1053: “Ten Thousand”

[notgm]

i seem to have lost my sense of humor...i highly dislike the pompousness of this particular joke.

meh.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.
^That would be pompousness.

Doing this isn't: "You don't know about _____? Awesome, let me show you!"

fairly certain i used it correctly, given the context.

i agree that the end result, "awesome, let me show you" is not pompous.

the idea that one would need to try hard to not scoff at the unknowing masses could be construed as pompous.

the idea that one would feel the onus of teaching the 'obviously dumb' target could also be construed as pompous.

there's a certain elitism in admitting that there's elitism in knowledge, and i just can't find that logic trap funny.

blergh.

[Fire Brns]

^or it could be construed as:
a) Be a jerk about people not knowing something. (pompous or egotistical)
or
b) Be nice and make the person's experience learning something fun. (polite and humble)

[Cervisiae Amatorem]

Another win comic! Please Randall wow us on Friday and make it an awesome week!

[daftrhetoric]

Feels good man. Epistemic sociology is the best kind of sociology.

[neoliminal]

Everything by 30? Crap. Knowing I have nothing left to learn is news to me.

[bmonk]

yawn, this comic is sooooo Monday the 7th, where's my Wednesday the 9th comic?

seriously though, this comic is all right, but I read it 2 days ago

Which made you one of the 10,000 for Monday?

[VoronX]

I just showed this to my co-worker, and what do you know? He's one of the lucky 10,000!! "Mentos and Diet Coke?" he asked me... What are the odds?
There was no grocery store visit, but definitely some Youtube fun! Good Times!

[Beatrice The Golden]

There was no grocery store visit, but definitely some Youtube fun! Good Times!

Damn. Youtube ruins EVERYTHING! I wish I haven't seen the video, back then. It would be awesome to test it myself. Sadly, after seeing it... there's simply no point.

[lowwall]

Yesterday, I got to tell a friend about cargo cults

[Fire Brns]

Yesterday, I got to tell a friend about cargo cults

I love you

[MichaelRpdx]

At the cafeteria at work this morning:

Me: Me
CS: Cashier
OG: Other Guy

CS: Happy Wednesday!
Me: Happy, happy!
OG: uuugh, not happy day..
All: General chatter
Me: So you don't know XKCD?
OG: No
Me: You should go read it. Brighten up your day.
Me: Today especially. It's a great day to learn about XKCD.

I hope he did.

[MichaelRpdx]

Everything by 30? Crap. Knowing I have nothing left to learn is news to me.

You mean like "crap, I've known all there is to now for 25 years now"?

[marsilies]

One of the things this comic doesn't cover is that there's new information that's discovered/created every day that potentially becomes part of this "common knowledge" For example, the Mentos + Coke reaction wasn't widely known until the Youtube video went viral in 2006, meaning there were millions of people who had reach 30 without knowing of it. So you never have to worry about knowing everything there is to know, even of "common knowledge" subjects, since there's something new to know every day.

[Kain]

basis point is actually pretty common when you get into finance where changes or differences in interest rates and profit margins are often expressed in basis points. (working in financial reporting, I hear basis points quite frequently, including the cost of our reporting services - basis points of the clients' total assets)

Ssssssh! "Permyriad" is a so much more awesome word!

not to mention between permyriad and permil, today was my lucky 10000 for finally understanding the origin of the term percent. Kinda odd, considering how I love to look up word entymologies, and how often I look at a word and get that "that cannot possibly be a word" feeling. Also, the choice of symbol actually makes sense now. I always thought of it as a dash severing an 8, which really makes no sense from a functional perspective...

[Pfhorrest]

I love to look up word entymologies

Well isn't that ironic?

Don't you think?

[maydayp]

as I said on the other topic about this comic, I really liked it, and it touched my heart. I wanted to give the cartoonist a hug, and say thank you, I wish more people felt like that.
sadly most people don't

[lowwall]

Yesterday, I got to tell a friend about cargo cults

I love you

Aw shucks

I do love helping people learn new things. I've done it on usenet, listservs, and forums (even started one).

Now that I have a 3-year old son, I get to explain new things every single day. Bliss.

[Kain]

I love to look up word entymologies

Well isn't that ironic?

Don't you think?

What makes you think that wasn't intentional? :p

[SoaG]

The other day at work, someone needed to convey to a group of 22 others the name of a town, Badger (NFLD).

For reasons best left unexplained, this was done Pictionary-style.
However rather than drawing a badger, or a map with the town's location indicated, he drew a computer. On the screen he first drew several ambiguous creatures in spread-eagled poses, replaced them with a mushroom, then replaced it with a snake. 2 or 3 of us figured out what he was on about.

We shared http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI with the uncultured heathens. Which had the predictable and desired effect of confusing them even further, while getting the song stuck in their heads the rest of the day.

As a side note, hadn't watched it in a while, interesting to note from the side-bar that not only is there now a 10 hour version of it, but over 1.6 million people have watched the longer one.

