Shout Out / What If?

• Occasional jokes involving the [citation needed] meme spawned by Wikipedia.
• The Alt Text for the third image of "Supersonic Stereo": "My cabbages!"
• "Go West" borrows its name from the song by Village People, and the Alt Text for the second image reads, "cars drive west, every one driven by someone with that song in their head".
• From "Train Loop":
  • The second image has the locomotive going "I think I can, I think I can," and the Alt Text lampshades it with "the little engine that let everyone down".
  • Alt Text for the fourth image: "i will diminish, and go into the west, and remain a train"
• To The Oregon Trail in the final image of "Frozen Rivers".
  • "You lost 3 family members and 2 oxen fording the river! I mean, you didn't lose them. They're right there. But they're definitely not going anywhere."
• To Minecraft in the fourth image of "Dropping a Mountain".
• "Signs of Life" contains the sentence "Wait for nightfall." followed by a footnote that, instead of containing a citation, references the classic SF story "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov.
• The Alt Text for the eighth image of "Little Planet" reads, "This is KSP on nightmare mode."
  • In the print edition, footnote 3 reads "This is presumably what happened to Sonic The Hedgehog."
• The Alt Text of the second image of "Lethal Neutrinos" refers to the kerfuffle over neutrinos traveling faster than light, which later turned out to be an equipment screwup.

  "Hey, these ones arrived faster than light! Wait, no."

• "Growth Rate":
  • The first paragraph and its image compare the birth length of the average human baby to the Death Star's exhaust port and a womp rat. He later compares the ensuing rapidly growing baby to the heights of Yoda and Darth Vader.
  • To Air Bud in the Alt Text of the thirteenth image:

    "What do you mean 'against the rules'? Your team has a freakin' golden retriever!"

• "Longest Sunset":
  • There's one to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the Alt Text of the third image. Appropriate, since it's the 42nd post.
  • Also, another one to Minecraft in the sixth, this time the image itself.
  • And The Terminator in the ninth.
• "Vanishing Water"
  • The Alt Text to the third image is another Air Bud ref.
  • The fourth image is another Hitchhikers ref.
• The first footnote in "Lunar Swimming":

  "Inertia is a property of matter^[1]  ♬ BILL NYE THE SCIENCE GUY ♬ independent of gravity.

• In "Stairs", the first image's Alt Text:

  ſtairs! We have found ſtairs!

• The last line of "Tug of War":

  "In the end, trying to develop stronger ropes leads only to greater danger to everyone, both participants and bystanders. In the ultimate game of tug-of-war ... the only winning move is not to pull.

  • The article also mentions a footnote pointing out that "People often play tug-of-war with their dogs. Going by weight alone, 30 humans would probably be about evenly matched against 101 Dalmatians."
• The third image in "Extreme Boating" shouts out to Jaws.
• "Sunbeam" has Shout-Outs/Take Thats to Twilight and its two sequels.
• One of the charts in "Niagara Straw" shows the rating "very yes".
• Look Around You with "What IS fire? We just don't know." ^* birds in the original and "Thanks, Nick. Thick."
• "BB Gun", the Alt Text for the first image, inevitably, has a reference to shooting your eye out.
• The final image in "High Throw" is of a small girl releasing a red balloon. The Alt Text says "just 98 more".
• The question of "Would all the world's bananas fit in all the world's churches" refers to the Spiders Georg meme.
  Bananas Georg, who lives on a mountain and eats 17 trillion bananas every year is an outlier and should not be counted.