XKCD

[SleepingOrange]

That assertion... Makes no sense at all. Although the quotes around thinking are a nice backhanded touch so you can insult people who disagree with you without actually making a point.

Heck, let's talk etymology for a second: the word pander comes from the character Pandare (from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde); its original form was a noun meaning a pimp, and the verb came directly from that meaning. And if there's any word that fits how Munroe treats his nerdiness, it's to pimp: he debases and lowers it, rendering it completely meaningless and crass. To say that a nerd can't pander to nerds is utterly ridiculous! Making a comic that appeals to your interests and experiences is one thing; making a comic that deliberately draws people in on that basis alone, the only strength of which is that one dimension and that relies entirely on making the same joke for the same kind of person over and over again, is pandering pure and simple. It's the very definition of it.

Don't be a sarcastic dick just because you don't like what other people are saying.

[Softspoken]

So I'm going to skip the discussion on the quality of XKCD. Is that okay? Because I'm doing it anyways.

Today's was funny to me because it was an unexpected turn of phrase. Also it pandered somewhat directly to me since I am in physics, so the wave - particle collapse was an immediate connection to me that was relevant to my studies.

Oh look I couldn't skip that discussion completely. What a surprise.

[Walliard]

I admit, today's made me chuckle. But pasting your stick-figures onto a GIS and dropping a one-liner is not two days' work.

[Kazerad]

That assertion... Makes no sense at all. Although the quotes around thinking are a nice backhanded touch so you can insult people who disagree with you without actually making a point.

Heck, let's talk etymology for a second: the word pander comes from the character Pandare (from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde); its original form was a noun meaning a pimp, and the verb came directly from that meaning. And if there's any word that fits how Munroe treats his nerdiness, it's to pimp: he debases and lowers it, rendering it completely meaningless and crass. To say that a nerd can't pander to nerds is utterly ridiculous! Making a comic that appeals to your interests and experiences is one thing; making a comic that deliberately draws people in on that basis alone, the only strength of which is that one dimension and that relies entirely on making the same joke for the same kind of person over and over again, is pandering pure and simple. It's the very definition of it.

Don't be a sarcastic dick just because you don't like what other people are saying.

I think the whole "pandering" angle of criticism is a little out-there. He's making a comic, some people enjoy reading his comic, and he's making a living off of it. It's a mutually beneficial exchange between him and the people who like his work. That's how being a professional artist works. Trying to entertain people is just what professional artists do.

I see it like this: People enjoy XKCD, so Munroe is doing something right. You don't enjoy XKCD, so Munroe is doing something wrong. I can understand complaints that the comic should appeal more to you, but it almost seems like you're saying that he should try to appeal less to his target audience, or that he's doing something inherently wrong by making them feel smart or witty. And that's just silly.

[Walliard]

I think the whole "pandering" angle of criticism is a little out-there. He's making a comic, some people enjoy reading his comic, and he's making a living off of it. It's a mutually beneficial exchange between him and the people who like his work. That's how being a professional artist works. Trying to entertain people is just what professional artists do.

Okay, this is a fair point. I think I've been spending too much time on SomethingAwful.

[Ed]

I think the whole "pandering" angle of criticism is a little out-there. He's making a comic, some people enjoy reading his comic, and he's making a living off of it. It's a mutually beneficial exchange between him and the people who like his work. That's how being a professional artist works. Trying to entertain people is just what professional artists do.

Yeah, entertainment by pandering. I don't see how it stops being pandering just because he's successful.

[Kazerad]

Yeah, entertainment by pandering. I don't see how it stops being pandering just because he's successful.

You could call it pandering, but I don't see how that makes it a reasonable criticism. Would his work necessarily be improved if he suddenly stopped trying to appeal to his readers?

