8 ms·
Frequency
- MattBearman 13y agoBest xkcd in ages, really interesting, and just beautiful to watch.
- jaimebuelta 13y agoHypnotic. It should be noted how it's done, they are a bunch of individual gifs with different cyclic times. Genius.
- jsmeaton 13y agoI actually viewed the comic on a feed reader, and didn't know about the flashing images 'til I read this comment. So, thanks!
- a3n 13y agoSee my response to gkya's complaint about his feed reader. Firefox includes an odd feed reader called Live Bookmarks. It almost certainly works differently from your feed reader, and implies a different "workflow." One thing it does nicely is display things properly, because it (the "reader") doesn't display anything at all, it just points to an updated feed. When you follow the link, it just goes to the page and displays it like any other page.
- martypitt 13y agoCan't help but feel that those damn North Dakotans should get out of bed and go adopt a Dog. Alternatively... Amelia - Put away the Pepsi Max, and save a kitty.
- chrismcb 13y agoThat star must be dizzy!
- neals 13y agoThose iPhone screens are pretty fragile, it seems.
- ygra 13y agoThere are quite many of them which also raises the frequency of one breaking.
- nknighthb 13y agoI'm having some trouble with this. The blinks look to be about 1 per second. If that's accurate, it means 31.5 million/year. In 2013, Apple sold ~150 million iPhones. 21% rate of screen breakage?
- eCa 13y agoEvery little league player that strikes out has a parent that breaks their phone in anger? Would account for 2/3 of them..
- outworlder 13y agoUntil you compare to, say, a Nexus 4 backside.
- brusch64 13y agoreading this in my RSS reader i didn't understand it all. Seems like it couldn't show the GIFs correctly. On the web site I finally understand it.
- jaimebuelta 13y agoProperly displaying animated GIFs seems to be an "advanced feature". I have seen a lot of apps that are not able to do it properly. I guess it depends on the render engine they use to display images...
- mikeash 13y agoLots of apps implicitly put images in a "never changes after the initial render" category. Retrofitting what is effectively a movie format into that can be interesting.
- ams6110 13y agoSome people who started browsing the web back in the days of GeoCities also reflexively disable GIF animation in their browser preferences.
- fredoralive 13y agoIn this case it's the RSS feed itself, not the reader. The image in the feed is just a static PNG: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/frequency.png http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/frequency.png Which did somewhat confuse me as well until I looked at the actual website.
- rwallace 13y agoAs far as I'm concerned, displaying animated GIFs is a bug not a feature (its use here notwithstanding), and I'd report it as one if I thought the Chrome team would take bug reports from the likes of me, so if your viewer doesn't have that bug, be happy!
- jmnicolas 13y agoI love how this XKCD guy has always new and interesting views on the world. He must have a really rich inner life. And I'd like to thank him for sharing his insights with us regularly.
- foz 13y agoI was lucky enough to see Randall Munroe speak at the OreDev conference last year. The video is online, highly recommended for XKCD fans: http://oredev.org/2013/wed-fri-conference/art-and-code-with-xkcd http://oredev.org/2013/wed-fri-conference/art-and-code-with-...
- adamtulinius 13y agoThe audio appear to be subtly broken, with audio moving between left and right channels. Somebody should convert the audio to mono, and upload the video again. :-)
- mcmak 13y agoSet your speakers to mono.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoThat was brilliant, thank you!
- yassim 13y agoThank you for the link. I wonder if Tinker Tots is now having a surge of traffic.
- nly 13y agoSurprised me that he hadn't been to Europe before then.
- deletes 13y agoThus far I have seen every gif blink except, for someone hits a hole-in-one, earthquake 4 and old faithful erupts. I'm tempted to open the gifs and check the frequency. EDIT: I have looked at GIF format: http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/formats/gif.html http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/formats/gif.html Then I opened the image with fhread and found the offset for the delay time. Look for: Delay Time (1/100ths of a second). ( Since the delay time has only 2 bytes reserved that means the max delay would be 65535. That is why some gifs have more frames than the other, when by logic all would need to have the same count ) Then I opened the image with photoshop which shows every frame on a separate layer. Then you just multiply the delay with the number of frames. I got the ratio of 3786.72 to 1 for earthquake-1 to earthquake-4. e1 is about ~3s so that would make e4 occur every ~3 hours. The ratio should be correct. But my seconds calculation was off by a factor of 4 for some reason. Maybe I missed some format specific stuff. You can try it for the rest of the GIFs if you want. EDIT2: A very quick estimate, looking in the other files: hole-in-one: ~50 minutes old faithful erupts: ~4 hours Wiki says 45 to 125 minutes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Faithful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Faithful
- tim333 13y agoYeah, how do you do that? I saved the gif and opened it in apple preview which show the frames but not the frame rate. Photoshop perhaps?
