XKCD: It's more than a comic

Oh, I think I figured it out - "size" means land area, and Hawai'i being an archipelago is longer than its area compared to the others. If I focus on that it looks smaller than the As, though I'm still not sure it compares to Florida or Connecticut correctly.

Realistically Alabama should take up at least half the map, being alphabetically first, because Alaska takes up half the map in real life as the largest state.

Also surely Delaware and Massachusetts should be smaller? Deleware is bigger than California and Massachusetts is larger than Louisiana and Kansas. Unless I'm misunderstanding how the alphabetical sizing works.

New York City seems to have been devoured by the surrounding states.

Software Testing Day.

#2929: Good and Bad Ideas

Let's face it: laser eye surgery sounds like a supervillain plot on the surface. And we really flubbed it with asbestos.

I like that soup is the baseline on this graph.

Not sure why square pizza slices are a bad idea.

I feel like cutting pizza into squares should be in quadrant two. It seems like it should be a good idea because squares are easier to divide and transport. But then reality hits and you realize that without a crust it just makes the entire thing a mess.

Edited by Freshwater on May 7th 2024 at 7:17:29 AM

Of course, exception can be made if the pizza is small enough that every square reaches the crust, but usually square cuts are made on large, party or catering pizzas.

Yeah, I recall square pizza from school lunches. Seems like a number of places do serve them on a smaller scale though, possibly a weak attempt at a gimmick.

The square pizzas are also favored by some people (the Philistines!) who don't like the crust of the pizza, or for larger pizzas meant to be served for things like company functions (Fox's Pizza is pretty notorious for their Big Daddy, and I've even seen a number of round pizza companies offering a series of horizontal and vertical cuts on their pizza to turn it into a mix of squares and segments from the outside). But I think the emphasis there is more in creating more smaller servings to allow people to sample the various flavors without having to either have really skinny long slices or people wasting an eighth of a pizza because they decided that they can't stand the PB&J pizza (the Philistines!).

What if all the lightning on Earth struck the same place at once?

The result is what you'd expect. It would destroy the entire neighborhood. There is also some rambling about why trying to use lightning as a power source would be impractical.

The pizza they have at Barnaby’s in Northbrook, Illinois is the best square-cut pizza ever.

Change my mind.

… And now I want to eat some. ^_^;; One of the things I’ll have to do when I get back from my vacation.

"Soup, the true neutral of ideas."

By way of contrast, "stair kyacking" genuinely sounds like a bad idea to me. : )

What about stair sledding?

Extension cords with prongs on both ends sounds like a much worse idea than soup to me.

They have some niche purposes that you might want them for (for example if you've got an extendable electronic thing, (like a lights string), and the socket end of the cable is closer to the outlet than the plug end, and also a few slightly more practical things), and if you know a little bit about how plugs and sockets tend to work they don't immediately seem like a fire hazard.

The problem is they actually are a fire hazard but not because of the immediately obvious way that they could be a fire hazard, and also cause a surprising amount of other problems that you wouldn't expect at all.

But I think it's reasonable to say they'd be something people wouldn't think is a particularly bad or good idea without looking further into it.

Edited by Florien on May 8th 2024 at 1:12:25 AM

The most important rule of electrical safety is not to leave live wires exposed. You don't need to be an electrician to know that. Said extension cord goes straight against that, so it should be immediately obvious that it's a bad idea. It's a serious shock hazard as well as being a fire hazard.

So why is it a bad idea? Besides the obvious "plugging the mains into the mains" thing?

Plugging the mains into mains will in the best case do nothing, and in the worst case cause a short circuit, which will hopefully trip the fuse instead of causing a fire. Besides that, it's a bad idea because, as I said, you'll have an exposed live wire at the end that can easily kill you, one way or another.

Edited by petersohn on May 8th 2024 at 11:31:57 AM

Why would the wire be exposed with two plugs, though? It's not exposed with one plug, after all.

Because if you plug one end into the main, the other end is exposed live contacts. Suuure "I'd never do that" but accidents happen. Or accidental unplugging of the far end while its in the mains. Or mixing up the cord when you meant to plug something else.

Or the fact that there are in fact cocky enough people in existence to make a plug-plug cable, replace their trip fuse with a wrench and then plug mains to mains without thinking about how it will go wrong.

Edited by Adannor on May 8th 2024 at 2:54:59 AM

Ohh, I get it now. Yeah, that would be very bad.

I'm surprised bloodletting is where it is, because therapeutic phlebotomy is a thing. IIRC it's used to treat too-high iron levels.

I was someone counseled to do so due to risk of hemochromatosis. As a regular blood donor, it's worked out quite well for me, although since then, I had it come up with my personal doctor and they've done a few blood draws and aren't certain how I got the diagnosis, as I've got a perfectly fine iron level with or without the donations. Best bet is that it had to do with my diet at the time, which largely consisted of pairing various canned foods.