You can be nice, just make sure you think about what you're actually doing before doing it.
Letting a car go in front in the situation above: you're probably causing an accident.
Letting a car go in heavy traffic when there's one lane each way and everyone's stopped already anyway: won't cost you much time and you've allowed that person to move on with their life instead of being permanently stuck at an intersection he's never going to be able to get out of unless someone yields.
I live close to a few intersections where if no one is nice and yields, it's impossible to join unless you barge your way in and hope people stop. But to be fair, these aren't designed like death traps like the one above.
Letting a car go in front in the situation above: you're probably causing an accident.
I disagree. In this situation, you are letting the left turning car move to the middle lane of this five lane road. From there, they can make a better decision of when to go. You aren’t causing an accident by letting them go TO THE MIDDLE LANE. From that point on, it is their ability to merge that may cause an accident. But they are supposed to stop in the middle lane and check that they can merge BEFORE they merge.
Edit: Woof, sorry my phone mangled my comment into a hot mess. Fixed it and re-commented here.
You are supposed to be in the middle near that rounded portion just above the time-traveling assassin.
These…
Turning Left on a Straightaway: Most main roads have median lanes into which you can move your vehicle if you need to turn left off of a straightaway. Move into the median, and yield the right of way to the oncoming traffic. Once there is an opening, you can complete your turn.
Turning Left onto a Straightaway with a vehicle in the median: Every once in a while, you’ll be trying to turn onto a straight away, and you’ll find someone already in the median—right where you need to be! The rule is that the vehicle in the media has the right of way. The idea is that they are in the most vulnerable position because they are literally stopped in the middle of the road. Let them complete their turn before you move to the median.
That is not what that excerpt is talking about, that is talking about a road with a middle turn lane.
The road pictured here has a median which cannot be driven over, generally there's a kerb and it's usually just grass on top. The center part is not for stopping in, it is only for driving through. You should not proceed unless you have a clear view of traffic from where that car is sitting on the left. In some cases there will be a white line to stop there, and in that case that is okay, but that is not what is pictured here.
What are YOU talking about? The median can 100% be driven over (circled in red below), and the center part (again, circled in red) is entirely intended to stop in prior to merging.
The entire middle area is the median, which also contains protected left hand turns, a raised section, and what I assume is a painted median (maybe, maybe not, but again the circled portion). I am talking about stopping here, in the circled portion, prior to merging. You are supposed to stop there, assuming you aren’t towing or driving a longer-than-average vehicle, if you do not have visibility into the lane you are merging into.
The quoted text I have above specifically mentions a left hand turn onto a straightway WITH ANOTHER VEHICLE IN THE MEDIAN, so clearly they mean a median that allows driving through.
Edit: The predictable thing to do here, turning left with low visibility into the lane you are merging into due to obscuring traffic, is to yield to traffic coming from your left until you have: no traffic coming from the right, or someone from the right waves you through. You then stop in the middle, circled red portion until it is safe to complete your turn. You don’t just Hail Mary blindly drive from where you were initially stopped into the desired lane. That is how you cause an accident.
I think you are entirely missing the point of this comic and misunderstanding the rules of the pictured intersection. There's a reason these were outlawed in my state (michigan). They are a dumb way to direct traffic, the "stopping room" you've circled is not meant for stopping in, or else there would be far more space there, likely an entire lane of room. I'm not suggesting making blind turns. You are not supposed to proceed without visibility or merging room, hence why the stopped line of cars in the middle lane have the right-of-way as they are blocking your view of that and possibly the traffic behind them, which the person at the front of the line has almost no way of knowing. You stop in the middle then you are still blocking them for as long as it takes to merge into traffic now that you've got yourself in this situation.
It just does not make sense to do it that way. If you can't make the turn left then you turn right and find somewhere to turn around, which is how our roads are designed from the jump here in michigan.
Anyways, this is a really stupid argument and I'm really not interested in continuing it.
Alright, bow out if you must. But keep in mind here you chose to pedantically argue there is no middle lane. You picked this fight, when my original argument to the first commenter I responded to was that allowing someone to go when you are in the middle lane of the straightaway (a.k.a the time-traveling assassin) is not "causing an accident". So agreed it is stupid, but it isn’t like I called you out first for something silly.