- kalleboo 13y agoOn the Mac, GraphicConverter[0] has been my go-to app for this kind of random graphic stuff since the mid-90's (wow, it's a 22 year old app now!). "Movie Information" in the windows menu says there's a 300 second period on the Old Faithful GIF. [0] http://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/ http://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/
- dredmorbius 13y agoThat would be far too high a rate. Old Faithful erupts approximately every 90 minutes, or 5400 seconds (though it can vary quite a bit -- 45 - 125 minutes): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Faithful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Faithful
- guard-of-terra 13y agoWatching this while listening to electronic music is priceless btw.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoSomeone's pet cat kills a mockingbird with a rate around 1/3.5 of "one death". I don't think we nearly have enough mockingbirds (or pet cats) on our planet by three orders of magnitude.
- deathcakes 13y agoOr is the birth rate of mockingbirds substantially higher than you suspect?
- wulczer 13y agoAlmost two years ago the "The Pulse of Spain" was made, based on the same idea (disclaimer: the designers of this are also designers for our product (and dear friends)). It's in Spanish, unfortunately. You have to click on the tiles to activate them and they'll start pulsating. If you have Flash, there'll be sound. The link is: http://img.actibva.com/pulso2/ http://img.actibva.com/pulso2/
- cs02rm0 13y agoSomehow it gives me the (obviously mistaken) impressions that people have sex in North Dakota in the time it takes the gif to blink and that people in Phoenix put condoms on but aren't then having sex but are perhaps doing something with those new shoes. Looks like there's scope for a startup or two around vibrators with the size of that market.
- thomasahle 13y agoI'm struck by the PSR J1748-2446ad... How can something with twice the mass of the sun spin a thousand times a second. An equator speed of 24% light speed... The Universe is so strange...
- srl 13y agoAnd sufficiently dense that the composition of matter inside is fundamentally different, consisting mainly of neutrons, unstable at ordinary pressure. The radius of neutron stars is measured in small multiples of the Swarzschild radius for the mass of the star. That is, the radius at which the star would become a black hole.
- jblazevic 13y agoI highly recommend Dragon's Egg, a hard sci fi novel by Robert L. Forward, as well as its sequel, Starquake, for anyone wanting to expand their mind with a fascinating portrayal of neutron star physics, dealing with the hypothetical possibility of life on their surfaces. The relative physical scales of time, space, velocities and forces are mind-boggling compared to our normal intuition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Egg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Egg
- 3pt14159 13y agoBecause preservation of angular momentum and gravity plus sub atomic forces and centrifugal force plus mass increases due to relativistic effects balance out roughly there for this star. Much more mass would create a black hole.
- nslocum 13y agowell, obviously...
- soganess 13y agoWithout further inquiry I will assume your answer as correct. That said, I do believe her/his question was more of affordance and less about the particular mechanism. At least that is the way I took. A sort of "How peculiar of a place our universe is to allow such phenomenon."
- idan 13y agoI'd love to know where he's getting the data for these.
- ema 13y agoI think a lot of the data for these is in Wikipedia.
- gkya 13y agoMy stupid RSS reader showed this to me as a single, static image. I wouldn't see it in animation if it wasn't posted here, so thanks a lot for posting!
- ygra 13y agoIt's not your reader. The feed just contains a single, static PNG image.
- a3n 13y agoFirefox has an odd RSS reader, called Live Bookmarks, which leverages the browser's bookmarks feature. I use it to access my tab categories in pinboard; each tab has an RSS feed, and each combination of tabs has an RSS feed. When you click on a feed to subscribe, it places the feed in the bookmark system and when you see it in your bookmarks it shows an RSS icon. To see what happens with this XKCD, I cleared my cache and history and everything, then subscribed to the feed, then clicked on the latest entry in that feed, Frequency. It was interesting to watch it develop. It starts as a grid of elements, each displaying the word FREQUENCY. (You can see the same effect by forcing a reload of the page, but I wanted to see how Live Bookmarks would display the page, hence the tedious trip report to this point). Each element's gif gets turned on row by row and (I think) column by colum. The first row is turned on immediately, the second soon after, and the rest of the FREQUENCY elements are transformed into animated gifs little by little, row by row. If I close the tab and come back to it, they're all animating right away. So that's how Firefox Live Bookmarks RSS reader handles this page. Side note: some of you will have seen the effect of transforming from a grid of FREQUENCY elements to animated GIFS right away when you viewed the page. Others, like me, might never have seen it. I'm one of those people who queues up a handful of tabs to read, and then goes through the tabs one by one. By the time I got to my Frequency tab it had already gone through its transformation.
