Xkcd

Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki! Help us finish them! Go to this comic explanation. The comic features a character identifiable as a minstrelbard or folk singerxkcd, performing a narrative song xkcd a jetty.

The subject matter of the comic varies from statements on life and love to mathematical , programming , and scientific in-jokes. Some strips feature simple humor or pop-culture references. It has a cast of stick figures , [3] [4] and the comic occasionally features landscapes, graphs, charts , and intricate mathematical patterns such as fractals. Munroe has released five spinoff books from the comic. The first book, published in and entitled xkcd: volume 0 , was a series of select comics from his website. His book What If? His book Thing Explainer explains scientific concepts using only the one thousand most commonly used words in English.

Xkcd

Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki! Help us finish them! Go to this comic explanation. This is a comic about the differences between magic and physics. Miss Lenhart , a school teacher, says that physics is applying forces to objects continuously over time, while magic tells you the outcome, but not how it'll get there. She gives an example of a magical curse that causes the recipient to slay their brother by midnight or possibly noon; it's not science because it doesn't say what will cause them to take this action. She then states that the laws of thermodynamics and other laws are also magic, with Lagrangians being deep magic. The joke is that these basic physical laws have been discovered empirically, but we don't know why they're true. So by the logic in the second panel, they're essentially like magic, since they specify a result without explaining how we get there. It may be possible to derive some of them from the others, but eventually we hit bottom and we have to say "because it just is", and that's like magic. The second panel alludes to Newtonian mechanics, which is formalized mathematically as an initial value problem; that is to say, the initial conditions of a system are known, and the rules relating the current condition of a system to the evolution of that system over time are specified. As humans, we are used to thinking of the present being a known state and the immediate future depending only on the present, so the Newtonian formalism makes intuitive sense as a picture of the world. The last panel contrasts this humorously with a series of physics ideas which violate this basic assumption in increasingly unsettling ways.

November 8, In this sense, the predictions of thermodynamics do not depend on the present state of the system, and xkcd not help predict its intermediate behaviour, xkcd.

The subject matter of the comic varies from statements on life and love to mathematical , programming , and scientific in-jokes. Some strips feature simple humor or pop-culture references. It has a cast of stick figures , [3] [4] and the comic occasionally features landscapes, graphs, charts , and intricate mathematical patterns such as fractals. Munroe has released five spinoff books from the comic. The first book, published in and entitled xkcd: volume 0 , was a series of select comics from his website.

Welcome to the explain xkcd wiki! Help us finish them! Go to this comic explanation. This is a comic about the differences between magic and physics. Miss Lenhart , a school teacher, says that physics is applying forces to objects continuously over time, while magic tells you the outcome, but not how it'll get there. She gives an example of a magical curse that causes the recipient to slay their brother by midnight or possibly noon; it's not science because it doesn't say what will cause them to take this action.

Xkcd

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Toggle limited content width. Munroe has released five spinoff books from the comic. Download as PDF Printable version. Retrieved March 20, Archived from the original on November 14, Archived from the original on December 13, The Yale Daily News. Retrieved January 23, There are a lot of comics that don't have set-in-stone explanations; feel free to put multiple interpretations in the wiki page for each comic. Archived from the original on October 13, The last panel contrasts this humorously with a series of physics ideas which violate this basic assumption in increasingly unsettling ways.

The seventh What If? In fact, it's honestly sort of impressive to find a solution that would actively make the problem worse in so many different ways.

Retrieved September 27, Retrieved February 26, And that's how we know thermodynamics is magic. October 9, Retrieved January 10, Archived from the original on April 1, Various websites were drawn as continents, each sized according to their relative popularity and located according to their general subject matter. Archived from the original on July 15, By the time he graduated from college, Munroe's "piles of notebooks" became too large and he started scanning the images. Retrieved September 28, Retrieved April 17,