Tag: xkcd

You Have Mail

Who remembers when AOL used to announce that to you? Old millennials, am I right?

Anyway, your humble author is using up some more holiday time the next several days and will be on holiday for Thanksgiving. Not that I will be travelling anywhere to see anybody. And for my American audience, you really shouldn’t be travelling either.

But that’s for a Covid-19 post. This is about e-mail. Because even though today is a Wednesday, it’s more like a Friday. So thanks to xkcd we have this post on how everything eventually becomes like e-mail.

Subj: RE:RE:RE:RE:Did you get that memo I sent you?

For the record, I’m at 999+ on my personal account and at 1200+ at work. So yeah, one of these days maybe I’ll clean it out.

And if you have a thought about this, just send me an e-mail. I’ll read it eventually.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Mask Up

Well, we made it to Friday. But, if you’ve been following me on the social, you’ll know that Covid is beginning to spread once again in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. I live in a tower block and I can say that many of my neighbours are no longer wearing masks indoors. Yet mask-wearing is the easiest defence we have against the spread of the coronavirus. So let’s take a look at the most effective types of masks, thankfully charted by xkcd.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Text Me

Well that was a week. Thankfully we all made it to Friday.

Now, your humble author is an old millennial, which means I remember a time before the Facebook and the Whatsapp and the internets. I also remember the first carphones and mobile bricks and flip phones. But what’s stayed consistent amongst all these platforms? It’s the humble old text message. Yep. Those still work. (And your humble author prefers it for his personal communications.) The technical term for a text is SMS. And despite approaching 30 years old, it’s still a widely used channel. If someone has a phone, but they don’t have Facebook? You can text them. No Whatsapp? Text. No Slack? Text. No Teams? Text. No Skype? Text. No whatever? Text.

xkcd recently looked at the ye olde SMS and its perseverance.

I don’t even know what half of these are. Get off my lawn.

And after all that, if you still want to come at me, bro, just text me first.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from…Venus?

If you didn’t hear the news, scientists have discovered a compound in the atmosphere of Venus. They’ve also ruled out a number of the normal ways the compound is created, and we’re left with two possibilities: some kind of unknown chemistry/chemical process or…aliens.

It’s got to be aliens. Because it’s Friday.

And because it’s Friday, we can turn to xkcd, who covered this news brilliantly.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Pretty Much My Life These Days

It’s another Friday. Which means another work week come and gone. Most of my days now consist of Covid-related work. A couple of months ago, Memorial Day began the surge in Covid-19 cases. Hopefully people take it more seriously now, and everyone masks up and stays distant so that Labour Day does not become a new big inflection point. Consequently, this piece from xkcd feels most appropriate.

For my American audience, since it is a holiday weekend, again, enjoy Labour Day. For my British audience, you already had your summer bank holiday. For everyone, have a good weekend.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Rating Scale

This week is almost over and so instead of a graphic about unemployment numbers, let’s look at a piece from xkcd that provides us all with a new rating scale.

Because, let’s be honest, we all at some point are going to need to rate 2020 come December. And while we still have almost five months remaining, what are you thinking?

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Habitable Zones Around Masses of Light and Heat

But those masses are campfires.

It’s Friday, everyone, and we’ve made it to the end of the week. And with the successful launch of Perseverance yesterday, this post from xkcd made a lot of sense. For those that don’t enjoy astronomy, basically stars have habitable zones, or sometimes the Goldilocks zone, around the star where planets would likely be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to form on the surface of orbiting planets. And since life as we presently know it requires water, it makes sense that these zones are where we focus our attention in studies of exoplanets.

Just generally not a fan of s’mores over here though.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

The Golden Ratio

Today is a Friday, an important point for those of us still in or largely in quarantine. So let’s try to ease into a more frequent posting with some humourous content from xkcd. It looks at everyone’s favourite golden ratio spiral and designers’ preferred ISO 216 for paper sizes.

I mean I would love if I could consistently get my hands on some A4. It just looks nicer than US Letter. But I digress, enjoy.

I mean graphic design is everywhere.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Corona Curves

It’s Friday. I’d normally say something like we’ve survived this far, but the fact of the matter is that thousands have not. But, still, let’s try to keep it a little light. So here’s something from xkcd about the shape of the various curve potentials for Covid-19.

PA seems to be somewhere around Scenario 2.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.