[SoaG]

Everything by 30? Crap. Knowing I have nothing left to learn is news to me.

I'm 39 and I know nothing. Just like Socrates.

[Nyerguds]

This comic reminded me of the Team Fortress 2 mapping forum I'm on. Everyone else seems to have gotten tired of answering the same standard questions; I enjoy showing newbies the ropes. (In fact, doing that probably accounts for about half my postcount.)

It depends. When there's a big sticky "read this first" thread detailing pretty much everything they could need, it gets kinda tiring to reply on a thousand newb threads with "please, just read the sticky, it's all in there"
(though my experiences are more 'getting old stuff running on new systems' on the official Command & Conquer boards)

[gmalivuk]

Yeah, there's a difference between the opportunity of showing someone Coke + Mentos or whatever, and the burden of explaining to someone something that they would already know if they'd done the least bit of due diligence before demanding that you do the work of telling them.

[Sprocket]

Everything by 30? Crap. Knowing I have nothing left to learn is news to me.

I'm 39 and I know nothing. Just like Socrates.

It wasn't supposed to be "everything" it was supposed to be "X thing" where X equals something of likely cultural significance. For example, an X-Wing. If you don't know what an X-Wing is, and you're 30, I would be pretty surprised.

I don't know calculus and I'm 31, but I'm hopefully going to be able to learn it through my current job. I will then become an adult, and then I will start to grow old and shit...wait...fuck that noise...young forever! Don't trust the Physicist! Math makes you old!!!

[neoliminal]

Everything by 30? Crap. Knowing I have nothing left to learn is news to me.

You mean like "crap, I've known all there is to now for 25 years now"?

I've traveled from 1968 to say ... "No."

[Western Rover]

Even more fun than telling them is, well, for example:

A co-worker of mine asked some years back, "What are these Dead Sea Squirrels people are talking about?"

So I gave her an explanation that was 90% true, with a perfectly straight face, about the Essenes who wrote their scriptures on dried squirrel skins, and stowed them in jars in a cave near the Dead Sea...

[Western Rover]

I used to be completely honest about what I could or could not do and enthusiastic about figuring out how to do things I didn't yet know: "can you do this?" was always answered with either "easy!", "I think so", or "not yet, but I'll figure it out". Unfortunately it seems in much of the business world the only acceptable answer is "yes" --

What line of work are you in? I've been a reporter, a software engineer, a tax preparer, and a college instructor, and nobody has ever suggested that it's unacceptable to say "I don't know, but I'll find out".

On the other hand, every time I interact with sales people, it seems to me that their first rule is to never admit they don't know the answer to a customer's question. They make up an answer without hesitation and deliver it with the same brash confidence they tell what they do know.

[foxpup]

This is one of the great things about raising kids. You get to teach them all the cool stuff you discovered throughout your life and they think it is cool and they think the same about you. I likes showing them the sparklys when you squeeze an orange peel near a flame, the shattering of a frozen banana that has been dipped in liquid nitrogen, and the sunspots visible on the projection of the sun on the wall. (We're kind of a geeky family - but we have fun. )

[San Fran Sam]

Even more fun than telling them is, well, for example:

A co-worker of mine asked some years back, "What are these Dead Sea Squirrels people are talking about?"

So I gave her an explanation that was 90% true, with a perfectly straight face, about the Essenes who wrote their scriptures on dried squirrel skins, and stowed them in jars in a cave near the Dead Sea...

You should tell her about there being too much violins in the movies.

Never mind.

[hulahoops]

A comic after my own nerdy education heart. Inspired me to post a link on my FB page to tell people about the awesomeness of XKCD!

[Plautdietsch]

I'm with Randall on this one! Why lose the chance to turn somebody's world inside out?

30's too young. Days when I'm the one asking after something "everyone knows" happen all the time for me, and I'm 31.

When I visited Australia a while back, there were 33 of us, and we quickly learned that if you pour sugar into ginger beer, you get a fun result. The last person to learn this -- even though we had plenty of meals as a group -- was also the oldest person there. "Just pour it into your bottle, Tami! See what happens!" **sugary ginger beer sprays everything in sight**

[ravemastaj]

So, he's saying over 9000 people haven't heard this joke yet?

[bmonk]

Even more fun than telling them is, well, for example:

A co-worker of mine asked some years back, "What are these Dead Sea Squirrels people are talking about?"

So I gave her an explanation that was 90% true, with a perfectly straight face, about the Essenes who wrote their scriptures on dried squirrel skins, and stowed them in jars in a cave near the Dead Sea...

You should tell her about there being too much violins in the movies.

Never mind.

Reminds me of the Saxon Violins entry in a certain RPG reference work: they noted that there were NO Saxon Violins in the game, although many thought they were still excessive.

[Widmerpool]

In reality daily life will show you that the less you know the more you will learn in a daily setting. In elementary school I learned common knowledge as often as 10[?] times a day, in high school I may have learned a common fact as infrequently sometimes as 1 in 4 days.

