xkcd Time - at your own pace | Hacker News Reader

xkcd Time - at your own pace

geekwagon.net

222 pointsJeremy102645 comments

Just in case any of you aren't already aware of it, there's extensive evidence that the Mediterranean partially or completely "dried up" during the Miocene (~6 million years ago) and then rapidly flooded again.

This is referred to as the Messinian salinity crisis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis

I'd assume that's a significant part of the inspiration for this storyline.

Here's a nice chart: http://i.imgur.com/oKBXjCT.png

1. This is neat information: it's worth sharing. (I'm glad I ran into a discussion of it not long ago, because it helped me understand the sort of thing in this comic. Come to think of it... was it mentioned in a what-if?)

2. This is also a pretty big spoiler, I'd think.

If you click on the image at http://xkcd.com/1190 it takes you to this page. Either a vote of "awesome" from Randall or a collaborative work. Does anyone know which it is?

Probably the former. There were a bunch of similar sites originally, this one arguably the best, and the comic didn't always link to it.

Part of my daily internet routine, for the past 4 months, has been to check up on Time. Well, I guess it's back to work now!

(I also feel like I've missed something in the story. The wikis say that the story takes place far into the future. How do they know? Are there other references I've missed? Is this... a larger allegory, or something, that I am missing out on?)

Well, the main story point is the flooding of the Mediterranean (revealed recently when the protagonists are shown a map of the projected sea level). We know that happened in the past and might happen again. People in the past had no way to produce such accurate maps. Also, the sand castle built in the beginning looks medieval, not prehistoric.

Update: the blurred dialog of the woman in the castle has been partially deciphered and also places the story in the future pretty clearly: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time:_...

We actually placed the story in April 13291 AD via astronomy. There's a section that shows the night sky clearly and the stars have moved slightly from their current positions.

Also interestingly enough Antares has gone supernova in the intervening 11278 years.

See http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Astronomy#The.C2.A013291_Hyp...

All is in the giant forum thread (51k posts and counting).

During the night scene several readers tried to use the stars to determine location and date:

* Diurnal motion matches 39.5° north.

* Proper motion and the position within milky way indicate far future.

* Eventually someone matched everything to Tuesday, 10 April 13291 and that estimate stuck (but it could be off by several hundred years).

http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/Astronomy

The proper motion of some of the faster stars is enough to get a date within about 200 years, and the positions of the planets have been searched exhaustively within that range, so I think the 13291 date must be accurate.

Could it have been by accident? I.e. Randall just happened to draw something that happened to roughly correspond to year ~13300? How unlikely is it? Really interesting!

We can tell it is not an accident because there many independent sources of evidence, all of which point to the same era. In particular, the proper motion of stars (i.e. the shape of constellations) matches exactly in every case. This is very strong evidence because a) unlike axial procession, it isn't cyclical, and b) we can look at any star that moves sufficiently fast relative to us, and use it as independent evidence. There are dozens of such examples in the parts of the sky that are shown in the comic.

For example, in the image below the left-hand image is from the comic, while the two on the right are captured from Stellarium using two different dates, 13291 and 2013.

http://i.imgur.com/PrQgn4k.png

As a side note, it just isn't possible that Randall drew the stars by hand. They were either captured within planetarium software like Stellarium, or generated programmatically.

For people like me that wasn't aware of the story behind the comic http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time

explainxkcd seems to be down at the moment

Of Epic scale, more individual frames than all the xkcd comics to date.

A grand and world-changing story for a people. Not spanning years, which a traditional Epic would require, but still containing acts of heroism and tales of adventure.

well but some xkcds were pretty epic themselves - certainly bigger than this frame

http://xkcd.com/980/

http://xkcd.com/1110/

http://xkcd.com/657/

http://xkcd.com/1037/

Well, A traditional Epic is a (long!) story that arcs over years, With life-changing events for a culture/nation. It should have a journey part, a hero part and a homecoming (usually).

Traditional Epics would be Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, Buddhacarita, Edda ( A collection of Epics ) And so on.

What I'm inferring is that the work as a whole is a traditional Epic.

I think it would be appropriate if someone just made a short video clip out of that.

I second this.

UPDATE: The gif here seems to be an animation of this comic but I don't know how updated it is or if it's updated with the newest frames of the comic automatically: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time and this one: http://richardwestenra.com/xkcds-time-animated-time-lapse/

The site has the option of auto-playing the frames at your choice of framerate. Not pure animation, but it's kind of close.

I had stopped in to catch up on Time occasionally, and it always seemed neat but pretty low-key. But wow, near the end it got progressively more interesting and fast-paced, and I was really caught up in the finale. Well done and my thanks, Randall Munroe!

