What if you tried to print Wikipedia?
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- Опубликовано: 8 июл 2024
- Get a copy of What If? 2 and Randall’s other books at: xkcd.com/books
More serious answers to absurd questions at: what-if.xkcd.com/
If you had a printed version of the whole of Wikipedia, how many printers would you need in order to keep up with the changes made to the live version?
Credits
*******
Randall Munroe | Narrator
Henry Reich | Writer & Director
Lizah van der Aart | Illustration and Video Editing
Ever Salazar | Chief Chaos Controller
Know Art Studios | Music & Sound Effects
What If? The Video Series is the official adaptation of the What If? books by Randall Munroe and is produced by Neptune Studios LLC.
Randall Munroe is the author of the New York Times bestsellers What If? 2, How To, What If?, and Thing Explainer; the science question-and-answer blog What If?; and the popular web comic xkcd (xkcd.com). A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the internet full time.
Henry Reich is the creator of MinutePhysics and executive producer of MinuteEarth and MinuteFood and founder of Neptune Studios LLC (the parent company for all three youtube channels).
©2024 xkcd, inc. 
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The only one of these videos where everybody doesn't die
everybody lives rose! just this once, everybody lives!
Well, at least until the printer starts to spew out paper like an assassin or it somehow creates the biggest paper jam of all time!
Except the trees. Think of the poor poplars.
Not true. In the NASCAR one, only one person died.
Was about the say the same thing. Where the mass extinction even?
If Wikipedia goes black just turn off the lights in the room where the print outs are stored. The pages will now be all be black to the human eye.
Well what if you carried the pages to your home?
What about flashlights?
what if you went to where the wikipedia servers are and stole files and took them home? @@hanstheexplorer
And you would recoup a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the printing costs with the lighting. Win-win!
With ideas like this, you're a shoe-in for their inkologist position. 1:55
Printing out every page of Wikipedia only to sharpie every single one sounds like a less efficient Fahrenheit 451.
"It was a pleasure to- black-out?"
That was my first thought, just burn the pages.
There's a joke in there about Boomers versus Millennials, but my coffee hasn't kicked in yet so I can't make it work. (Says the proud-to-be-Gen-Y person.)
This video is actually sponsored by Newell Brands, the makers of Sharpies (TM).
@@davydatwood3158 "All these regulations and liability getting in the way of efficiency, used to be we'd just burn 'em."
I literally just saw a post about Wikipedia's protocol for a societal collapse/Extinction event where moderators are instructed to print out as many articles as they can.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Management_Policy
@@TheT8or That was... quite something. Almost sounds like a joke.
@@TheT8or the line between wikipedia editor and SCP writer is far thinner than some might think
this sounds like one of the Portal 2 narrator lines
"If you are a non-employee who has discovered this facility amid the ruins of civilization, welcome! And remember: Testing is the future, and the future starts with you."
@@AbCd-kq3kyIt is a joke. It literally says at the top that Wikipedia does not, and will not, consider the article to be a serious piece of advice
This hypothetical really helps you respect monks a whole lot more
I read it as "monkeys" at first, as in "with typewriters", until I looked again.
@@TonViperThey demand even more respect.
Explain please
Why, because of the palimpsests?
@@davidwuhrer6704 The hypothetical monks definitely save a lot of animal skin that way. I imagined the op was referring to the efficiency of marginalia.
Not entirely related, but when I was a first year CS student at uni, one of the Post-grads decided to abuse their printing allowance and incidentally annoy one of the other grads by printing all the pages of XKCD using the CS student printers and then put them all up in the CS common room.
MFD Printers are surprisingly quick, especially when you're using 5 of them, so they then moved on to printing other things.
Tbh that's not a lot of pages. Page wide printers can often print more than 70 pages per minutes so a few thousand pages is probably less than an hour of work. Any proper print center can probably handle such peak without compromising availability. Unless everyone in the school suddenly all want their copy of the entire XKCD, of course, but outsourcing a printing press isn't very hard, and the quality of that is often better than common draft quality digital prints.
This is when I'd try to optimize it.
For CAD work where paper blueprints are desired, such as architectural work, there is a different kind of printer, it is what replaced Pen Plotters for drawing out blueprints.
This is an inkjet printer for the most part, but scaled up a lot in the width dimension, and the paper is fed from a reel instead of individual sheets.
