The XKCD Effect

On Jan 21 XCKD, a very popular web comic, posted a comic referencing the Fujitsu Q2010 laptop:



Prior to this, due to a lack of search volume, Google Trends had no global search trend data. However, the day XKCD published a webcomic referencing the Q2010 there was a global traffic spike. Not only does this demonstrate the high volume of XKCD traffic, but it also tells us where the top readers are.



On Jan 23 XKCD posted a comic referencing skynet:



The impact of XKCD on skynet also had a noticeable impact on global search trends! The traffic spike on Jan 23 can be clearly seen in the United States search trends:



The XKCD effect is big and all comics are still released under the Creative Commons License. I wonder how much an XKCD shoutout costs? From the trends below, I suspect things might change.

A New Equals Sign - Dot Equals

I think that mathematics could use a new commonly used character to describe certain types of equalities. Typically, the equals sign, = , is used to denote the equality of two quantities. A simple example of this would be



A lot of times, algebraic manipulations of expressions are made and the equals sign is also used. An example of this would be:



In this latter example, I think a unique equality character should be used to distinguish equalities made solely from mathematical manipulation.

So I propose the following a dot equals to denote equalities made solely from mathematical manipulation or evaluation. A simple example being:



Or




Although this symbol is available in unicode and Latex, if the character does not exist an equal with a period ( .= ) could be used. I must note that I have seen this to denote "in the limit of". I do not think this is a common use, and as an alternative a dot underneath the equals sign could be used or anything else similar to an equals sign. This symbol and many others exist in Unicode or Latex. For inspiration, check out all of the unicode symbols here.