Magic, monsters and mysteries await in the odd city of Sanity. It's up to Attley and a colorful group of characters to find out just what is going on.
Knights Errant
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Wilfrid's humble quest for revenge becomes bigger and bloodier by the day.
Jailbird
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An all-ages comic about a recently escaped prisoner's struggle to understand the outside world, and vice-versa. Also, a magic cape!
Astral Aves
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A fantasy coming-of-age following the adventures of Astra The Black and friends, as they navigate the mysterious world around them. It's politics, adventure, and the supernatural; oh, and crazy hair.
Atomic Robo
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The robot punches monsters and bad robots and one time he was a cowboy.
Godslave
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Star Trip
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Jas is a human taken from her home planet on a trip across the galaxy she will never forget.
Paranatural
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Superpowered middle schoolers fight evil spirits in their rural hometown. Come for the jokes, stay for the cast, the creatures, and the mystery that ties them all together!
Monsterkind
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Wallace Foster, a young, bright-eyed human social worker, has his entire world view rocked when he's suddenly relocated into a city primarily inhabited by monsters.
Girl Genius
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In a time when the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war, Mad Science rules the World...with mixed success.
Anarchy Dreamers
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Sparkly undead kids fight society's worst Nightmares in this pastel-punk urban fantasy coming-of-age!
Empowered
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A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
This is Not Fiction
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What do you do when the person you're in-love with is an anonymous romance novelist? Get your best friend to hire your worst enemy for help!
Sam & Fuzzy
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Troubled by gangster rodents, lovesick vampire stalkers, or confused ninja assassins? Don't panic! Sam and Fuzzy are here to help. (For a reasonable fee.)
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Fireweeds Moors
Gato Iberico
A cat-headed man and a girl with a sandwich hankering accidentally end up in a myth-infused country where magic chalices are a really big thing.
Whomp!
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A depressed, portly, hirsute anime fan stumbles through life in the ever-pursuit of chicken nuggets and other life-shortening indulgences.
Widdershins
Kate Ashwin
A series of light-hearted Victorian-era adventure stories featuring grumpy bounty hunters, accidental thiefkings, and more, in England's magical capital city Widdershins!
The Witch Door
Anni K.
Katariina Lehto discovers her neighbor is a witch called Jousia Muotka. Jousia introduces Katariina to the strange people and places beyond the witch door...
Star Impact
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A young, energetic woman fights her way up in the world of super-powered boxing after discovering the mighty gloves of her missing idol!
The Lonely Vincent Bellingham
Diana Huh
Vincent is an unkind man looking to disappear, and finds himself in the care of a vampire and her two wicked children.
El Goonish Shive
Dan Shive
WARNING: This comic often ignores the Laws of Physics
Starhammer
J.N. Monk, Harry Bogosian
A teen girl inherits a powerful alien artifact and proceeds to make a series of increasingly poor decisions
Lighter Than Heir
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A young Volant woman joins the military in an effort to upstage her war-hero father.
Lilith's Word
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Cyanide & Happiness
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Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Caramel Corn
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Sarah is the only human left in a world full of mythical creatures and monsters. All she wants to do is live a quiet life, but everything changes when she meets her guardian angel, Jacob.
Cassiopeia Quinn
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A cute, pantsless thief is pursued across the stars by a buttoned-up military officer in the spacey, laser-filled future.
Devil's Candy
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A lush fantasy about boy genius Kazu Decker, the girl he constructed for his 9th grade science project, and the world of devils and monsters they live in.
Goodbye to Halos
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Cuddles, gay flirting, weird feelings, and magic-fueled knife fights - it's an adventure across the queer multiverse!
The Automan's Daughter
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Aisha Osman and her uncle Siddig outwit bikers, spies and kidnappers while gearing up for a showdown with the formidable Widowmaker mecha.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Wilde Life
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Oscar decided to rent an old haunted house, and that's when things got weird...
Kochab
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A YA F/F fantasy comic about Sonya, a lost skier trying to survive a snowy wilderness and find her way back to her village; and Kyra - a fire spirit trying to fix the home that she let fall apart around her.
[un]Divine
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A highschool senior thought giving up his soul for a demon was a good idea. It wasn't.
Real Science Adventures
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Spin off stories and other adventures from the world of Atomic Robo!
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Cut Time
Juby
Rel and her trusty avian friend Fugue are on a quest to save a world that's lost track of time. Follow them and their new recruits, in a story written with help from the stars.
Awaken
Koti Saavedra/Flipfloppery
Superpowers, monsters and conspiracies. Piras, the spoiled Dameschi heir, fights to recover his identity after becoming a terrorist!
Monster Pulse
Magnolia Porter Siddell
Four kids run afoul of a creepy secret organization's experiments, which turn their body parts into fighting monsters. Part sentimental coming-of-age story, part monster-training shonen manga, with just a bit of sci-fi body horror.
Love Not Found
Gina Biggs
Abeille is on a quest to find someone who wants to do it the old-fashioned way in a time when touching has become outdated.
Ghost Junk Sickness
Studio CARTRIDGE, Laura Lee
Two hunters try to survive and end up being pushed to pursue a deadly bounty dubbed "The Ghost".
Wychwood
Varethane
When Tiara's pyrokinesis is finally noticed, she is captured by a magical research organization for study. If she cooperates, she could be helping to save humanity from a dire threat - but can she trust them?
Tigress Queen
Allison Shaw
A barbarian warlord and a pampered prince try to avoid a marriage alliance that could end decades of violence.
Between Failures
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The low stakes adventures of an assorted group of 20 somethings trapped in the declining years of American retail. They are naughty and say lots of swears.
Never Satisfied
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Lucy Marlowe, a magician's apprentice, competes against other apprentices for an important, magical, Goverment Job.
Alice and the Nightmare
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Alice finally attends University to learn to collect the dreams of humans, meet new friends, and deal with a pesky reflection along the way.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
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A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
Go Get a Roomie
Clover
Experience the queer journey of an upbeat hippie and the friendships she makes along the way! A tale of self-discovery and love of many forms.
Hazy London
Scotty
A story about messy relationships. From friendly foes to crazy families. Nothing is black and white, just full of color. But, all colors can get a little hazy...
Kiwi Blitz
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
Steffi thinks she can use her kiwi mech to become a superhero. This idea turns out to be very stupid.
Demon's Mirror
Harry Bogosian
Based loosely off of "The Snow Queen", a story by Hans Christian Andersen, we see things take a different turn as the demons become central characters, and the side characters stick around. Yup, that's the only differences. Enjoy!
Sufficiently Remarkable
Maki Naro
Two young women living in Brooklyn discover that you're always coming of age.
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
The End
August Brown, Cory Brown
Two aliens crash a sci-fi convention and accidentally take seven nerds on an adventure that spans the galaxy!
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I’m not sure why now, but I was under the impression she had largely moved onto the patron forum for those who read a day in advance. But I really miss her point of view.
My original idea was to have Dina request that Becky say she was going to take over the world with her pizza (and subs), but the thought of that ship was too horrifying.
Dina being into Tony the Tiger is somehow much more rational.
Have you heard the good word? Frosted Flakes are the cereal choice of champions. Did you know that Tony perfectly frosted flakes for your sins? For he saw the delicious part of a balanced breakfast before him. And it was good. Nay. It was more than Good. Praised be the tiger.
I just love how enthusiastic Becky is for learning! Reminds me of when I was younger, when my favourite characters were always the smart, responsible nerds.
Nowadays I lean more towards snarky, generally mature but having their moments badasses.
HA! I realize he’s probably joking because alt text, but I HOPE Dina’s new system is actually based on pseudoscience and the calling out thereof. I mean, it wouldn’t keep Sal out (though considering they never DID sort her toys, that may be a feature, not a bug) but it’d keep Joyce out just because of all the creationist cobwebs.
That entire strip was gold, I swear. Such an incredible rise and fall. It’s like “oh my gosh, Joyce is connecting with Dina about dinosaurs this is so amazing she’s trying so hard wait no HOW DID THIS GO SO WRONG!
What manner of scientist, though Beckster? Recent years have made me realize that there’s like…100 different areas of expertise. If you become anything that has nothing to do with History, archeology or biology there’s a good chance that you don’t have to know jack squat about dinosaurs.
It’s always dangerous forming your interests in the heat of a relationship. It can be hard to separate your love for that thing and your love for that person. Part of me worries Becky is just using it to fill the void overt religion has left.