With this printer comes some economies of scale. Ink is supplied by tanks that do not move with the print head, which makes the ink tanks a lot cheaper to keep topped up because now you don't have to limit their size to what the carriage can carry, and you also don't have to design nearly as much of an anti-frothing action into the ink's chemistry (or a foam anti-slosh buffer into the ink tank which requires making sure the ink is chemically compatible with said foam) to prevent the ink from having bubbles in it which would cause blank spots in the print. Still expensive, but you're also not paying for 3 inks at a time when only one is out (if using color), a whole print head and plastic ink tank every time you need to get more ink (which is universal to all ink cartridges) and that brings the cost down a lot. Closer to the cost of laser compared on the basis of equal areas of printed paper produced, but still more expensive by a little bit.
Now for how that gets back to printing out all the XKCD comics.
Thru some intelligent use of scaling the XKCD pages to fit the width of the drafting printer paper roll, you would be able to fit a whole lot of XKCD comics on a single "square area" (as a stand-in for a page) of this drafting printer paper, and this printer is actually a good bit faster than a standard letter/A4 paper inkjet printer because it doesn't have to pause to feed a new page, it just advances the paper a bit without printing anything to create a small gap between "pages" that it prints, if desired. Or it can print one long continuous "page", if you set up your print job that way.
Point is, with the right paper selection this would be a good way to create a one-off "XKCD Comic Compendium" wallpaper thing for an interesting "nerd room" in a house maybe, but it's also a lot less expensive and a lot faster at just "printing out all of the XKCD comics" than a standard inkjet printer if using the normal drafting paper.
Now yes, SOME business-class laser printers can be faster to print the whole thing even when only using Letter/A4 paper, but those are generally found in law offices and not so much on a college campus unless it's a centralized printer for something like "the whole floor of classrooms in this campus building" which is a lot closer to how they're set up in law offices (source: my mom is a retired legal secretary from the real estate department of a rather large law office, and what I have said about law office printer types and locations is how she described the printer set-up at her office, I have no reason to think it's much different in other law offices).
Oh and those business-class laser printers generally aren't the kind to have a "color printing" function. For a laser-fast printer that can do color, you need to look for a Dye Sublimation printer, those are really neat because the "ink" or "Dye" is not a liquid, it's a solid and easy to handle "lump" of "colorful stuff" and the printer somehow transfers that to the paper and makes it stick there as close to permanently as my lifespan would allow me to observe.
@@44R0Ndinbut could those big printers fit that one big interactive explorable comic? There might be more than one actually. Of course you could stack them if you needed to.
@@EmergencyTemporalShift Probably?
The paper's roughly a meter wide, and the roll of it is really, really long (50-200m long for HP CAD plotters)
The specific kind of printer I'm talking about is called a "CAD Plotter".
Most of the major printer makers have an offering in that category.
The specific one I looked at for the purposes of my first comment was the HP DesignJet T850.
@@EmergencyTemporalShiftthere's a lot of interactives
I love seeing these adaptations of the what-if blogs: when they're animated and voiced, they're much more engaging.
If you didn't already know; Will Wheaton read the audiobook versions of "What if?" And "what if 2". They're definitely entertaining, worth picking up if you ever find yourself listening to audiobooks.
@@almeron82 That's how I was first introduced to What If, Wheaton does a great job. His narration is filled with geeky glee at the absurdity of it all.
I especially like the sound effects.
So so glad it's actually Randall voicing these new ones
youre saying this vid is just based on some older thing?
This is one of those rare situations where the longer the print-queue is, the better. It's common for pages to be edited multiple times in quick succession, so if the print queue was an hour long, a huge fraction of the print jobs could just be removed from the queue because they were already out of date.
This brings up a secondary question though. If your optimization algorithm just naively removed out of date pages from the queue, some pages are edited so often that their updated version would never make it to the front of the queue.
You'd probably need an algorithm that decides to let an obsolete edit through the queue every once and a while just so the printed version doesn't fall too far out of date. I'm not sure what the optimum algorithm for that would be.
I guess edits to English Wikipedia aren't constant throughout the day, but tend to fall when the most populous English-speaking countries (ie USA) are mostly asleep (or at work, I expect most edits are done in personal time). So a longer print queue also lets you use fewer printers and catch up during that downtime.
You could just have more recent updates replace the spot in the queue of the now obsolete update maybe ?
