1014: "Car Problems"

[Meem1029]

Alt: Or if you replace your car, we'll be happy to set it on fire again so you can take another crack at getting that shot.

This one made me chuckle. I had to check to make sure that it wasn't BHG saying all 3 of the responses, as they all seem very BHGish. I also feel like I would consider doing something like this to troll my friends.

[CorruptUser]

Ah, mathematician's answers...

[furgle]

I found it funny that there was an establishing photo of the car not on fire. To prove that the car is not always on fire.

Why it took him 13 days to take a photo of his car on fire I have no Idea, and in the 13 days you'd think he would have set up the perfect photo.

[rhomboidal]

To be fair to the arsonists, the nonlinear dynamics of the swirling smoke vortices are exquisite.

[907Code-G]

Well she did ask what's wrong with the picture, not what's wrong in her life that is represented by the items in the photo. Also, why does she even have a picture of his car 13 days ago? who takes pictures of their cars regularly?

edit:Thanks. I can't believe I didn't notice the genders.

[Invisiblemoose]

Why it took him 13 days to take a photo of his car on fire I have no Idea, and in the 13 days you'd think he would have set up the perfect photo.

Well he did ask what's wrong with the picture, not what's wrong in his life that is represented by the items in the photo. Also, why does he even have a picture of his car 13 days ago? who takes pictures of their cars regularly?

People seem to be having difficulty determining the sex of XKCD characters. Honestly I thought hair-drawing was one of Randall's strong points too.

Or maybe I'm wrong and there's even more homoerotic content in this comic than I realized.

[907Code-G]

I really like seeing comics with this much of a defined cast actually. It's pretty cool to see specific characters, and even better when there's a bunch of them apparently not doing anything.

[sardia]

I agree with Randall's snark against cameras with the most "megapixels", I don't know how many times my sister came up to me bragging about how great her camera was, and the pixels was the only thing she knew about it.

[Djehutynakht]

Obviously the car owner has their suspects... I'd say it's a pretty good list. BHG probably did it, or his significant other.

People seem to be having difficulty determining the sex of XKCD characters. Honestly I thought hair-drawing was one of Randall's strong points too.

Or maybe I'm wrong and there's even more homoerotic content in this comic than I realized.

It could just be a woman with short hair. As a generalization, the males are usually bald or hatted.

[jpk]

What's wrong with this picture?

Well, you took it with a digital "camera", so it's hideous, artifacted to hell, compressed to shit, patches of solid color look like weird skin conditions, and there isn't a hint of definition about it.
Oh, and the car is on fire. Was that not intentional?

[Pfhorrest]

Why it took him 13 days to take a photo of his car on fire I have no Idea, and in the 13 days you'd think he would have set up the perfect photo.

Well he did ask what's wrong with the picture, not what's wrong in his life that is represented by the items in the photo. Also, why does he even have a picture of his car 13 days ago? who takes pictures of their cars regularly?

People seem to be having difficulty determining the sex of XKCD characters

People seem to be having difficulty with math. Who sees "two weeks ago" (which is anywhere from from ten and a half to sixteen and a half days ago, if you're interpreting it as a significant figure of two and order of magnitude of weeks; or exactly fourteen days, if you're being exact), and converts that to precisely 13 days?

[tobiassjosten]

This must be reverse bike shedding.

[VectorZero]

Didnt see the fifth panel initially (on phone.)

Didn't miss anything. Otherwise, cheese was burned.

[TG333]

How come I´ve been finding the latest comic in the forums way before it appears on http://xkcd.com/#? Am I writing from the past? Somebody ship me the lottery results, pls, you generous people of the future!

[msm]

Chromatic aberration doesn't necessarily mean that the camera is crap. It usually means a crap lens.

(I did register to make just this point. Perhaps I will make others in the future. Time will tell.)

[Idhan]

I have to say, she kinda seems to be asking for this one. I mean, if your car catches on fire, why on Earth would you show pictures of it on fire and not-on-fire? If she asks "what's the difference between the on-fire and not-on-fire pictures," it almost seems like the fire has to be a red herring, and if you were in the audience, you'd expect that if you did say "the car is on fire," she'd say "aha! I was talking about the choppy anti-aliasing!" or something.