Courtesy of the twitter account of Rosemary Mosco, behold this wonderful example of Butts Syndrome in nature.
Two people are watching army ants in the field. They notice something is a little odd about one ant’s derriere. They discover it is a bug masquerading as an ant’s derriere. They don’t know what it is, so they find a beetle specialist, who realizes it’s a new species.
This is how deep it goes. Imagine: someone finds a beetle on an ant’s butt, and they don’t know what it is, so they come to you, and the three of you have discovered a new species. THAT IS SPECIALIZATION, AND IT IS GLORIOUS, AND IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME IN SCIENCE.
I’m sorry, but did you just use the word “glorious” to describe highly trained and intelligent people devoting their time and effort to beetles riding on an ant’s ass?
….
I mean I don’t DISAGREE, but the cognitive dissonance is still there.
And then since you found a new species, you get to name it. Since we’re talking about mimicking an ant’s butt, the new species becomes Anthelephila mixalotii.
She doesn’t necessarily have to have that figured out yet. She’s gotta take at least a couple sciences as requirements for anything anyway, so she could slap out a couple 100-level courses to figure out what she likes.
I hate to say this, but Dina if you were a true scientist you would accept that there is a distinct possibility that that indeed took place. I mean there’s no way to fact check it and it most likely didn’t but like…science, by definition, isn’t absolute. For all we know that’s true. Science is pretty stupid sometimes.
Kinda. But base systems are positional, meaning you have carries and multiple-digit numbers. In binary, the count goes 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, and you can keep counting up forever and never loop back around. Bases are more about different ways of representing number systems, rather than different number systems.
In Z3 (which is close enough to “mod 3” for me to say that Butts identified it correctly), counting goes 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, looping on forever. Count 2 past the number 2, and you get to 1. If you imagine a clock you’ll get Z12, where 7 hours after 8 is 3. Just imagine a 3-hour clock, and that’s Z3. (At least until you get into multiplication and division, which are… funky for non-primes.) A real world application might be “I’m traveling around a circle with a circumference of 3 miles. I go 2 miles and then 2 more miles, and I’m now 1 mile past my starting point.”
The thing is, astrophysicists don’t know if space is flat overall. It’s close to flat, but there’s always a margin of error. So space could be curved, and that could be a closed curve. If so, go far enough in one direction and you could end up back where you started. (Ignoring things like the expansion requiring you to go faster than the speed of light to overcome it and what does “where you started” even mean when every frame of reference is moving anyway.) So it might be possible that 3 quadrillion light years in any given direction (at the present moment, not peering back in time thanks to light speed) … is this very same spot we’re in right now.
I’m not sure what you call it either, but you’re really moving out of number theory into topological spaces there. The fact that multiplication and division are wonky modulo composite bases is actually fairly important when you go to factor large composite numbers. While my general area is machine learning, one of my particular interests has been the application of artificial intelligence techniques to factoring. Which turns out to be real world important due to cryptography.
That’s one of the fun things about science. You have all these narrow specialties where you can understand and keep track of everything that’s going on. And then you have all these unexpected links between completely different area of study. And when it comes to anything outside your area, you’re really an amateur scientist. But anyone, regardless of background can become an amateur scientist for any field they want to spend a little time following and dabbling in. There are even some opportunities here and there for amateurs to make a solid contribution, but the main thing is that it’s fun.
Or you could just use one of the 0 = 1 proofs. Multiply both sides by 3, add one to both sides, write it a little funky… Bingo bongo, 2+2=1. Granted those tend to be frowned upon because they involve algebra trickery to pull a sneaky and avoid following some basic math rules.
I’m less than impressed by such Popperism. When someone discovers a new species of beetle, for example, “this sort of beetle exists!” is not falsifiable, but it is a scientific discovery.
Karl Popper wasn’t actually a scientist himself, and I don’t think his statements about science consisting of falsifiable statements are even true, let alone definitional. What he says about un-provability applies to universal statement (∀ statements and ~∃ statements), but science also includes particular statements (∃ statements and ~∀ statements). Also, provability is a matter of primary importance for mathematics and philosophy, but science is really more concerned with discovery and prediction than with proof, and is very comfortable with limited precision and limited confidence.
The heavy emphasis on Popperism in US schools and courtrooms is, I think, a disservice to science.
“This sort of beetle exists” is data, not theory. Mostly.
That this particular beetle is a new species is theory and falsifiable. Mostly, since species is partly just human definition.
I mean, it’s only idiotic if it doesn’t happen. If it does happen then they’ll have a satisfying, yet fleeting, victory. Off the top of my head I could think of several reason for that event to happen anyway.
Spontaneous just means that the cause need not be apparent, not that it need not exist. If Mike Tyson walked through my door right now, that’d be Spontaneous, but I mean, he certainly has the means to do that.
Not with regards to explosions, for which spontaneous has a specific meaning, and which is far more relevent to the conversation.
Words have meaning, and you’re arguing in favor of literal insanity. You just said that people who believe in random impossible stupid crap are actually smart because the random impossible stupid crap could happen, even though it can’t. There is a difference between an event not being specifically forbidden by the laws of physics and it being within the bounds of possibility.
I was mostly jokingly playing devil’s advocate. If I’d realized people were gonna take me so seriously I’d at least done more research so I didn’t sound like a dummy.
Hmmmm…. well one approach would be to look for fossilized cinders and char and see if there’s a higher-than-expected correlation between their locations and the locations of Parasaurolophus finds. Correlation isn’t causation, but it’s a start.
Well lasers require a crystalline structure in which to laze, and their presence in Parasaurolophus skulls would be notable. Firebreath is a bit more difficult, but if you have cavities that hold flammable gas or liquids secure from oxygen, that has to be reflected in the morphology. The cavities would have to be supported and protected by the skeletal structure.
… let’s start with a shark that migrates ever-lower over generations and eventually evolves to live in the abyssal trenches. It doesn’t really need its eyes to hunt, relying instead on scent and electoreception.
Somewhere along the line it gets infected with (and develops a hereditary symbosis with) bio-luminescent plankton of some sort. This makes its eyes glow, rendering them useless as eyes (not that they needed their eyes) but makes prey more likely to approach them to investigate the light.
Over successive generations the eyes’ lenses morph to better focus the light on distant prey detected through electroreception, first to draw them closer, later generations strong enough to overwhelm their senses and stun them, and finally strong enough to do damage to flesh at the point. This lets the sharks cook their food, aiding digestion and increasing calorie intake.
Sharks with freaking laser beams in their heads. Every creature deserves a warm meal.
Not necessarily. First, both would have selection pressure to develop heat-resistance. And second, the focal point of the beams might be a lot smaller than the eyes, resulting in a higher intensity at the target than at the source.
Not much. Water is almost perfectly transparent in the blue and green wavelengths (a typical color for deep-sea bio-luminescence), and so would not absorb much of the laser as heat. (And anyway, water can absorb a LOT of heat before undergoing a significant change in temperature.)
A hotshot corporate troubleshooter, from a planet that makes super-duper exoskeletal suits (due to truly nasty weather), goes to figure out why the company’s base has fallen silent on another planet where the life forms are a dazzling (literally) array of mineral crystal structures.
His suit was supposed to make him invulnerable and invincible. Its last words: “I was not programmed to defend against life forms that lase.”
(That and Nor Crystal Tears are my two favorite Alan Dean Foster books, and I re-read them occasionally.)
Falsifiability is a basis criterion for all scientific inquiry. If there’s no way to fact-check it, it’s inherently unscientific. And anyway, while there are multiple plausible hypotheses as to the primary purpose of Paurosaurolophus’ crest, there’s no motivation for the idea that it “shoots flames from its nostrils like a bombardier beetle” other than “because dragons”.
“Distinct possibility” is kind of a stretch, here.
All we have to go on are bones, sure, but the bones suggest a natural resonating chamber in the crest, that could be used to make a noise a little like a brass horn.
Suggesting that they were used in the same way a bombardier beetle expels chemicals from its anus (not fire) is… well… nonsense.
And plus scientific “facts” can change on a dime given what new information comes up. At one point it was a scientific fact that Pluto was a planet until it wasn’t, the earth was flat until it wasn’t, and I think I remember someone claiming that it was scientifically established that milk from cows don’t actually make you stronger or help you grow.
