xkcd

by **Nylonathatep** » Wed Jun 13, 2012 3:23 pm UTC

Source: http://www.xkcd.com/1068/

Alt Text:

Spoiler:

by **WolfieMario** » Wed Jun 20, 2012 5:59 pm UTC

ALL the Planets

Disclaimer: only 559,504 planets are depicted in this chart. This is because the original was 38 planets short, and this is only nested once because it literally would be identical even if nested three times.

by **poxic** » Thu Jun 21, 2012 12:43 am UTC

WolfieMario wrote:ALL of the Planets

You are insane.

by **sw_username** » Sun Jun 24, 2012 10:32 am UTC

Exoplanets

Spoiler:

by **SirBryghtside** » Sun Jun 24, 2012 1:41 pm UTC

Haha, that was my first thought when I saw the comic

by **MaFraL** » Mon Jun 25, 2012 7:46 pm UTC

944: Hurricane Names

http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/487181_128988267240610_949029337_n.jpg

Spoiler:

Apparently newbies can't post images or links... Unless I missed something.

by **Роберт** » Mon Jun 25, 2012 8:14 pm UTC

Just need to get your post count up to five. Image below:

Spoiler:

by **MaFraL** » Mon Jun 25, 2012 8:37 pm UTC

Thanks! I took the time to find the right GIMP filter for that rather than just stealing TV static from a random Google Images result. :lol:

by **UniqueScreenname** » Mon Jun 25, 2012 8:40 pm UTC

Despite living in Florida, it took me a while to get that. And it's just so true.

by **bluebambue** » Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:57 am UTC

...explain please?

by **WolfieMario** » Tue Jun 26, 2012 6:06 am UTC

bluebambue wrote:...explain please?

944 has a rather apocalyptic hurricane scenario (especially with the alt text). In such a storm, you'll be lucky if your TV can even turn on; don't expect any signal to come through - hence the static.

by **MaFraL** » Tue Jun 26, 2012 1:40 pm UTC

WolfieMario wrote:
bluebambue wrote:...explain please?

944 has a rather apocalyptic hurricane scenario (especially with the alt text). In such a storm, you'll be lucky if your TV can even turn on; don't expect any signal to come through - hence the static.

Yep, you need to read the original comic (and assume the reporter is being watched on someone's TV) to get it.

by **SecondTalon** » Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:16 pm UTC

MaFraL wrote:
WolfieMario wrote:
bluebambue wrote:...explain please?

944 has a rather apocalyptic hurricane scenario (especially with the alt text). In such a storm, you'll be lucky if your TV can even turn on; don't expect any signal to come through - hence the static.

Yep, you need to read the original comic (and assume the reporter is being watched on someone's TV) to get it.

And be young enough to be of an age where TV static was a thing. Because these days?

Spoiler:

by **bluebambue** » Tue Jun 26, 2012 4:09 pm UTC

thanks

by **MaFraL** » Tue Jun 26, 2012 7:31 pm UTC

SexyTalon wrote:And be young enough to be of an age where TV static was a thing. Because these days?

Okay, that too. I actually still have two CRT TVs at home, but the LCD is the only one that really gets used.

by **Moole** » Wed Jun 27, 2012 2:58 am UTC

I'll bet someone's done this already, but I can't be bothered to read all 168 pages. Original

: I'm as surprised as you. I was on a winning streak!; xckdruin.png (9.67 KiB) Viewed 4259 times

by **Elvish Pillager** » Wed Jun 27, 2012 3:19 am UTC

You can search this archive by source, which reveals that it's already been done at least once. You even copied the "Make the 'LOST' look badly out of place" part!

On the other hand, you just gave me the idea for this, which ... well ...

: At first, it didn't believe ME

Sources: 391, 256 (for "soviet russia")

by **Yakk** » Wed Jun 27, 2012 4:39 am UTC

My current TV displays static. It isn't that old.

by **tastelikecoke** » Wed Jun 27, 2012 9:29 am UTC

I'm guessing the plain blue screen is a Digital TV thing? Our TV still studs the screen with ghost images of other channels and stretches the gamut randomly, yet fairly new.

by **eSOANEM** » Wed Jun 27, 2012 11:09 am UTC

Mind you, even with digital tv's you don't always just get plain monochrome. When we have a storm, it's not unusual for certain sections of the image to lose one or more of the colour signals (so a rectangle in the top right might lose green whilst the bottom centre may only have red left). I think it would depend on the exact encoding.

by **Ptolom** » Wed Jun 27, 2012 2:40 pm UTC

MaFraL wrote:
SexyTalon wrote:And be young enough to be of an age where TV static was a thing. Because these days?