Randall, if you're here... I would totally watch this movie!

For detailed discussion of this comic, see the following 51000 comment thread on the XKCD fora:

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=101043

I went through the comics and read the story plot on http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190 but I have to say as a non-native speaker, I don't think I “get it”. Could anyone explain in a few paragraphs what the story tries to tell us? In particular, why is the dialog of the woman in the big castle on the mountain all blurred but still somehow readable?

The person in the castle is a non-native speaker of the valley-people language. The dialog is blurred to give the impression of a mix between the two different languages. Some phrases are translated into the valley-people's language better, and so the non-native speaker's text is less garbled.

http://readwrite.com/2013/07/26/xkcd-time-saga-comes-to-the-...

This gives a better explanation of the plot, I feel. Essentially, it is a possible future wherein the Mediterranean Sea has become landlocked and dries up considerably, similar to the Dead Sea today.

Thanks very much! Now I feel I have even more questions…

If the story happens in the far future of year 13291, as mentioned by the link above, I'd assume the people would understand the geography of their surroundings pretty well, no? Well, unless this is a post-apocalyptic fiction…

Also, at the beginning of the comic there is a quite lengthy depiction of the two main characters building sand castles, which appear at the end of comic. What does it imply?

It probably is post-apocalyptic of a sort.

~11,278 years is an extraordinarily long time in human terms. That's about how long it's been since the earliest stirrings of civilization. We've gone from the discovery of electrons to present-day technology in ~1.2% of that time.

A lot could happen in that time to reverse society to near-subsistence levels. Wars, climate change, major impact events.

It's also notable that we have only the faintest insight into anyone other than the two main characters, who are of indeterminate age, education, and experience. They might easily be teenagers. Go find a bunch of 16-year-olds of average intelligence in 2013. What do they really know about the world around them? If you ask them to name a sea which might be realistically drained and refilled, what will they say?

Now imagine their lives having been spent in 40-person village effectively knocked back a couple hundred years, focused on farming and fishing and just generally getting by.

Humanity might be aware of a great deal. These two might be aware of relatively little.

Link to first frame: http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/

Except it's not the end, it's still updating...

Kind of, there were a few more frames added after the "The End" frame, but it has been stuck at 3099 frames for about 2 hours. Considering that they were updating hourly for the past few months, I'm betting that the last frames were Randall's way of making sure that if you goto http://xkcd.com/1190 you wouldn't see "The End".

The title text still reads "The end."

The last few frames just show the water level rising slightly. I think it's just a cheeky way of ending the story.. "but the water is still rising.. so this isn't the end for them".

I'd really rather just have a zip full of the images so I could look through them in my image viewer. This takes forever to load them if I go through them any faster than a snail's pace. Edit: Just saw the button to preload them all. That's better than the zip, then. Using the play button doesn't work without preloading everything for me. I wonder why that's not done by default.

I think you can preload them or just wait and it will preload them and then you can play it around 10FPS which is as fast as you'd want to in order to catch all the action, but doing this manually with images in a viewer would be pretty tedious, I would think.

It's quite clever actually, and pauses on interesting frames with dialogue, as voted by people previously? or something: https://github.com/deplicator/xkcdTime_atyourownpace/blob/ma...

Yeah, I didn't notice the preloading option earlier. With the preloading, it is a lot better.

The pause-on-interesting-frames feature doesn't work too well when there's disagreement over whether a frame is interesting, unfortunately. If the number of Yes and No votes both exceed some fixed threshold, then it marks the frame as "debated" and only stops on it if you tell it to stop on debated frames - which includes both frames with an overwhelming majority of Yes votes and ones with an overwhelming majority of No votes.

You could scrape them, if you want to. http://xkcd.mscha.org/ has direct links to all images (and cached copies and more).

If you do, remember to upload the results somewhere.

Here's a zip file for anyone who might still prefer it: http://peterjmags.com/files/xkcd-time.zip

(Scraped from http://xkcd.mscha.org/. Thanks for the link phaker!)

I wish this were a game a la knytt stories.

How can I view the debate that apparently is being held about some frames on that site? (It may be that a browser plugin is blocking it for me, but I could not find out which or how.)

Debated frames are just frames that are close in Yes/No votes on wether or not the frame is 'important'. From the GitHub repository for the project "Debated Frames are frames that have recieved a number of both yes and no votes."

Thank you so much for posting this!

Has anyone decoded the "other language" that shows up around frame 2664?

Looks like some Semitic language.

There's a translation of one word so far: http://translatebeanish.com

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