­xkcd thread

I was in a position to feel a personal grudge towards listed superlatives.

As you may know, ginkgo trees drop almost all their leaves in one event, overnight when the temperature drops past a certain point for the first time each Fall. As a teen I was expected to rake them all without delay. Because our ginkgo was only number six on this list, I always felt my labor diminished in significance, Herculean though it be.

Technically, it’s still the tallest statue of a skateboarding squirrel in the northern hemisphere even if there aren’t any in the southern hemisphere.

Knowing that your spouse saying they love you more than any other of your gender this side of the Mason Dixon line still raises a question …

Intrigue!

That alt-text pun is terrible. And now I regret never having had access to polar ice cores.

The closest I could have come was a birth-year antacid from speleothem sampling…

“I love you more than anyone within 0.000847 AU.”

So Google tells me that this is 0.00055 United States Dollars. But I imagine it has missed some critical context.

But (not) seriously, why restrict yourself to a piddling trivial part of an Astronomical Unit? It’s not like there’s a chance you’ll find someone else you love more within the orbit of the Moon, or on Mars or something.

I guess I don’t immediately recognize the significance of 78733.569 miles.

You don’t even want to see the Venn diagram for the transporter accident in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”.

The White Witch messed with Deep Magic, and ended up breaking a (periodic?) table

“And never, ever speak of The Force Which Must Not Be Named.”
“You mean grav-?”
“Silence!”

So are dark energy and dark matter science or magic?

It’s uncertain. :grin:

Dark matter is stuff that we happen to not know what it is, but it still seems to follow all of the same physics as the stuff we do know about. It’s science with some mysteries to it, but it’s definitely science.

Dark energy, we may yet be able to figure out, but we haven’t yet.

And psychology is definitely, absolutely, magic. Or at least has a strong component of magic to it.

Have we confirmed that dark matter exists? Is there no other possible explanation other than mysterious invisible matter that doesn’t interact with anything?

@Chronos, your comment was enlightening to me, possibly in ways you didn’t intend.

On first reading it, I wasn’t sure if you were using the terms “science” and “magic” in their common definitions or in Randall’s definitions. I wondered if dark energy was magic according to the comic.

I thought maybe it was because, we can start with an outcome: the galaxy has this much “light” matter and rotates at this angular velocity and then something–we know not what–is posited to explain the outcome.

That is, of course, wrong, because, even if we don’t know what dark matter or energy is, we nevertheless can start with its current state and “progressively apply those forces over time” to predict its future state. On the other hand, you can state a conservation law and immediately state the outcome without even caring about how that outcome is brought about.

I occurred to me that perpetual motion machines can be analyzed either way: you can immediately look at any perpetual motion machine and say, “it doesn’t work because conservation of X” and it’s unassailable but it’s so much more satisfying to say “it doesn’t work because you’re not accounting for the loss of X at step Y”

We’ve discussed Modified Einsteinian Mechanics here I thought.

I don’t understand the Earth/Venus cartoon. OK we think both planets suffered collisions with large bodies. But unlike Earth with the Moon forming from the remnants of the collision, there apparently wasn’t any such ejecta for Venus since it currently has no moon or ring system, where we think the two bodies simply merged (altering Venus’ rotational cycle to be retrograde).

That’s what I dislike about this strip; you never know just how far down the rabbit hole the author is going with his gag on any given day. Sometimes the joke can get pretty durned deep; other times it’s preposterously shallow. But there have been so many of the former that my first instinct is to look for that deeper scientific meaning-when all he apparently did here was craft a simple sight gag, and nothing more.

Well, that’s by far the simplest explanation. And there’s nothing at all weird about the prospect of matter that doesn’t interact electromagnetically: Rather, if it didn’t exist, then we ought to be asking why not.

A little bit of both, plus some of my own definition. “Magic” is something that’s often sloppily-defined: Common definitions are often based on something being impossible. But if we’re asking the question “does magic exist?”, then we clearly can’t mean that definition. Rather, I define magic as something which not only is not currently explained, but which cannot be explained. And it’s worth noting that, even with this stringent definition, it’s still known that magic definitely exists: Gödel proved, effectively, that there exist things that cannot be explained.

Back to conservation laws, I wonder what Munroe thinks of Emmy Noether and her work.

It’s depicting a collision between the two planets, that coincidentally happens to resemble a Venn (or Euler) diagram.

Yeah, I get that. I had assumed it was comparing the two separate collisions in each planet’s natural histories, in which case only the shock wave thing would have been something they had in common, hence my confusion (yeah the head-on Venusian one would still have generated SOME ejecta, just not enough to form a ring/moon). Of course it’s trying to depict a literal collision between the two extant planets in question, making a lame gag out of it. I’m just a bit disillusioned, 'tis all.