '4', not using binary, Megan has no idea what a four is because in fact she was using binary in her question.
In the image text, 11/100 would be 3/4 or 75% which is why you could ask for a 'C' grade.
AI
by Jeff
Image text: And they both react poorly to showers.
This comic is about Cleverbot the AI chat application. Someone must have put the input from one Cleverbot session into another session with hilarious results and posted it on the internet. For those that are interested, occasional "explainer" Berg started a tumblr where he improvises scenes with the Cleverbot app.
Burning Man is a yearly festival in the desert where, well, I'll let the Burning Man website take it away: " Burning Man is an annual art event and temporary community based on radical self expression and self-reliance in the Black Rock Desert". The Black Rock desert is in Nevada.
So, as you can see that is where they are making the joke that AI is like a Burning Man attendee because they react poorly to showers, can play chess and drive a car across the desert but they can't hold a normal conversation.
Password Strength
by Jeff
Image text: To anyone who understands information theory and security and is in an infuriating argument with someone who does not (possibly involving mixed case), I sincerely apologize.
This comic is saying that the password in the top frames "Tr0ub4dor&3" is easier for password cracking software to guess than "correcthorsebatterystaple". And this is absolutely true that people make passwords hard to remember because that means that they are "safer".
The important thing to take away from this comic is that longer passwords are better because each additional character adds much more time to the breaking of the password.
Steve Gibson from the Security Now podcast did a lot of work in this arena and found that this password "D0g....................." is harder to break than this password "PrXyc.N(n4k77#L!eVdAfp9". Steve Gibson makes this very clear in his password haystack reference guide and tester:
"Once an exhaustive password search begins, the most important factor is password length!"
That's what xkcd is trying to get through here. Complexity does not matter unless you have length in passwords. Complexity is more difficult for humans to remember. Length is not.
Progeny
by Jeff
Image text: I tell my children 'it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.' I'm trying to take the edge off their competitive drive to ensure that I can always beat them.
This comic seems to be a reference to IBM's computer called "Watson" that beat humans at Jeopardy. The IBM team created a computer that could listen to the answer from the host, Alex Trebek and then answer it in the form of a question. In case you are not familiar, that is the format of the game show, Jeopardy. When going up against two Jeopardy champions, Watson was able to beat them both.
Megan chimes in that we are "pretty awesome at teaching" - which I think she is referring to the fact that we are pretty good at programming computers to beat us at different things.
The image text seems to be pretty much a random statement, unless he is comparing the programming of the computers to the teaching of children. There is contradiction in the statement, because he is telling his children that it is not all about winning, so that he can continue to win against them.
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by Jeff
Image text: Brains aside, I wonder how many poorly-written xkcd.com-parsing scripts will break on this title (or \\;;"\''{\<<[' this mouseover text."
First of all, this tension is going to last with me all day.
EDIT: Best commenters in the world tell me that this not related to math, but to parsing scripts as the image text hints to. Guess I should have taken the hint.
Secondly, luckily for us, we do not use a xkcd.com parsing script, we use old fashioned human powered blogging.
Tree
by Jeff
Image text: Not only is that terrible in general, but you just KNOW Billy's going to open the root present first, and then everyone will have to wait while the heap is rebuilt.
A heap is a computer science data structure in which if B is a child node of A, then key(A) ≥ key(B). In the case of this xkcd comic, that means that the greatest present will be on top of the heap also known at the root present. In the image text, Billy picks the root present, which causes the heap to be rebuilt which means that a new present will take the place at the top of the heap.
Five-Minute Comics: Part 3
by Jeff
Image text: Resulting in The Little Rock 9x + C.
Top: Reference to the Japanese attack on the American base of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii that brought the US into World War II.
High Middle: I believe this is a reference to perl scripting language. And the comic is also a reference to how much more persuasive you can be if you say that you saw a study defending your argument.
High Left: Don't know why women try to breastfeed anyone on the bus. I haven't seen that happening on all the buses I've been on. Maybe I've been on the wrong buses?
High Right: Coke and pop rocks makes a crazy foaming explosion in your mouth, but I'm not sure where the phone and creepy girls comes from.
Lower High Middle: This is a reference to the Billy Joel song called "We Didn't Start the Fire". But, I guess, the police suspected him anyway.
Middle Left: In 1957, Eisehower ordered the Little Rock Arkansas Schools integrated, which means that there were no longer black schools and white schools, there were just schools. But, of course integrate can also have a math meaning and in this comic, the police are putting up an integration symbol next to the school. The image text is also a reference to this.
Middle Right: This one is pretty self-explanatory. Typical horror movie set up, this time with smart phones.
Lower Middle Left: This is a reference to the children's story, the 3 Little Pigs. As the story progresses, each pig builds his house out of stronger material to try to fend off the Big Bad Wolf. In this comic, there is a lot more pigs, and a lot more increasingly strong materials. The elements in the comic is strontium which is (thanks Wikipedia!) is a chemical element with the symbol Sr and the atomic number 38. An alkaline earth metal, strontium is a soft silver-white or yellowish metallic element that is highly reactive chemically.
Lower Middle: The phrase "Fastest gun in the west" is usually reserved for how fast a cowboy can draw. In this case, this is a pun on that and the gun actually "runs" races.
Lower Right: Scientists use centrifuges to separate elements. In this comic, the pun is on the phrase "separate the men from the boys", which is a typical American (at least I think it's just American) phrase for a hard task that is forces you to see who is capable and who is not.
Bottom Left: Typical xkcd. SETI and Narnia in one comic. If you have seen the movies or read the Narnia series by CS Lewis, time works differently once you go through the wardrobe to get to Narnia. Time passes much more quickly in Narnia. So, Cueball is capitalizing on that by putting his computer in Narnia to be able to do more work in less "real" time. SETI@home is the search for extraterrestrials by using extra processing power of computers that go to the screeensaver. Foldilng@home is a similar idea, but this is with protein folding.
Bottom Right: This is a reference to the old TV show, the Honeymooners in which the male character, Ralph always threatens his wife by saying "One of these days, Alice, Pow right in the kisser". Which is an old-timey threat of him hitting her in the mouth. In this comic, instead of the "pow" sound effect, all the waterslide sounds are used.
Applied Math
by Jeff
Image text: Dear Reader: Enclosed is a check for ninety-eight cents. Using your work, I have proven that this equals the amount you requested.
Donald Knuth is a computer scientist that has written several computer science textbooks and he offers rewards for anyone finding errors in his publications. The first error found in each book is worth $2.56. Other errors and suggestions are worth less than $2.56, but a check is still sent out if Dr. Knuth finds them to be reasonable.
In this comic, Black Haired Girl uses a proof to invalidate logic itself. And then, she writes a letter to Dr. Knuth to collect her money for the 1,317,408 errors in The Art of Computer Programming at $2.56 each.
In the image text is the reply from Dr. Knuth in which he uses Black Haired Girl's logic disproving proof to evaluate her work down to 99 cents.