@@gdclemo I read the phrase "edits... tend to fall when..." with the meaning "edits... tend to happen when...", and then the rest of the sentence still almost made sense! The second sentence clued me in to my mistake. :)
Cache invalidation is widely recognized as one of the hardest problems in computer science. ;)
You could probably create a program that freezes printing if the queue is less than, say, 100 pages. If a page gets edited while it's still in the queue, you remove the now obsolete edit, and then put the new one in, and move it to the position of the obsolete edit.
This way, any time a page begins printing, it is ALWAYS the latest version of the page. The margin for error would be while printing the page.
All there is from there is optimizing the queue size for maximum throughput, accuracy to the current version, and minimum time in queue.
It’s said - by the Hitchhiker’s Guide - that if the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were to be printed out, it would be roughly the size of two large skyscrapers. But if wikipedia alone theoretically takes up 300 cubic meters, even simplifying it down to the phrase “mostly harmless” the two skyscraper guess seems an exceptional underestimation for an entire galaxy’s worth of planet entries!
"Several inconveniently-large buildings." Also the Guide seems to have a fairly glacial update schedule.
(Ford also mentions about limits on _space_ in the book which I guess given the tech at the time would have been a concern.)
Notably, the Hitchhiker's Guide summed up the totality of Earth (i.e. the entire non-science and math portions of Wikipedia) as "Harmless"
“What? Harmless! Is that all it’s got to say? Harmless! One word!’ Ford shrugged. ‘Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book’s microprocessors,’ he said, ‘and no one knew much about the Earth, of course.’ ‘Well, for God’s sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit.’ ‘Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it’s still an improvement.’ ‘And what does it say now?’ asked Arthur. ‘Mostly harmless,”
300 cubic meters sounds like a lot but it‘s basically the volume of a slightly above average apartment.
You've got exactly 42 likes! 😆
The size of the skyscrapers isn't very well defined. I would expect a civilization capable of casual space travel to build larger skyscrapers than we do on Earth. (I mean, we've invented carbon nanotubes and we still make buildings of WOOD? We're basically still stuck in the stone age)
One things to consider is font size. As a kid before ereaders were affordable I would download ebooks and print it on the school printer which was able to go down to 4pt font.
I would print the books double sided with no margins and I was able to fit entire books on like four to eight pages. I would literally carry around a magnifying glass and use that to read the book that I could carry around in my pocket 😂
Basically microfiche
That could actually be really effective, not for keeping up with edits, that doesn’t change, but let’s say that this 4pt font strategy lets us condense 100 pages into 4 (assuming that the entire book in four pages was a 100 page kids book like the ones I used to read). It would fit into 4 of that one art installation mentioned in the video. That’s a storeable value.
In the case of a civilization collapse, a text Wikipedia would be extremely useful, lasting hundreds of years and not requiring technology to read. Given that the most important stuff is scientific facts, and that doesn’t change often, unlike history, we can afford to update this physical library far less often, I’d suggest somewhere between 1 and 5 years, depending on how much we want to care about modern events and how quickly we want new discoveries to enter the vault.
@@liegeparadox2624 Keep two copies. One complete one, that you update every few years, and the addition, which updates more frequently (once a month maybe), but only contains the stuff that changed since the last full archive
@@liegeparadox2624 Close, but not cigar. In case of your ISO-standard sci-fi flavored technological collapse, what you'd need is not only science books, but also TECHNOLOGY books - you know, those books detailing the exact procedures to make the nifty stuff that the encyclopedia describes. Don't believe me? Do not try building a car based upon the Wikipedia article for "car"; try just building a metal file based upon the article for "File (tool)".
Most paper is acidic and degrades p quickly, they'd need to use archival quality paper which is astronomically more expensive than standard paper
When I started working at a large teaching hospital, I remember one person during induction giving us the factoid that printer ink was the most costly consumable used on site - including every medication, industrial gas, and imaging isotope - printer ink beat them all (this was to reinforce the significance of unnecessary printing)
When you purchase OEM ink for sure.
Sounds like they should have switched to laser printers...
@@tompw3141 I dunno if laser still cuts down the cost _that_ much. At the college I went to (2003-06) there was a box provided by the printer bank (All HP colour lasers) for putting unwanted _whoops_ pages in (Y'know, those annoying banner ads at the end that *always* came out on a separate page?) for use as jotting scrap, and when I started there you'd get maybe ten sheets in it a day. By the time I left the volume of waste pages was so high the box had changed from the _lid_ of a paper box to two 5-ream boxes, daily addition easily in the 50-100 sheet range. 🖨📈💸
And people wonder why UK tuition fees seem to track alongside HPs share price?... 😉
As a pharmacy tech, it was my job to update the "Drug Facts & Comparisons" book. We'd get a packet every month with all the pages that contained edits, and an instruction sheet of what pages to remove and what pages to add. When I left in 2006, the thing was roughly 5 inches thick, with the ability to become about 8 inches thick.