And some scientific facts that are stated are obviously not true, bumblebees aren’t supposed to be able to fly because their weight is too heavy for their wings to carry them and yet there they are flying and giving science the metaphorical middle finger by defying physics and gravity. I like to see the importance of science myself but come on.
Pluto’s status as a planet isn’t a case of facts changing, it’s a case of a definition changing. It’s only not a planet because we redefined “planet” in a way that made it not a planet, because otherwise we would have had to classify dozens or hundreds of other objects with similar characteristics as “planets” also (or else give up on the idea of an even somewhat rigorous definition of “planet” entirely).
And the bumblebee thing’s fake. It’s based on one dude in the ’30s who didn’t take into account nonlinear and viscous effects of fluid dynamics, which are incredibly important at the scale of an insect’s wings. We know how bees fly.
More generally, the problem is thinking of scientific fact as binary. People like to think of things as “fact” or “not fact” based on scientific evidence, but it’s all a question of significance— how much evidence do we have that something is the case, and more importantly, how significantly would the universe have to differ from what we observe for that thing to not be the case. One study can easily be disputed; overturning two hundred years of dinosaur paleontology would require a proportionally massive amount of contradictory evidence.
Fucking THANK YOU for the Pluto thing. I’ve taken ONE astronomy class in my life and I still understood the hows and whys of the Pluto reclassification. It’s not that tricky – it doesn’t clear it’s orbit, and frankly there’s a zillion other objects in the solar system that Pluto has more in common with than actual planets. This is not some ‘scientists are dumb and mean and excluding Pluto’ bullshit, it’s a ‘Pluto never really fit with the other planets, but now we’ve found all these things it has way more in common with, so we’re classifying it with them now’. It’s a dwarf planet that hangs out in the Kuiper belt!
They could have found a way to grandfather it in. Just define “planet” as “Anything big enough and close enough to have been discovered by ancient naked-eye observation or by its gravitational effects on other planets.”
In my opinion, they should have done that. Demoting Pluto was unnecessary bad PR.
Pluto was discovered in 1930, certainly not by the naked eye. And asking scientists to worry about PR is exactly how Galileo got excommunicated and why Turing had to be closeted.
I said, naked eye OR gravitational effect. Pluto’s existence was deduced – prompting an intense telescopic search – due to its effects on Uranus’s orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Discovery
Pluto isn’t visible to the naked eye, and while it was found as part of a “explain this anomaly” search, it isn’t massive enough to explain the anomaly. So pretty much fails on both counts.
To add to that, they later discovered that the “anomaly” in Neptune’s orbit which had led to the search in the first place was nonexistent – Neptune’s orbit could be perfectly explained by normal mechanics without positing the existence of an additional planet (and Pluto, being about the size of some of Neptune’s moons, is far too small to affect Neptune anyway).
If you are worried about PR, think about a solar comic book. Among other dear planets is a dwarf planet called The Goblin. The same team that helped reclassify Pluto is still looking for another planet, and as of 2018 at least, The Goblin might be evidence of another planet too. Pluto isn’t a demotion. It’s part of an entire “cosmic” universe that we team switch based on understanding and it retcons it’s own characters ever time a star becomes a red giant and meets the inevitable “shortly” after.
Okay, like, those examples? Like all of them are nonsense. All of them.
No scientific “facts” were established as to whether or not Pluto is a planet. Pluto was discovered in 1930, making it the ninth planet we’d found until then. Except that, back in the 1850s, we’d gone up to 23 planets until we decided we needed to call the smaller things ‘asteroids’ or it would get unmanageable. And now that we’ve found something like a hundred things that might have to count as planets if Pluto does, we’ve come up with a name for these sorts of orbital bodies.
The earth was determined to be round around 300 BCE, well before ‘science’ was a thing at all. A “flat earth” was never any sort of scientific fact.
Milk has protean and calories. Children who get protean and calories grow more than children who don’t. This isn’t… this isn’t super controversial.
The ‘bumblebees can’t fly’ thing was literally just someone doing some parlor math on the back of a napkin that, somehow, became part of the public discourse. The mechanism for bumblebee flight is well understood. They are not giving anything the middle finger.
1: Pluto’s status as a planet had to do with a vagueness of the definition of planet to begin with. Once a more precise definition was accepted, it was obvious Pluto wasn’t going to be part of it.
2: It’s practically never been a scientific fact that earth has been flat. Sure, people may have believed it, but all over the world, natural philosophers (which are sort of like a proto-scientist) managed to understand that the world is round, all independently of each other.
And as for the bumblebee thing… Yeah, what DYW said. I’m actually honestly a bit surprised that myth is still alive; it should have died about ten years ago.
And even in the myth form, it’s not really that science said bumblebees can’t fly, it would be that science didn’t understand how bumblebees flew. Which would be cool – then scientists could study it and learn more about flight!
There’s an old joke about scientific breakthroughs not starting with “Eureka!”, but with “Hmm, that’s weird.”
More generally, science isn’t really about “science facts”. It’s about theories and models to make sense of observed facts and to make predictions about future observations. “Bumblebees fly” is an observation. “How bumblebee flight works” is a scientific theory. Theories do get stuff wrong regularly and are revised to match new observations and failed predictions, if generally on the cutting edge not on the level that lay people think of with “science facts”.
That’s… not a joke? “Eureka!” is how scientific breakthroughs END, though fortunately they are no longer accompanied by the breakthrougher running stark naked through the streets.
It wasn’t really a joke. Isaac Asimov pointed that out many years ago (the discovery of Penicillin is a prime example). RIP Isaac. In related news, his wife Janet died recently at age 91.
You know it’s weird, actauly appreciate the number of people lining to up call me out on my shit. Not in a sense of me being a troll and getting attention but more so that I like being humbled.
Plus, even if they didn’t, would you really be that cruel? Like, this is Mike-level cruel. Or Carol-level cruel. You’re better than Mike and Carol, aren’t you?
Pluto’s status did not change because of new facts. The definition of “planet” was changed.
The nutritional value of milk has been known since forever. You hearing a denial of this fact from some random bozo does not constitute a new fact.
Science never denied that bumblebees could fly. An aerodynamicist correctly stated that he didn’t know how they flew, using the theory prevalent at the time. Then we found out, using a new theory based on new facts.
We don’t actually know of any time at which well-informed people thought that the world was flat. Widespread knowledge (i.e. well-founded true belief) that the world is a globe is two thousand years older than modern science.
A true scientist would accept there is a technically non-zero possibility of Parasaurolophus shooting flames, but they should also recognize it is so close that it is effectively zero. Science is about following evidence to find the best models you can, not throwing up your hands and saying “well, anything could be true”.
By that logic, we could propose that a dinosaur whose head is missing could have insect mandibles and we’d have to consider that this idea is just as plausible as it having an ‘average’ dinosaur head.
Another example: we don’t have direct evidence of Smilodon fur, so the idea of it being scally is just as plausible (obs that isn’t the case, but it follows the same train of thought).
In science there’s plausibility based on evidence. In the fire-spitting Parasaurolophus’s case, we’d need any indication that it could do that, and considering that it is a vertebrate with a totally different anatomy from that of insects, it couldn’t have the same mechanisms as the bombardier beetle so it isn’t even a good analogue even if we assume that Paras could spit fire.
Does anyone else wonder whether Becky realizes she’s gotta get more specific than that at some point, or just thinks that the sciences are just all wrapped up in one catch-all job? Since the type of people who treat science as a dirty word don’t tend to differentiate between them I can imagine she was never taught much about their being different types of scientists
Since the comic will likely get beyond freshman year (and Becky isn’t even enrolled yet), I’d say she has time. I didn’t declare until midway through my sophomore year, and there’s plenty of core stuff like math that she’ll need regardless to keep her busy for a while.
And given the volume of UnScience she has in her brain, she’ll probably need to restart with the 101s anyway.
She definitely seems to enjoy evolutionary biology in particular (‘corn looked like what 8000 years ago?’) but that may just be because she’s been exposed to more of it than, say, astronomy. (Which I don’t trust the fundie books to have taught her much of either.)
Pfft, no, astronomy teaches you how planets formed and how many millions of years it takes and how physics helped life form on earth. I almost guarantee it was not allowed.
While you were just genuinely surprised/confused for a second, and then immediately accepted the fact of the realness, I’ve seen a few times where people are pissed off at DYW for not portraying fundamentalism realistically, calling it caricature beyond belief.
These people tend not to stick around for long once they’re hit with a few facts.