At least to me, it feels like "pandering" accusations come exclusively by people outside of an artist's target audience. You could make the case that, say, Gunnerkrigg Court panders to people who like a slow-paced, mysterious story. Most people who fall into that category, however, would just say Gunnerkrigg is a "good story". XKCD has kind of the same thing going on; it appeals to a very specific group of people that clearly does exist, and some people who fall outside of this group are really offended by this.

I can understand disliking a comic because it doesn't appeal to you, but the traditional pandering argument always seems to attack things because they do appeal to others. The very fact that Sleeping Orange has criticisms implies that he thinks the comic could be better if it did things differently. Heeding Slorange's criticisms would be no different than simply pandering to Slorange's tastes, but I don't think he (or anyone who agrees with him) would complain if that happened.

[tynic]

I'd be happy if he just put some more effort in. Pander to nerds and engineers all you like, fuck, I am a nerd and an engineer and I love being pandered to! Jon R panders to my demographic all the time, if we take pander in the sense that he does jokes designed to appeal to nerds, and I happily lap it up even when the idea is a little trite or obvious, because his art is wonderful and he puts a lot of careful crafting into his writing. Randall, on the other hand - well, he may not be able to draw, and he sets up jokes that tend to be contrived at best, but he is definitely capable of coming up with interesting ideas. The comics that he has done which I like tend to be the ones where he has actually spent a lot of time researching things and telling me something I didn't already know - the ones with the logorithmic height expansion, for example, were really clever and cool. So then one wonders, why doesn't he do that all the time?

I think this is where some of the 'pandering' thing comes in - many of randall's comics are the nerd equivalent of Marvin's writer doing poopy diaper jokes seven times a week, because he knows his target audience (frustrated parents) will have just enough of a familiarity-laugh-reflex to keep them coming back. Randall's cleverer comics take considerable effort, as well as requiring a clever premise, and while some people can certainly be brilliant on a day to day basis, for most it is a choice between being clever occasionally or being mediocre three days a week. Take Kate Beaton, who I believe is brilliant - her comic is intermittent, because she'd rather rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and then discard a joke that isn't working than update regularly with subpar humour just to keep a mindless click-through audience happy.

From a creative perspective, it is irksome when somebody has an opportunity that a lot of people would give their eye-teeth for - the opportunity to do what you love for a living, to create something for yourself and call it your career - puts in the bare minimum amount of effort to sustain that. It is doubly irksome when you know the creator is capable of much better. It's the garfield effect, where what is an innocuous, even above-average product nevertheless generates a huge amount of ire, because the creator's lack of involvement and attention is palpable. If you are putting your all into something, and you're not coming up with anything great but people seem to like it, then ok that's on them and good for you. etc etc ok bored of banging on about this now. To sum up: XKCD is purely mediocre, and it doesn't have to be, but the creator seems content to push a few nerd-buttons and call it a day rather than really producing the work he is capable of. Hence, pandering.

That said, I know Randall is currently going through a really difficult time with his personal life, and it's probably hard to give a shit about anything much when your loved ones are unwell. On the other hand, xkcd has been like this since long before his current problems; it's an endemically lazy comic.

[tynic]

all that said, I smirked at today's.

[waterbottles]

Can we turn this thread into the 'tynic, please explain science to me thread"? Because you are an engineer, I'm going to assume that you know (in great detail) everything about every field of science.

Why does light act as both a particle and wave? And why does it act like a particle only when observed? Also, what's the deal with that double-slit experiment?

In short, please explain to me the quantum mechanics.

Thanks/sincerely,
Emilybottles

[Ed]

Kaz, english is not my first language but i think "appeal" is not a synonym for "pander". I'm sorry if i'm misunderstanding your post, but that is all i can make of it.

Also everything Tynic said.

[Namboto]

1) I actually enjoy XKCD on occasion, it's not something I follow relentlessly (like homestuck or gunnerkrigg court) but it's ok for a good chuckle every once in a while.

