Xkcd what if archive

The Moon orbits around the Earth at a speed of roughly one kilometer per second, making a wide circle [10] Yes, I know, orbits are conic sections which in the case of the Moon is technically not exactly a circle.

It's actually a pentagon. That's how fast the top end of our hypothetical fire pole will be traveling. The bottom end of the pole makes a much smaller circle in the same amount of time, moving at an average speed of only about 35 mph relative to the center of the Moon's orbit:. Unfortunately for you, the Earth is also spinning, [11] I mean, unfortunately in this specific context. In general, the fact that the Earth spins is very fortunate for you, and for the planet's overall habitability.

Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, measured from sea level. A somewhat more obscure piece of trivia is that the point on the Earth's surface farthest from its center is the summit of Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador, due to the fact that the planet bulges out at the equator. Even more obscure is the question of which point on the Earth's surface moves the fastest as the Earth spins, which is the same as asking which point is farthest from the Earth's axis.

The answer isn't Chimborazo or Everest. The fastest point turns out to be the peak of Mt. Cayambe, a volcano north of Chimborazo. And now you know. Cayambe's southern slope also happens to be the highest point on Earth's surface directly on the Equator. I have a lot of mountain facts.

Even though the end of the pole is moving slowly relative to the Earth as a whole, it's moving very fast relative to the surface. Asking how fast the pole is moving relative to the surface is effectively the same as asking what the "ground speed" of the Moon is.

This is tricky to calculate, because the Moon's ground speed varies over time in a complicated way. The Moon's ground speed varies pretty regularly, making a kind of sine wave. It peaks twice every month as it passes over the fast-moving equator, then reaches a minimum when it's over the slower-moving tropics. Its orbital speed also changes depending on whether it's at the close or far point in its orbit. This leads to a roughly sine-wave shaped ground speed:. Ok, fine.

There's one other cycle we can take into account to really nail down the Moon's ground speed. The harbor is also somewhat larger [6] The tidal range in Boston is so large over three meters that the harbor's volume at high tide is nearly double what it is at low.

There's another problem: Heat. If you wanted to make tea from a lake, such as Ullswater or Wular Lake, you'd have to heat the water up. Is that even possible? There's clearly enough stored energy in the world to do it. After all, we presumably heat that amount of water for tea every year already; we just do it in small batches around the world. Asking Britain to go without electricity for 20 days just to fill one of their lakes with tea seems like it might be a hard sell.

Fortunately, there's an easier solution. It can vary from almost none shut-ins or people in small towns to many thousands a police officer in Times Square. But with the threat of dying alone looming so imminently, society could restructure to try to enable as much eye contact as possible.

We could put together massive conveyer belts to move lines of people past each other …. I modeled a few simple systems to estimate how quickly people would pair off and drop out of the singles pool. If you want to try to work through the math for a particular setup, you might start by looking at derangement problems.

In the real world, many people have trouble finding any time at all for romance—few could devote two decades to it. So maybe only rich kids would be able to afford to sit around on SoulMateRoulette. They might sponsor projects akin to One Laptop Per Child but with a sleazier vibe. As there is not a JSON API for the What If blog or at least, the author was unable to find one , this seemed the simplest way to implement fetching of information about them.

This class is designed for internal usage only; there should be no reason for you to use it directly outside of the xkcd module. Returns a dictionary of WhatIf objects, indexed into by their number. This function must be invoked after the HTML parsing has finished, i.

It is unlikely something you will need directly, and its use is discouraged. Produces a Comic object with index equal to the provided argument. Prints an error in the event of a failure i. Returns the resulting Comic object for the provided index if successful, or a Comic object with -1 as the index if not. Produces a Comic object for the latest xkcd comic. This function is just a wrapper around a call to getLatestComicNum , and then constructs a Comic object on its return value.

Returns a WhatIf object representing the latest What If article. If this argument is None, the getWhatIfArchive routine is first called to populate the archive of published What If articles.