No clue if that's still maintained. I hope not. It was really dumb in the digital age.
I worked at an independent pharmacy until 2010 and still did this.
Moved and got a job at a big chain, and it was all electronic.
Most states dont even require paper prescription records anymore, as long as the records exist digitally
The problem is, what will you do when there's an outage? Not if, when. Because all technology breaks.
My country used to have a book like that but for electricians. Where how to do installations according to code was written in plain language and with diagrams etc. They used to publish a packet of update pages once a year.
Basically, every licensed electrician would have a subscription for this and then change those pages in their ring binder.
Not sure if it's still available on paper. The ring binder was A5 size and about an inch thick, printed on sturdy, slightly glossy paper that could withstand being used on a construction site and even being handled in damp conditions.
@@HmmmmmLemmeThinkNo I image they have backups in case that happens.
Also paper can also break.
@@HmmmmmLemmeThinkNo My IOTs smart pacemaker goes out whenever the internet goes down so I don't guess I'll have to worry about it.
You had me thinking "why the hell would you EVER go with ink-jet for this?" there for a second, but you rescued it nicely. 😁
From the moment I heard inkjet I was sure that he did it specifically to highlight the ink cost XD
Most people tend not to think of colour laser printers as being a Thing, because they're so expensive up front that you rarely see them unless you're part of a larger organization that has reason to have them. So if you wanted pictures, in colour, most people are going to default to 'ink jet'... never mind that it's been a Long time since an inkjet made sense when you could use a black and white laser printer for everything except the rare/niche situation where colour pictures actually matter (and again, print shops exist, last I checked).
@@laurencefraser Color laser printers aren't very expensive anymore, but they are certainly not photo quality. They are intended for printing charts and graphs for business documents. If you want to print a lot of color pictures, the cheapest way is to use an inkjet printer that's been modified to use a continuous ink system. They use bulk ink that can be bought in large bottles fairly cheaply.
@@laurencefraserEveryone I know who still owns a printer went laser years ago. People either print enough that it's worth it, or they print rarely enough that inkjet dries out between uses. They priced themselves out of the middle ground, so inkjet is going the way of the dodo.
@@Merennulli I wish I could say the same, but I support many small businesses, and the owners of those business only care about "it does color!" (even though they don't really need it) and "low price!" They all find out that fallacy the hard way, and many still repeat the mistake.
Imagine printing out all of Wikipedia with no edits and in the future a historian becomes puzzled on how its possible a man called Charlie Sheen could be 'half cocaine'
They'd dig up his corpse and find some kinda dust or powder on it and assume the article was right!
if pages about Wikipedia itself or vandalism of it survive they'd eventually figure it out
They would probably assume it was an idiom that was common for the time, but there wold be some argument if it was about his actual drug use, or how good he was. The latter opinion would be based off the known compliment "this contains crack" for foods and drinks that are considered so good you want to keep consuming them.
Especially because he is actually .75 cocaine.
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charlie_Sheen&diff=prev&oldid=846419309
The written word is so beautiful. It was the comment about how even those shelves full of wikipedia's entire content are small in comparison to your *average* library. The sum of just currently accessible, recorded human knowledge and creativity is so vast it's almost incomprehensible
Makes sense. Most books have their own Wikipedia article, but of course the book itself is magnitudes larger.
Another of the What If questions (the infinite Twitter timeline one, I think?) points out as an aside that, if saved as ASCII plaintext, every book that has ever been published would fit on 2 DVD disks. We have so much storage space these days and we just waste it on less efficient file formats... :P
@@GameDevYal how about we optimize further - ascii has a bunch of characters that aren't used in 99% of the books, so let's make new standards (all different bits per character) per book, and just have a single byte saying which one it is before anything
I just wanna say I love the vocalizations of all the sounds. Makes me chuckle every now and then 😂
E
there has to be a mountain of endless fan fold computer paper with the green lines. Still need to invent a continuous printer, but so what.
I used to work in a law library. For a lot of subjects, law textbooks are binders so you can replace the paces when something changes rather than replace the entire book. A big part of my job was doing the actual page replacements. Based on that, I think that this video is seriously underestimating the labour and time costs needed to update the hardcopy of Wikipedia.
As a former engineer at Ricoh working on commercial continuous feed inkjet printers (roll feed machines printing , there is way more efficient ways to do this. Frankly act print shops that print all the bills and fliers in your mail box could handle a monthly update in an afternoon no problem. We count speed in feet per minute (current model rated at 492 rpm, resulting in approx 1000 sheets per minute).
The big difference is ink. Ink is in 10-20L containers and cost orders of magnitude less than desk top ink.
I'm assuming that those big ink containers aren't, say, available to be ordered on Amazon by the general public (at least not without risking everything becoming a big inky mess in the process :P)?
Just about *anything* is orders of magnitude less than desktop printer ink.
@@gordontaylor2815If you were thinking of using those in a conventional desktop printer, that might not go so well. According to another commenter, the ink formulation is different. You typically can't directly sub ink from tank fed systems into carriage tank printers because tanks that move with the print head need anti-foaming properties to avoid bubbles generated by the rapid side to side motions resulting in blank spots in your print. Now, if you have high, but not commercial scale print volumes, you can get smaller tank fed desktop printers from Canon and Epson at least, that still get you savings, but you do need to have enough volume to actually use the ink while it's still good.
Back in 2011 my teachers would edit the Wikipedia pages that were very specific to our current course when we were 13 or 14 and therefore got the entire site banned on our school's Network. Wikipedia is entirely a reliable source as long as you source your source and use Wikipedia as a reference since it literally lists the source of the information in a large area below the article
I said in a jokey way once to some people "come on, who hasn't edited a wikipedia article to win an argument before!" and all of them looked horrified at the concept!
Pages aren't very stylish, why don't we print Wikipedia on scrolls instead.
Our Kingdom of the divine Bartholomew VII has began a war.
-Lord King Thomas, Thubert of pantria XII
Or inscribe it on granite obelisks....
Print?
Ooh, how much tractor feed paper can you get in one box? We might have to find and refurbish a high-end dox matrix or daisy wheel printer, but once you get it set up, it should go quickly. Just bring ear protection.
The scribes would be working overtime to get every edit written down
Get a slightly more expensive off the shelf printer that supports a tank adapter. Both Canon and Epson have them. Ink is drawn from from a large (quart to 55gal drum) external reservoir. Ink+print head costs go down by roughly two orders of magnitude. Or, go with laser, which has a more durable print. Finally, to help with storage, switch from 20# paper (standard copier) to a lighter base stock - like 17# or 15# stock. If you want to go all the way, 12# stock (flyweight) which is what most portable religious books are printed on.
I think having a local personal copy of Wikipedia is a good idea. Lot of great info in there.
TBH i doubt thatregular printers can handle very thin paper :)
@@sognarisenheart7806 Just *_THINKING_* about the amount and severity of paper jams from using 12#, is enough to make me want to ALT+F4 in real life... 😟😵
or don't worry about your pictures being in colour and use a black and white laser printer... or shell out more up front for a Colour laser printer because, while most people will never actually reach this threshold normally, it doesn't actually take all That much use before not paying the artificially high cost of coloured ink makes up for the rather steap price jump for the machine itself.
Printing wikipedia on an inkjet is insanely dumb, buy a high capacity laser. Actually any inkjet is dumb. There are two rules of printing. Rule one is you brought an inkjet and do so much printing it would have been cheaper to buy a laser. Rule two is you brought an inkjet and don't do much printing, so spend a fortune cleaning the print heads and it would have been cheaper to buy a laser. If you want a photo there a services that put your print on real photographic paper, use them.
2:19, I LOLed at the world's happiest ink-cartridge salesperson!
Honestly such a great video keep up the amazing work mate
You didn’t Even watch it yet.
uhh... you didn't watch it?
Thank you for being honest
Wikipedia claims that, without images/media, the English version takes up a between 22 and 23 Gigabytes.
I think that's a fundraising opportunity for the organization. A lot of us would love a localized backup. Put out a limited run yearly release on thumbdrives, and charge $500 for it.
Not exactly what you're talking about, but there is a project sponsored by Wikipedia called Kiwix that does largely that, most of their downloads are free but they also have some private server packages that cost about as much as a movie ticket or two
What blows my mind is that I could fit over five of those on my phone
They do provide downloads of archives of it
@@HmmmmmLemmeThinkNo What blows my mind is when I try to fit all those pages into my brain
You can! Have a search for Kiwix :-)
This is under the assumption that you're using Home-Grade printers. I used to work at a Reprography shop in my local town, we had a large sheet printer, that could print up to 4 feet wide, and as long as there was paper in the roll. It was also wicked fast, and had a high quality as well (iirc, 1000 dpi (dots per inch)). It was quick enough to print large scale maps and blueprints for construction projects in under 20 minutes. Some of these project papers were over 100 pages thick.
