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Comment by svckr | Hacker News Reader

Here's _the real_ live stream: https://xkcd.com/1446/

ESA lists 35min to lander separation, Randall lists 65.. I'll definitely keep both windows open, but it sure seems like the ESA site might be quicker on updates for live events!

http://xkcd1446.org/

Go back a few frames and notice that Randall's counter was in synch until T-50min when it suddenly rose to 75min.

I know that website is a useful tool in itself, but when I learned this is what Mark Karpeles is up to now, I felt bitter. I guess I still am not over the fact his company stole a non-trivial sum of my money.

Please don't take it as a slur against this harmless site. It just... surprised me.

Can you elaborate? What does Mark Karpeles have to do with xkcd?

Mark Karpeles programmed the website xkcd1446.org:

https://github.com/MagicalTux/xkcd1446

The signal travels ~30min to earth. ESA's counter shows when it will actually happen and Randall's counter when we will get confirmation.

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/12/rosetta-and-philae-g...

It really brings special relativity home to think that the ESA's counter is only valid from the reference frames we usually use. It's only when Randall's counter reaches zero that we can unambiguously say that the probe landed in the past.

>I'll definitely keep both windows open, but it sure seems like the ESA site might be quicker on updates for live events!

This is so hilarious. For up to the minute information, it's a toss-up between the European Space Agency's live stream on the probe it's landing on a comet, and... a hand-drawn web comic about it.

The absurdity of that statement became clear to me almost immediately after I typed it.. but then again, the XKCD updates ended up occurring exactly on schedule so maybe it wasn't so absurd after all!

ESA's PR is not very good. They have mostly talking heads while Randall Munroe actually provides a good overview on what's happening now and what's going to happen next.

When humanity landed on Titan (which is a mind boggling achievement), the pictures couldn't be shown right away because they had to have some politician talking some platitudes first.

NASA does it infinitely better.

Not only 'infinitely' but presumably a 'quantum leap' better?

light years ahead...

I actually liked that they interviewed the actual people who had done stuff with it. I just wished there was a bit more context graphics.

Does anyone know if Randal is "Live Animating" this event or does he just know enough about the landing procedure to draw it all out ahead of time?

The comic references the problems with the cold gas thrusters, so it is not all pre-drawn.

I really quickly hacked together a script (https://github.com/DanGe42/xkcd-1446-fetcher) to fetch every frame starting from the current one so I wouldn't have to keep the page open all night. There's not much more to it than a few modifications I made to Randall's client-side script to make it compatible with Node.js and write to the file system instead. Hopefully it doesn't crash overnight on my server.

lacks only of a counter in title tag that signals a page update. (like Twitter, Facebook ect.)

strangely enough, does not work for me on chrome on osx :(

Yoga's submitted website[1] works fine.

[1] http://xkcd1446.org/

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