Recent Comments

1. 4 days ago on Animal Crackers

   Ricky Nelson song, “Garden Party” >

2. 18 days ago on Get Fuzzy

   Well, George Boole was born in 1815 and Charles Babbage in 1791. The Difference Engine, a truly digital device though mechanical, 1823. I was using that kind of language in the early 70s. There were digital devices before the PC. I refer you to “The Soul of a New Machine” 1981.

   You may be right, I wasn’t paying much attention to popular culture in the 80s and 90s. But it sounds so similar to our casual engineering slang it is hard to believe there is no connection.

3. 19 days ago on Get Fuzzy

   Bit of electronics engineer trivia. A and not B makes perfect sense in Boolean algebra. You can also make a circuit with a 7404 and a 7408 that implements it in real life. In the older logic families of the 70s like DTL and TTL the inputs were asymmetrical. It only takes 40 microamps to pull them up but 1.2 milliamps to pull them down. So it became common to make switches and buttons that connected to ground, commonly referred to as “negative logic”. Saves a tiny amount of juice. To make this clear on schematics, some symbol like a bar over the name, a slash before it or a hashtag after it shows that it is negative logic.

   You could have a fire button for your video game, call it Fire. But if it switches to ground, you might write Fire# to make that clear. Pronounced aloud, “Fire not”. Negative logic is also indicated by a small circle called a bubble. Sometimes described as “active low”.

   Somehow this slipped into normal language in a stupid way that the cartoonist is parodying here. As in “I really love Politician A. NOT”. Maybe it was the “Big Bang Theory” that popularized it. At any rate it just sounds dumb to anyone who actually understands the terminology.

4. about 1 month ago on Crabgrass

   Oddly a very appropriate question for a member of the Great Ape family. Most of the others in our family don’t have anything like the feet that allow us to walk erect for long distances. We can’t use them as hands to help with tree climbing, though oddly they still have claws of a sort (toes). Useless for grasping.

   Our modified hands at the ends of our legs allow a hunting strategy that is quite effective. Damage the prey to separate it from the herd, and just walk after it until it collapses. You can even walk down much stronger animals like horses, who can run much faster but eventually have to rest, allowing the hunter to catch up.

   Our non-handlike feet also allow us to travel great distances in search of better conditions. Humans travelled by foot from Africa all across Aisa and the Bering Strait into North and South America. Though it is estimated that the rate was around twenty miles per generation on average.

5. 3 months ago on The Argyle Sweater

   Actually the appendix does have a useful but somewhat disgusting job, according to some. Hosting gut bacteria in a film so it can be reconstructed after an illness. Now we find out that our friends, the bacteria in the gut, are vital to survival. Who knew? Now if we could just figure out the purpose of the coccyx…

   Other than to annoy folks who don’t believe in evolution.

6. 3 months ago on Adam@Home

   Sadly if AI “writes a book” it is simply plagiarism. The AI of today knows nothing it has not had trained into it. In some cases, it may be hard to trace, denying the real author income and prestige. In other cases, the results are obviously derived, bringing nothing but shame to the user. Nothing good can come of this story arc, which I suspect is part of the point.

7. 6 months ago on Baby Blues

   When I was in Grade School in California (60s) we had an evil genius in the class like the one in the strip. He showed us how to take a used ballpoint pen apart to get the brass tube. Then you insert the brass tube into a green apricot. Living in California among the former orchards we had lots of those.

   This makes a tiny slug of green apricot. You do it at both ends of the tube. Then you insert a rod of a smaller diameter, like a paper clip, into the tube at one end and direct the other end at the teacher. Pressure will build up in the tube until the apricot slug becomes a projectile. Careful practice and perfect timing make an almost undetectable way to annoy an annoying teacher.

   This was the time that the “New Math” was just coming out, the “Stanford Mathematics Study Guide” (SMSG) which we called “Some More Stupid Garbage”. Set theory. I think some of the teachers deserved the occasional spit ball or apricot gun attack for foisting that on innocent 5th graders.

8. 6 months ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

   On the other hand, “pixelated” is a real word that gets past the spell checker. If the strip came out pixelated by the pixies proper, the painter could appropriately be p!ssed.

9. 8 months ago on Baldo

   I’m an engineer, so I deal in quantities more than numbers. If we are talking ordinal numbers, like the number of apples in a basket, it is absolutely true that two baskets of two apples each make four.

   But in engineering the problems are more commonly similar to taking two metal bars that are each 2.00 inches +/- .01 inches and placing them together to make a 4.00 inch +/- .02 inch bar. With possibly additional error if the ends don’t match perfectly.

   In the real world there are no absolutes, no one who is perfectly evil or perfectly good, nothing that is so true that you cannot find an exception. Often the exceptions are the cracks that open the door to deeper truths. If you are 100% certain about something you are probably wrong. We have to live with 99% or less and be mindful that we could be led astray.

10. 8 months ago on Baldo

    I looked up the song – it’s “Quizas Quizas Quizas” by Los Panchos. In English, “Maybe Maybe Maybe”. A completely genius song for our time, though you could take it as a love song. Philosophically it is apropos, because no matter what anyone says someone else can say “maybe, but I also read the opposite on the Internet…” Truth has become relative, two plus two does not always equal four, maybe five or three or infinity.

    In truth there is always uncertainty, anyone who tells you otherwise is probably lying to get your vote or your money. But that does not mean there is no such thing as truth.