Irregular Webcomic!

Irregular Webcomic! #2571

Lossy compression is a method of compressing digital data files so that they take up less storage space, with the characteristic that the original data cannot be recovered exactly from the compressed file.

Why would this be useful? Well, firstly there is another type of compression called lossless compression, which compresses data files into smaller files in such a way that you can reverse the procedure and recover exactly what you started with. That sounds great, and in fact is what is needed for compressing files containing things like financial records, scientific data, or your latest novel. When you uncompress your compressed data file, you want the exact same information you put in.

So why don't we just use that all the time? Because there are some types of files for which it doesn't matter so much if you lose some of the original information. And if we don't care about losing a bit of the original data, then we can compress the file into a smaller size than if we used lossless compression. little bit of loss of quality is often acceptable, espcially if it means you can fit 1000 songs on your iPod rather than just 30, or if you can take 500 photos with your camera rather than just 50.

While some people claim they can detect the loss of quality in images or music when the file is compressed in a lossy fashion, if it's done right then the information which is lost will be stuff that is imperceptible to a human being when you either view an image or listen to an audio file. It can be done wrong too - in which case the quality will be obviously affected - but most lossy compression algorithms these days are pretty good and you'd be very hard pressed to notice the tiny difference between the original and the compressed version.

In fact, the compression algorithms are deliberately tuned so that the parts that are lost are precisely the parts that human beings are the worst at noticing in the first place. The bits that we pay most attention to are retained in their detail, and the bits that humans don't notice are thrown away or reduced in quality. It's really quite clever stuff.

Indeed, if only it could be applied to our work schedules, tasks, and deadlines...

Irregular Webcomic! #2570

I wonder if that's the most common thing people ever say: "Where am I?" when they wake up in the afterlife. Whatever sort of afterlife it may (or may not) be, it's probably going to surprise a lot of people.

(Unless you subscribe to the idea that everyone gets the afterlife they expect. Which doesn't really seem like a good idea to me. Unrepentant evil people would get a nice afterlife, while basically good people who worry about things like forgetting to sending thank you cards would end up in some sort of personal hell.)

Another common thing that people say is when their phones ring and they're on the bus. They answer the phone and invariably they say, "Hello. ... I'm on the bus." Every single one of them. Every single time. What is so interesting about being on the bus that that's the first thing you have to tell someone when they ring you and you happen - through sheer chance - to be on the bus?

Just once, I'd like to hear someone's phone ring on the bus, and have them answer, "Hello. ... No, I'm still in the office. Working hard on those reports."

Irregular Webcomic! #2569

Okay, I know I've eaten too much in the past week of holiday season overeating madness.

The thought of frozen yoghurt right now is making me queasy.

Irregular Webcomic! #2568

Last night (as I write this) was New Year's Eve. I was at a party, at which a friend told me about this thing he did with some simple fireworks. It sounded awesome.

I was going to mention it more explicitly here, but some brief searching on the Internet just now has made me decide that sharing the details of what he did would be rather irresponsible.

Do not play with fireworks, kids. They are dangerous.

And do not, under any circumstances, attempt to emulate Kyros. He is a trained idiot.

Irregular Webcomic! #2567

It's a common and convenient assumption in many time travel stories that the time machine is capable of travelling not only in time, but also in space. This is often to avoid raising the awkward question of where exactly you end up if you travel in time, considering that the Earth is (a) rotating under you, (b) moving through space in its orbit around the sun, (c) moving around the centre of the Galaxy with the sun, and (d) drifting through intergalactic space along with the Galaxy.

To any sensible first approximation, for each year you travel through time, you should end up several million kilometres away from Earth.

Some authors explicitly get around this by proposing that the time vortex or whatever anchors itself to a local gravitaional field or somesuch, which effectively means that when you travel through time you end up in the same location on the surface of the Earth as when you left. Which is fine as far as it goes.

The first problem here is that the surface of the Earth moves up and down over large timescales. If you travel back a few tens of thousands of years without moving relative to the Earth, you're likely to end up either in mid air or buried inside rock. Again, this can be handwaved with some sort of appeal to local gravitational strength relative to an underlying geoid, or equipotential surfaces, or something similarly technobabblish. Which, again, can be fine if that's the way you want to go.

But the easy way out without appealing to technobabble is simply to posit a time machine that can also make arbitrary trips through space at the same time as it travels through time. This way you get exactly where you want to be without having to pull curtains over all the handwavey temporal physics that might be poking out from underneath.

The disadvantage is that if you don't know where the time machine is set to take you, you could end up both anywhen and anywhere.

Irregular Webcomic! #2566

Well, I haven't linked to this the other times I've used it, so...

WARNING: TV Tropes link ahead!

Let me get this straight...

Irregular Webcomic! #2565

Of course, on the moon you could probably lift four other people at once too.

Not that this comic is set on the moon - just in case that was confusing anyone.