Cringe, and implies you're trying to win an argument rather than have a conversation.
Also, I'm sorry, but you're totally wrong. I know what kind of intersection you're talking about, this definitely is not it. Maybe it's a regional thing, but XKCD is an American webcomic, these intersections are all over the place and you definitely are not supposed to stop in them.
This is the kind of intersection you're talking about. You'll notice that the center area where the car turns is much longer than the area in the original post, in addition to having clear lane indications.
If someone were to stop in the intersection in the OP, they would have to be stopped at an awkward angle not parallel to either lane, and if someone were to follow them into the intersection, the second person would have nowhere to go.
Long story short, there's two different kinds of intersections being discussed here, regardless of whether or not you acknowledge it or which one you believe is being depicted. One of them makes the comic make sense, while the other does not. Which one do you think the artist intended to draw?
Cringe? Okay, thanks. So this was a discussion until meowMix came in with a "there is no middle lane what the f* are you talking about". Charged language, incorrect statement, and a nitpick nonetheless.
Now you are here arguing for meowMix, but again, you are arguing something counter to most US states. You are generally allowed to turn into an intersection as long as you are not impeding traffic turning left in that same intersection. I am talking about intersections without lights, not controlled intersections. Those are different, and not applicable here.
In this case, there is clearly enough room for a reasonable sized car to be in the intersection assuming they yielded for traffic from the left AND were waved into the intersection by another left turning car on the straightaway (the time traveling assassin), so traffic from the right. Left and right, basically the general rule that applies to all left turning uncontrolled intersection traffic questions. But that waving though only is to the lane of the car waving you through, closest to your side of the street. No time traveling assassin can give you right of way to lanes to their right, a.k.a the lane with the 45 mph car.
That’s the premise of this joke, that people cannot give you right of way to SOMEONE ELSE’S LANE. In case everything above is still unclear, there is a wiki for this exact joke. Because this has been debated countless times before. Because everything from xkcd has. Because this is the internet, where everything is debated to death.
Now I have no idea where this supposed intersection is. Could be Pennsylvania where the artist is from, or Virginia where they went to college. Or even Massachusetts where they currently reside. Or it could be in any number of states that allow this exact behavior I am talking about. Tough to say without knowing directly from the author where this is from.
The example you provided is another intersection type, and different than the joke. The middle section of the joke is what appears to be a double wide (wide as two lanes) section, so there is definitely enough room for a standard sized car. Angle of the intersection plays no part in whether it is a valid turning place, awkward or not. There are countless examples of intersections that aren’t perfectly perpendicular, should ALL of these awkward left turn merges be forbidden because you aren’t in a spot exactly parallel to the lane you are merging into? No.
Who cares about the second person? You shouldn’t be taking them into consideration for this kind of turn. They are supposed to turn when they have enough space. Following you blindly into an intersection is a poor decision on their part, and of course not your responsibility.
Long story not short! You’re talking about a different intersection, not even the one from the joke. You are right there are different kinds of intersections, but any of them with: an intersection, two left turning drivers, a two way straightaway, a middle section with a left turning lane (a.k.a. a middle lane, or a center left lane, or a median with a raised section and left turning lane, …), and enough space for a non-straightaway left turning car to move into the intersection without impeding traffic from either direction of the straightaway would have worked for this joke.
Because the joke wasn’t there isn’t enough space in the intersection. It was that NO DRIVER CAN GIVE YOU RIGHT OF WAY TO SOMEONE ELSE’S LANE.
You’re potentially right that I enjoy a debate, most people on the internet do. That’s why I am here. But I’ll be damned if sit on the sidelines while some cat food user makes an incorrect nitpick, or you yourself argue for driving behavior that is counter to most states’ DMV rules.
I was gonna lose my mind reading some of these comments. Thank you for being sensible.
The majority of cases where one could politely let someone through are not going to be on highways like this.
It's also ridiculous to assume that the driver that you're letting through would just stop checking for oncoming traffic because you waved them through.
