Oh, and I think he messed up on the caption to the spinthariscope. A high ratio of “that can’t possibly be safe and legal” to actual safety and legality would imply both a high amount of TCPBSAL and a low amount of ASAL. Spinthariscopes, however, have high amounts of both TCPBSAL and ASAL, and so it is their product that is especially high, not their ratio.
Yeah, he should probably have changed the last phrase to “Actual Danger and Illegality”. Then the math would check out (and “ratio” sounds better than “product” to my ears).
I feel like “deuterated” should be on there, somewhere near the end.
I don’t know; I’d put “deuterated” in between “sour” and “meaty”. The lower end is too abstract for that.
Fair. Still, in a way it is not far from “cursed.” Tastes like normal tea, except that you die if you drink too much of it.
And now I wonder if the replicator is actually capable of producing non-standard isotopes.
Deuterium, I’d guess probably. The ship likely has a supply of it for engineering purposes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some species in the Federation that’s evolved to need deuterated water.
U-235, probably not, but then, they probably couldn’t do U-238, either.
Something like C-14 or O-18, who knows.
“Blessed” is interesting. Can you replicate holy water or a saint’s relic?
Technically, boiling a saint’s relic in water is a holy infusion, not a tea.
This reminds me somewhat of SCP-294. A few of the items on the xkcd list could correspond to the “surprise me” request of SCP-294: a cup of Earl Grey tea, superheated so that the slightest vibration causes it to boil and explode.
St. Tisane.
No update yet, but we’re seeing more of the picture. Definitely looks like an airplane. So someone that’s important to him will arrive/depart at the time the countdown ends. Something like that.
It looks like someone has decided we’ll do a new xkcd thread for this year. I was wondering if I should start a new one, since this one has over 1K posts. But I’ve seen threads with many times that number and the board software seems to handle them just fine. But I guess we’ll go with the new thread anyway.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/xkcd-2022-and-onwards/958289
Wait… didn’t he just reinvent magnetohydrodynamics?
It’s very interesting how, that with the ubiquity of cameras, some things have become reported less often, while other things are reported more often.
Yeah, as mentioned in this previous comic:
At least they’re not flat Earthers.