I think I have a few devices equipped with those…
Who let the ducks out?
Reference to the demon core.
Yeah, it took me a while to get that one, because my standard referent for that experiment is “dragon’s tail”, not “demon core”, and “demon egg” is one step further removed.
If it weren’t for the “blue flash” in the title-text, I wouldn’t have thought of it either.
Back in college one math professor always said “and here we invoke integration by parts” - which did sound like a spell was being used.
Yeah, let’s replace one difficult integral with two difficult integrals, because that’ll (somehow) make everything easier! And then maybe do it again! And if we’re really lucky, maybe one of the new integrals will be the same as the original one!
We’ve clearly been in the same classes
This most recent xkcd reminds me of this one:
And that’s only in the observable universe. Who knows how many are in the rest of it.
Are “galaxies with only a few stars” a real thing?
To be honest, the number seemed kinda small to me. But I think it’s about right. There are 41,000 square degrees in a sphere. If that circle is 1/6 of a degree (plausible, since it’s noticeably smaller than the 1/2 degree diameter of the sun/moon), then the figure comes to 41000 / ((1/6)^2 * (pi/4)) * 50000 = 94 billion. Which is pretty close to the right answer. There are a surprising number of square degrees on a sphere…
No. He’s (humorously) trying to minimize the shock of the size of the Universe right after giving us the shock
I found the wording on this one to be weird. There obviously aren’t any galaxies within that circle. And he didn’t say anything about holding it out to the sky, to imply that he’s talking about projecting a cone. I’m actually not sure if he means a cone projected to the edge of the visible universe, or if he’s thinking about a cylinder and talking about how many galaxies it will go through.
I know you can (mostly) intuit what he means, but the wording seems odd, particularly for Munroe and these sorts of facts. I actually was expecting a joke in the hover text about how small galaxies must be to fit so many in a room.