![[1130] Pseudoscience](/comics/2019-11-19-1130-pseudoscience.png "[1130] Pseudoscience")
Sorry for posting the new strip one day late. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to post two updates this week.
Here they are, the places 11 to 20 of this year’s artwork contest!
- Male judge: And what do we have here?
- Yuna: A perpetual motion machine!
- Male judge: It’s impossible to build a perpetual motion machine!
- Female judge: It’s pseudoscience!
- Yuna: But here’s one standing right in front of you!
- Female judge: How’s your “perpetual motion machine” supposed to work?
- Yuna: The molybdenum inside the rods is arranged in a way to induce quantum foam fluctuations in the krypton surrounding it. Thus, excess vacuum energy can be harvested as predicted by the Hawking-Unruh-Williams equations!
- Male judge: Molybdenum? Did you make up that word?
- Female judge: Krypton? The stuff from the Superman comics?
- Yuna: But! But…!
- Male judge: And what do we have here?
- Matthew: An American flag made out of light bulbs that blink “Jesus Christ be praised!” in Morse code.
- Female judge: Marvelous!
|
@ The Pink Spartan:
As someone that has dabbled in number systems that turn negative numbers into numbers less than zero, this hurts.
Isn’t this one of the “OK boomer” moments?
If at first you don’t succeed, call down the wrath of your space laser and burn off the hairs from their heads… and randomly distribute it across the rest of their bodies.
I object, good sir!
No one judging a science fair would be unfamiliar with the Periodic Table.
That’s because to judge a science fair you must arrange a science fair.
And to be willing to arrange a science fair, you must love science!
The situation you are suggesting is impossible!
…Comic, you say? What’s that?
df82 wrote:
BTW, this is unrealistic. Modern teachers are WAAAAAY more likely to chide that boy than cheer.
That depends very heavily on the school district.
I wonder, do all the lights blink out the entire message, does each light blink out one character in the phrase, or is each light set up to represent either a dot or a dash so they have to be read one at a time? The first would probably take too much attention span, but the last would be almost too easy.
The explanation for Yuna’s experiment is more plausible than most science fiction. Not bad.
Walter wrote:
You should only release your puns when they are fully groan
It’s pronounced [M’lbd’nm] according to most people I’ve heard say it.
Nachikethass wrote:
The Jesus kid also needs a hiding while they’re down there.
@ VVIZRRD:
Yes, but the Ignoble gasses are so much more fun to play with!
People from other countries seem to forget that the U.S. is huge and diverse. In some areas this is a plausible reaction in others not so much. The cultures of say California and Iowa can and are vastly different. This is what causes such division in our nation. I’m sure I don’t have to even mention politics. But yeah that could totally happen in some small town in the sticks.
Nachum wrote:
The comic was always set in the U.S., the German version is the same story. You can replace a pun by a regional Counterpart, but not tell a completely different story, that wouldn’t have made sense. Besides, Novil made plenty of fun of Geman stereotypes in the refugee arc.
You say wrong to a degree … since this isn’t a fact report, but a comic that uses satire (which literally means making fun of real problems by exaggerating them to an absurd degree), then the comic actually was spot on.
By the way, just exchanging the flag wouldn’t have done the trick. You actually can’t butter up to German teachers by displaying excess patriotism, since patriotism is regarded as a spice that is best to be used in very small doses and dangerous if overdone by most Germans. Also, in most areas of Germany, there are very few Christian-conservative hardliners, so buttering up to the Jury by chosing a religious theme wouldn’t help you score either (Well, unless it is a private boarding school run by the church). At the most it would maybe make the judges voice the criticism about a bad project more respectfully.
If you wanted to make a German stereotype joke, you’d need the other guy to have some lame-ass project that deals with beer or football.
I felt the same way when a substitute science scolded me for “mispronouncing” the star Betelgeuse like the Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice…which is correct BTW.
You know in a certain way the other kid is proving he’s smarter than Yuna, that is such shameless and almost artful pandering that it indicates a talented future in politics while Yuna tends to just gloss over the all important PR side of things.
That was too predictable.
I sanction Exterminatus upon them.
Uh… not really.
In the US nowadays, if anyone mentions America in a patriotic way or even mentions the name of Jesus, the “scientific and progressive intellectuals” sharpen the guillotines and light the torches.
That kid would be torn apart, if not by the teachers then by his classmates who basically do their dirty work for them.
Find it weird that judges who know enough to state that perpetual motion machines are pseudo-science don’t know what molybdenum and krypton are.
