Title text:
Mantle plumes explain Hawaii, Yellowstone, Iceland, the East African Rift, the Adirondack uplift, the Permian extinction, the decline of Rome, the DB Cooper hijacking, and the balrog in Moria. Those little hills of sand in your yard are caused by antle plumes.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3141/
It's a good description, but the problem is you've still just outsourced the pseudo-mystical role of the observer in this explanation with that "requires knowledge" bit.
I think a lot of the difficulty in explaining these things is ultimately semantics.
Yeah, I guess knowledge is also a bad term. I guess a better way to say it is "when an interaction happens, so the position is concrete."