Yeah, but… Even before moving from Norway to USA, I knew a fair bit about tele-evangelists and other rather… unsavory elements of organised religion, to say the least.
You’d think that (about 68% likely) actual ‘Murricans would be aware of these things too.
Some levels of Fundie Weird insulate themselves against the outside world. Also the US is so damn BIG people in some regions might not know the particularly skeevy sects because they’re just not around.
Yep…it went up (or made it to the Twitter widget, at least) just as I was making a post asking if it was real in the comments on the strip where Joyce mentioned it. This was a hilarious coincidence to me.
She knows that creationists lie to children about dinosaurs. She has seen the damage it has done to Joyce. But to realize that up until a few weeks ago her sweet, perfect, rad Becky never had reason to question fire breathing dinosaurs…
“Please, tell me one more time that you don’t think parasaurolophus shot flames from his nostrils because of bombadier beetles”
Wait, you mean PACE, the Program for Accelerated Christian Education? Those self-paced self-study booklets? I had those back in the 70’s. I remember really enjoying them, in contrast with traditional schooling which was not self-paced.
(Fortunately, my parents told me “They’re wrong about evolution, just nod and smile, and learn the rest of it.” But I still remember the phrase “Similarity of design indicates a designer.”)
Wait, “experimentation” is still acceptable sexy-science type innuendo? It’s not unbearably cliche? I totally could have used it in my stupid fanfic without looking like a dang fool!?
I hate to even think it, but when Becky mentioned hearing back about the student loans I had the horrible notion that she might be shattered by bad news on that front.
*googles “what does it take to qualify for a student loan”?
Okay, so the following are required for a federal loan:
Valid Social Security Number. Check…. probably. She’s got her birth certificate and can get the SSN with that, I think.
Registration with the selective service. This is only for men, except a federal court just ruled that male-only requirement to be unconstitutional, but there’s room for appeals and comic time and… screw it, Becky probably qualifies.
Be a citizen or eligible noncitizen. Check.
Let’s see… fill out paperwork… enroll in school… maintain a certain course load…
…. crap. She needs high school diploma or equivalent, like as a GED or homeschooling certificate. And she DIDN’T GRAB HER CERTIFICATE WHEN SHE WAS RAIDING HER OLD HOUSE.
They do have Becky’s social security number, just not the little card (but the card wouldn’t be necessary).
Her hometown’s school district should have records of her completing high school through homeschooling, or she could actually just ask Anderson to forward her records, as everything had to have been in order for her to be enrolled there in the first place.
There is also the little matter of eligibility for grants and certain types of loans that are based off of . . . parent’s income. Requirements assume parents will actually support their kids financially, even if they don’t.
A lot of kids cast out by their families are hit with that double whammy.
There are ways around that, generally reliant on establishing that the family isn’t actually supporting them. Which can be difficult for those informally cast out, but having your parent jailed for kidnapping you will probably make it much easier.
If nothing else, he’s got no income now.
Registering for Selective Service is part of the application process on the FASFA form anyway, even if female-born individuals have to register at some point in the future she’ll be covered.
Fun fact: individuals born between March 1957 and December 31 1959 are exempt from Selective Service because Gerald Ford’s son neglected to register when he was supposed to.
I didn’t have to provide my diploma to either the feds or either of the universities I attended across ~20 years, either to get registered or to qualify for student aid. My high school transcripts were apparently sufficient for that as far as the schools were concerned, and my presence as a registered student was evidently sufficient along with the financial stuffs to deal with my aid eligibility.
If IU wants her certificate to admit her, that might be a problem, but if IU extends an admissions offer, not having her certificate on demand isn’t gonna prevent her from getting aid.
Yeah, I just came across my high school diploma inside a bin of other random junk that my dad had in his office’s basement since the moment I got it, and I haven’t missed it. I remember pulling it out of its sleeve, realizing what it was, and thinking… wait, wasn’t this supposed to be important
I have something hilarious to share with you all that involves pictures and I am not sure the best way to go about it. It involves searching for used copies of the Dumbing of Age books and getting hilarious suggestions for how I misspelled title words.
Dinas isn’t going to have any pseudosciences in her home.
“In this house we study experimental and theoretical works, no shit from fundies, racists, communists, capitalists, mysticists, and no bullshit from Tyler Durden fans.”
The second rule of Dina’s room is DO NOT TALK ABOUT FLAT EARTH. The Third rule is that scientific arguments should be done by two people that have researched previously and don’t improvise with “intuitive” knowledge.
Coming from an European country, I must say that, while I reckon that for Becky is going to be good news, I instinctively shiver inside thinking to the prospect of getting in debt just to get an education.
I went to college in the US, and have been out of school for many years. My student loans felt wrong on so many levels. And it’s gotten exponentially worse since then…
I can’t believe the crap that gets put in those homeschool books, it must violate some kind of standard to misrepresent facts so badly that they can ONLY be lies.
Mine too. A double-cross means your luck will double cross you. You sometimes cross multiple fingers (and toes), but you always have to make sure there’s an odd number of crosses! That’s just SCIENCE!
How to read all 28 issues of my Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane run on Marvel Unlimited:
1: The first four issues were published as the miniseries "Mary Jane."
www.marvel.com/comics/serie...
today in #9chickweedlane i learned we have to be shown children learning and relearning what sex is, for Reasons, even though they already clearly know and have prepared nuanced questions about it!
also that Gran must hate, if she's still alive, how Old Juliette is the same but with gray hair
one of my favorite things is when a commenter explodes WHEN DO THESE CHARACTERS GET THERAPY but directed towards a character who canonically has a regular therapist
Hot Toys Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith 1/6 Scale Darth Vader Deluxe ($495) & Standard ($315) is up for preorder at Sideshow - shrsl.com/4wcx6 #ad
If you preorder make sure to hit the Exclusive versions since they include a commemorative plaque and cost the same.
btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 1d
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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that’s a very specific fetish
I’m growing more and more convinced Cerb hit the euphemistic nail on the metaphorical head in describing their dynamic as dom-sub.
aw jeez i see it now
Didn’t Becky have a line about how if girls like Billie had stuffed her into lockers she would have figured out her orientation a lot sooner?
I remember some strong sub indication like that.
Becky did say that about Billie.
Well.
That explains why she wanted to work at Galasso’s.
And why rebe,l bad girl, Joyce really does it for her.
Galasso’s Pizza (and subs)
Huh. :-O
Lord I miss her commenting on these strips…
yeah, me too.
oh no what happened? is she ok?
she turned up occasionally last year, just not the daily in depth analyses
I’m not sure why now, but I was under the impression she had largely moved onto the patron forum for those who read a day in advance. But I really miss her point of view.
Me too. I hope she’s doing well, haven’t seen her on Patreon for a while.
Yeah, most of us. What a great mind, and the soul of a Teacher!
Oh shit you’re right
To be even more specific, I’d call it a CGL type relationship.
I have more specific ones.
*cough*
You don’t count, that’s one of the most general of all.
Once you beat all the other fetishes, you have to beat their leader, General Butts
man i don’t even *have* an ass fetish, i just think they’re funny
I saw some pictures of the fetish model Masuimi Max in a rubber dinosaur suit last week. That’s a very specific fetish.
Panel four: Becky with the sweet talk!
Also panel two: that sweet Dina smile; my heart.
Dina: Now say “They’re Grrrreaat!”
Becky: …
Dina: I have interests outside the dinosaur thing!
Becky: …
Dina: …Okay, I have an interest outside the dinosaur thing.
My original idea was to have Dina request that Becky say she was going to take over the world with her pizza (and subs), but the thought of that ship was too horrifying.
Dina being into Tony the Tiger is somehow much more rational.
Have you heard the good word? Frosted Flakes are the cereal choice of champions. Did you know that Tony perfectly frosted flakes for your sins? For he saw the delicious part of a balanced breakfast before him. And it was good. Nay. It was more than Good. Praised be the tiger.
Would that side interest eventually balloon into an interest into all things Thurl Ravenscroft, or can it only ever be for Tony the Tiger?
That has to be one of the coolest names ever, and it wasn’t even a stage name.
Daw, the first roadbump in their relationship
I am extremely here for Becky’s sheer enthusiasm to learn actual factual science.
And apparently so is Dina. Panel 4, wowza.
Yeah, not gonna lie, I can relate to that one. Science is hot, yo.
