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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.

Xkcd.com

In popular music, a supergroup is a musical group formed by collaboration of existing solo artists and members of other musical groups. This comic shows a marquee announcing a concert by a supergroup formed from members of 10 musical groups whose names all begin with a number. The name of the supergroup is the sum of all those numbers, , followed by the names of the original groups without their numbers. It's reasonable to estimate that there could be up to 32 members of the supergroup see below. The title text indicates that this supergroup performs a medley or mashup of songs whose titles begin with numbers. The title of this "supersong" is similarly formed by adding the numbers and following with the rest of all the titles. Notably, none of the referenced songs were written by any of the referenced artists. There are two more songs titled or known as " Miles" , by Hedy West and Tori Amos, which could be added up to replace "A Thousand Miles" or " Miles" in the tally as well. These counts mostly reflect the bands' most well-known lineups and may vary with time due to changes in membership or the band's status. On the other hand, especially for worthy causes , it is possible that groups with many changing lineups could perhaps rustle up far more members than they ever had at a given time, never mind any prominent artists who may guest-star in their own right. It is unclear whether the band names would be pro rated in these circumstances for example, if only one of gecs joined the supergroup, would they only count for 50? Randall may be making a subtle reference to mathematical physics, in which a supergroup is a generalization of a group based on the concept of supersymmetry.

Archived from the original on February 25, Archived from the original xkcd.com August 26,

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The seventh What If? There are a lot of problems with the concept of a single random soul mate. But of the 9. Would we find each other? Right away, this raises a few questions. For starters, is your soul mate even still alive? That sounds horrible. This is stricter than the standard age gap creepiness formula , but if we assume a year-old and a year-old can be soul mates, then the creepiness rule is violated if they accidentally meet 15 years earlier. With the same-age restriction, most of us have a pool of around half a billion potential matches.

Xkcd.com

In this comic, White Hat suggests creating a meta-metric, "number-of-metrics-that-have-become-targets," and making it a target. First, Cueball introduces and defines Goodhart's Law , which is the observation that when a metric — a measure of performance — becomes a goal, efforts will be unhelpfully directed to improving that metric at the expense of systemic objectives. For example, imagine a scenario in which a car dealership is looking to grow profits, and its managers decide to focus on increasing a component metric of profit: how many cars it sells. So they offer a bonus to their salespeople to sell more cars. But then the salespeople offer deep discounts to rack up sales, rendering the car sales unprofitable. This example shows how a metric cars sold can become the target , replacing the real target, profit growth, if individual incentives are not properly managed. White Hat's suggestion could be a good or a bad idea.

Space marine eviscerator

In addition, a number of researchers have acknowledged particular xkcd comics as the source of inspiration for their scientific articles. Toggle limited content width. This was also the approach used in Destination Moon from The Adventures of Tintin , with the fuel problem addressed by using a nuclear reactor for much of the trip—which would be a really bad idea in reality since "rockets have a tendency to explode" [1]. Archived from the original on September 19, Information Science Institute. Archived from the original on November 11, Archived from the original on March 6, Retrieved August 17, ISSN Retrieved April 25, Eventually released on November 24, , Thing Explainer is based on the xkcd strip "Up Goer Five" and only uses the thousand most commonly used words to explain different scientific devices. Kalamazoo Gazette.

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Information Science Institute. Archived from the original on December 23, Direct Ascent Description: The lander is launched from Earth directly to the Moon without entering orbit. Explanation: This was the actual method used in the Apollo missions. A supergroup cover of 99 Luftballons would probably be awesome. Retrieved December 7, Namespaces Main page Discussion. The Guardian. Archived from the original on October 13, Archived from the original on November 1,