2052

like and share if you too have read the wikipedia article about stanislav petrov

2051

Now Monday's citation of an earlier comic makes sense. Today's is an almost perfect copy of 386: same art, same pose, same point, and even the same cadence in the dialogue. Since then, Randall has switched to a laptop, and his desk now has feet-- that's all that has changed.

The intervening years have demonstrated over and over again that he cares very deeply about people being wrong on the internet. He can't help but comment on it. It drives him nuts. Any chance to register his displeasure simply must be taken. Condescendingly explaining that most people are dumb but he knows better is Randall's true hobby-- the way to "nerd snipe" him.

What Randall appears to be doing is reflecting, after a decade, on his failure to heed his own advice. In some ways it is an encouraging sign. Maybe, in his mid-30s, Randall is finally beginning to mellow out. Maybe we will see less of this insufferably supercilious preening in the future. Maybe, right now, Randall is contemplating this one.






lol nah he just can't be bothered to realize that he has now literally posted the same comic twice

2050

What's really interesting about this is neither the conversation-while-doing-Tai-Chi or the deeply banal "joke"-- those are both par for the course. He's acknowledging (perhaps inadvertently) that he's familiar with his back catalog*, and raising a lot of uncomfortable questions about his inability to avoid retreading the same narrowly collection of comics over and over again.



*I initially thought this was going to point to the one about competing standards

2049

2048

So stung was Randall by my allegation that he only knows how to do regression in Excel that he has gone on to familiarize himself with all of the options available in Minitab. Unfortunately, he does not yet grasp that logistic regression on two dimensions is nonsensical, or that a linear regression and a linear regression with no slope are not fundamentally different.

2047

Reader London says

Alternate caption for 2047: It freaks me out that our digestive system has evolved in an organic way, and liquids are a thing.

Personally, I'm more impressed that Randall is able to pour an entire glass of liquid straight down his throat in a single motion, without swallowing.

2046

A reader says:

 Do you know the number 11 is a palindrome? (That means it reads the same forwards as backwards)

2045

As of 8:30 this morning, Randall didn't know how to spell "mastodon":

2044

This is what happens if you spend decades meticulously excising anyone smarter than you from your life.

2043

This is the kind of comic that is so stupid, so lazy, and so monumentally insulting that it reaffirms the necessity of our mission here. It fails on every conceivable level, and yet Randall remains smugly, complacently convinced that he has yet again brought forth a beautiful pearl of genius.

The basic premise is that you can generalize a taxonomy from words for things that contain other things. In the first place, it's the equivalent of this:

In other words, a stupid-ass concept all the way to its foundations

In the second place, Randall is completely wrong about the operating principle! A houseboat is NOT "a boat that holds a house", it's a house that is also a boat! You can tell the difference by asking yourself if it's possible to take the house out of the boat. You can't, because then it's no longer a boat either. A boathouse, at least, is a house that holds a boat. But then this puts us in the position of Randall once again trying to generalize a category from examples that didn't goddamn work in the first place.

So it shouldn't be surprising that, having failed to establish this pattern, Randall goes on to screw up its applications. A boat trailer is not a car that holds a boat (it is in fact not a car at all*). An apartment is not a house that holds houses (it is in fact not a house at all**). A mobile home is not a car that holds a house (it is in fact not a car at all***). Maybe you could make a case for tow trucks, garages, and car ferries, but by this point I am no longer inclined to cooperate. By God, XKCD still sucks.




*You can tell because it doesn't have its own engine.
**You can tell because you can't physically remove individual units from an apartment building and still have both a complete unit and an apartment building. I will only note in passing that what Randall actually wrote in his idiotic table was "apartment", and not "apartment building", so we are forced to assume even that.
***You can tell because mobile homes and RVs are not the same things.

2042

Isn't this just how Randall goes through life, always?

2041

It's weird Randall didn't double check this, considering how much he loves Google Trends: