Holes
The comic imagines a cosmic entity or "hole" that passes through Earth, causing widespread destruction as it traverses cities and landmarks. The scene visualizes the aftermath of this catastrophic event in a dramatic, large-scale illustration.
Background
- xkcd is a popular webcomic by Randall Munroe, known for blending humor with math, physics, and computer science. Comic #3266 ("Holes") depicts characters debating the size of holes in a substrate, referencing a real-world ambiguity in engineering and everyday language: when you poke a hole in something (e.g., a sheet of paper or a board), the "size of the hole" can mean the diameter of the removed circle or the diameter of the resulting opening — which are the same thing. The punchline is an absurd escalation to microscopic precision and then a landfill, mocking how people can argue pedantically about definitions that are actually identical.