What did the story mean? Munroe offered no direct answers, instead seeding the panels with esoteric clues from botany, astronomy and geology. Soon, "Time" had developed a fanatical following that pored over every update pixel by pixel and gathered online to trade theories , decipher clues , and even write songs. While they refer to Munroe simply as "OTA" the One True Author , a "newpic" plural: "newpix" is defined as the unit of time that elapses between updates, also known as "outsider minutes.
After more than four months of hourly updates, the journey finally came to an end last week, and the final product is 3, panels long—so long that the Youtube video compiling them above runs more than 40 minutes from start to finish.
Even better, Munroe is finally talking about the elaborate backstory behind the minimalistic and seemingly ancient world of "Time," which he reveals was set not in the past, but 11, years in the future. Every civilization with written records has existed for less than 5, years; it seems optimistic to hope that the current one will last for 10, more," Munroe told WIRED.
Although the comic takes place many millennia in the future, its setting is modeled on a geological event that took place more than 5 million years ago, when tectonic activity sealed off the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean, causing the sea to evaporate and leave a basin of dry land two miles below sea level.
In Munroe's comic, the same geologic shifts have reoccured in the distant future, and that's where we find the characters when the comic opens: in the bottom of the desiccated Mediterranean Sea, building castles out of sand. The cartoon is, like most XKCD comics, a simple back-and-white line drawing with a nerdy punch line.
The gag reveals how research literature, when stripped of its jargon, is just as susceptible to repetition, triviality, pandering, and pettiness as other forms of communication. The concept was intuitive—and infinitely remixable.
A doctoral student cobbled together a website to help users generate their own versions. We reached Peak Meme with the creation of a meta-meme outlining a taxonomy of academic-paper memes.
Put another way: The joke was on target. But they are required for promotion. Take a bunch of clever, ambitious people and tell them to get as many papers published as possible while still technically passing muster through peer review … and what do you think is going to happen? Of course the system gets gamed: The results from one experiment get sliced up into a dozen papers, statistics are massaged to produce more interesting results, and conclusions become exaggerated.
The most prolific authors have found a way to publish more than one scientific paper a week. This is a bug in Firefox, Mozilla Bug It has been outstanding for many years now. Note: It looks like it's been fixed in Firefox 3. Now, as an added tweak, to keep the tooltips from expiring while you're reading, you can use this. If it's a not-for-profit publication, you need no permission -- just print them with attribution to xkcd.
You can post xkcd in your blog whether ad-supported or not with no need to get my permission. How can I find the date a comic was posted?
The posting date is in the mouseover text on the archive page. Is there an interface for automated systems to access comics and metadata?
How do I write "xkcd"? There's nothing in Strunk and White about this. For those of us pedantic enough to want a rule, here it is: The preferred form is "xkcd", all lower-case. In formal contexts where a lowercase word shouldn't start a sentence, "XKCD" is an okay alternative.
What is your favorite astronomical entity?
0コメント