Driving is one of those things where we're supposed to be human - make choices, act sensibly, think about what we're doing and adapt to others around us. But often people assume it's something entirely deterministic - "if the light is green I'm going to launch forward even if there's still traffic moving past me and I'm going to get hit or hit someone, because green means I HAVE to go".
Being polite to others, asides from the nicety of it, is often more positive to everyone on the road than going "I have the right of way so I won't let anyone in" and allows traffic as a whole to move with less issues. But some people go way too hard on the mentality that every road user other than them is stupid and stop acting like humans because they assume others won't be able to cope. Which usually complicates traffic for everyone.
There's a roundabout in my daily commute in which at the end of the afternoon 80% of drivers are coming from and going to the same direction and there's usually heavy traffic in that specific direction that blocks the roundabout. Often, drivers who are approaching the roundabout to go to a different direction will signal their intention, and users already inside the roundabout will give way - even if they technically have the right of way and don't have to - because those users aren't going their direction and will only increase the number of cars stuck if they're not allowed through. Roundabout users being polite effectively makes traffic as a whole go more smoothly and everyone benefits. Sometimes someone inside the roundabout will be an ass and not let people through - and the result is always that everyone is stuck for more time because there are now cars inside the roundabout which could've already vacated it which are stuck behind someone who could easily let them through.
you dont have two lane roads in your town? i sure do and this is a real issue. the driver pulling into traffic cannot see the car coming along at higher speed.
you dont have two lane roads in your town? i sure do and this is a real issue. the driver pulling into traffic cannot see the car coming along at higher speed.
5 seconds of summer, nine inch nails, one direction, and 30 seconds to Mars.
That are loads that fit this category but I just don't know all of them. For example I've heard of 99 red balloons but I didn't know that was the name of the band, I thought it was the name of the song.
So the joke is they added up a list of bands with numbers in their names to get 176? I dunno if it's just me but that seems profoundly, purposely unfunny. But I'm also not smart enough to get most of xkcds jokes so it really is probably just me
I am entirely fine and on board with sensible chuckle. I would go as so far as to say that sensible chuckle has now taken the place of edgy snicker in my life.
No the comic is pointing out that the sun and the earth are both orbiting the milky way galactic center.
Edit: While also true, I was wrong, they orbit the center of mass of the two body problem (earth and sun). I still think that's too simple of a way to look at it. It's not a two body problem and the other planets and the whole galaxy are also in play.
this doesn't give a very good explanation but I'm sure there's some good YouTube video that breaks it down. essentially maps out everywhere in space and time that could possibly interact with you in any way. this maximum is represented by how fast light can move away from you.
for example if you stole my car and ran away from me, I can draw a circle on the map every hour for how far you could have gone (assuming I knew my car's maximum speed). if I put those circles on top of each other it'll make a cone.
Yes, but it's mostly shifting because of Jupiter. It's just so dang heavy. Like, a couple times heavier than every other planet put together. I don't have the brain wattage to do the cool math right now, but a quick google search says that while the barycenter of the solar system does depend on all the planets, more often than not, it is outside the sun
But I think the math of the argument is only about the common center between Earth and the sun, taking away all other planets out of the equation, especially Jupiter.
Wait I'm sorry, are we saying that the earth's orbit isn't almost entirely dictated by the gravitational pull of the massive star at the center of our solar system? I am a simple man, I apologize if that is a stupid question.
When dealing with gravitational systems the gravity of each object has to be taken into account. So even though the sun is 99.999% (hyperbole) of the gravity in the equation, the earth’s gravity contributes that small 0.001% and thus the “center” of where they orbit isn’t truly the center of the sun. Tack on Jupiter, which is much more than a fraction of a percent and that “center” moves even farther away from the middle of the sun.
To look at it further, if you had two objects of perfectly equal mass and no other gravitational interference, they would orbit around a point in the middle of each other since their pull is equal. So it’s basically a sliding scale of sorts.
