XKCD: Circuit Symbols

Ow. This is particularly painful.

Explanation for those who need it

SMBC Theology: Why the universe is 4-dimensional

Don't believe the news

Mallard Fillmore comic: March 23, 2022

Transcript (in case the image goes off-line in the future):

Mallard is watching TV, which is saying:

Coming up... We'll consult our panel of experts who've been proven dead wrong about every international conflict for the past two decades but are definitely NOT wrong about this one.

Comic and a bit of philosophy

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for Friday, February 25, 2022

• How do you stop being jealous of other people?
• The key is to always do what is true to you. Find your highest ideal and pursue it.
  Then, when other people have more success, you can recast your failure as a heroic struggle for purity or beauty or whatever.

This comic, which portrays a very cynical view of the world (a common feature of comics by its author), calls to mind a very famous quote from the Talmud (Pirkei Avot, aka "Ethics of the Fathers", Chapter 4, mishna 1):

SMBC: Love Modeling

I'm a regular reader of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a very strange comic that has a lot of geek-appeal.

Today's comic is particularly amusing. I won't embed the image here, because of copyright, but please click through and read it.

The interesting part is that this has been demonstrated. Back in the 60's, researchers at MIT created ELIZA, a program that can (among other things) simulate a psychotherapy session. It mostly works by parroting back whatever the human user says, with occasional non-specific questions and statements. It is nothing close to AI, but it is nevertheless convincing to quite a lot of people, including many who understand software enough to know better.

The Heisenberg Life Insurance Principle

H/T Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic actually makes a lot of sense.

FiveThirtyEight: A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling

A Comic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pandemic Modeling
By Zach Weinersmith, Maggie Koerth, Laura Bronner and Jasmine Mithani. Published Apr. 13, 2020

Here we are... In the middle of a pandemic... Staring out our living room windows like aquarium fish. The questions on everybody's minds: "How bad will this really get?". "How long am I going to have to live cooped up like this?"

We all want answers. And given the volume of research and data being collected about the novel coronavirus, it seems like answers ought to exist. And numbers are certainly out there. Trouble is, they're kind of all over the place.

A great comic-narrative explaining why we have no straight answers and are not likely to get any for quite some time. It's nobody's fault, but the result of lots of people trying to draw meaningful conclusions based on data that is inconsistent and highly uncertain.

h/t Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

There is pseudo-intellectual life on other planets

h/t Mallard Filmore

Dry Bones: Pelosi Rips it Up

Pelosi Rips it Up
Thursday, February 06, 2020

Pelosi Destroys Government Document, Violating Federal Law Click here to read the law

Absolutely true, but of course, nobody would be petty enough to prosecute over this.

And I would assume that there are plenty more copies, including one officially archived by the US government in order to guard against the destruction of individual copies.

But it's still an amusing observation.

New comic: Laws and Sausages

Laws and Sausages

Greg Weiner and Zach Weinersmith (author of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) have teamed up to present, in comic form, a series of lessons on American history, civics and how the US government works (or is supposed to work).

The lessons posted so far are:

1. Separation of Powers, part 1
2. Separation of Powers, part 2
3. Impeachment
4. Practical Info #1: Writing to Congress

It's a fast read and very educational for those who haven't learned about this in the past (which I suspect is a lot of people) and a good humorous refresher for those who already know the material.

xkcd: Lunch Order

Lunch Order

Sort of reminds me of the premise of Sid & Marty Krofft's Far Out Space Nuts.

May The Fourth Be With You

Yeah, it's May 4th again. I'm not doing anything special, but GoComic put together a page full of comics related to Star Wars.

Enjoy

Mental Floss: Don't "Chai" and "Tea" Both Mean the Same Thing?

Don't "Chai" and "Tea" Both Mean the Same Thing?
by Haley Sweetland Edwards

Almost 5,000 years ago, when folks in China started sipping a yummy, steeped beverage made from dried leaves and buds, different regions had different names for it. Most Chinese languages, including Mandarin and Cantonese, referred to the stuff by a word that is pronounced like “chá.” But other dialects, including Min Nan Chinese, which was spoken around Fujian, Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan, referred to it by a word that sounds more like "te."

Fascinating article about the origin of the word "tea". And the fact that "chai" technically has nothing to do with "flavored with milk and Indian spices".

h/t The Devil's Panties:

The Nib: Jack Chick Goes to Heaven

Jack Chick Goes to Heaven
by The Nib. Posted October 27th, 2016

The Christian cartoonist who tried to save us all from the fires of hell died Sunday. Here's our send off in the style of his famous comic tracts.

Although the news is from October, I just heard about it now. I would never wish death on someone, but I'm very glad Jack Chick will never write another of his hate-tracts. All throughout college, various Christian fundamentalists would distribute "Chick Tracts" across campus. These comics accuse everybody and everything of being in league with Satan. They attack Jews, Muslims, Catholics, pagans, video games, rock music, role-playing games, pop culture, politicians (of all parties) and even other evangelical Christian groups. Anyone not 100% into his insane paranoid theology is declared evil and must be harassed ('scuze me, "witnessed") into submission - all for his own good, of course.

As someone who was frequently harassed by missionaries, who were using these comics as "proof" of their moral obligation to be offensive, I'm glad he's gone. Hopefully the rest of his organization will also go away.

The send-off by The Nib is a good parody of these comics and is an appropriate memorial.

Blondie 2015-10-25: Comic party at the Bumsteads

Wow!. A veritable "Who's Who" of the comic strip world. I love it.

xkcd: Tech Loops

Tech Loops

I know the feeling. Every now and then, I think about what I actually use computers for (outside of my job, of course,) and it's not a whole lot:

• Spreadsheets - household budgets and a few related things
• Database - simple databases to track all the books, music and videos I own
• E-mail
• Web browser - mostly for reading web-comics, buying stuff off of Amazon and logging in to my bank account
• iTunes - mostly for ripping CDs and loading my iPods. And for making backups of what's on my phone
• Family photos - seems like this is a write-only repository. I rarely look at any of them, but I want to keep them organized here. I would probably be better off printing the pictures and making albums, like I did before I started using digital cameras.

It's very sobering to realize that for most of what I do, my old Apple II with 128K RAM and two floppy drives would be sufficient. And that old system might even be faster, since it won't have the massively bloated overhead of every modern operating system. Maybe I should consider switching back. I just need to figure out how to print to my laser printer and where to buy a box of blank floppy disks.

More seriously, any computer from the 90's would be more than adequate for everything here, except for iTunes. And that's only because I need it to support my iPhone. 20 years of massive improvements in hardware just to do what we've always done at the same speed we've always done it. So much for progress.

Dry Bones: Not the Donald

The media is so shocked by Trump's pronouncements that folks can't believe that the quote in the cartoon is not by Donald S. Trump but rather by a liberal Democrat.

Click through to read the entire quote by Al Franken.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal #145

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal #145

I recently ran across this completely ridiculous webcomic. Share and enjoy.

Comic: St. Patrick

h/t Kosher Kola

I know it's not St. Patrick's Day, nor is it even close, but I ran across this comic today and wanted to share it with the world.

Dry Bones: Good News, Bad News

So what, one wonders, are an Iranian general and Iranian troops doing on the Golan Heights, on Israel's borders? Hmmmmm?

What, indeed. And yet the US and Europe remain steadfastly dedicated to the idea that this whole conflict is over Palestinian refugees and Jews building homes on their own land. And when you tell them that this is, and always has been, a proxy-war with Iran, they laugh at you. But I'm sure they'll just dismiss this article as fantasy since it doesn't align with their prejudices.

Click through to the article to see a Yahoo News article about this.