xkcd #3251: Time Machine Conversation
Title text:
It’s possible to do sea navigation without a compass, but you’ll have to get some spoilers from the Polynesians.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3251/
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I’m pretty sure iron age people knew the concept of spoiled food and would be able to apply that to stories. You people know it has nothing to do with car spoilers, right?
“What’s a spoiler?”
“It’s a fixed wing that you attach to a vehicle to provide additional downforce, but that’s not important right now.”
try to refrase it using only iron age terms
“So you know how when you go really fast with a chariot , it slips and slides around in tight turns? And you know when it’s really windy and you hold your hand like this, it gets pushed up? And when you hold it the other way, it gets pushed down? Right. We can use that to solve the chariot problem. We can put a board on the back of the chariot in the same way you would hold your hand to have it pushed down. That way, the chariot gets pushed down and has better contact with the ground so it stays more stable.”
Ooga booga upside down wings
Ooga booga run fast
Ooga booga stay grounded
I think you’re off by a couple millennia. Depending on the definition, the iron age (in Europe) aligns roughly with Greek and early Roman antiquity, a time famously known for philosophers whose works we still read today, not with stereotypical cavemen.
Shit, man. Must be my time machine.
Lemmy has the best humour I’ve seen on the internet.
Uh… it’s a hard, dead bird that you nail to a chariot so you don’t slide so much when you make sharp turns… 😰
…We will now proceed to publicly decease you on the account of being too smart. We don’t like that.
You wouldn’t know if someone was “just lost” at sea if the problem was a lack of compass. You’d just not have heard from them for years, still wondering whether they survived, started a new life, or what.
yes you would the god poseidon would tell you jesus
He is not the messiah!
“Lost at sea” means he gone out for fishing and never returned.
He may be out buying cigarettes for all we know.
Unless there were survivors from the shipwreck and this person’s family wasn’t among them.
Even then they might have survived but not made it back.
You make an excellent point about how information couldn’t propagate before the information age.
I think we can give Randall credit for knowing this but making an editorial choice for brevity, particularly due to the scope of the rest of their work … on the other hand, that makes the ‘um, actually’ more fun and satisfying.
(Honestly, mostly just spelling this out in case others who aren’t as familiar with XKCD (hi user from ‘all’) have context)
idk, maybe try texting them some time? good to reconnect with an old friend etc.