[marcgaston]

I found my car vandalized this morning as well. The comic made me feel slightly better because they only ripped out my licence plate and threw it on the streets below. Still a neat coincidence.

Marc

[tomandlu]

I found my car vandalized this morning as well. The comic made me feel slightly better because they only ripped out my licence plate and threw it on the streets below. Still a neat coincidence.
Marc

Why was your car on a roof?

[wam]

I have to say I can see my friends doing this.

It also go me in trouble at work for bursting out laughing!

[haxax]

...and there's no driver at the wheel. And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides. And a dark wind blows...

[djoppio]

Hi,

i couldn't stop myself.
but the chromatic aberration is a thing that don't come from the CCD or CMOS of the camera. Its from the lenses.
its happens when the glass that is used to make the lenses refract different lights frequencies in different angles.

But i get the joke, when the black hat says "the most megapixels" he's talking about low quality cameras with a lot of marketing.

but it don't costs to say. =)

[Keiji]

I liked the comic, but the alt text was what really cracked me up. The car is a stage prop

[marcgaston]

I found my car vandalized this morning as well. The comic made me feel slightly better because they only ripped out my licence plate and threw it on the streets below. Still a neat coincidence.
Marc

Why was your car on a roof?

It was parked on an access road to a bridge.

[SirMustapha]

That's the problem with constantly having random characters every time: I'm not sure whether I should find it humourous for the three people on the right being jerks, or for the woman being a retard (fix'd). The joke is a bit too sitcom-esque to work in a setting like that, but it's a good one.

[EpicanicusStrikes]

... or for the woman being retard.

Randal can has retard?

[SirMustapha]

fix'd thx

[compcarp]

"Let's try this again, SHALL WE?!"

For some reason, the basement scene from PeeWee's Big Adventure comes to mind. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Tx8jnndMes

[radtea]

I knew a photographer (back in the days of film) who was like this: show him any photo and he would give pretty much the same critique (colours off, white balance, blah, blah.) Nice guy but this particular habit got annoying, and I called him on it one day pointing out that since every single photo was bad in the same way it was literally unremarkable and he should stop remarking on it. Another friend chimed in with, "Yeah, it's like saying, 'Nice car... too bad its only got four wheels' every time you see an automobile."

But I'm also surprised no one has mentioned Magritte yet. C'est ne pas une voiture?

[ams]

The audience's response tells me they aren't good photographers. In most cases, the problems they talk about are operator error more than the fault of the camera. Really skilled photographers can get good pictures even with crappy cameras, and complete amateurs will still take amateur photos with the best equipment.

[apomb]

The audience's response tells me they aren't good photographers. In most cases, the problems they talk about are operator error more than the fault of the camera. Really skilled photographers can get good pictures even with crappy cameras, and complete amateurs will still take amateur photos with the best equipment.

But they are also picking on the photographer (assuming the androgynous figure showing the pictures is also the photographer) the joke still works.

[chrth]

The audience's response tells me they aren't good photographers. In most cases, the problems they talk about are operator error more than the fault of the camera. Really skilled photographers can get good pictures even with crappy cameras, and complete amateurs will still take amateur photos with the best equipment.

The alt-text seems to indicate they recognize this fact.

[eran_rathan]

Oddly enough, a friend of mine had her car burst into flames yesterday.


She did not have time to take a picture, however.

[jonadab]

Chromatic aberration doesn't necessarily mean that the camera is crap. It usually means a crap lens.

When the camera (and specifically the sensor) is junk, you get a weird mottled effect wherein red, green, and blue are each significantly over-reported in small, adjacent regions of 30-50 pixels (one of the colors being over-reported per region) -- an effect that is particularly obvious when a photo is taken in low lighting conditions, because even slight over-reporting of one color can cause a dark area to be dominated by that color. Cameras in the less-than-$100 range have a strong tendency to be plagued by this problem if you try to take photos in anything short of broad daylight. The only ways I've found to fix such a photo are A) reduce it to grayscale or B) reduce the resolution to the point where each pixel contains parts of more than one of the 30-50-pixel regions from the original photo; this typically means you have to reduce the dimensions by a factor of at least 4, sometimes 8.