Okay, that too. I actually still have two CRT TVs at home, but the LCD is the only one that really gets used.

It's not a question of CRT vs LCD. You can get static on anything that's displaying an analogue signal. When we first got an HD TV, the signal was still in analogue for a few weeks until we got the antenna tweaked.

by **MaFraL** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 1:25 am UTC

Yeah, that too. Although, it's more about whether or not the TV itself is digital than whether or not the signal is digital when there's no signal available. My LCD TV can pick up both digital and analogue channels with an antenna, but setting it to use the coaxial jack with nothing plugged in or on an unused channel results in a blank screen. The CRTs go to static without input. Or maybe the (digital) LCD ignores signals recognized as background noise whereas the CRTs don't (meaning no background radio frequency noise results in a blank screen)? Someone put an analogue TV in a Faraday cage and find out!

by **xkcdinspired** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 7:22 am UTC

I just reread this comic while skimming through news about a Microsoft tablet

Alt text: That's what I never made a first move!

by **FCN** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 8:12 am UTC

Today's Doghouse Diaries makes xkcd slightly worse. Similar concept to TheChewanater's version.

Originals: http://xkcd.com/724/ http://xkcd.com/888/

by **WolfieMario** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 11:51 am UTC

MaFraL wrote:Yeah, that too. Although, it's more about whether or not the TV itself is digital than whether or not the signal is digital when there's no signal available. My LCD TV can pick up both digital and analogue channels with an antenna, but setting it to use the coaxial jack with nothing plugged in or on an unused channel results in a blank screen. The CRTs go to static without input. Or maybe the (digital) LCD ignores signals recognized as background noise whereas the CRTs don't (meaning no background radio frequency noise results in a blank screen)? Someone put an analogue TV in a Faraday cage and find out!

I had a CRT which detected static, and would display a blue screen after receiving only background noise for a moment. Sometimes it would change to blue before I even noticed any static. When the signal came back, of course, it would display the content again. My digital cable box, on the other hand, would get scrambled picture and then turn to blackness when the signal was lost, independent of this - in these cases, the TV did not display blue.

So it's a little different than just "CRT/LCD?" and "digital/analogue?", considering my combo of CRT/analogue usually didn't display static when it otherwise would have (I suppose it doesn't entirely count, however, considering it still did sometimes display static).

by **eSOANEM** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 3:16 pm UTC

It's going to be a combination of digital/analogue and the encoding when it picks up the most noise.

If I have an analogue signal, I can't easily remove noise without losing the signal so you tend to get fuzzy images. This is pretty much an unavoidable consequence of using analogue signals during noisy parts of transmission and so you can't really do anything clever with the encoding to get round it.

If the signal is digital, it's pretty easy to trim off small amounts of noise using buffers however, if the noise gets too great (enough to trigger the buffer to change state) you'll end up with an even worse and, most likely, unintelligible signal. To try and deal with these sorts of things, you have checksums on each packet you send to check if the data has for whatever reason failed to be transmitted properly. If the checksum fails, the system will usually either request the packet again (as I believe videos streamed over the internet do) or just not display that signal until you start getting packets which pass their checksums.

Now, if you're transmitting the entire video in a single signal, if you start getting packets failing their checksums, you'll get the image disappearing and being replaced by the no-signal image which will depend on your tv's hardware. If you encode each colour in a separate signal, you'll get the image (or possibly rapidly moving regions of it) losing all of one of its primary colours. If you send only the changes in each pixel rather than the absolute value (an easy way to reduce bandwidth as for smooth videos it can be almost lossless), you'll end up with the frame hanging.

These are just some of the things which could happen and they are almost certainly based on an over-simplified model, but the point is that it depends primarily on exactly how the video is transmitted at the point at which the most noise is picked up. I suspect that for most non-cable tv signals, this will be at your aerial/satellite dish but this is basically a guess, depending on your setup, it could easily be the cable from the aerial to the tv itself.

by **Yakk** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 3:45 pm UTC

eSOANEM wrote:It's going to be a combination of digital/analogue and the encoding when it picks up the most noise.