And that's JUST the large scale printer. we also had several office grade laser printers and other such things. Made the work a hell of a lot easier.
Not to mention it's going to be cheaper when you're doing such large volumes. Printer ink is expensive because cartridges aren't interchangeable between printers and have a lot of specialized parts. Refillable cartridges are cheaper, but you're not buying in bulk. If you have an actual print shop/factory? You're using industrial quantities of ink and it's going to be lower than a home printer.
Never knew about dark Wikipedia until I saw this video. I thought it was some 2012 joke, but I did a quick search and now I know that it was a protest for a free internet.
Whoa, we didn’t destroy the world again
I think xkcd is in his wholesome era
the tree watching his whole family being turned into wiki pages: 🗿
not just his family, his entire SPECIES
My favorite article is the hairdryer. Hope it comes up soon
2:51 you forgot the glue
I love how you don't just answer the question at face value but even to as deep as breaking down electricity, ink, etc
I like how the illustration used for xkcd's Wikipedia page uses (a version of) the same strip from the comic as the Wikipedia page itself.
(quick, someone change it to force Randall to put out a new version of this video)
2:02 "that's right! We are taking advantage of them!"
Having a physical version would be dope. But, instead of daily edits, make once every or two years.
"ah yes, the 2025 edition of Wikipedia, part 7245"
There WAS something called the WikiReader that was basically "pictureless Wikipedia on a flashcard", but that stopped getting updated years ago when the size became too big for the media the reader was designed for: watch?v=1lRI35gKSPA
I just wanted to express how much I adore how every sound is vocalized. makes me smile from time to time
2:20
You can easily tell this was written WAAAY before ink-tanks became a thing.
But that makes sense. Not just that I read this on the What-If websites many years ago, but also that ink-tanks is quite recent, coming as a result of the chip-shortage that again was caused by the pandemic.
So the ink-cost would have to re-calculated here, but that is only a marginal change to the whole problem on printing wikipedia.
Printers with refillable ink tanks have existed almost as long as ink-jet printers. way before xkcd even existed. They have never been super popular, because the printers themselves were always more expensive, and they were usually high-end models.
Toner is also a thing.
if chip shortage really caused printer companies to stop using chips to force you to buy new ink cartriges, that's kinda funny.
@@deepspacewanderer9897
Partially true. Ink-tank printers are now affordable and affordable for personal use.
A bot stole your comment
0:46 had me absolutely cackling with laughter.
Not to mention how much of a headache it would be to organize it all. No point in printing this much information if it's going to sit in an unorganized cube.
It's a never-ending job, because the moment an edit is made, you have to locate the old information and replace it with the new information as quickly as the changes are made. Rushing back and forth between the printers and the shelves, then to the archives folder for potential future reverts 150,000 times a day is the librarian equivalent of a Sisyphean task.
It's simple. All we need is a computer database to track where the information is, and where in the pile the edit page goes.
I mean, we just need a computer that effectively has a copy of the text, so you can calculate which page is altered.
Now we just need people to maintain that digital copy, and keep all the edits tracked, and of course the software to track reverts and such. Who is going to write all that code?
(ahem: Sarcasm/joking, if you didn't already get it)
I'd say this would be a non-problem.
Just print a new edition each year.
The size of said edition could be vastly shrunk by printing it on microfiche and including a reader next to the rack of slides. The index would be another smaller set of slides.
@@C.I... True. As long as the digital Wikipedia still exists, having a printed version would be more for the spectacle and/or in the case of emergency. Nobody would go there for up-to-date information when they can just go to the website. An annual refresh seems reasonable.
@@C.I... now, imagine if we engraved these articles into glass, and had a small reader controlled by a small but fast computer that can read or write to any of these.
You reinvented digital storage.
@@cewla3348 the use case of this system over digital storage is that we do not need electricity to access the data
Once again, fun analysis video! Thanks for uploading, & here's looking forward to more like this from you!
I actually love these too much for you to ever stop; how much, chief?
I’d say the most harrowing obstacle for such endeavor would be avoidance of any wasted/unused ink
2:25 - no, you don't have to invest in a laser printer. You just need a non-cartidged printer. Like epson Ecotank or Canon Megatank. I would suggest canon, because these have more replacable components which cuts costs of buying a new printer
Actually, that's a good idea. A laser printer would cost around 4 cents per page; but if you only used black ink, the cannon tank printer would be 1/10th of the price
A laser printer would still be much better because tank ink jet printers have waste pads that fill up really quickly if you're doing high volume printing I filled the one on my printer up in 3 years. Also inkjet is much slower than laser.
Needing to print a whole page for even the tiniest edits is a great analogy for how write amplification works on computer disk drives.
always learning with you things i never questioned with amazing answers
Honestly? In the scale of a country, a government, or even a company, that wouldn't be too expensive to run, and it would be really really really cool to have.
I think we, as humanity, should do it. It's feasible enough that I'd love it.
My two what-if questions are (1) what would happen if you opened a portal 100m across from the centre of the sun to the surface of the Earth either pointing up or down and (2) what would happen is you had a sheet of aluminium 1cm thick but 10km on a side and dropped it from 100m above the ground. Would the air in the middle get so hot from compression and not being able to escape fast enough that it would melt it's way out?
i've read both books several times but man do i love these little animated shorts
Absolutely love this channel
Apparently, Randall hasn't heard of Epson's EcoTank Printers yet. Even with stupid high printing volumes, ink cost is a complete non-issue with these at around 0,15 Euro Cents per (black) page. And you can cut evan that low cost in half with third party ink.
the article was made before epson heard of tank printers, this is just that article but animated and voiced
@@cewla3348 Still should've been updated or at least been pointed out in an annotation imo, especially since it concerns a major point. This is atypical for Randall.
In elementary school I wanted to print the entire wikipedia article about penguins. My teacher wasn't happy
I just discoverd this channel, i didnt know you were remaking your book in video. I loved your books as a child these bring back do much memories ❤. Love from Spain
Love all your sound effects!
Sounds like a cool idle game tbh
hi xkcd
love these videos
How is this (just likle the what if books) so much more pleasent than kxcd? Marvelous!
How long would the consequences of a satellite collision cascade (kessler syndrome) scenario last?
And could we speed up the process? Giant unfolding kevlar sheets / sponges come to mind, as they'd probably be the most effective way to slow down objects at orbital velocities enough to make them fall back down.
@@DeuxisWasTaken Praying for a Carrington event would help more. A solar storm of that size would puff the atmosphere out far enough to cause most tiny particles to reenter faster. I don't know how we could possibly replicate that, though.
Your idea might work better if we could develop a system to create aerogel from a sealed container in orbit. At 20 kg per cubic meter it could absorb quite a few hits and yet have enough air resistance to slow appreciably even in the near vacuum 200 km up.
@@willythemailboy2Wouldn't high-altitude nuclear detonations also do that kinda? Though not sure if self-EMP is a good idea in such situation
@@ignaloidasNo, it wouldn't. (See: Operation Fishbowl.) And an EMP is still subject to the inverse squared per distance thing.
billions of years. without us,.
makes me nostalgic even though its a brand new video
2:40 - But imagine the buzz you’d get though. ☺️
I really like the noise at 1:18 (and everywhere else it is) for some reason, it makes me happy (:
1:16 You lost me at "a good inkjet printer". That's an oxymoron if I've ever heard one.
If an immutable rod with the diameter equivalent of an atom to be penetrated a human body, would it cause any - or fatal for that reason - damage to our body?
I'd win.
We actually already kind of know what happens when something similar happens. A guy in Russia got a particle accelerator beam shot through his head. It would have been enough radiation to kill him instantly, but because it was in such a small area, he survived. Look it up. It's really interesting. He's actually still alive, at least as of the last time I checked.
There's actually a case of something like that happening to someone, where he stuck his head into a particle accelerator and got shot through _the head_ with a particle beam...
And yet he lived!
@@gohunt001-5The reason for his survival is that the particle which penetrated through his head was actually so powerful it didn't dump all of it's energy inside the man's head but pass through him in a relatively clean fashion leaving relatively non destructive path behind
& here everyone was expecting this episode to be the one about Earth's water going to Mars, lol.
Super excited for this fun analysis video! Thanks for uploading! Might comment more later, & here's looking forward to more like this from you!
Love the content! Keep it up!
