Or LENR, the reboot of cold fusion.
I’m surprised Munroe has never heard about gerbiling on a monowheel, as I’m sure the same principle would apply to a scooter in a ball.
Pro Tip: do not look up “gerbiling” without specifying “on a monowheel”
Shhhhh! You should let people expand their horizons.
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This feels like it’s a reference to something else. Was there some sort of “road space comparison” making the rounds, trying to argue for the superiority of some mode of transportation?
Similar images have been around for decades, with varying numbers of people. Usually only cars, bikes, and buses. No hamster balls.
So what bizarre thing is BHG going to do with the eclipse? You just know he’s planning something strange. Probably involving a superpowerful laser.
Sorta like the old Soviet joke:
- I want to sign up for the waiting list for a car. How long is it?
- Precisely ten years from today.
- Morning or evening?
- Why, what difference does it make?
- The plumber’s due in the morning.
This particular xkcd appeared on two of my Star Trek Facebook groups before I saw it anywhere else.
He forgot:
A * (1.0 / B) : Software performance engineer
Also,
B\A Matlab coder
What about Carol and Dave? Did the programmer not think about how they will feel?
The whole point of this app is that they will never find out about it.
Can somebody explain the joke to me?
Lots of thought experiments about cryptography use Alice (A) and Bob (B) as the names of the entities trying to communicate secretly.
This isn’t limited to cryptography, those names are often used in relativity and quantum mechanics analogies as well. I’m sure they get screen time in other fields, too.
If A and B aren’t enough, then C and D start coming into play, hence Carol and Dave, sometimes in cryptographic thought experiments, they are the ones trying to intercept the message.
Once you get Eve involved, you’ve got yourself a pretty damn complicated thought experiment.
ETA: the joke in the xkcd comic is that the creator of this app has taken the thought experiment a bit too literally.
Poor Ted. I guess he never made it out of the 60s.