I totally did not get this xkcd strip from 19 May 2010 -- and that's awesome!

I have a lot of feeds on my Google Reader account, but one of the few that I read religiously is Randall Munroe’s xkcd.

I’m going to risk some major geek cred here to make an embarrassing admission: I don’t always understand the punchline in xkcd strips.

It’s like that old game show, Win Ben Stein’s Money. Just about every episode is an intelligence test disguised as a joke. When I get it, it’s funny — and genuinely funny, not funny in an arch, “Oh, aren’t we so smart because we get this?” way. When I don’t get it, I always google the punchline. Invariably it’s something interesting, even if it’s not related to my field or my interests.

Today’s strip inspired this post. How IP addresses are assigned isn’t your usual fodder for comic strips, and like most punchlines, it’s not as funny if you have to do research to understand it. But I do get the punchline in xkcd strips often enough that it makes me want to figure out what I missed in the ones where I don’t.

I love it when comedy works hard at making us smarter. I wish there were more comic strips like this.

Pages of which you're a fan now appear for Everyone.

This morning brought an updated privacy policy with Facebook, together with some changes to how your profile is displayed. I was disappointed to see that the one feature for which I’d really been rooting — controlling who can see what groups you belong to — wasn’t added.

Here are some things you should check on:

• The one that really annoyed me is that Everyone can now see your fan pages. There are lots of good reasons why users should be able to keep this secret. From a business standpoint, I don’t want competitors who’ve identified me to necessarily know which pages I’m a fan of. I also don’t necessarily want potential employers to be able to see all of my fan pages. Having them know I like Dungeons & Dragons is okay. I work in technology; it’s a given that I’m a raging nerd, right? But what if I want to join a political or religious fan page? Showing fan pages to everyone can have a chilling effect, and it’s a bad move on Facebook’s part.
• Check your photo album settings. Photo albums that were hidden under your old settings might appear to Everyone now.
• Check your notes settings. Old notes might now show up to Everyone.
• Check your post comments settings. This seems to be a new setting; the default allows Everyone to see your post comments.

Most other privacy settings should remain as you had them if you choose the “Old Settings” option on the privacy page you’ll get when logging in to Facebook today.

One thing I do like about this change: you can now override your defaults for individual posts. So if your default is to only show wall posts to friends, as mine is, you can now opt to have certain posts show up to Everyone. I like this level of control, even if I’m unhappy with some of the other changes.