Tag / Randall Munroe

by zbicyclist

Saturday OYs — Some math for e day

Pi Day (March 14, or 3/14) gets a lot of play in the U.S., but doesn’t work in other countries that write dates as DD/MM/YYYY, so it becomes 14/3. An alternative in those areas is e day, after the base of natural logarithms, e, (2.71) on 27 January. So, we’re going to avoid the Pi Day rush and post some math cartoons today.

Like pi, e shows up in a variety of places in mathematics, and is associated with some of the greats in mathematical development. From Wikipedia:

“The number e is sometimes called Euler’s number …—after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler —or Napier’s constant—after John Napier. The constant was discovered by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli while studying compound interest.”

Some fuzzy math from websites. The first is from Kiva.org.

This one is from MyVirtualMission.com, a site where you can virtually pretend to climb Everest or complete the Camino de Santiago as you run/walk/bike around your neighborhood. Somehow, their counter of missions (trips) has gone awry. Or maybe I did one backwards?

by multipleciduers

Saturday Morning OYs – February 11th, 2023

Thanks to Becky for this XKCD.

The rollover text (for those who insist it’s an integral part of each XKCD cartoon) was “3D graphs that don’t contact the plane in the closure area may proceed as scheduled, but be alert for possible collisions with 2D graph lines that reach the hole and unexpectedly enter the 3D space.”

Is the therapist playing off an ambiguity to humorously chide the client for being late … again?

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs, January 15th, 2023

Thanks to Boise Ed! Are salads and tights the current faves on the insta?

Not the most sophisticated of jokes, but near irresistible when accompanied by the drawing.

Definitely a geezer if this was your textbook!

Meta text is “Researchers claim to have identified 6 additional elements in the second row, tentatively named pentium through unnilium.”

We most often see PBS in the OYs, but this seems a straight-ahead LOL:

by EditorM

Saturday Morning Oys – April 23rd, 2022

Thanks to Andréa for this subtle groaner:

And another from Andréa:

Sources say that either the exclamation “Great Scott” is not attached to any particular person with that name; or else may be associated with Sir Walter Scott, or with U.S. General Winfield Scott. But here, with the talk of Antarctica and the South Pole, surely they intend some kind of glance at famous and unfortunate polar explorer Robert F Scott?

And another from Andréa, who calls this “Barely an oy”. Also fodder for you dialectologists out there.

by Winter Wallaby

D. B. Cooper

From BillR, who comments “Ok, I know who D.B. Cooper was, but the rest of it is beyond me.” Yep, me too.

For those who don’t know who D. B. Cooper is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper

I find the hovertext even more confusing than the cartoon itself: “The only other person to walk by was a linguist back in the ‘80s, but she just spent a while directing the phrase ‘help me down’ before getting distracted by a squirrel and wandering off.”

(Edit: the hovertext actually says “dissecting,” not “directing.” So that’s much less confusing.)

by Winter Wallaby

Mnemonic

Hovertext: “It’s definitely not the time to try drinking beer before liquor.”

Clearly there’s some sort of reference to “leaves of three; let it be” for poison ivy, but it’s still a CIDU for me.

I suggest that it’s more fun if we avoid peeking at explainxkcd until the discussion here has run its course.

From RR.