Literally and figuratively. Science can give us nuclear fusion, and also better understanding of sex.
Wait, are you telling me that science has been hot this entire time? I had no idea!
No, seriously. I’m not much of a science-y type. … Dang, yo.
Two contractions in one strip? Dina’s evolving!
I think Dina would argue that she is adapting, but evolution is a way groups adapt, not individuals.
Okay, Hello to the new security system…
Should keep Mary out, good enough.
Having fun you two?
I just love how enthusiastic Becky is for learning! Reminds me of when I was younger, when my favourite characters were always the smart, responsible nerds.
Nowadays I lean more towards snarky, generally mature but having their moments badasses.
HA! I realize he’s probably joking because alt text, but I HOPE Dina’s new system is actually based on pseudoscience and the calling out thereof. I mean, it wouldn’t keep Sal out (though considering they never DID sort her toys, that may be a feature, not a bug) but it’d keep Joyce out just because of all the creationist cobwebs.
Dr. Stone made me regain my love for the super smart characters because his intelligence is so very grounded in reality.
I think it’s more as my own personality changed, so did my preferences.
I’m always into the smart ones. Particularly if they actually act smart, and we’re not just told they are smart.
Case in point – when I was younger, Blossom was always my favourite powerpuff girl and Michiru was my favourite on sailor moon.
Michiru is still my favourite on SM, but nowadays I skew more towards Buttercup.
Don’t know much about History
Don’t know much Biology
Don’t know much about the Science book
Don’t know much about the French I took…
Well I don’t know how to tell the weight of the sun / And of mathematics I want none
I actually recognized this one!
I am super hype, I usually can’t.
If Becky doesn’t get to be a scientist (or otherwise on the road to being a scientist) by the time DoA ends, will there even be a point?
Dina’s reaction when Joyce said that is still one of the funniest faces in the entire webcomic, and that’s really, really saying something.
That’s very, very true.
Especially coupled with Joyce’s happy face. She really thought she was contributing, poor girl
That entire strip was gold, I swear. Such an incredible rise and fall. It’s like “oh my gosh, Joyce is connecting with Dina about dinosaurs this is so amazing she’s trying so hard wait no HOW DID THIS GO SO WRONG!
What manner of scientist, though Beckster? Recent years have made me realize that there’s like…100 different areas of expertise. If you become anything that has nothing to do with History, archeology or biology there’s a good chance that you don’t have to know jack squat about dinosaurs.
I believe Dina wants to be a palaeontologist so likely something similar.
It’s always dangerous forming your interests in the heat of a relationship. It can be hard to separate your love for that thing and your love for that person. Part of me worries Becky is just using it to fill the void overt religion has left.
Honestly, it strikes me more like a middle finger to her dad, which is… probably not great, but significantly better.
…. wait, only 100? I thought it was at least 1000.
I wouldn’t know. I’m not a part of the “categoring sciences” science
Courtesy of the twitter account of Rosemary Mosco, behold this wonderful example of Butts Syndrome in nature.
Two people are watching army ants in the field. They notice something is a little odd about one ant’s derriere. They discover it is a bug masquerading as an ant’s derriere. They don’t know what it is, so they find a beetle specialist, who realizes it’s a new species.
This is how deep it goes. Imagine: someone finds a beetle on an ant’s butt, and they don’t know what it is, so they come to you, and the three of you have discovered a new species. THAT IS SPECIALIZATION, AND IT IS GLORIOUS, AND IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME IN SCIENCE.
……..
I’m sorry, but did you just use the word “glorious” to describe highly trained and intelligent people devoting their time and effort to beetles riding on an ant’s ass?
….
I mean I don’t DISAGREE, but the cognitive dissonance is still there.
Exactly.
Frans de Waal has spent his life so far watching primates, and in doing so immeasurably improved our understanding of our own lives.
(Spoiler alert: “alpha male” doesn’t mean what you think it means.)
And then since you found a new species, you get to name it. Since we’re talking about mimicking an ant’s butt, the new species becomes Anthelephila mixalotii.
Wow. That is literally one fake-ass beetle.
A fake ass-beetle?
No, it’s a real ass-beetle, but it’s also a fake-ass beetle. More formally, it’s a real fake-ass ass-beetle.
She doesn’t necessarily have to have that figured out yet. She’s gotta take at least a couple sciences as requirements for anything anyway, so she could slap out a couple 100-level courses to figure out what she likes.
Also, it’s probably best if Becky takes some general science classes before she decides on a major. Just to get an idea of what she really likes.
She doesn’t have to decide now. Proto-scientists fall into all kinds of specialties for the darndest of reasons. Just ask Mary Roach.
ALL OF THEM
A FUCKIN’ scientist
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/unlimited/
Hey, that’s a legitimate field of research. Just ask Masters & Johnson.
Becky will study all the sciences… and eventually decide on one she likes best.
Becky become Ms. Frizzle confirmed.
I was gonna say that she has access to an iguana, but I don’t think she and Fuckface have actually met face to (fuck)face yet.
I now want that to happen. And for Becky to horrify Joyce when she speaks the reptile’s name without hesitation.
And Dina to be pissy because it’s not a REAL dinosaur
Mmm sexy science
Dina version of foreplay lol
Dina’s face in panel 4 is gold
Oh my God, Panel 4 Dina face is the greatest Dina face.
I hate to say this, but Dina if you were a true scientist you would accept that there is a distinct possibility that that indeed took place. I mean there’s no way to fact check it and it most likely didn’t but like…science, by definition, isn’t absolute. For all we know that’s true. Science is pretty stupid sometimes.
I had a biology teacher who said “Nothing can be proven, only failed to have been disproven.”
But yeah, some things are really hard to disprove. Not sure how 2+2 doesn’t equal 4 somewhere in the universe. *Insert 1984 reference here*
I’ve worked with a number system where 2+2 = 1, and it does have real-world applications, so nyeh.
Ooh, what is it? Honestly curious to find out for myself.
Mod 3?
*Looks at wiki for modular arithmetic* Oh wait, is that like a base system? Like binary, which is Base 2 and only contains “0” and “1” as digits?
*facepalm* Wait, 2+2 = 11 in that system, I think.
Nah it’s where numbers loop back around. So modulo 3 goes 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, etc.
Kinda. But base systems are positional, meaning you have carries and multiple-digit numbers. In binary, the count goes 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, and you can keep counting up forever and never loop back around. Bases are more about different ways of representing number systems, rather than different number systems.
In Z3 (which is close enough to “mod 3” for me to say that Butts identified it correctly), counting goes 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 2, looping on forever. Count 2 past the number 2, and you get to 1. If you imagine a clock you’ll get Z12, where 7 hours after 8 is 3. Just imagine a 3-hour clock, and that’s Z3. (At least until you get into multiplication and division, which are… funky for non-primes.) A real world application might be “I’m traveling around a circle with a circumference of 3 miles. I go 2 miles and then 2 more miles, and I’m now 1 mile past my starting point.”
The thing is, astrophysicists don’t know if space is flat overall. It’s close to flat, but there’s always a margin of error. So space could be curved, and that could be a closed curve. If so, go far enough in one direction and you could end up back where you started. (Ignoring things like the expansion requiring you to go faster than the speed of light to overcome it and what does “where you started” even mean when every frame of reference is moving anyway.) So it might be possible that 3 quadrillion light years in any given direction (at the present moment, not peering back in time thanks to light speed) … is this very same spot we’re in right now.
Addendum: Though admittedly that would be less Z3 and more of a…I’m trying to remember what it’s called. You still have 2+2 = 1, though.
I’m not sure what you call it either, but you’re really moving out of number theory into topological spaces there. The fact that multiplication and division are wonky modulo composite bases is actually fairly important when you go to factor large composite numbers. While my general area is machine learning, one of my particular interests has been the application of artificial intelligence techniques to factoring. Which turns out to be real world important due to cryptography.
That’s one of the fun things about science. You have all these narrow specialties where you can understand and keep track of everything that’s going on. And then you have all these unexpected links between completely different area of study. And when it comes to anything outside your area, you’re really an amateur scientist. But anyone, regardless of background can become an amateur scientist for any field they want to spend a little time following and dabbling in. There are even some opportunities here and there for amateurs to make a solid contribution, but the main thing is that it’s fun.