Alternately, if your camera is *extremely* bad (like, say, the ones built into cheap phones) you can get an image with very poor color depth (like, worse than 16-bit color -- in excruciatingly severe cases, not very much better than 8-bit color; like, a person's entire face may have only three distinct shades of color in it), which is quite painful to look at.

Why was your car on a roof?

It was parked on an access road to a bridge.

In what universe is it acceptable to park a car on a bridge access road overnight? Vandalized? It should have been towed at the owner's expense, on top of the ticket and fine.

Really skilled photographers can get good pictures even with crappy cameras,

Up to a point, but there are limits. (The cameras built into a lot of cheap phones are incapable of producing a quality image no matter how |_|83r1337 the photographer is.)

Really skilled photographers can get good pictures even with crappy cameras, and complete amateurs will still take amateur photos with the best equipment.

Somewhere in the middle, there are people like me, people who have a really hard time getting a usable image out of cheapo consumer-grade cameras (unless we take in broad daylight or heavily post-process the image with levels and unsharp masks and whatnot and still have to scale it down at least 4x, resulting in a web-resolution image unsuitable for many printing purposes) but can get passable images (good enough to meet our own standards, anyway) even in rather mediocre lighting conditions out of a somewhat better camera.

Yeah, I know, I'm not the world's greatest photographer. I don't always line up the shot perfectly. Sometimes I find that I have to crop a little. Sometimes I don't find quite the perfect angle from a lighting perspective. Shouldn't I be able to take a halfway-decent photo now and then anyway? A decent camera really helps with that.

[EpicanicusStrikes]

... if your camera is *extremely* bad (like, say, the ones built into cheap phones) you can get an image with very poor color depth (like, worse than 16-bit color -- in excruciatingly severe cases, not very much better than 8-bit color; like, a person's entire face may have only three distinct shades of color in it), which is quite painful to look at.

[sanchises]

It intruiges me that people are arguing about the lens used, whereas people buying cameras for 'the most megapixels' don't buy cameras with seperate lenses, but compact cameras instead. There is barely any competition with lenses in compact cameras, most competition is based on megapixels or features.

It seems to me that the average xkcd viewer has a big system camera, maybe we ought to poll on the forums what kind of hobby equipment visitors have...

[Tom93]

Reminds me of a _very_ drawn out conversation with a *@!?!# over precisely the issue of there being more to life than resolution. Arrogant, ignorant sod he was about it too.

In any case, I'm no photographer, and I've only ever had fairly low-end cameras (including, at one point, a matchbox with a hole in it).

[Fish-With-A-Beard]

As someone floating around on photography / camera rumors forums I really got a kick out of this. (Even have a bunch of photos of cars on fire, none of which I think I actually lit on fire myself.)

[EpicanicusStrikes]

Hey. On a more serious note...

Yeah, I know, I'm not the world's greatest photographer. I don't always line up the shot perfectly. Sometimes I find that I have to crop a little.

What is up with this modern 'crop in the field' nonsense? I was trained to always capture a little more than you intended and then crop in the lab. This gave a photographer the ability to select his imagery with greater care and consideration, as well as the chance to feature elements which may not have been immediately noticed when the photo was taken.

Outside of portraiture, in what universe does a photographer ever want to delay his shot by trying to form the perfect frame at the rate of their shutter speed?

[RogueCynic]

The audience's response tells me they aren't good photographers. In most cases, the problems they talk about are operator error more than the fault of the camera. Really skilled photographers can get good pictures even with crappy cameras, and complete amateurs will still take amateur photos with the best equipment.

Sort of an old joke I heard once. Men buy all the expensive cameras, lenses, light meters, tripods, etc to get a good picture. Women buy $10 or $20 one shot cameras. Women take the better pictures. Of course, today's comic could be a reference to "Sheeple", as the people on the couch are oblivious to the photographer's plight.

[ctdonath]

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson went on a camping trip. After a good meal and a bottle of wine they lay down for the night, and went to sleep.

Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his faithful friend.

"Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."

Watson replied, "I see millions and millions of stars."

"What does that tell you?"

Watson pondered for a minute. "Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful and that we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. What does it tell you?"

Holmes was silent for a minute, then spoke. "Watson, you idiot! Someone has stolen our tent!"