Toby, Dave & Ian Explain XKCD

Taking a cue from this blog, the Author has derived humor from the explanation of an otherwise humorless item. Except, as we have grown to expect, the sole comedic device the Author has used to create the humor is: a graph.

Another example in the “My Fake Hobby” series, herein the author lies about a hypothetical hobby: finding coincidental equations and then arguing that they– in fact–represent some deeper invariant of the universe. If it truly were an invariant, then altering any given term would require that some or all of the other terms would change.

The punchline for this comic is one of four potential punchlines that your Curator has enumerated below:

1. “Then England will drift out to sea.”
2. “Then the earth will be ripped apart!”
3. “Then the universe would destabilize, all life would cease and all matter would blasted apart!”
4. “All spheres and circles in the universe would simultaneously grow proportionally, which leads us to the subject of Universal Expansion…”

Your Curator is somewhat disappointed that the Author has chosen not to go with #4.

The author is using the lifecycle of various processes in a multi-user unix environment as an allegory for life and death in general. Normally when a user connects to a unix server, any processes they start are tied to the lifecycle of their session. Therefore, if one is disconnected abruptly from the server any processes they started in that session are killed once it times out. Because of this, many users invoke their processes via the screen command. Screen is a popular unix utility that allows most any process to live outside of the normal lifecycle of a user session. A user may make use of commands to connect and disconnect to any number of screen sessions that are running in the background.

In this comic strip, one particular user named “sam” is running the IRC client irssi using the screen command and his default shell - zsh (z shell). The author picked this particular shell in order to make the humorous pun, “the ghost in z shell”. Which is a reference to the popular hentai movie Ghost in the Shell.

During a press-conference, a scientist is asked if his research has proven the non-existence of the “g-spot”, a well-known erogenous zone in the vagina (this is one of the first sexual terms most children learn and joke about). In a humorous twist, the researcher explains that he works in the field of solar cells, and not sexual medicine. In an even more humorous twist, he then pauses and shamefully admits that he himself has yet to find the g-spot. It’s funny because he isn’t good at giving women orgasms. This also makes the comic more relatable to its audience.

The author is frustrated.

He is frustrated because even after depicting a man performing oral sex on a female multiple times in his comic strip, he has not yet successfully attracted a mate. Even after endlessly proving to female readers that he cares deeply for their feelings, and will bend-over backwards to please them - he still does not have a girlfriend. He fights for them. They do not call. He praises their intelligence and strength. They will not remove their clothing. He creates diagrams, graphs, math jokes and homographic puns that perfectly describe his feelings for them. They will not let him touch their breasts. He is frustrated.

He also refers to the movie Avatar, to ensure that some geek pop culture is still present in the comic strip.

The Author begins the new decade of XKCD with an unusually formatted parallel timeline. On the left, “movie scientists” perform a series of activities in a “montage”. On the right “actual scientists” do the same. The movie scientists are seen performing a wildly varying series of tasks in a set of dizzying locales, finally coming to the conclusion that “the killer” is connected to an antimatter factory in Belgrade. The actual scientists stand over a small device (perhaps a mass spectrometer?) and wait an indeterminable period for it to finish, concluding that neither Barium nor Radium are present in the sample.

The punchline implicit in this comparison is that “movie science” makes the scientific process out to be as glamourous and outrageous as everything else that Hollywood reflects, whereas real science is often a boring, meticulous, and uncertain process. To the informed audience, the notion of combining animal research with particle emitters and outlandish chemistry rigs is deliciously ridiculous, with the linguistic icing of paint and antimatter combined. But to the uninformed audience, the idea that “real people” sit around waiting for an impossibly complex and inscrutable computer to tell them the answer to a tiny question is surely equally absurd, and the lack of certainty only making it more laughable.

This process of multi-layered humor that appeals to a broad audience is one fo the hallmarks of the Author, who has exhibited a talent for this many times before. It is in no small part thanks to this talent that XKCD is so incredibly popular.

We see Darth Vader, a character from the popular science fiction series “Star Wars,” being wheeled away on a gurney. In the second frame there is a room with a mirror and a laptop displaying the wikipedia page for Autoerotic Asphyxiation.

The reader is meant to believe that this was the room where Darth Vader was found by the EMT’s in the first frame. The laptop is meant to signify that Darth Vader was interested in autoerotic asphyxiation. Autoerotic asphyxiation is a sexual practice in which the practitioner restricts his own breathing in order to enhance sexual pleasure while masturbating. The mirror, we are meant to believe, is the means by which Darth Vader strangulated himself. In the “Star Wars” series Darth Vader is a practitioner of “The Force” which grants him telekinetic abilities. This comic indirectly references the famous scene where Darth Vader telekinetically strangles an officer who mocks “The Force.” We are meant to believe that Darth Vader needs line of sight in order to strangle someone therefore he used the mirror to telekinetically asphyxiate himself.

Given this apparent turn of events, it is curious that the first frame of the comic does not depict Darth Vader as having a Death Erection, which is common in cases of autoerotic asphyxiation death. Given Darth Vader’s disfigurement and subsequent prosthetic enhancement we can speculate that Darth Vader’s penis is either prosthetic or covered over by his armor. Further, one of Darth Vader’s most iconic attributes is the sound of his respirator. Given the automated nature of his respirator, one would think that merely turning it off or turning down its frequency would give the desired effects for erotic asphyxiation. Thus obviating Darth Vader’s motivation to strangulate himself using the force. But then there would not be a chance to make such a hilarious joke.

Please click the figure above for a larger image with annotations.

Note 1.

A paraphrase of Carl Sagan’s famous line:

“…But from a planet orbiting a star in a distant globular cluster, a still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sun-rise, but a galaxy rise.”

Carl Sagan delivered a speech about star lifetimes and globular clusters in episode 9 of his series, Cosmos. A clip of the original is available on youtube. That line has recently become the refrain of a song generated from speeches by physicists and scientists.

Note 2.

While the local approximation that the Author gives here is well-defined and a reasonable metric for visualization, numerous other factors are at play that could decrease the apparent size of the gravity wells. In particular, “gravity assist” examples such as the Oberth effect could allow rockets to enter and exit a gravity well more easily. Other proposed methods exist, but are largely impractical for today’s rocket technology which has difficulty producing powerful but tightly controlled thrusts ([1] [2]).

Note 3.

Update: Thanks to Tumblr user Menstrom for pointing out this is a Sirens of Titan reference. To be frank, your Curators are stumped by the Author’s intent here. Several speculations have been offered, but nothing seems consistent. The best guess we can offer to our Dear Readers is that this is a rowing chant. This interpretation seems plausible, as it is notable that Titan and Earth share a unique kinship as the only planets in the Solar system with surface-exposed oceans (albeit of radically different chemical structure).

Addenda

It was somewhat surprising to your Curator that no mention of the re-classified dwarf planet Pluto, given the Author’s previous work on the subject.

People whose birthdays fall on Christmas often receive gifts, attention and parties that are combined to cover both special events. The amount of gifts received on these combined events is often less than the sum of both, had they been separated.

These people are generally upset about this situation. It can be assumed that an abnormally large percentage of this comic strip’s fans are in this situation, as this kind of childhood circumstance often leads to becoming a geek.

A Jewish physicist claims to not know when Christmas is because he does not “observe” that holiday. What’s happening here is a reference to an observer effect, specifically one pertaining to quantum mechanics, which states that if the outcome of an event has not been observed it exists in a state of being in all possible states at once.

It is essentially the same joke as we previously explained, here: a physicist is acting in a humorous manner because of a physics-based homographic pun.