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xkcd #3110: Global Ranking (europe.pub)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by xkcdbot@lemmy.world to c/xkcd@lemmy.world

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xkcd #3110: Global Ranking

Title text:

Starting a meta-leaderboard for tracking who holds the record for ranking behind the most distinct people on an online leaderboard.

Transcript:

[Cueball is seated at a desk, and uses a laptop. White Hat is standing right behind him.]
Cueball: I'm ranked 7,145,000^th^ globally on this chess platform.
Cueball: It's hard to be ranked that low in any activity.

[Zoom on Cueball talking]
Cueball: Few pastimes even have 7 million rated players. Until the Internet, it wasn't really possible. You could be this bad, but only unofficially.

[Cueball is now facing White Hat]
Cueball: So in a sense, I'm worse at chess than anyone was at anything for most of human history.
White Hat: Why are you still doing it?

[Cueball is back on the laptop]
Cueball: Well, no human has ever had this many friends to play with.
White Hat: That person is calling you some very obscene names.
Cueball: Our friendship is complicated.

Source: https://xkcd.com/3110/

explainxkcd for #3110

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[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Not if it's measured with a fractional part.

I wonder if the rate is high enough and the distances large enough that relativity could make it so people on opposite ends of the world disagree on which baby was born first. Then again, birth takes a lot longer than a second and it's not really possible to pinpoint an exact timestamp when the baby is born and wasn't previously.

[–] trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Not if it’s measured with a fractional part.

In that case I'd expect the wording to be "time lived", not "number of seconds lived".

I don't think the time someone is born is registered that precisely anywhere, so it would probably be very hard to get anyone to agree on it.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

You know I thought of how to word that better, but wasn't sure I could convey what I meant clearly enough. I should have just used something like 'time lived'.