Square Units: an amusing comic strip at xkcd

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Randall Munroe’s xkcd webcomic on March 19, 2025 there is the comic about numbers shown above titled Square Units.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In it, a message about the area of grass devoured by an insect gets distorted each time it is passed on - as is graphically shown above.  

 

The Explain xkcd web page says that:

 

“In this comic, Megan is using her phone to read about an insect species that consumes (hyperbolically described as ‘devours’) one square inch of grass per day. As it is relayed through a chain of conversations, this measurement gets misinterpreted up to 12 times until Hairbun tells other people that it devours an area of grass equal to two times the land area of Australia per day….

 

This gross error is the result of repeatedly misinterpreting the number of square units as the side length of a square, thus increasing the described area by the power of two.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 It’s a wild exaggeration of the old “Game of Telephone.”

 

The cartoon phone woman was adapted from OpenClipArt.