If I have an analogue signal, I can't easily remove noise without losing the signal so you tend to get fuzzy images. This is pretty much an unavoidable consequence of using analogue signals during noisy parts of transmission and so you can't really do anything clever with the encoding to get round it.

No, you can write error correction routines for analogue signals.

If the signal is digital, it's pretty easy to trim off small amounts of noise using buffers

No, error correcting schemes for digital signals are not based off of buffers.

What happens is that it is easier to write error correcting codes for digital signals. When you do so, you could choose to arrange is so that the signal degrades in the event of some amount of interference before breaking down. However, it is simpler to just attempt to generate a perfect signal, so you make your codes so that they don't result in degradation but rather perfection. On top of this, you layer an error detection code that you can use to say "this is just random noise at this point".

By doing these two things, the decoder of the post-corrected digital signal can be much simpler. And, you can stuff much more data through the pipe than you could with a similarly simple analog signal system. A digital TV signal at 1080p@60Hz takes up less bandwidth than an old-school analog TV signal, if I remember right, which is 480i, while the 1080p signal has close to 20 times the information content.

If you wanted to set up the system to degrade, you could just send a massively error-checked low-bandwidth signal. Like massively. And then send deltas with less error checking for the higher resolutions. Then whomever picked up the signal would have a really good chance to get the low-bandwidth signal intact. And you could do this with less bandwidth than the original 480i analog TV signal.

But people are cheap. So what they did was they chose to use less bandwidth for their TV signals, and have more TV signals in the same bandwidth.

(The above is over-simplified, and the comparisons I made between various bandwidth uses are my impression from working in an industry adjacent to the broadcast industry, and not hard checked figures)

Packets over the internet are rarely corrupted. What happens is that packets are lost (some router somewhere has full buffers, and drops a packet). Which corresponds to your antenna being torn off your TV for a short bit, rather than a fuzzy signal. You could "fix" this by sending multiple packets by different routes and hoping one makes it, or by sending redundant data over multiple packets.

by **eSOANEM** » Thu Jun 28, 2012 5:05 pm UTC

I was talking more about the random noise stuck on top of whatever signal you were trying to transmit than other errors. This is difficult if not impossible to remove from an analogue signal without potentially causing errors (even if the signal is then converted to digital) whereas for a digital signal it is removed easily (for reasonable signal:noise ratios) by passing the signal through a Schmitt.

As I said, I'm sure my original explanation was based on too simple a model, all my practical experience is on a breadboard scale.

by **MaFraL** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 4:20 pm UTC

1027: Pickup Artist

Spoiler:

by **Great Justice** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 5:58 am UTC

1075 (I had a rant all ready, but made this instead)

: warning.png (9.86 KiB) Viewed 3804 times

"Yet, there you go."

by **UniqueScreenname** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 6:03 pm UTC

The cubed root of i? Mind blown.

by **brakos82** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 7:46 pm UTC

UniqueScreenname wrote:The cubed root of i? Mind blown.

We need a maths answer.

by **Dason** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 8:00 pm UTC

You're looking for the cube roots of i?

-i
-sqrt(3/4) + i/2
sqrt(3/4) + i/2

If you take any of those to the third power you get i.

by **eSOANEM** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 10:07 pm UTC

Dason wrote:You're looking for the cube roots of i?

No, it's the cube-root(-7i) + heart. Although going between your answers and the solution to the SW is not tricky.

by **WolfieMario** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 11:03 pm UTC

I'm surprised this hasn't been done yet.

TAS

Her reaction was similar...
Source: 744

by **Menacing Spike** » Sun Jul 01, 2012 8:23 am UTC

WolfieMario wrote:http://i45.tinypic.com/bljtf.png

How would that even work? You use a glitch in her memory so she orgasms as you greet each other, then leave?

by **UniqueScreenname** » Sun Jul 01, 2012 1:27 pm UTC

I forgot about turning roots into fractioned exponents. That makes the math make sense again. Carry on.

by **teelo** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 12:49 am UTC

My version of #125. Credit to GHETTo_oVERLORD for the idea.

Edit: Slightly revised:

by **Menacing Spike** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 9:24 am UTC

Just keep the first two panels. Don't go all Tim Buckley.

by **teelo** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 11:18 pm UTC

Like this?

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