That did help, thanks for taking the time. I think I was thinking about mass and gravity not orbits. Again, I'm an idiot, so that's probably why I missed the central point of the cartoon. 😁
That is why the explanation continues: "(other than pedantic exceptions due to calendar issues or timezone alterations, or someone dying before their birthday, or being born on a leap day, none of which apply in this case)".
A friend of mine has his birthday on feb 29th. He was turning 49 and me and my gf showed up to his party with balloons with the number 12 on them (since that's how many actual birthdays he'd had).
Because you can see how, after H and He, you do 2 loops of 8 and add the transition metals to the next 2 loops; then you add the lanthanides and actinides to the next 2 loops. And can easily see how the superactinides guy in the extended period table
What about the table of nuclides? IMO that’s the best way to list elements in a logically consistent manner. The trouble is, nature is a messy kraken that just won’t fit neatly into a shoe box. You can try to squeeze it in, but the lid won’t close because there are always a few tentacles sticking out.
I once met a girl in a bar who spoke such absolutely perfect and grammatically correct German she did sound like an alien impersonating a human.
Or someone who very much wants to show that she's better than you.
Turns out she wasn't from Germany at all. She was an immigrant from Slovakia, who had learnt German at such a high level that it sounded weird.
English speakers can really enhance their vocabulary when they know French. English does have a lot of French words that most people don't use anymore but if you use them, your vocabulary becomes off-the-charts intellectual.
Pseudo-intellectual. A clear communicator uses the simplest, precise word that has the precise meaning they intend, reaching most commonly for the Germanic vocabulary unless they need the subtler shades of meaning from the Latinate. A pseudo-intellectual uses Latinate vocabulary to conceal what they're actually saying or to intimidate people who aren't as comfortable on the Latinate side of the fence. It's a form of intellectual bullying that, to my mind, makes the person using it look insecure (not to mention likely dishonest).
A good communicator's motto should be "eschew gratuitous obfuscation (see what I mean?)".
I once did an English language vocabulary test that yielded that I'm amongst the top 0.01% in terms of amount of English-language vocabulary.
English is not my mother tongue and I still and often make mistakes in the use of "in"-vs-"on" or even in certain forms of past tense.
However I read a lot in English, in various areas of knowledge, plus it turns out lots of really obscure words in English are pretty much the same as a the word in some other language I know or even pretty much the Latin word, so when I didn't know that was the English word for that, I can often guess the meaning.
All this to say that I absolutelly agree with you that it's a reading thing, plus at more specialized language level, the "knowledge of foreign languages" also has some impact.
Got called a rich kid for knowing the word "carafe." Pretty sure I learned it from a book, my parents didn't have carafe with mountain spring water or some shit around the house.
I learned that word from my dad when I was a child. we kept a carafe in the refrigerator designated for water. It's a wine carafe but can put anything in it. My dad was an alcoholic so he had a wine carafe and a lot of other alcohol-related accoutrements like beer steins.
The term "carafe" puts me in mind of a crystal glass container of between half a litre and two litres of volume for wine or water. What is it in relation to coffee? The glass bowl the coffee drips into in one of those dripping coffee makers?
I was scolded by a boss for using words that to me were perfectly ordinary everyday words. Words like "cognate" or "cognizant", say, but to him they sounded like I was showing off and making people feel bad.
That's a different issue from sandhi. Vocabulary and dialect are another area of active study (often paired with yet another realm: sociolinguistics: the language you speak changes according to your social environment) that is a real rabbit hole.
I've been learning German too myself, and the thing that the traditional language courses don't teach you is the way natives speak. Listening to actual German speakers was pretty much alien to me even after two years until I bumped into a couple Easy German videos where they touch the very same subject as this xkcd and that actually got me listening to certain parts of speech more carefully and that way also understand it better.
Now I actually find myself doing the same shortcuts sometimes when I'm progressing with the skill. It's the same with English since I have to use it daily at work even though I'm not a native speaker. Funny how the languages work in real life vs. in theory.
I’d not heard of this before, but this explains a lot of why my call center jobs were such BS.
We were expected to resolve networking, MS Exchange and VoIP issues in 20 minutes or less on average, which just resulted in a lot more customers having to call back because all the agents had to try and rush to a solution without time to test.
