Time Machine Factory
I take great pride in announcing that the math definitely (?) checks out in this comic!
Edit: Even though this is not a math joke.
Edit 2: I was wrong, the math didn’t check out. I’ve temporarily kinda fixed it by using 24 x 10^9 instead of 2.4 x 10^10. (Hopefully I’ll get the 100% correct fix up sometime soon.)
Awesome:D
Shouldn’t it be 2.4 x 10^10? 2.4 x 10^9 days is 2.4 billion days. Divide that by 365 and it’s about 6.6 million years, which would mean the factory traveled back to the late Miocene. Maybe the second panel could show the factory surrounded by a bunch of early hominids.
How do they say it? “You must be fun at parties” :P
Dammit, you’re probably right. I’m guessing I forgot it was 2.4 and not 24. Currently hanging my head in shame. I would have to redraw it to â€fix†it though, or is using 24×10^9 an acceptable compromise instead?
Well, if it’s intended to be normalized scientific notation, the number to the left of the times sign ought to be between 1 and 10. It’s up to you how much that matters, though. There probably aren’t many readers who pay attention to stuff like this, but when the description for a comic says that the math checks out, that’s inevitably going to encourage people like me to check it for ourselves.
Hah, you’re absolutely right. I’m kinda swamped currently, but I’ve put up the super easy temporary fix by just removing the dot. Proper fix coming later!
If you want to make it totally accurate, another thing you could do is change the number to the left of the times sign from 2.4 to 2.5. Accounting for leap years, 2.4 x 10^10 years is 65.7 million years. Popular books about paleontology usually say that the Cretaceous period ended 65 million years ago, but the most recent precise estimates put the boundary at 66.0 million years ago: http://stratigraphy.org/ICSchart/ChronostratChart2016-04.pdf But 2.5 x 10^10 days is 68.4 million years, which would put the factory squarely in the Maastrichtian.
I think 24×10^9 is perfectly acceptable, in that it fits in with the “digit signs denoting integer number of days” thing going on in the factory. Of course I was already OK with the original version, so I’m probably biased.
There are a lot of comments on this post about the math.
That is all. =)
How many?