2) and while this will probably lower certain people's opinions of me, I actually do own some XKCD merchandise, namely two shirts. One of which I got basically to wear in my programming classes ("I'm not slacking off, my code's compiling") to look somewhat witty and maybe get some of the other programmers in the class to chuckle. The other one I got because the image of a flying shark chasing after two scientists with the word SCIENCE plastered in big letters never fails to make me giggle.

Is it the best webcomic ever? No, but it's by no means the worst.

[tynic]

Can we turn this thread into the 'tynic, please explain science to me thread"? Because you are an engineer, I'm going to assume that you know (in great detail) everything about every field of science.

Why does light act as both a particle and wave? And why does it act like a particle only when observed? Also, what's the deal with that double-slit experiment?

In short, please explain to me the quantum mechanics.

Thanks/sincerely,
Emilybottles

Oh, that's easy.






It's magic.

Um. More seriously, it's complicated, and actually we still don't know why, in the purest sense, the universe is like it is; it may be that why is the wrong question to ask, philosophically, because it ascribes a causal (temporal) aspect to something that ... ok wait no erasing what I've written after that this probably isn't what you mean now I think about it. Let's get back to what I think you're asking about:

spoiled for long.

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Disclaimer: not a physicist! in fact, I actively avoided all physics classes after my compulsory undergraduate courses.

So, wave properties of light. What does this mean? Well, it depends on how deep down the rabbit hole we want to go.
If you want the very simplest explanation, then it helps if we think about a photon, rather than a particle, as being an energy bundle, which vibrates at a specific frequency. This is the high-school version of quantum mechanics; you usually get a mental image of a wave being all scrunched up really tight into a bundle. When you look at one particle you see a particle, when you look at a bunch together you see their statistical properties, which manifest as a 'wave' with the inherent frequency, etc, of the individual bundles.

Is this accurate? Um. Yes and no. It is not wrong, but it is not the whole story, and it can be misleading. It implies that there exists such a thing as a photon 'particle' (no matter how abstracted). What does a wave bundle mean? A wave is a vibration, it can't have a physical location unless it is vibrating in a medium? yes? ... or no?

A lot of physics seems to change depending on the paradigm you use to think about it, which is mind-bogglingly recursive if you dwell on it too much.

So then we have to think about what the 'wave' aspect of subatomic-particles really is. At this point, if you're reading about this stuff, you tend to run into the Copenhagen interpretation, which points to the 'wave' being a purely theoretical construct, merely a mathematical tool for calculating the probabilities in a specific experiment; and upon observation, this wave-function will 'collapse' to a specific location. Under this view, we can interpret the wave-like properties of particles as being a probability distribution over their likely position in a region of space. The idea is that by observing this particle, you get a precise idea of where the it is (within your measurement capabilities), which 'collapses' the wave into a point. Imagine a gaussian distribution becoming narrower and narrower (while still having an area under the curve of 1) until you can no longer detect the curve at all and it simply looks like a vertical line. If we imagine this in three dimensions, then as you measure more and more precisely, the 'wave' becomes smaller - the probability distribution becomes denser and tighter - until you get a point, or your particle. This is what measuring does. A rough measurement will still result in a more 'smeared' estimate of location than a more precise measurement.

I believe the debate as to whether at that point you still have a wave at all may be ongoing. It's been a long time since I read about this stuff, but to quote "there is no evidence for the existence of particles with definite position and momentum. This concept is an unobservable idealization." So basically, even though you have what looks like a particle, it's still a (probability) wave. So with shitty tools, your 'particle' might be quite a big blob (which we interpret as a probability distribution), with more refined ones it seems to be a point, but actually it's still just a distribution.

So the 'magic' of quantum physics seems to come in when we measure things, because it seems that the act of measuring - or where in the experiment we measure something - actually changes the results itself. It compresses the probability wave to a point where we can only detect it as a particle, and then we also cannot detect the wave-like interactions of that 'particle' (because they're even smaller than the particle!).