@ Segev:
You raise an interesting point: Yuna’s machine isn’t an experiment either! It’s an application thus, technology not science
@ Autoskip:
I do read QC and that’s where I heard about it! And that’s kinda what I meant by the psuedoscience being well explained! Similar to the magic system in Gaia where you can find references to Anabelian geometry and the math makes sense for what they’re doing but with key details assumed like in this case the mention of hawking-unruh-williams equations which I’m PRETTY sure aren’t real.
@ Pig Lota:
I see you are also a reader of Questionable Content
I read a lot of stories in notalwaysright website where the teacher refuse to admit that his/her student is smarter than him/her. Unfortunately, this usually followed by the teacher having a powertrip and punished the student.
@ Segev:
Pretty much what he said. Only thing is i’m just a tad bit more forgiving for dismissing someone who claims to have a perpetual motion machine out of hand.
DraccoonXIII wrote:
Better to be torn apart than live a life of delusion.
DraccoonXIII wrote:
Also, if the deluded are now routinely getting challenged, thenn perhaps there’s hope for the US yet.
@ VVIZRRD:
But the IGNOBLE gasses are so much more fun to play with!
I feel like Yuna’s homeroom teacher would be sweating in the background after witnessing this scene.
Actually most science fairs are not about actual science, just a way to show off knowledge learnt in school. So anything with science, engineering and even maths or history would do. In this case the teachers seem to be on the christian conservative side of the spectrum, which is getting very rare, even in the USA.
The kid’s flag could be made out of christmas lights, arranged in a row by row fashion and bulbs rearranged and replaced with the right color ones to build a US flag (or any mosaic pattern really). If the kid is smart, then by cutting the series wire in the middle (the farthest point from the mains plug), it’s relatively safe to add an encoder wheel with glued on foil contacts containing the morse code and use a small DC motor to drive this wheel through a slowing rubber band transmission. This would allow any pattern to be glued or stapled onto the wheel and the lights would blink as the two brass strip pickups sweep over it. It’s a nice and relatively simple elementary school engineering project. (actually older traffic lights were sequenced by a more professional and multi channel version of this setup using proper contactors and geared down synchronous AC motors for timing)
@ Syaoran:
Yuna has Ye Thuza for a mother, so . . . . . . those two will never be found.
@ persia:
Quite. Tolerance only goes so far, and being expected to tolerate intelligent design as anything more than at best a hypothesis demands people lessen their intelligence.
@ badbloodkiller:
It’s like this. Before, she’d destroy the world by accident. Now, it will be deliberate!
df82 wrote:
What I was going to say! Yes, for a – what, ten-year-old? – that’s fairly amazing!
You pair gone AWOL?
Well, to be fair, it IS impossible to build a perpetual motion machine, as are probably many of the things invented by Yuna throughout the comic.
The teachers are dismissing the whole thing too quickly though, as even a machine that uses very little energy or gets its energy in original ways would be very interesting and well above normal student level.
Poor Yuna, as sad as this is for her, she needs to remember this isn’t D&D. Nobody’s going to thank you for abusing the laws of physics on a daily basis.
Depressing to find the ignorant running one’s science fair.
@ dragonsister:
It’s an example of a very basic computer. It takes stored information and outputs it. The information and form of output are not very appropriate as they are complex enough to basically look like gibberish to all but the skilled, and thus prone to error.
@ Dremdin:
From my memories of school art contests, it’s not innovation or quality that teachers are looking for. They’re looking for something cute, safe, and conventional they can use to make their school look good to those who don’t know the subject, not something risky that could impress experts.
I had the lowest passable grade in chemistry back in highschool and even I know that krypton is real :facepalm:
I used to find these exaggerations about stupidity funny a while ago, but since my country legitimately elected a borderly-retarded fascist bigot for Presidency, I realized this isn’t a exaggeration, it’s just a model representation of reality in comic strip form.
I am shocked that the teachers do not know that it is “Kryptonite” (I have however to confess that I had to google “Krypton” to see that it is a real element. At least I could identify it as a noble gas even before reading the description because of its suffix.)
@ Lowin Bayrod:
Lowin Bayrod wrote:
Indeed.
Fex wrote:
I would respond to the absurdity of your statement, but the last time I did something like that I was banned from posting in these comments for months.
But allow me just say: if your going to nominate a person who claims to feel the pain of middle-class Americans while wearing Armani clothes, you should expect to lose.
Apparently, in a science fair, Engineering > Science
I remember just enough of college to follow that no, she isn’t making up words.
But not much beyond that. It’s good to be smart enough to recognise your own ignorance.