I recall a calculation someone made a few years ago that, without pictures, all of English Wikipedia could actually fit on a single USB drive! Could be useful on the off chance that you end up in a post apocalypse where you have access to the hardware to read a USB but not access the internet or any physical books containing the same information as the Wikipedia articles themselves 🙃
A picture is worth a thousand words, which makes pictures very inefficient in terms of words per unit of disk space.
Flash drives are big enough now to include the pictures too.
It's said to be about 23 gigabytes - so, yeah. Text is very efficient.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Management_Policy a zip drive might be nice. Though actual printing would last longer depending on conditions
1:38 if you have to print the equivalent of the whole thing over every month, makes more sense to dispense with edits and reprint it all annually. Of course, while we're at it, we could exclude stubs and minor articles, to cut the length down to a couple shelves of volumes. It wouldn't really be wikipedia at that point per se, though. Let's rename it, since it will be released in English on a regular cycle: En-cyclo-pedia.
ehh, leaving out stubs makes sense, minor articles not so much.
I like that there is always a final twist in the tale
Great video! I loved it!
18 seconds ago, 1 view. fell off
12 years, 1 begrudging person who has ever cared about a single thing you thought. Fell off.
I love these videos!
These videos are sooooooo good!!!!!!!
"The reason why The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in."
thank you, math. you have once again answered a question no one actually wanted the answer to
2:14 Just buy a printer with a TANK for each ink, it's quite common and less expensive than "REGULAR" printers
love your videos, wish you could make the one where everybody points a laser pointer at the moon
From a commercial printing aspect (i.e. like used in a staples print center), you could cost control the printing by leasing a full size office printer rated at 125 ppm. The lease we have includes the toner and you pay by the copy at a much reduced rate.
The ending makes me feel old from him having to remind people of an event that as relatively recent when the original comic came out.
kind of crazy that if we didnt have the internet we would actually need to do this and print thousands of copies too
Really hope yall got the periodic table one in the works. That was one of my favorites
I’m also looking forward to a periodic table
Beautiful!
2:37 About 15 years ago, I calculated that with my Brother HL-14?0 laser printer (B&W), the total cost of printing 1 page text at 5% coverage was about 1/3 DKK, including paper, toner and drum replacement. I still have that printer (have had it since 2002 or 2003), but I use it much less these days.
Hey Mr. What if sir, could you give us updates for when you're soon to making more of these I always wanna look forward to them!
The fact that this didn't all coalesce into an earth-shattering black hole surprises me, especially given it's an xkcd video.
That thumbnail frame is golden
First video posted after subscribing, nice.
Great video!
One of the rare ones of these where it's not some astronomically comically unrealistic thing
I'm imagining the effort to keep the paper filled
what the huckerdoo, i was just thinking that it's been a while since a "What if?" video and then this pops up on my recommended
nov 29th 2023 : aim hubble at earth
dec 5th 2023: magnitude 15 earthquake
dec 19th 2023: No rules NASCAR
jan 9th 2024: earth stops spinning
feb 6th 2024: speed of light baseball
feb 20th 2024: laser umbrella
mar 5th 2024: submarine in space
apr 2nd 2024: Swim in a nuke pool
apr 16th 2024: everyone jumps
may 7th 2024: all the lightning in one spot
may 28th 2024: when the last light goes out
june 18th 2024: drained the oceans
I'll leave the actual math as an exercise for the student, but this looks to be about right on time.
The Matrix gets more efficient every day!
very interesting, thanks!
This is why you get a good old fashion matrix printer.
It seems like the 1page per edit seems like something more precisely defined in many other what ifs
This is my favorite What If
Alright you convinced me. If I win the lottery I will buy a building and make it like a library, but with wikipedia articles that are actually printed out in physical book form. They will all be sorted out by name, with numbers taking priority over letters. They will all be free to view and read. There will be a room with tables, chairs, and a keyboard where you can search a specific article and find the book it is located in on a screen, along with the spot the book should be in, you are not allowed to take books, food, or drinks in/out of the building, each book would contain 100~ articles and only be in black and white, if you damage one of the book you will have to pay us money to replace it, there would be a small group of people who are paid to check all books that get taken out, make sure they are not damaged, and put them up where they are supposed to go.
I expected all the world's trees to be cut or something like that. Glad these questions are getting survivable.
This is the first time ive ever heard xkcd'a voice
you should do the “glass half empty” one next.
I would argue that for the ink cost, if you switch to industrial/professional tank-based printers, it becomes far more affordable, likely on the same ballpark as the paper cost.
"World's Happiest Ink Cartridge Salesman"! 😂
Awesome video