Another day, another xkcd graph that requires an understanding of mathematics or a FAQ to comprehend. At least that’s what it feels like to me, but when you get past that outer shell, the inside is always moist and chocolaty. This particular Randall Munroe feature is a polar graph that shows which days the internet likes to do specific things. That is to say, it shows the relative popularity of phrases like “[day of the week] is the big day,” based on quantity of Google hits.

So, if you’re like me and polar coordinates helped push you to abandon computer science in favor of an English degree (or you just have a short attention span), here’s how you read this graph. The rings represent the phrases being searched, are color-coded for your convenience and are made of text of the actual phrase. Where they cross over the big, grey beam that has the day of the week on it is where the info is the important part. If the ring crosses a beam near the center, that particular phrase-day pairing is uncommon. If the ring crosses the beam at the periphery, or off-screen, that phrase-day pairing is the cat’s pajamas. It’s all explained on the graph, of course, so if my explain didn’t work for you, maybe the man himself did it better.

Bigger image after the jump.

Spoiler: Wednesday is ladies’ night.

The webcomic XKCD dropped another Internet truism when it proclaimed in the alt-text of its latest comic:

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”

Someone took it as a challenge, and put together a “useful” little tool that will show you, with links, exactly how many clicks it takes to get from the subject of your choice to the Wikipedia article on philosophy. It certainly is eye-opening, and is certain to keep folks entertained for quite some time.

The real question is if anyone has yet proved XKCD wrong. 20 steps was my longest chain, who can beat it?

Update: Geekosystem reader Andrew has found one that breaks the chain: “numerary” first links to “supernumerary,” which first links to “numerary” … and so on. What other combo breakers exist?

(XKCD Wikipedia Steps to Philosophy)

xkcd gets its share of backlash from within the geek community for its occasional nerd-pandering (‘hey, you like math and video games? me too!’), but it’s stuff like this and the radiation chart that proves that xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe is still the best in the business. Anyone can profess to enjoy Star Wars and Portal, but laborious, useful data-crunching is the mark of true geekery.

Here, Munroe combines first-page Google search results for a number of queries about the future to paint a picture of the coming century. Oh, and when the nerd-pandering punchline finally arrives, it is just delicious.

Full comic after the jump.

That square house door in front is probably the deal.

(via xkcd)

Xkcd took on a pet project in which the doses of radiation a human can and can’t withstand were documented and thrown onto a handy chart. Head on past the break to see the larger, informative, somewhat terrifying chart.

Yes.

(via xkcd)

Thank you, xkcd, for guiding us to Wikipedia’s list of common misconceptions. I am sad to say that I believed several of these just looking at the first few.

Christopher Columbus’s efforts to obtain support for his voyages were not hampered by a European belief in a flat Earth. In fact, sailors and navigators of the time knew that the Earth is spherical, but (correctly) disagreed with Columbus’ estimates of the distance to India. If the Americas did not exist, and had Columbus continued to India (even putting aside the threat of mutiny he was under), he would have run out of supplies before reaching it at the rate he was traveling. The problem here was mainly a navigational one, the difficulty of determining longitude without an accurate clock. This problem remained until inventor John Harrison designed his first marine chronometers. The intellectual class had known that the Earth was spherical since the works of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Eratosthenes made a very good estimate of the Earth’s diameter in the third century BC.

(via xkcd)

Are you disappointed that there’s no way for you to make it to a certain Washington D.C. gathering? Maybe you’re going, but can’t think of any good slogans for a sign?

Maybe you’re bored and looking for something to occupy yourself for the rest of the day?

Well then you could do worse than to head over to Saneornot.com and submit and rank some signs. Who knows, maybe you’ll even see somebody with your submission?

Today’s xkcd consists of a massive overhaul of the webcomic’s famous 2007 map of online communities. Per author Randall Munroe‘s description a lot of work went into making this new map, from stat-crunching to sysadmin-cajoling. Aside from all of the new names on the map (including our sister site Mediaite, which launched just last year, but is now ensconced right between the liberal and conservative blogs, at the mouth of the Sea of Flame), the most interesting thing about this map is that Munroe has discarded raw traffic as his main metric. Instead, this is a map of “total social activity in a community.”

Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community’s current size and health. This updated map uses size to represent total social activity in a community – that is, how much talking, playing, sharing, or other socializing happens there. This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best and tried to be consistent.

Estimates are based on the best numbers I could find, but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, nonrandom sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct. (i.e. making things up.)

Sources of data include Google and Bing, Wikipedia, Alexa, Big-Boards.com, StumbleUpon, WordPress, Akismet, every website statistics page I could find, press releases, news articles, and individual site employees. Thanks in particular to folks at last.fm, LiveJournal, Reddit, and the New York Times, as well as sysadmins at a number of sites who shared statistics on condition of anonymity.

>>>Check out the fully sized map.

The talented bakers at Pink Cake Box sculpted this xkcd-inspired wedding cake using cutouts of the characters, wire, and lots of white fondant. Considering the pastry chef hadn’t even heard of xkcd until a (very cool) client requested the cake for their wedding in Jersey City, we think they did a pretty good job!

(via Boing Boing | Artists’ site)