1949
It just kills me how Randall is so obviously convinced that this is a great idea: the way he just keeps trying to riff on it-- like in the alt text to 996, where Randall clearly thinks he's stumbled on COMEDY GOLD. OK, we get it, you know what particle accelerators are.

And of course the hoary XKCD trope of someone giving a quirky presentation.

1948

Is this my purgatory or Randall's?

1947

The trick to this one is to remember that they're doing Tai Chi in the park at night, not wandering lost through the woods. As such, they really did leave their phones behind deliberately, and are honestly thinking about the kinds of important questions you have time to ask when you aren't being constantly distracted.

1946

Of course Randall's nightmares are about being unable to log into Twitter. If only there was some existing infrastructure designed to broadcast messages wirelessly over large areas whose operators the governor could have had his staff contact...

1945

My first thought was that Randall clearly doesn't read a lot of scientific papers currently if he thinks they don't have a lot of terrible figures. Then I realized the shaded period also covers papers published within 5 to 10 years of Randall's time in college.

1944

This exercise in masturbatory pedantry brought to you by Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Tai Chi Association of North America.

I love that the first objection is not "no there isn't", it's "rainbows have no ends because they are circles". And it's not even really correct. You would never say that a mirage is a cone because it's light leaving the sun, being refracted through heated air in front of you, and then arriving in your eyes. "Mirage" and "rainbow" are the names we apply to our perceptions of these optical phenomena, not the entire length of the journey of the photons composing them.

"THERE'S A POT OF GOLD AT THE END OF THE MOON BECAUSE LIGHT FROM THE SUN BOUNCES OFF IT LOL"

Megan's description, even as written, is wrong. She is not describing "an inside-out double-ended cone", that would look like this*:

What Megan is describing is a cone you're standing inside, facing towards the ending, with another, smaller cone co-terminal with it beginning at your position. But hey! At least she got to make her leprechaun joke-- who cares if she had to violate every one of her interlocutor's naive assumptions that she was trying to have a conversation in good faith? Remember when Randall used to make fun of people who talked like this?

And "thinking about a pot of gold" does not in any way make your brain a pot of gold, as Randall would know if he'd paid attention in his core Philosophy 101 class instead of fantasizing about the girl three rows up with the "It's An Anime Thing" t-shirt. Has he ever read a book more than 30 years old?



*Topologically, is it even possible to turn a cone inside out?

1943

So we have two people discussing dreams about scenarios that couldn't happen: you can't forget to prepare for an exam if you're not in school. Then we have Black Hat Guy, who I guess is trying to disturb them by making up dreams. It's so detached from its own internal reality it's almost Zen.

Just as an aside, I've never had any of these dreams, so they're clearly not universal.

1942

I have a dream that one day Randall will realize 100 bad jokes do not add up to a good joke.

1941

Someday, everyone who knows what XKCD is will be dead. Someday, no one will remember XKCD at all.

1940

I have no idea what this is about. All I know is the food truck at work sells three minuscule tacos for $11-- have tacos actually been getting larger over time?

1939

Yup, Trump is still president.

1938

This actually made me understand these exploits worse. I'd be inclined to think the joke is supposed to be that the blonde stick person is terrible at explaining things, but that would mean Randall isn't striking a courageous blow for feminism, so it seems like he really thinks that quantum ghost trolleys is a concept most people will grasp intuitively.

Stylistically, it appears not to be a one-off thing: every time Randall tries to write people having a conversation it sounds like a Big Bang Theory script. He goes completely off the rails (GET IT? TROLLEY PUN) in the very first line: no human being would begin a conversation this way. We proceed through the quantum ghost trolley lesson (if you think a drawing of the example instead of the stick figure talking about it would be helpful here you are clearly new), and then abruptly shift gears (ANOTHER TROLLEY PUN, I'M ON A ROLL*) so Randall can pat himself on the back for knowing about another, unrelated hardware exploit.

Anyway, it's not important for you to know how these exploits work. Leave understanding and fixing them to the elite geeks (especially strong independent women in STEM), and you just worry about installing updates.










*Secret bonus trolley pun

1937

Wow this is awful.

1936

Actually it's about ethics in games journalism.