Title text:
‘This HAZMAT container contains radioactive material with activity of one becquerel.’ ‘So, like, a single banana slice?’
Transcript:
[Cueball holds a stick while talking with Megan and White Hat.]
Cueball: This stick is one meter long.
Megan: Cool.
White Hat: That’s a nice stick.[Cueball holds a smallish rock.]
Cueball: This rock weighs one pound.
Megan: I’d believe it.
White Hat: Looks like a normal rock.[Cueball holds a small battery.]
Cueball: This battery is one volt.
Megan: Seems fine.
White Hat: Might need a recharge.[Cueball holds a capacitor while Megan and White Hat panic.]
Cueball: This capacitor is one farad.
Megan: Aaaaa! Be careful!!
White Hat: Put it down!!
Source: https://xkcd.com/3106/
Guys you’re not gonna believe this:
pfff at 2.7V that aint much of a danger, now show me 50F @ 2kV
This capacitor will cost around one Bitcoin
I used to teach AP physics to kids on the weekends. One asked me why Farads were so big. I had to explain that there’s a fixed ratio between Farads, Volts, and Joules. One of them had to be crazy big or crazy small.
See also Coulombs.
Caps are especially scary because they can develop their own charge through static electricity, so large value caps are often shipped with their terminals tied together.
“This magnet has one tesla”
That stucks ;-)
It is not that much though. You could easily make an electromagnet with magnetic flux density of multiple tesla in it’s core.
And you can get 1F capacitors in bulk from China for a few dozen dollars each.
Those things are still dangerous and scary. The 1T magnet way more so than the capacitor.
Most neodymium magnets have like 7 Tesla at their surface.
Only criticism is the use of non-metric weight units when everything else is SI-based.
The joke wouldn’t have worked as well.
A gram is actually a pretty small unit of weight, and the joke relies on the base units. It’s actually a weird little abberation in the metric system that the “base” unit is considered the kilo gram. so a 1 gram rock would be a little pebble, strangely small.
Their names are Cueball, Megan, and White Hat?
It is my understanding that XKCD’s “characters” are somewhere between an actual character and an archetype. It isn’t clear…and kind of doesn’t matter, if Black Hat is the same guy in every comic or if he’s a different devious schemer in each. Randall hasn’t bothered to name any of them so the community has given them unofficial nicknames.
Randall hasn’t bothered to name any of them so the community has given them unofficial nicknames.
Megan is actually named in multiple comics though,
so is Danish (Black Hat’s girlfrenemy)(actually that was picked semi-arbitrarily by the community). Cueballs also have different names occasionally but they’re all drawn the same.And actually I do believe that certain non-named characters are the same comic-to-comic. Black hat and Beret guy almost certainly are.
Yeah Black Hat called her “My dearest darling danish” after she called him “my cutie pie.” Closest thing she’s had to a name.
I remember reading about their names in explainxkcd. I think the only one never named in the comics is Cueball.
For a while, there was a blog, but I don’t think it named any character.
🚲
this guy gets it.
Ah, Randall is alive! I kept thinking my bot had broken as it’s so rare for him to miss an upload.