We don't test for false convictions, which are as good as true ones for furthering careers in prosecution and law enforcement.
We don't know if our prison population is 10% innocent or 75% despite Blackstone's ratio.
In fact, when someone isn't successfully convicted, it's assumed the suspect got off on a technicality rather than continuing the investigation to find other suspects.
It's wildly under-taught. It explains like half of all problems in the world. Education: "teaching to the test." Economics: optimizing GDP at the expense of non-material well-being. Maximizing shareholder value by selling out employees and enshittifying your product. Software: "data-driven decision making" optimizing short -term gains over long-term because they are more measurable. That's just off the top of my head.
The corporate bureaucracy is as much a product of the overall system, and just as much a slave to its incentives, as you or I. Though granted, the level of self-awareness of their role in the system is on average pretty low. With few exceptions, there is nobody at the wheel of problems like these. Worrying about whose fault it is is usually a waste of time.
I had no idea what the name of the sound was so I credit being a native speaker and reading the comic out loud with my understanding.
Do read it out loud - the more you exaggerate it the more fun it is.
Cannot believe how smart this guy is. If 10% of the planet were like Randall we would’ve cured cancer like the second time somebody got diagnosed with it.
I appreciate the origin story being included in this cliché, cuz it got repeated so often on Reddit that people seemed to forget it was said by a parody of an obnoxious heartless bureaucrat and repeat the phrase without irony.
If you're into hard sci-fi and you're looking for a good read, they actually dropped a pretty good recommendation with that reference at the end - Larry Niven does a great job of blending real-world theories like Dyson spheres and advanced propulsion drives, with some of the more far-flung standards of the genre like an intra-planetary teleportation grid.
All chemical propulsion is just controlled explosions that we use to push a thing forward. It's not that different, as long as you don't use it in the atmosphere or near humans.
If you can trust the human monkeys with the "shaping" of a rock that got us here, how you gonna distrust the widdle trivial matter of taking little bits of something and splitting them.
It's shaped charges, it's totally fine and sane. I'd happily get on the 1,000th Orion flight*.
I'm not familiar with the books, and the plot summary of their Wikipedia article does not mention nuclear propulsion whereas the article for the series does, so I went with that.
Unless what bothers you is the x followed by the apostrophe and the s, which I never know when to omit the s, so it is what it is.
Ah gotcha. Yeah you should check out the books if you're liking the show! The books go into a ton more detail and the Staircase Project is pretty cool. Seeing it on the screen is cool too, but if you really wanna nerd out I highly recommend the books.
It would probably work just fine, but it needs a huge ship. It could get up to a few percent of the speed of light.
FWIW, nuclear test ban treaties are considered to outlaw it. I think we're more likely to solve the technical difficulties of antimatter propulsion than we are to get over the political difficulties of nuclear bomb propulsion.
Just as an observation, there was a time when everyone on the Internet was gaga over the idea of Project Orion, and you didn't dare speak out against it lest you get a hail of downvotes.
It'd work fine in deep space. It's not a good idea to launch from Earth this way. But again, we'll probably find something better once we're at the stage of needing it.
Implosion-type nukes are all but impossible to make go off that way. They need a whole bunch of small explosives to go off very precisely to squeeze the core in just the right way. A short circuit or a crash won't have the necessary precision. This isn't entirely safe, either--it can still cause a small explosion with a flash of fallout and radiation--but it's a manageable problem.
Gun-types (Little Boy was one) are easier to go off on accident, but the US retired its last gun-type design decades ago. I don't think Russia used them much, either. They're only good for smaller bombs, and their safety issues make them questionable for any use. Smaller nuclear powers aren't bothering with them.
Considering that you need huge shields and dampening and you only have the mass of the bomb itself as propelant, is it still as effective as controlled propulsion?
I think you may be mixing up Project Orion (let's chuck bombs out of the back to make us go zoom) with NERVA (a nuclear thermal rocket engine where the heat from chemical reactions is replaced with heat from a nuclear reactor to generate gas expansion out of a nozzle). Something like NERVA is actually a great idea. Let me tell you why!