It's easy to think about this on an individual level - let's say we've got down to the point where we can no longer distinguish a wave from a particle, using our measurement tools. So everything acts like a particle. Now, if you want to measure the position of such a 'particle', you have to bounce light off it (to see it). But since it's very small, the energy imparted to it by bouncing the light will change its position! So in this way the measurement affects the thing being measured. It becomes a bit more brain-bending when you look at it on a larger scale, like with the double-slit experiment.

Eg, a quantum version of Young's double slit experiment shows

when it is possible to identify the slit through which a particle passes, there is no wave-like passage through both slits, but when there is no possibility of identifying the slit, the particle covertly passes through both slits in a wave-like way.

basically when we don't measure which slit the light passes through, then our experiment can only tell us the probability of where the light has gone. If we measure which slit the light went through, the act of measuring refines the probability down to a particle-like 'point', and we see particle-like interactions taking place.

... and sorry, I've got to run off and get some work done! but I'll post this draft anyway. I haven't done a very good job of explaining things at all really! Maybe hunt down a book by a real physicist - i believe Brian Greene is pretty good at breaking things down for a lay audience, though undoubtedly there are others. If I get some more time we can talk about it a bit more, but a lot of it will probably involve me figuring it out for myself as we go along, because it's really not my field.

I'm really more informed about insects, overall.

[Namboto]

@Tynic

Well, you just helped me understand just what my chemistry teacher has been saying for the past couple of days, so thanks!

[Wesley Foxx]

I used to have a video faved on youtube that explained the basics of the wave/particle thing nicely enough, but I am pretty sure it got taken down. I'll edit it in if it hasn't.

Edit: Nope, still up.


Do note that it simplifies quite a bit. This is just the basic concept explained via classroom-style animation.

[PetPeeve]

That assertion... Makes no sense at all. Although the quotes around thinking are a nice backhanded touch so you can insult people who disagree with you without actually making a point.

It wasn't backhanded, it was entirely intended to be seen, and it's what I think. It's entirely appropriate and well-formed to call XKCD lazy - a lot of the time it IS rather haphazardly put together and not all that well thought out (there was one about video resolution that REALLY pissed me off). But when he's on, he's on, and if you're a particular kind of nerd, the kind that compulsively looks up everything they don't know when first encountering it, and then NEVER FORGETS IT, XKCD is aimed at you. If you're not this kind of person, and the comic pisses you off on that basis, then it's saying more about you, than about the comic.

Oh, by the way, when you quote a dictionary definition, you have lost the argument. That kind of thing gets you booed off the stage in high-shool debate class, there's no excuse to do it as an adult.

Why does light act as both a particle and wave? And why does it act like a particle only when observed? Also, what's the deal with that double-slit experiment?

In short, please explain to me the quantum mechanics.

There is no "in short" about quantum mechanics. The infuriating thing about it is that it's an almost entirely flawless theory (the only flaws are the things it doesn't even try to describe, like gravity) that makes NO FREAKING SENSE in the world as we know it. The sub-nanoscale universe is a very silly place.

"what's the deal with that double-slit experiment?" - answering that gets you a nobel prize, and a place on the science mantelpiece next to Newton and Einstein. So get to it!

[waterbottles]

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Oh, that's easy.






It's magic.

Um. More seriously, it's complicated, and actually we still don't know why, in the purest sense, the universe is like it is; it may be that why is the wrong question to ask, philosophically, because it ascribes a causal (temporal) aspect to something that ... ok wait no erasing what I've written after that this probably isn't what you mean now I think about it. Let's get back to what I think you're asking about:

spoiled for long.

show spoiler

hide spoiler

Disclaimer: not a physicist! in fact, I actively avoided all physics classes after my compulsory undergraduate courses.

So, wave properties of light. What does this mean? Well, it depends on how deep down the rabbit hole we want to go.
If you want the very simplest explanation, then it helps if we think about a photon, rather than a particle, as being an energy bundle, which vibrates at a specific frequency. This is the high-school version of quantum mechanics; you usually get a mental image of a wave being all scrunched up really tight into a bundle. When you look at one particle you see a particle, when you look at a bunch together you see their statistical properties, which manifest as a 'wave' with the inherent frequency, etc, of the individual bundles.

