I’m just going to put this down as one I don’t really get and move on
I guess he’s referring to a map like below (which would get messed up if you added a spurious legend and a flag element that looked like a national boundary).
I, too, couldn’t quite understand the premise. I feel there is a “joke” in it but didn’t come out clearly. Something about flag colors using the map legend to indicate the country. Explain XKCD didn’t really explain, but it looked like a first pass explanation so maybe later. Did they put the map on the flag?
Look at hogarth’s post directly above yours. On a map like that, which colors in countries with their national flag, the XKCD flag would color in the country it represents with a spurious map legend and a spurious national border.
Yeah, hogarth’s map did help matters (I did see it before your post) but the joke in my mind is still only vaguely there. Doing research on the Belgian flag helped, though.
This is definitely one of XKCD’s less accessible vexillology-themed jokes.
I feel like there’s a math equivalent of Poe’s law. There’s no parody of a mathematical statement that’s so bizarre that it can be distinguished from an actual mathematical statement.
Yeah, are these actual math problems?
And in the second one, what’s the procedure if the random walk takes you into a trap (like if the next step after that open-circle endpoint is to the right)?
Or that it becomes one, and many years are spent on its solution.
Hm, odd. My vaccine card uses mostly lower-case letters along the top line, not smallcaps.
But then, mine was one of those freebie ones. Maybe Munroe paid more for a premium one for his.
It’s interesting how the name of xkcd is in actual lowercase, but the fonts and handwriting all use small caps (except in the earliest comics).
I love this one. This is so so true.