02 in base 3 + 02 in base 3 = 11 in base 3 = 04 in base 10
I guess base 3 is useful according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_numeral_system#Practical_usage but I don’t think they use it with only one digit
Another idea is perhaps they Reltzik’s system uses a different + operator?
let’s see…
OR: 10 or 10 = 10
AND: 10 and 10 = 10
NOR: 10 nor 10 = 01
NAND: 10 nand 10 = 01
XOR: 10 xor 10 = 00
so I guess if + is either the binary operator nand or the binary operator nor then 2+2=1, but that’d be a weird thing to call + haha
lowkey hoping that like the pun thread, people continue looking for ways that 2+2=1?
2+(-2)=0, at least?
Or you could just use one of the 0 = 1 proofs. Multiply both sides by 3, add one to both sides, write it a little funky… Bingo bongo, 2+2=1. Granted those tend to be frowned upon because they involve algebra trickery to pull a sneaky and avoid following some basic math rules.
I’m less than impressed by such Popperism. When someone discovers a new species of beetle, for example, “this sort of beetle exists!” is not falsifiable, but it is a scientific discovery.
Karl Popper wasn’t actually a scientist himself, and I don’t think his statements about science consisting of falsifiable statements are even true, let alone definitional. What he says about un-provability applies to universal statement (∀ statements and ~∃ statements), but science also includes particular statements (∃ statements and ~∀ statements). Also, provability is a matter of primary importance for mathematics and philosophy, but science is really more concerned with discovery and prediction than with proof, and is very comfortable with limited precision and limited confidence.
The heavy emphasis on Popperism in US schools and courtrooms is, I think, a disservice to science.
“This sort of beetle exists” is data, not theory. Mostly.
That this particular beetle is a new species is theory and falsifiable. Mostly, since species is partly just human definition.
There’s also a possibility the Earth will spontaneously explode, doesn’t make people who expect it any less idiotic.
I mean, it’s only idiotic if it doesn’t happen. If it does happen then they’ll have a satisfying, yet fleeting, victory. Off the top of my head I could think of several reason for that event to happen anyway.
If there’s a reason for it, then it’s not spontaneous.
Spontaneous just means that the cause need not be apparent, not that it need not exist. If Mike Tyson walked through my door right now, that’d be Spontaneous, but I mean, he certainly has the means to do that.
Not with regards to explosions, for which spontaneous has a specific meaning, and which is far more relevent to the conversation.
Words have meaning, and you’re arguing in favor of literal insanity. You just said that people who believe in random impossible stupid crap are actually smart because the random impossible stupid crap could happen, even though it can’t. There is a difference between an event not being specifically forbidden by the laws of physics and it being within the bounds of possibility.
I was mostly jokingly playing devil’s advocate. If I’d realized people were gonna take me so seriously I’d at least done more research so I didn’t sound like a dummy.
I’m sorry to get all serious, but this shit is why cults still work.
Thor will smite you for that.
Oh look, it’s not happening.
But is it spontaneously not happening?
I think it’d be pretty easy to prove whether Parasaurolophus could breathe fire was true or not. Laser death beam eyes however…
Hmmmm…. well one approach would be to look for fossilized cinders and char and see if there’s a higher-than-expected correlation between their locations and the locations of Parasaurolophus finds. Correlation isn’t causation, but it’s a start.
Well lasers require a crystalline structure in which to laze, and their presence in Parasaurolophus skulls would be notable. Firebreath is a bit more difficult, but if you have cavities that hold flammable gas or liquids secure from oxygen, that has to be reflected in the morphology. The cavities would have to be supported and protected by the skeletal structure.
…. wait, do they have to be LITERAL lasers, or just something a layman would see and call a laser?
You’d have to propose a mechanism for laser death beam eyes first.
Hrrrm…. okay….
… let’s start with a shark that migrates ever-lower over generations and eventually evolves to live in the abyssal trenches. It doesn’t really need its eyes to hunt, relying instead on scent and electoreception.
Somewhere along the line it gets infected with (and develops a hereditary symbosis with) bio-luminescent plankton of some sort. This makes its eyes glow, rendering them useless as eyes (not that they needed their eyes) but makes prey more likely to approach them to investigate the light.
Over successive generations the eyes’ lenses morph to better focus the light on distant prey detected through electroreception, first to draw them closer, later generations strong enough to overwhelm their senses and stun them, and finally strong enough to do damage to flesh at the point. This lets the sharks cook their food, aiding digestion and increasing calorie intake.
Sharks with freaking laser beams in their heads. Every creature deserves a warm meal.
Oh, wait, laser beams in Parasaurolophus.
…… I got nothing.
The only problem I see with that is that the shark and plankton will be cooking themselves well before they’re able to heat up any prey.
Not necessarily. First, both would have selection pressure to develop heat-resistance. And second, the focal point of the beams might be a lot smaller than the eyes, resulting in a higher intensity at the target than at the source.
What would happen to the water in the path of the lasers?
Not much. Water is almost perfectly transparent in the blue and green wavelengths (a typical color for deep-sea bio-luminescence), and so would not absorb much of the laser as heat. (And anyway, water can absorb a LOT of heat before undergoing a significant change in temperature.)
Heh. Sentenced to Prism by Alan Dean Foster.
A hotshot corporate troubleshooter, from a planet that makes super-duper exoskeletal suits (due to truly nasty weather), goes to figure out why the company’s base has fallen silent on another planet where the life forms are a dazzling (literally) array of mineral crystal structures.
His suit was supposed to make him invulnerable and invincible. Its last words: “I was not programmed to defend against life forms that lase.”
(That and Nor Crystal Tears are my two favorite Alan Dean Foster books, and I re-read them occasionally.)
Falsifiability is a basis criterion for all scientific inquiry. If there’s no way to fact-check it, it’s inherently unscientific. And anyway, while there are multiple plausible hypotheses as to the primary purpose of Paurosaurolophus’ crest, there’s no motivation for the idea that it “shoots flames from its nostrils like a bombardier beetle” other than “because dragons”.
“Distinct possibility” is kind of a stretch, here.
All we have to go on are bones, sure, but the bones suggest a natural resonating chamber in the crest, that could be used to make a noise a little like a brass horn.
Suggesting that they were used in the same way a bombardier beetle expels chemicals from its anus (not fire) is… well… nonsense.
And plus scientific “facts” can change on a dime given what new information comes up. At one point it was a scientific fact that Pluto was a planet until it wasn’t, the earth was flat until it wasn’t, and I think I remember someone claiming that it was scientifically established that milk from cows don’t actually make you stronger or help you grow.
And some scientific facts that are stated are obviously not true, bumblebees aren’t supposed to be able to fly because their weight is too heavy for their wings to carry them and yet there they are flying and giving science the metaphorical middle finger by defying physics and gravity. I like to see the importance of science myself but come on.
the “we don’t know how bumblebees fly” thing is not actually true
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bumblebees-cant-fly/
ahh damn it you sniped me with snopes
Pluto’s status as a planet isn’t a case of facts changing, it’s a case of a definition changing. It’s only not a planet because we redefined “planet” in a way that made it not a planet, because otherwise we would have had to classify dozens or hundreds of other objects with similar characteristics as “planets” also (or else give up on the idea of an even somewhat rigorous definition of “planet” entirely).
And the bumblebee thing’s fake. It’s based on one dude in the ’30s who didn’t take into account nonlinear and viscous effects of fluid dynamics, which are incredibly important at the scale of an insect’s wings. We know how bees fly.
More generally, the problem is thinking of scientific fact as binary. People like to think of things as “fact” or “not fact” based on scientific evidence, but it’s all a question of significance— how much evidence do we have that something is the case, and more importantly, how significantly would the universe have to differ from what we observe for that thing to not be the case. One study can easily be disputed; overturning two hundred years of dinosaur paleontology would require a proportionally massive amount of contradictory evidence.
Fucking THANK YOU for the Pluto thing. I’ve taken ONE astronomy class in my life and I still understood the hows and whys of the Pluto reclassification. It’s not that tricky – it doesn’t clear it’s orbit, and frankly there’s a zillion other objects in the solar system that Pluto has more in common with than actual planets. This is not some ‘scientists are dumb and mean and excluding Pluto’ bullshit, it’s a ‘Pluto never really fit with the other planets, but now we’ve found all these things it has way more in common with, so we’re classifying it with them now’. It’s a dwarf planet that hangs out in the Kuiper belt!
They could have found a way to grandfather it in. Just define “planet” as “Anything big enough and close enough to have been discovered by ancient naked-eye observation or by its gravitational effects on other planets.”