- dudus 13y agoI haven't seen a single comment about the turn lights gifs. that's something that always intrigued me. why mine and the one from the car in front of me never matches? I wonder if there's a reasonable explanation other then "by chance".
- deletes 13y agoIn my opinion, that is a joke on the apparent Doppler effect. The car in front of you is making a turn, and thus you are ( probably )moving towards it. The real difference is much lower.
- taylorfausak 13y agoIt's a reference to this: http://xkcd.com/165/ http://xkcd.com/165/
- brc 13y agoIt's chance. Even two cars of the same type never seem to match up. They will often sync for a while, but then gradually get out of synch until they are 180 degrees different. I suppose it is down to minute differences in lighting circuits, bulbs and all sorts of other things. Somewhere out there is a population of cars with the same exact turn signal frequency as yours. But the chances of you stopping behind it at a set of lights while you are both signalling to turn and noticing are very, very small.
- sp332 13y agoThey are intentionally made to be different, even on the same kind of car. I think the circuits used to be made with high-tolerance (high-variability) capacitors to make sure they would come out differently. But now it's all computerized, and in fact I think they are programmed to drift a bit faster and a bit slower as they run! Old hazard lights, like the ones in rows along construction sites, used to blink more-or-less in time despite not being manually synced. The lightbulb itself would act as a weak photo-diode, so when a neighboring light was on, it took a minutely smaller time to charge the circuit. Eventually they would sync up :)
- dudus 13y agoI haven't seen a single comment about the turn lights gifs. that's something that always intrigued me. why mine and the one from the car in front of me never matches? I wonder if there's a reasonable explanation other then "by chance".
- dudus 13y agoI haven't seen a single comment about the turn lights gifs. that's something that always intrigued me. why mine and the one from the car in front of me never matches? I wonder if there's a reasonable explanation other then "by chance".
- sp332 13y agoReminds me of this Usenet Oracle response from 1990: http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/bestof.cgi?N=101-125#102-06-Q http://cgi.cs.indiana.edu/~oracle/bestof.cgi?N=101-125#102-0...
- SixSigma 13y agoaverage frequency
- crucialfelix 13y agoThe first time I loaded the page each of the gifs would appear spaced a few seconds apart. So the table kept loading and adding rows and I could read each one as it was added. The requests are still being initiated 1m after initial page load. That was a great effect, prolonging the initial experience. Its important in UI to pay attention to the time element - how the experience progresses for the user as they explore. Now they are all in the cache so they appear right away. You have to clear cache to get the initial effect again.
- couchand 13y agoThanks, I thought that was just my slooooow network.
- crucialfelix 13y agoI looked at the code but still didn't find anything that deliberately schedules them like that. but they are just IMG tags.
- qznc 13y agoI just realized that comic 1337 is near. :)
- giantrobothead 13y agoNow, that is fun. Made the morning a bit more thoughtful.
- Houshalter 13y agoThat's a lot of babies. And a disconcerting number of deaths as well. I'm also surprised the number of mocking birds getting killed by cats isn't that far from the number of humans dying.
- snarfy 13y agoThe birth gif blinking faster than the death gif encompasses most of the problems in the world.
- bjt 13y agoWhy? Some huge war, plague, or famine is your most likely bet for getting the death rate up. I don't think anyone's pining for that though. Despite having more people than it's ever had, there is less poverty and disease in the world than at any other time since we started keeping track. http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/ http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/ does a good job debunking the myth that things are always getting worse all the time. There has never been a better time to be alive.
- devcpp 13y agoWho's talking about getting the death rate up? What about lowering the birth rate? And don't get me started on Bill Gates' bullshit arguments. These are long-term trends, his recent "it's been getting better! (for the last 40 years)" cannot be extrapolated over the next centuries.
- DanBC 13y agoBill Gates' "bullshit" is backed by research which you could rebut if you cared to do so. The world currently produces enough food for 11 bn people. World population is expected to expand to about 9 bn in the middle of this century. This is using current production techniques.
- Houshalter 13y agoI don't think overpopulation is responsible for most of the world's problems and in fact I think death is the biggest problem we have. The increase in population over the last few hundred years correlates with our massive increase in technology and industry.
- cellover 13y agoI have always been amazed by the fact that the 2004 tsunami in Indian Ocean (227'000 deaths) cancelled the global human growth of one day... Enlightening link, thank you for posting.
- doktrin 13y agoInsightful as always, XKCD. I'm a little surprised at the number of sharks being caught.
- ajslater 13y agoIts not HTML5 video. Shame. Does anyone know enough about I-frame frequency limits in H.264 or WebM to tell us weather Randall could have included the pitch drop experiment?