Acme Earthquake Seeds, maybe?
Used by only the finest coyotes. Other natural disaster initiators are availible.
Volcano seeds? Maybe here?
Any cat weighing 12 solar masses is going to collapse into a star. I figured the alt text referred to telescope laser compensation systems, that is, astronomers seeing a new cat star in the sky start pointing their laser compensated telescopes at it. Now I wonder what he really meant?
I figured that twelve solar masses was big enough to bend light.
Not just light. Spacetime itself, more likely.
Doesn’t everything with gravity bend both light and spacetime, even if only barely? (By “everything with gravity” I mean planets or bigger.)
You don’t even need to make that caveat. Anything with mass bends light and spacetime, even the tiniest mass.
I personally took the line to mean that he was fitting 12 solar masses into the volume of a standard sized cat, which would actually make it far denser than a black hole, which should be more like 15 miles in radius.
It’s past 8:30 pm (PST) on Friday, and this Wednesday strip is still the latest on offer. Is there any way to find out if something’s going on?
One ripped from the headlines…
That’s the advantage of writing your own webcomic, instead of working for a syndicate. Your lead time is whatever you want it to be, so you can react instantly to current events.
Sounds like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
I question the data. This shows equipment damage with a mass around 107 to 108 kg. By 102 kg, you’re going to have trouble rolling it with any speed, and its stationary mass will damage the floor long before 107 kg.
He’s optimizing around the previously-found optima for the other parameters. Having found an optimum speed of approximately 10 m/s, he’s continuing to use that value.
Where’s the turtles?
So far I’ve discovered there’s more than one body in this system, and your spaceship changes if you hit that cannonball that’s in mid-flight.
There’s probably a ton more spoilers on the explainxkcd page by now.
And so far I’ve discovered that this page causes a really nasty crash if you try to view it in Firefox. It’s particularly nasty because, when you re-open Firefox, it doesn’t ask you if you want to restore all of your pages, so unless you’re very quick to hit the stop button at just the right time, it instantly re-crashes every time you restart.
Playing around with it in Chrome, I’ve also discovered that some objects in the system seem to have negative gravity, and will repel you. And there seem to be some weird coordinate singularities, where if you pass them the whole screen suddenly pivots around.
To be fair, he has this disclaimer at the bottom of the page:
xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS at a screen resolution of 1024x1. Please enable your ad blockers, disable high-heat drying, and remove your device from Airplane Mode and set it to Boat Mode. For security reasons, please leave caps lock on while browsing.
I’ve run it for 5 minutes at a time in Firefox v.107 without any issues. It doesn’t even use all that much RAM or CPU.