I knew them before they were hot.
The vinyl kept melting
Well-played, on that mouseover text.
But now I’m wondering… Is there, in fact, an evil twin for Peach but not Daisy? And which princesses correspond to the mu and tau leptons?
Currently explainxkcd says:
" Certain current understandings of the process require that the electron neutrino be an antineutrino, but antineutrinos have not so far been sufficiently confirmed to exist, with some theorising that a neutrino can be its own anti-particle (unlike the neutral neutron, composed of charged quarks, which has the similarly neutral antineutron, composed of oppositely charged antiquarks)."
which is wrong about antineutrinos, unless I’m much mistaken.
The electron neutrino produced in beta decay of a neutron must be an antineutrino, but the open question is whether an antineutrino is the same thing as a neutrino. Some particles (like the photon) are their own antiparticle, but most (including the neutron and all charged particles) aren’t.
Thanks - I hadn’t realized that was an open question; I knew a photon was its own antiparticle, but thought that neutrinos and antineutrinos were known to be distinct
Well, it’s complicated by the fact that all interactions that neutrinos can take part in have this weird handedness thing going on, and that can masquerade as anti-ness. Like, we know that the neutrino produced in regular beta decay is always right-handed, and the neutrino needed as input in a neutrino-induced beta decay must be left-handed, so the neutrino from one beta decay can’t induce another… but do those two particles have any difference other than their handedness? That’s the part we don’t know.
And to further explain the mouseover text, the “conventional” model (where neutrinos and antineutrinos are distinct) is called the Dirac model, and the currently-more-popular model (where they’re the same thing except for handedness) is called the Majorana model. Hence why the notion that Daisy is her own evil twin was first raised in Majorana’s Mask.
Not as big as the heating bill will be when the Gulf Stream switches off some time in the next 50-200 (?) years.
I don’t know about enamel lasting that long. If you use fluoride toothpaste, some of the OH’s in the enamel molecules get replacd by F, thereby making them new molecules.
Hey! We just covered this!
Hmmm… is Randall lurking here for ideas?
Or maybe he’s not lurking; maybe he’s an active member, and just nobody knows it’s him behind that username.
He has cited us occasionally.
When I first saw that page, the tower next to the rocket (I forget what that’s called) was there in the first and third panels, but distinctly missing in the second.
Anybody else see that? (Maybe I should have taken a screenshot, but I didn’t. And when I go back to the page now, it’s there in all three panels.)
Service Structure.
Although I’ve heard it called just “the tower” in context.
And for me, I haven’t seen that cartoon at all before here, so I never noticed any anomalies. But Randall has updated comics after initial publication before. And the explainXKCD trivia section notes the same thing you saw:
The tower next to the rocket was also missing from panel 2.
Thanks.
I think “umbilical tower” is what I was trying, and failing, to think of.
How about “gantry”?
The gantry is the moving part of the tower.
Another type of tower is the strongback, used on the Falcon 9 and probably others. It acts as a tower and provides the propellant umbilicals. But it also raises the rocket from horizontal to vertical. At launch, the umbilicals disconnect and it tilts back a little bit for clearance. It isn’t big or robust enough for manned missions, though.