In my opinion, they should have done that. Demoting Pluto was unnecessary bad PR.
Pluto was discovered in 1930, certainly not by the naked eye. And asking scientists to worry about PR is exactly how Galileo got excommunicated and why Turing had to be closeted.
I said, naked eye OR gravitational effect. Pluto’s existence was deduced – prompting an intense telescopic search – due to its effects on Uranus’s orbit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Discovery
Galileo and Turing are off-topic.
Pluto isn’t visible to the naked eye, and while it was found as part of a “explain this anomaly” search, it isn’t massive enough to explain the anomaly. So pretty much fails on both counts.
To add to that, they later discovered that the “anomaly” in Neptune’s orbit which had led to the search in the first place was nonexistent – Neptune’s orbit could be perfectly explained by normal mechanics without positing the existence of an additional planet (and Pluto, being about the size of some of Neptune’s moons, is far too small to affect Neptune anyway).
By that logic, the moon is a planet.
To be fair, at least some ancient cultures did consider the Moon a planet, I believe.
Well, sure, but that was before we had a working scientific definition of a planet.
Why should scientific terminology reflect what the universe is like, when it’s better PR to reflect what boomers want it to be like?
If you are worried about PR, think about a solar comic book. Among other dear planets is a dwarf planet called The Goblin. The same team that helped reclassify Pluto is still looking for another planet, and as of 2018 at least, The Goblin might be evidence of another planet too. Pluto isn’t a demotion. It’s part of an entire “cosmic” universe that we team switch based on understanding and it retcons it’s own characters ever time a star becomes a red giant and meets the inevitable “shortly” after.
Okay, like, those examples? Like all of them are nonsense. All of them.
No scientific “facts” were established as to whether or not Pluto is a planet. Pluto was discovered in 1930, making it the ninth planet we’d found until then. Except that, back in the 1850s, we’d gone up to 23 planets until we decided we needed to call the smaller things ‘asteroids’ or it would get unmanageable. And now that we’ve found something like a hundred things that might have to count as planets if Pluto does, we’ve come up with a name for these sorts of orbital bodies.
The earth was determined to be round around 300 BCE, well before ‘science’ was a thing at all. A “flat earth” was never any sort of scientific fact.
Milk has protean and calories. Children who get protean and calories grow more than children who don’t. This isn’t… this isn’t super controversial.
The ‘bumblebees can’t fly’ thing was literally just someone doing some parlor math on the back of a napkin that, somehow, became part of the public discourse. The mechanism for bumblebee flight is well understood. They are not giving anything the middle finger.
1: Pluto’s status as a planet had to do with a vagueness of the definition of planet to begin with. Once a more precise definition was accepted, it was obvious Pluto wasn’t going to be part of it.
2: It’s practically never been a scientific fact that earth has been flat. Sure, people may have believed it, but all over the world, natural philosophers (which are sort of like a proto-scientist) managed to understand that the world is round, all independently of each other.
And as for the bumblebee thing… Yeah, what DYW said. I’m actually honestly a bit surprised that myth is still alive; it should have died about ten years ago.
Well, that should teach me to make a bathroom break in the middle of making a post.
And even in the myth form, it’s not really that science said bumblebees can’t fly, it would be that science didn’t understand how bumblebees flew. Which would be cool – then scientists could study it and learn more about flight!
There’s an old joke about scientific breakthroughs not starting with “Eureka!”, but with “Hmm, that’s weird.”
More generally, science isn’t really about “science facts”. It’s about theories and models to make sense of observed facts and to make predictions about future observations. “Bumblebees fly” is an observation. “How bumblebee flight works” is a scientific theory. Theories do get stuff wrong regularly and are revised to match new observations and failed predictions, if generally on the cutting edge not on the level that lay people think of with “science facts”.
That’s… not a joke? “Eureka!” is how scientific breakthroughs END, though fortunately they are no longer accompanied by the breakthrougher running stark naked through the streets.
It’s a joke because it’s true, but it conflicts with how many non-science people think about how science is done.
It wasn’t really a joke. Isaac Asimov pointed that out many years ago (the discovery of Penicillin is a prime example). RIP Isaac. In related news, his wife Janet died recently at age 91.
You know it’s weird, actauly appreciate the number of people lining to up call me out on my shit. Not in a sense of me being a troll and getting attention but more so that I like being humbled.
Hey man, no worries. We’re not here to call you out, we’re just very enthusiastic about science apparently!
Science and butts. Our two top enthusiastic subjects.
I’m gonna let you in on a little secret… I’m more into science than butts.
What about science studying the subject of butts? Posteriology?
I like that you are staring disapprovingly of butts’ butt while discussing butts.
Those two avatars are gifts that keep on giving, especially when used together like that. It keeps happening!
And in turn, I appreciate that you are one of those people that are capable of others correcting you without getting mad about it.
I’ll tell you a secret… I’m not always graceful when that happens to me. I should be, and I try to…. but it’s not always happening.
I’m resisting the urge to post the entire Bee Movie script
Come on, they’ve already admitted their mistake.
Plus, even if they didn’t, would you really be that cruel? Like, this is Mike-level cruel. Or Carol-level cruel. You’re better than Mike and Carol, aren’t you?
Pluto’s status did not change because of new facts. The definition of “planet” was changed.
The nutritional value of milk has been known since forever. You hearing a denial of this fact from some random bozo does not constitute a new fact.
Science never denied that bumblebees could fly. An aerodynamicist correctly stated that he didn’t know how they flew, using the theory prevalent at the time. Then we found out, using a new theory based on new facts.
We don’t actually know of any time at which well-informed people thought that the world was flat. Widespread knowledge (i.e. well-founded true belief) that the world is a globe is two thousand years older than modern science.
A true scientist would accept there is a technically non-zero possibility of Parasaurolophus shooting flames, but they should also recognize it is so close that it is effectively zero. Science is about following evidence to find the best models you can, not throwing up your hands and saying “well, anything could be true”.
Very well stated! And a great rebuttal to Marcelo Gleiser, a physicist who just won a religion prize and who claims atheism isn’t scientific.
That’s not how it works…
By that logic, we could propose that a dinosaur whose head is missing could have insect mandibles and we’d have to consider that this idea is just as plausible as it having an ‘average’ dinosaur head.
Another example: we don’t have direct evidence of Smilodon fur, so the idea of it being scally is just as plausible (obs that isn’t the case, but it follows the same train of thought).
In science there’s plausibility based on evidence. In the fire-spitting Parasaurolophus’s case, we’d need any indication that it could do that, and considering that it is a vertebrate with a totally different anatomy from that of insects, it couldn’t have the same mechanisms as the bombardier beetle so it isn’t even a good analogue even if we assume that Paras could spit fire.
RE:ALT-TEXT: So what you’re saying is that a flame-snortin’ Parasaurolophus is the new security system, correct?
Does anyone else wonder whether Becky realizes she’s gotta get more specific than that at some point, or just thinks that the sciences are just all wrapped up in one catch-all job? Since the type of people who treat science as a dirty word don’t tend to differentiate between them I can imagine she was never taught much about their being different types of scientists
Since the comic will likely get beyond freshman year (and Becky isn’t even enrolled yet), I’d say she has time. I didn’t declare until midway through my sophomore year, and there’s plenty of core stuff like math that she’ll need regardless to keep her busy for a while.
*will likely NOT get beyond freshman year, forgot a word.
And given the volume of UnScience she has in her brain, she’ll probably need to restart with the 101s anyway.
She definitely seems to enjoy evolutionary biology in particular (‘corn looked like what 8000 years ago?’) but that may just be because she’s been exposed to more of it than, say, astronomy. (Which I don’t trust the fundie books to have taught her much of either.)
Taking a whole bunch of 101s would be a great way to decide what types of science interest/match her the most.
Becky will audit SO MANY classes.
Pfft, no, astronomy teaches you how planets formed and how many millions of years it takes and how physics helped life form on earth. I almost guarantee it was not allowed.
She just thinks it means you get to wear a white lab coat.
She’s basically right. That’s the most important part.
Oh gods, I had that flamethrower parasaurolophus/bombardier beetle book.
Wait, the book is real?
It is. I believe Willis put up a picture of it on Twitter before.
Guess that shouldn’t be surprising, considering the hymnal video is real.
When it comes to plumbing the depths of evangelical stupidity, do NOT assume there is a bottom.
