There’s so much awesome there that I am compelled to ask: Is there anything like this in a higher-quality format, suitable for hanging on a wall? (In other words, not a quickly-drawn cartoon, but a nice graphic, using actual images of galaxies, etc.)
There is a forum for xkcd in which a number of people are asking Randall Munroe (the cartoonist/creator) for a door-sized poster of the cartoon. I just checked the xkcd Store section and about 3/4 way down I see that he has a 28” poster available for US$15.
I’m meh over this. I appreciate the brainpower and the in-jokes, but perhaps the disconnect I feel is that 1) it’s simply not funny to insert references everywhere and 2) it must be the same feeling that some lurkers get when they don’t post here because of any in-jokes.
Can’t be. For that to be true, it would have to be infinitely wide at ground level. On a true log plot, zero is infinitely far off the bottom of the plot.
What is “In retrospect, they shouldn’t have sent a poet…I have no idea how to land” referring to? “They should have sent a poet” appears to be a Carl Sagan quote that was referenced in Contact, but I don’t really get the joke there.
Also the guy saying “Woo Python!” What does this refer to?
It’s not deep or anything. Yes, it’s from Contact, but all the comic strip is saying is they shouldn’t have sent a poet because a poet isn’t trained in operating a spacecraft like, say, an astronaut is.
This has little actual relevance to Contact, but there it is.
I would guess they represent the the relationship of the orbits of those planets to their distance from Earth. They’re close enough in astronomical terms that the variation in distance is relatively significant. The pointy part at the bottom would represent the closest approach to Earth.