Is this accurate? Um. Yes and no. It is not wrong, but it is not the whole story, and it can be misleading. It implies that there exists such a thing as a photon 'particle' (no matter how abstracted). What does a wave bundle mean? A wave is a vibration, it can't have a physical location unless it is vibrating in a medium? yes? ... or no?

A lot of physics seems to change depending on the paradigm you use to think about it, which is mind-bogglingly recursive if you dwell on it too much.

So then we have to think about what the 'wave' aspect of subatomic-particles really is. At this point, if you're reading about this stuff, you tend to run into the Copenhagen interpretation, which points to the 'wave' being a purely theoretical construct, merely a mathematical tool for calculating the probabilities in a specific experiment; and upon observation, this wave-function will 'collapse' to a specific location. Under this view, we can interpret the wave-like properties of particles as being a probability distribution over their likely position in a region of space. The idea is that by observing this particle, you get a precise idea of where the it is (within your measurement capabilities), which 'collapses' the wave into a point. Imagine a gaussian distribution becoming narrower and narrower (while still having an area under the curve of 1) until you can no longer detect the curve at all and it simply looks like a vertical line. If we imagine this in three dimensions, then as you measure more and more precisely, the 'wave' becomes smaller - the probability distribution becomes denser and tighter - until you get a point, or your particle. This is what measuring does. A rough measurement will still result in a more 'smeared' estimate of location than a more precise measurement.

I believe the debate as to whether at that point you still have a wave at all may be ongoing. It's been a long time since I read about this stuff, but to quote "there is no evidence for the existence of particles with definite position and momentum. This concept is an unobservable idealization." So basically, even though you have what looks like a particle, it's still a (probability) wave. So with shitty tools, your 'particle' might be quite a big blob (which we interpret as a probability distribution), with more refined ones it seems to be a point, but actually it's still just a distribution.

So the 'magic' of quantum physics seems to come in when we measure things, because it seems that the act of measuring - or where in the experiment we measure something - actually changes the results itself. It compresses the probability wave to a point where we can only detect it as a particle, and then we also cannot detect the wave-like interactions of that 'particle' (because they're even smaller than the particle!).

It's easy to think about this on an individual level - let's say we've got down to the point where we can no longer distinguish a wave from a particle, using our measurement tools. So everything acts like a particle. Now, if you want to measure the position of such a 'particle', you have to bounce light off it (to see it). But since it's very small, the energy imparted to it by bouncing the light will change its position! So in this way the measurement affects the thing being measured. It becomes a bit more brain-bending when you look at it on a larger scale, like with the double-slit experiment.

Eg, a quantum version of Young's double slit experiment shows

when it is possible to identify the slit through which a particle passes, there is no wave-like passage through both slits, but when there is no possibility of identifying the slit, the particle covertly passes through both slits in a wave-like way.

basically when we don't measure which slit the light passes through, then our experiment can only tell us the probability of where the light has gone. If we measure which slit the light went through, the act of measuring refines the probability down to a particle-like 'point', and we see particle-like interactions taking place.

... and sorry, I've got to run off and get some work done! but I'll post this draft anyway. I haven't done a very good job of explaining things at all really! Maybe hunt down a book by a real physicist - i believe Brian Greene is pretty good at breaking things down for a lay audience, though undoubtedly there are others. If I get some more time we can talk about it a bit more, but a lot of it will probably involve me figuring it out for myself as we go along, because it's really not my field.

I'm really more informed about insects, overall.

Thanks, tynic! That did help, as everything I try and read on it, well, I just get confused. I'll try and see if there are some Greene books I can read and follow up on.

I wish I had cool insect questions to ask you, but I don't know that much about them.