Why would it decay?

It decays for each person as they age, so the average *age* of those 10k people is going to be quite young for most of the facts "everyone knows".

True - but irrelevant. The strip isn't about how many facts a given person learns each day, but how many people learn a given fact each day.

Nor does it mention the age distribution within the daily 10,000.

It's true that the birth rate has been falling since the middle of the last century, but the population has been rising; so the number of births per year has remained pretty steady (\pm4%), with no discernible trend. As a result, the number of people arriving in the US each day (by being born there) and needing, at some point, to learn that zebras don't wear pajamas, is not decaying.

[VectorZero]

needing, at some point, to learn that zebras don't wear pajamas

For a given value of 'need'.

We shared http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI with the uncultured heathens.

We don't need no stinking badgers.

[Steve the Pocket]

The only oversimplification I see is that the model ignores people that die before turning 30.

Or who otherwise fail to join the (obviously slightly less than) 100% of everyone-who-knows that [you don't make airplanes out of lasagne]*

But that's OK, because for the USA the correct figure for daily births is a lot closer to 12,000. So 10,000 remains a conservative estimate.

*[insert the "but surely it's obvious" fact of your choice]

I feel suddenly compelled to try to build an airplane out of lasagne right now and prove you wrong.

...I'm not sure I want to learn what that says about me.

[jonas]

Hmm, has anyone mentioned the previous Diet Coke + Mentos strip on xkcd?

I tried the "diet coke and mentos thing" and it didn't work. […] So the bottle of diet coke went entirely to waste - didn't get entertainment value out of it, and didn't drink it (I can't stand diet soda, and my wife can't drink it once the mentos have gone in and gluten-contaminated it - though it was pretty much flat after that mild "eruption" anyway.)

You could have tried with normal coke. The mentos thing doesn't actually care about whether it's diet or not. You could have then drinked it afterwards.

[Fire Brns]

In reality daily life will show you that the less you know the more you will learn in a daily setting. In elementary school I learned common knowledge as often as 10[?] times a day, in high school I may have learned a common fact as infrequently sometimes as 1 in 4 days.

Why would it decay?

It decays for each person as they age, so the average *age* of those 10k people is going to be quite young for most of the facts "everyone knows".

True - but irrelevant. The strip isn't about how many facts a given person learns each day, but how many people learn a given fact each day.

Nor does it mention the age distribution within the daily 10,000.

It's true that the birth rate has been falling since the middle of the last century, but the population has been rising; so the number of births per year has remained pretty steady (\pm4%), with no discernible trend. As a result, the number of people arriving in the US each day (by being born there) and needing, at some point, to learn that zebras don't wear pajamas, is not decaying.

Well less people in older ages would be learning facts than at younger ages. (Completely made up numbers)
30k learn a day that dogs are colorblind (not entirely true) when they are 15 years old while closer to 500 a day learn at 30 years old.

[gmalivuk]

In reality daily life will show you that the less you know the more you will learn in a daily setting. In elementary school I learned common knowledge as often as 10[?] times a day, in high school I may have learned a common fact as infrequently sometimes as 1 in 4 days.

Why would it decay?

It decays for each person as they age, so the average *age* of those 10k people is going to be quite young for most of the facts "everyone knows".

True - but irrelevant.

Irrelevant to the comic, perhaps, but relevant to the point Fire Brns was making and which you misunderstood.

[Fire Brns]

I realize I had a mistake in my reasoning as well for that instance. I assumed the number on the fact would drop as the population continued but forgot to include the birthrate.
There are also the facts that "go without saying" so that everyone of 1 generation learns them and then doesn't pass it on to the next. For example, remember a few years ago when everyone was saying "snakes aren't actually slimy", it goes without saying but in 20 years everyone will go back to assuming snakes are slimy and then we'll have to put up with the resurgence of that stupidly obvious tidbit.

But as they say,
There are many facts to consider when considering the facts.

[Sasquach]

Not everyone wants to know....and it's find if they don't...

It's really not, though. Collective willful ignorance is a constant drag on society. It prevents us from moving forward, and, in some cases, prevents us from teaching our children in such a manner that we can do anything but regress.

It is a drag on society but....some people just aren't equipped/prepared to learn/know. We will go on, society will progress.....those people are simply the friction in the machine.

Way back when (fine, 2 years ago) I dated a blonde haired, blue eyed ex cheerleader who now cuts hair for a living. She was, by all measures, the stereotypical ditz. World events, math, science, literature, social awareness, politics, wondering about the future, heck, wondering about anything at all just wasn’t in the cards for her. That said, she was delightfully happy, incredibly kind, and extremely loyal. Being with her did a lot to help me see her side of things….the perspective of people who just don’t have the capacity to CARE about the big things and can and do happily trot through life.

I never was able to adequately describe why I didn’t want to be with her anymore….and I still feel guilty for upsetting her so badly when I split away.