Recent Comments

1. 8 days ago on Pickles

   They’ve run quite a few strips without color in recent months. Maybe they aren’t being submitted in time to add the color.

2. 25 days ago on FoxTrot

   Since I’ve never heard one of her songs, I probably couldn’t even tell it was one of hers. And frankly, all the songs I’ve heard that were written in this century sound exactly the same to me: little or no melody, lyrics with no meaning or just about “poor little me”. Tough to be a depressed billionaire, but depression sells well these days, particularly to teenagers, who have always been the most depressed of all generations, regardless of the century.

3. about 1 month ago on Pearls Before Swine

   I love the musical puns; they remind me of the days when popular music had lyrics, melodies, and feelings.

4. about 2 months ago on Non Sequitur

   Even the oligarchs aren’t safe in a dictatorship. For that matter, even the dictator isn’t truly happy; he usually thinks everyone’s out to get him, and it isn’t paranoia — it’s the truth.

5. 3 months ago on Pearls Before Swine

   I love the song lyrics puns. I can hear the music all over again, as I read them. Great Sinatra song.

6. 3 months ago on Non Sequitur

   They actually make still make detailed atlases of cities in some places, like London, where “you can’t there from here” is almost literally true.

7. 3 months ago on Pickles

   Flowering plants can make lots of flowers, but that takes a lot of energy. To reduce wasted energy, flowers that have already finished their part in reproduction emit ethylene gas, to tell the plant that it can stop making flowers. So if you want your plants to keep making flowers, you have to “dead-head” the wilting flowers. Many people think dead-heading is just a way to keep the plant looking pretty, but it actually forces it to keep making flowers.

8. 3 months ago on Baby Blues

   Speaking as a former mathematician, when first learning, rote memorization is by far the easiest and most effective way to learn math. When you get to mid-level math (algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus), learning how to PROVE that’s the right answer becomes important. But if you want a career in mathematics, the most critical facility is the ability to imagine ways of doing math that no one else has ever thought of. The really hard questions can’t be answered by using “tried and true” methods; they require a leap of the imagination, and if someone is taught, right from the start, that they always have to do things the “right” way, they will never truly master the topic. But of course those writing the “new math” textbooks are not brilliant mathematicians, or even competent instructors; so they don’t realize what a dis-service they are doing all students, not just the beginners, but even the ones who might otherwise learn how to do things the “wrong” way, and STILL get the right answer.

9. over 2 years ago on Non Sequitur

   That’s true, but takes dozens of passes by those planets, since they don’t have much mass. Going by Jupiter (or running into it) just once is much easier.

10. over 2 years ago on Non Sequitur

    Actually, the Sun is the hardest place in the Solar System to reach. It only takes a change of about 9 km/sec to use Jupiter’s gravity to toss things into interstellar space, but you need a change of 30 km/sec to get to the Sun, which involves more than ten times as much energy per pound of trash.