[-Benedict]

why the heck are they so creepy-looking is one thing, and are there some bugs who are just really smart instead of being pinheaded hive-mind drones and/or hyperactive buzz buzz fly around randomly nuts?

also

[tynic]

Smart? well, obviously not by humanity's lofty standards.
But just to ensure we have a culturally unbiased IQ test, let's whittle your brain down to a few thousand neurons, give you inordinately short sight, and make you fly long distances through unfamiliar terrain by flapping your appendages.

Oh, and in answer to your comic's question! Bees perform an invaluable pollination service, without which many of the crops vital to the survival of humanity would die out! The bee crisis in the US has already had huge knock-on effects on the agricultural industry. Most species are benign and docile and won't harm anything that leaves them alone.

... wasps, though. Wasps are unrepentant shitheads.

[Nimz]

Another good QM expositor was Richard Feynman. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter is a relatively accessible explanation of the Electromagnetic portion of QM (and the Weak Force as well, iirc - it's been a while). The Strong Force is a little bit harder due to the perturbations from the calculatable baseline being relatively large. A quantum theory of Gravity is almost like a modern day philosopher's stone. It's kind of hard to get it because the equations keep on giving infinity as an answer to things that ought to be finite. Where it does work, QM already deals with this in a process called renormalization (cancelling out infinities), but Quantum Gravity is hard to renormalize.

Oh, by the way, when you quote a dictionary definition, you have lost the argument. That kind of thing gets you booed off the stage in high-shool debate class, there's no excuse to do it as an adult.

I do not agree. I can't say from experience, but I can only imagine that kind of thing gets you booed off the stage in high-school debate class due to the immaturity of high schoolers in general. If you want a meaningful debate, it makes no sense to discuss a topic if the involved parties do not agree on what they are discussing. For that reason alone, definitions are invaluable, and what better source for definitions than a book whose sole purpose is defining things? [/soapbox]

[ontopic]
My favorite xkcd strip is the factoring the time one. It is interesting to note that the time is prime when the clock setting is changed to 24-hour mode in the web version. In the xkcd book it is composite. There are other subtle discrepencies between the web and book versions, but I noticed that one almost immediately. Something that has not yet been mentioned is that xkcd has some mirrors. For instance, http://cu.nniling.us is an xkcd mirror. Hmmmn.

[Epamynondas]

okay so tynic if we have a room with a bee and a human being but we don't open the door, does the human shit his pants in fear BUT ALSO has clean pants at the same time?

also what happens when you throw a swarm of bees at a double slit


okay now more seriously, I always thought the consensus was that insect eyes are great? Instead of short-sighted i mean altough i guess it fits with insects being small and all that

[tynic]

depends what you mean by great! They have a much, much bigger field of view than we do, and a blue-shifted visual spectrum, and high-speed backup eyes, and various adaptations which means their vision system is faster, so they can react much more quickly than us ... quite a few advantages.

But their resolution is comparatively poor in most regions. The faceting induces a weird kind of pixellation, too. And they can't change their focal length the way we can. And because they're so small, they don't really have depth perception, except maybe to about 10 cm directly in front of them.

Basically insect visual systems went down a completely different path to mammalian ones. It's hard to say if they're better or worse overall; they're just very, very different. This is an image made by a friend/colleague of mine, taken from a system which imitates the parameters of a bee eye as well as is currently possible:

[Drillgorg]

Also creepy crawlies but not insects, why do spiders have eight eyes? Do they really even end up using all of them, or are they for redundancy?

[ragmaan]

XKCD has become a topic so binary that it required science to maintain a lack of arguments. I think that deserves three cheers for science everybody.

On that note: does anyone know an empirical method of measuring the heat one feels?

[tynic]

Spiders actually don't have a fixed number of eyes! depending on species, they can have between 2 and 13. And yes, the ones with many eyes do use all of them, as far as we can tell, but it's unclear how much they rely on each set and how much redundancy there is.