I’ve hit rock bottom and I saw a tunnel going straight through it.
Ouch! While not sharing any religious beliefs, I try to be respectful of those who do.
I will acknowledge that this is sometimes difficult.
While you were just genuinely surprised/confused for a second, and then immediately accepted the fact of the realness, I’ve seen a few times where people are pissed off at DYW for not portraying fundamentalism realistically, calling it caricature beyond belief.
These people tend not to stick around for long once they’re hit with a few facts.
Poe’s law strikes again.
Yeah, but… Even before moving from Norway to USA, I knew a fair bit about tele-evangelists and other rather… unsavory elements of organised religion, to say the least.
You’d think that (about 68% likely) actual ‘Murricans would be aware of these things too.
Some levels of Fundie Weird insulate themselves against the outside world. Also the US is so damn BIG people in some regions might not know the particularly skeevy sects because they’re just not around.
I’m not entirely willing to buy that P(know about televangelists) and P(want to move to another country) are independent probabilities.
Yep…it went up (or made it to the Twitter widget, at least) just as I was making a post asking if it was real in the comments on the strip where Joyce mentioned it. This was a hilarious coincidence to me.
Sadly, yes.
Wow. Um… I feel that maybe we should not linger after panel 4. They might require some alone time.
Awwww, Dina. That trauma will stay with her a LONG time.
It just shows how much she cares for Becky.
I mean, really, it does. When you get more upset about what happen to someone else than if it had happened to you, then you care about them.
And the level of upset Dina got on Becky’s behalf was… over 9 000.
Very, very true.
She knows that creationists lie to children about dinosaurs. She has seen the damage it has done to Joyce. But to realize that up until a few weeks ago her sweet, perfect, rad Becky never had reason to question fire breathing dinosaurs…
“Please, tell me one more time that you don’t think parasaurolophus shot flames from his nostrils because of bombadier beetles”
Sounds like Becky was another casualty of the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum. :/
Wait, you mean PACE, the Program for Accelerated Christian Education? Those self-paced self-study booklets? I had those back in the 70’s. I remember really enjoying them, in contrast with traditional schooling which was not self-paced.
(Fortunately, my parents told me “They’re wrong about evolution, just nod and smile, and learn the rest of it.” But I still remember the phrase “Similarity of design indicates a designer.”)
Oh gods I want the title of their Slipshine to be “FOR SCIENCE!”
……. but who’d be in the control group?
Two of the most anti-science people in the cast, I suppose.
So Mary and Peter.
Isn’t that a different red-headed scientist? Say, with glasses?
…Becky/Dina/Carla is not a ship I expected to hear but I’m not about to complain
Hee hee. I meant Agatha Heterodyne, to whom For Science nearly functions as a mating call.
But I can see Carla too.
…I didn’t expect to hear Becky/Dina/Agatha either, but I’m sure down for some cross-universal shenanigans
Well, Dina’s been over to visit, so anything’s possible.
Ah, the call of my fellow shippers: “Anything’s possible”.
Or possibly “experimentation”
Wait, “experimentation” is still acceptable sexy-science type innuendo? It’s not unbearably cliche? I totally could have used it in my stupid fanfic without looking like a dang fool!?
I can’t believe I talked myself out of it.
I hate to even think it, but when Becky mentioned hearing back about the student loans I had the horrible notion that she might be shattered by bad news on that front.
Pffft, as if Willis would ever do that to us!
*googles “what does it take to qualify for a student loan”?
Okay, so the following are required for a federal loan:
Valid Social Security Number. Check…. probably. She’s got her birth certificate and can get the SSN with that, I think.
Registration with the selective service. This is only for men, except a federal court just ruled that male-only requirement to be unconstitutional, but there’s room for appeals and comic time and… screw it, Becky probably qualifies.
Be a citizen or eligible noncitizen. Check.
Let’s see… fill out paperwork… enroll in school… maintain a certain course load…
…. crap. She needs high school diploma or equivalent, like as a GED or homeschooling certificate. And she DIDN’T GRAB HER CERTIFICATE WHEN SHE WAS RAIDING HER OLD HOUSE.
Only one thing to do
RE-HEIST!T
HEIST 2: ELECTRIC STEALAROO
They do have Becky’s social security number, just not the little card (but the card wouldn’t be necessary).
Her hometown’s school district should have records of her completing high school through homeschooling, or she could actually just ask Anderson to forward her records, as everything had to have been in order for her to be enrolled there in the first place.
NOPE! RE-HEIST!
There is also the little matter of eligibility for grants and certain types of loans that are based off of . . . parent’s income. Requirements assume parents will actually support their kids financially, even if they don’t.
A lot of kids cast out by their families are hit with that double whammy.
Her dad is in jail, though, so that probably affects his income.
There are ways around that, generally reliant on establishing that the family isn’t actually supporting them. Which can be difficult for those informally cast out, but having your parent jailed for kidnapping you will probably make it much easier.
If nothing else, he’s got no income now.
Registering for Selective Service is part of the application process on the FASFA form anyway, even if female-born individuals have to register at some point in the future she’ll be covered.
Fun fact: individuals born between March 1957 and December 31 1959 are exempt from Selective Service because Gerald Ford’s son neglected to register when he was supposed to.
I didn’t have to provide my diploma to either the feds or either of the universities I attended across ~20 years, either to get registered or to qualify for student aid. My high school transcripts were apparently sufficient for that as far as the schools were concerned, and my presence as a registered student was evidently sufficient along with the financial stuffs to deal with my aid eligibility.
If IU wants her certificate to admit her, that might be a problem, but if IU extends an admissions offer, not having her certificate on demand isn’t gonna prevent her from getting aid.
Yeah, I just came across my high school diploma inside a bin of other random junk that my dad had in his office’s basement since the moment I got it, and I haven’t missed it. I remember pulling it out of its sleeve, realizing what it was, and thinking… wait, wasn’t this supposed to be important
Symbolically important.
May have been more important back in the day, before electronic record keeping and communication?
And, unfortunately, Joyce was one of those kids who accepted anything as true if someone with sufficient authority in her eyes said it was!
I have something hilarious to share with you all that involves pictures and I am not sure the best way to go about it. It involves searching for used copies of the Dumbing of Age books and getting hilarious suggestions for how I misspelled title words.
Dinas isn’t going to have any pseudosciences in her home.
“In this house we study experimental and theoretical works, no shit from fundies, racists, communists, capitalists, mysticists, and no bullshit from Tyler Durden fans.”
The first rule of Dina’s room is do not talk about Fight Club.
The second rule of Dina’s room is DO NOT TALK ABOUT FLAT EARTH. The Third rule is that scientific arguments should be done by two people that have researched previously and don’t improvise with “intuitive” knowledge.
Unless that intuition helps reach experimental results that can be repeated.
Nah, third rule is ‘Evolution is a fact. Deal with it’.
It USED to be about scientific arguments, but coming to college made her revise a few rules.
It might have FELT like flames though, because beetles in the nostrils. Ow.
Coming from an European country, I must say that, while I reckon that for Becky is going to be good news, I instinctively shiver inside thinking to the prospect of getting in debt just to get an education.
That feels wrong to me on so, so many levels…
I went to college in the US, and have been out of school for many years. My student loans felt wrong on so many levels. And it’s gotten exponentially worse since then…
Well that escalated quickly
Just for the record, Mr. Willis, you misspelled “bombardier.”
I can’t believe the crap that gets put in those homeschool books, it must violate some kind of standard to misrepresent facts so badly that they can ONLY be lies.
God, I hope nothing gets in the way of Becky enrolling. I’d give just about anything for a student like her.
Nice touch on Becky giving the double birds again when she says she’ll be a scientist.
She’s crossing her fingers
she’s crossing her fingers, actually
so technically this might be a quadruple birds, i guess
Yup. Noticed as soon as I posted it. Goddammit.
Although, my childhood is insisting she’s doing it wrong – crossing fingers on both hands was bad luck where I grew up – you only crossed one hand.
Mine too. A double-cross means your luck will double cross you. You sometimes cross multiple fingers (and toes), but you always have to make sure there’s an odd number of crosses! That’s just SCIENCE!
You’d think she’d know that trying to be a scientist and all.
More lesbian energy than Captain Marvel
Brains are sexy.
Maybe that’s why zombies can’t get enough of’em.
I can say with certainty that I had the EXACT book Willis had and is referencing.
Mmm.