RTFirefly, I didn’t even have to go to that strip. I recognised it from its number; it’s part of the SDMB culture, or it should be anyway, especially GQ.
New strip: Large Number Formats
The astronomer number gave me a laugh, but it’s so true.
By coincidence (related to the last number) I just looked up the Gettysburg Address on Wikipedia this afternoon. In fact the page is still in a tab on my browser.
The one on mouseover gave me flashbacks to a legacy Fortran project I was on. The original programmer apparently preferred to program on a slide rule, rather than on the VAX the program was written for, and so half the variables in the program were stored in log form. And there was no pattern to which were linear, which were base-10 logs, and which were natural logs. Nor, of course, any pattern in the variable names, nor comments.
Meh, I’m not enough of a mathematician to care about this one.
On repeat reading, I think I’m getting what he’s trying to say, but it’s not particularly funny.
Somewhat better is the title comment, where he also managed to spell Perelman’s name correctly.
Needed explainxkcd for that one. Man, is there a prize for greatest common denominator humor?
Yeah, I think you need to be pretty steeped in mathematics to appreciate that one. It’s not all that hard to get, but just getting it won’t lead to appreciating it.
Return of black-hat guy.
Couldn’t they use lead from old building roofs? Like Notre Dame Catherdral. Maybe the fire was a coverup by BHG to conceal his theft of the roof for his time machine.
I’m a little surprised he didn’t have 134 dBin as one of the ways.
Old building roofs are no good-- They’re exposed to cosmic rays. Being at the bottom of the ocean shields shipwrecks from the bulk of that.
Old building roofs are no good-- They’re exposed to cosmic rays. Being at the bottom of the ocean shields shipwrecks from the bulk of that.
Old building roofs are no good-- They’re exposed to cosmic rays. Being underwater shields shipwrecks from most of that.
Are those paper sizes really such that they exactly fit the spiral, or just pretty close?
The spiral is such that it exactly fits the paper sizes. European paper sizes do have the property that each one is exactly half of the next size larger, so that much is accurate, but the curve is just a nothing-in-particular curve that’s forced to fit the rectangles.
Gonna try that onebox thing here. Maybe it’ll be legible enough people don’t have to go to the xkcd page.
As for the comic, another one mathematicians will appreciate more than others.
I love the old days of computing. Except when there was a zero shortage. I hated scrounging around in bit buckets for thrown out zeros. And it was always a pain in the butt to get them back into the computer.
We just made our own zero’s with a hole punch. But I agree, they were more difficult to get in the computer, especially as you had to take care that they didn’t touch the bulbs.
Also appreciated in regards to COVID-19 model reporting.
That reminds me of the old style Ethernet connectors where you had to use a cap on the end of them. If you didn’t, you’d have all these ones and zeros just spilling out all over the floor.