It's completely clean (unlike Orion and fission-fragment rockets)
the reactor and fuel never touch, the fuel goes through a heat exchanger and is not radioactive
it provides extremely high efficiency
chemical rockets top out at ~400-500 isp in vacuum
NERVA tests in 1978 gave a vacuum isp of 841
ion thrusters like NEXT has an isp of 4170
it provides lots of thrust
NERVA had 246kN of thrust
NEXT (which was used on the DART mission) is 237 millinewtons
That's 6 orders of magnitude more thrust!
No oxidizer is needed
All you need is reaction mass, just like ion thrusters
For automated probes, the extreme efficiency and low thrust of ion thrusters makes perfect sense. If we ever want to send squishy humans further afield, we need something with more thrust so we can have shorter transit times (radiation is a bastard). Musk is supposedly going to Mars with Starship, and the Raptor engine is a marvel of engineering. I don't like the man and I'm not confident that he'll actually follow through with his plan, but the engineers at SpaceX are doing some crazy shit that might make it happen.
Just think though, if the engine was literally twice as efficient and they didn't need to lug around a tank of oxidizer, how much time could they shave off their transit? How much more could they send to Mars? Plus, they could potentially reduce the number of big-ass rockets they have to launch from Earth to refuel. If you can ISRU methane, then I imagine you could probably get hydrogen.
There are problems that still need to be resolved (the first that comes to mind is how to deal with cryogenic hydrogen boiling off), but like, the US had a nuclear thermal engine in the 70s. It was approved for use in space, but congress cut funding after the space race concluded so it never flew.
I'm happy to see that NASA is once again researching nuclear thermal rockets. Maybe we'll get somewhere this time.
ISO 8601 contains way too many obscure formats. RFC 3339 is pretty much a subset and defines only sensible ones. It also allows 2018-02-05 08:02:43-00:00 (no T and explicitly specifying no timezone)
One of my all-time favourite facts is that solar eclipses are actually a very rare thing to happen in space. There is no reason why but our moon just happens to be the right size/distance to have this happen.
I've never seen one in person, but the next one is on the 8th of April crossing Mexico and the US. If you have the chance and are able, go check it out, if only to gloat on an internet stranger longing for his first total eclipse.
One passed over my area while I was at university, and the professor whose class we were meant to be in just said the day beforehand that he wasn't even going to bother scheduling anything for the first hour because he didn't expect anyone to be in. There's a famous hill-top cemetery in the city, and sure enough I saw basically all of my classmates there too
And keep in mind that the difference between a total eclipse and a partial eclipse is massive. It's worth it to find a spot that is in the line of totality.
I got to see one about 7 years ago. Made a whole vacation of it, and was not disappointed. In the darkness, all the birds stopped singing. And to top it off, at the motel I stayed there was a cleaning lady yelling at me to get back into my room because this was a sign from her god saying this was the end of days.
This is incorrect. The moon is moving away from the earth and will stop. At some point in the future the tidal forces will balance out and the earth-luna system will be tidally locked. From that point on they will remain locked in orbit neither moving away or towards one another unless some other large gravitational force perturbs them (e.g. an extra solar planet wandering through the solar system and passing by earth-luna).
Fuck yes, enjoy bud. I've read people not using high enough rated welding goggles and getting eye damage though. I'd stay on the safe side and get appropriate solar eclipse glasses. You'll be looking directly at the sun for several minutes after all.
I hate those bug trackers and forums. Like you have a problem that is quite difficult to explain. Then, after some time you finally stumbled upon a thread where someone else has the exact same issue... but there is NO solution and the thread was locked due to inactivty.
I recall reading an article about version numbers, and it mentioned an interesting example of some app where the version number is essentially pi. Each update just adds another digit to the version, so eventually it’s going to get really long. When the developer dies, all the remaining bugs in the software will officially become undocumented features.
I just noticed this info on the xkcd website for the first time:
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.
It unlocks your screen rotation settings and links screen orientation to the phones gyroscopic sensor to maintain orientation perpendicular to the horizon.
imgs.xkcd.com
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