Recent Comments

1. about 5 hours ago on Non Sequitur

   “Tarot” is really short for Truth and Accuracy Rot.

2. about 5 hours ago on Non Sequitur

   And neither are inherently problems in and of themselves. If treated simply as hobbies, like collecting stamps, going bowling, or reading Harry Potter, they’d be harmless diversions. But taking them seriously is a symptom of a very real underlying problem, namely faith — the mindset that deludes people into thinking that they can somehow or other “know” things without a shred of supporting evidence, and frequently in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. Faith gives us not only tarot and astrology but also homeopathy, objectivism, ufology, conspiracy theories, climate-change denial, false accusations of ritual satanic child abuse, numerology, anti-vax movements, a host of superstitions, personality cults, dowsing, jingoism, imperialism, racism, psi phenomena, quackery, Chinese traditional “medicine”, feng shui, religion, and the insidious brain parasite that leads people to endlessly obsess over anyone named Kardashian.

   Faith is humanity’s all-time, blue-ribbon, gold-medal, undisputed, undefeated, heavyweight world-champion worst method EVER of making decisions or arriving at conclusions! Nobody ever uses faith for anything that can be tested or measured or that really matters in real life.

   Needless to say, the priest class as well as the astrologers and other scammers praise faith to the skies, because their livelihood depends on suckers continuing to fall for it.

3. about 16 hours ago on Non Sequitur

   Anyone who falls for tarot as anything other than a parlor game probably needs therapy.

4. 1 day ago on Frazz

    The whole point of calculus is what happens when you approach zero.

   Here cue Zeno’s Paradox, which said (way back when) that you could never get where you were going, because first you had to get halfway there, then you had to get halfway thru the remaining distance, then you had to get halfway thru that, and so on endlessly, always getting just that last teensy bit closer but never actually arriving.

   This of course would make sense if space, time, matter, and energy were continuous instead of quantized. But, millennia later, people came to the conclusion that they’re not.

5. 1 day ago on Frank and Ernest

   Well, you should probably reconsider the way you’re phrasing it, because when you say “Do your own research” far and away the most common interpretation of it is that they should re-invent the wheel with test tubes and survey instruments and stopwatches and test animals — you know: research! — not that they should consider multiple sources. A better approach would be exactly that: “Consider multiple sources. Evaluate them for credibility before determining which one you want to believe. Even then, keep an open mind to other possibilities.” So much closer to what you apparently mean than “Do your own research”.

6. 1 day ago on Frazz

   Aptitude testing also applies in sports.

   I once tried out for football. The coach said they already had one.

   I went out for track and field in high school. I was awful. I finally quit the team when the coach determined that the only event I really qualified for was the javelin catch.

   Didja hear about the couple that spent over a hundred thousand dollars sending their son to college, and all they got was a quarterback?

   I’ll be here all week, folks.

7. 1 day ago on Frazz

   Technology marches on. Language follows only fitfully. Many people still refer to dialing their phones. (I haven’t seen a phone with an actual dial in something like four decades now.) Video crews are still said to be filming something. Ratting someone out is still colloquially called “dropping a dime on them”, referring to untraceable pay phones. And people whose flat-screen TVs are hard-wired to the Internet still say they “tune in” to “broadcasts” on “the tube”.

8. 1 day ago on Frazz

   Georg Cantor was the mathematician responsible for much of what we currently understand about infinities. He drew the first distinction between countable and uncountable infinities. To grossly oversimplify, countable infinity is the number of integers (1, 2, 3, 4, …), while the simplest uncountable infinity is the number of irrational numbers (like π, 3.14159265 …, or e, 2.71828 …).

9. 1 day ago on Frazz

   Or AIish. (That 2nd character is a capital eye, not a lower-case ell.)

10. 2 days ago on The Argyle Sweater

    Well, my curiosity finally drove me to check. There are in fact 5 Towns of Springfield in Wisconsin. Springfield may be the capital of Illinois, but Wisconsin is the national capital of Springfields!