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 S&W in German/auf DeutschGaia (my fantasy comic) Scarlet (my science fantasy comic) |
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![[0923] Larisa Is Changing](/comics/2017-09-25-0923-larisa-is-changing.png "[0923] Larisa Is Changing")
- Larisa: Ultimately, the continuous existence of living beings is an illusion.
- Larisa: The body grows. Cells die and are replaced by new ones. After a while, not a single atom in your body is still the same.
- Larisa: This raises many philosophical and legal questions.
- Jelena: You set fire to the neighbor’s lawn gnome yesterday!
- Larisa: I’m only 99.7% guilty!
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Sandra and Woo by Oliver Knörzer is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. See the About page for details.
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Ah. The other .3 percent are cells that have been replaced since that incident.
This is a pretty strange place to go after her apparent… “rift” with Landon in the previous update. Is this a new Status quo change we are going through?
Theseus called , he wants his ship back
So… is this what time barring crimes is? Did too much of the body get replaced by that point so nothing guilty is left on the criminal in question? Now that’s a shower thought that needs pursuit…
HOW do you set a lawn gnome on fire?
@ Randy19:
There are many reasons for statutes of limitation to exist, but I dont think ‘the inexorable flow of time and entropy’ fits as a *legal* definition, anyway.
Different types of cells “turn over” at different rates.
Larisa’s skin and the lining of her digestive tract might get off with that excuse, but her brain will be forever guilty, guilty, guilty!
Edda:
My comment had a link which doesn’t seem to be appearing.
http://book.bionumbers.org/how-quickly-do-different-cells-in-the-body-replace-themselves/
@ myth buster:
If anyone could find a way it’d be Lar.
Your physical body may change but your mind is a base constant that can be judged within your ever changing physical vessel.
@ Anonymous Alias:
Maybe this is how she deals with stress?
@ athroughzdude:
You have a point. Having the ‘lust’ of your life get cold feet is rough on a teenaged girl’s self-esteem. It might well make her burning down a garden gnome justifiable. Heck, I’m all for burning all of them.
@ myth buster:
Thermite will set almost anything on fire and you don’t need to be Yuna to make it at home. I wouldn’t be surprised if Larisa had a supply.
myth buster wrote:
HMRC4EVR wrote:
Case in point. (continued in the next comic)
@ Autoskip:
Sorry, I messed up the second link. Take two
I dunno, there’s probably been a shift in the ratio of throwaway gag comics to actual plot based ones, but there’s always been S&W comics just done for the punchline and not necessarily tied into the story at all. Is Larisa and Landon still a thing? Who knows, but they probably won’t break up in a gag-a-day.
Is Jelena annoyed that Larisa set the lawn gnome on fire yesterday, or is she annoyed that Larissa wants to set it on fire again, today. It could be read both ways. “You did something bad!” “You just did that already!”
@ myth buster:
I don’t know, but if there is a way to set a ceramic or stone figurine on fire I’m sure Larisa could find a way, even without succubus magic.
Edda wrote:
I had a similar problem. In my case, the link didn’t appear when I put it on top (despite the fact that it referred to this site). If you put that link on the top of the post, that’s probably the problem.
Edda wrote:
It’s appearing all right (in the page source). It’s just that you didn’t specify any link text between the opening and closing tags.
myth buster wrote:
It’s Larissa. ‘Nuff said.
well… giving her a 99,7 percent of punishment would likely still be very efficient.
@ Anonymous Alias:
in this comics not all strips are part of a story arc. many are just stand alone.
If you light yourself on fire, are you really lighting yourself on fire?
@ Crystalgate:
No, my intended link was between the first and second paragraphs and the formatting was copied from the “how to use HTML” example at the bottom of this page. ‘a href =’ and everything. Just like I use ‘start boldface’ and ‘end boldface’ delimiters.
When I explained the error in the second post, I just pasted the text in without any of that stuff.
And the text automatically appeared in a different color, recognized as a link.
So I still don’t know why the “done according to directions” didn’t work.
Pelendones wrote:
Or possibly my grandfather’s axe.
As for the Landon/Larissa breakup, I really thought it felt more like a one-off gag than anything serious.
Actually, by the time she finished that speech, every subatomic particle in her body had been replaced, so she’s 100% innocent.
A person’s neural connections and firing patterns persist long after the particular atoms of which the neurons are composed have been replaced. You can remember events for which only a tiny fraction of your current physical body was actually present.
Is Larisa just the current physical body, or is she also the pattern of neural activity? I would hold someone responsible for any action they remember taking and over which they had control at the time.
@ Agarax:
I would argue that guilt is dependent on if free will or predestination was the reality of the universe. If free will, then absolutely, guilt exists, but if predestination is the way of the universe, then virtue and vice are meaningless, as the good are not laudible nor the evil contemptible because neither has a say in their condition.
Jesse wrote:
How so? Valence electrons may be transferred fairly easily, but how would the atomic nuclei be replaced in so short a time?
@ Jesse:
Even if at some level everything is predestined, we still live with a perfect illusion of free will. We can’t predict exactly what will happen, so we need to make decisions based on the information we have available, and to deal with the consequences of those decisions. That is essentially the definition of free will.
An omniscient being would not have free will, since it would know in advance every decision it would ever make, and be incapable of making any other choice.
Courts generally assume that free will is a given. Certain factors, like mental capacity and such, can mitigate a ruling of guilt; but on the whole and *legally*, a person has free will. That assumption carries throughout a person’s lifetime: in that, you are responsible for any decisions made in your past. Although Larisa does have a good philosophical arguement, the simple fact is that it’s an arguement that’s been long since dealt with by legal precedent.
Destroying a lawn gnome isn’t a crime, it’s a public service.
@ Mechwarrior:
The toxic smoke emitted by her chosen method was technically a crime.
Philosophy in an attempt to escape consequences. Larisa has been here before.
http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2012/07/02/0390-sandra-vs-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics/
“This very broom was originally owned by my grandfather. It’s had two new handles and three re-bristlings.”
Nah, that should be 50% max! After all, they put that gnome there! 🙂
myth buster wrote:
Just about anything will burn in Fluorine gas. Lawn gnomes, rocks, ashes… yup, you can burn things twice: Once in oxygen, the second time in Fluorine.
How to set a lawn gnome on fire? Place another one across from it so their eyes lock and walk away, they’ll Both combust shortly.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/26/34/6f/26346f6b6e52d5301c0bd0bb9b05ae42–garden-gnomes.jpg
athroughzdude wrote:
This is also an illusion. Our minds are changing constantly as we receive and process new input over time. The person I am now is different in many ways than who I was 10 years ago– a lot has happened since then. And in 10 years more, I’ll have changed again, by just as much.
(That said, Larissa is still responsible for setting fire to the neighbor’s lawn gnome– she is admitting that she took this action. What, if anything, should be a consequence is a completely different question. For example, if the fire spread to the neighbor’s house, or injured anyone who got too close to the lawn ornament while it was hot, the consequences might be greater than if the fire merely singed the gnome’s cap and then went out. Or not, depending on how one feels about lawn gnomes….)
You forget that brain cells rarely if ever reproduce, and heart cells NEVER grow again
@ David tennant:
The molecules of which brain cells are composed get replaced.
@ myth buster:
By being a pyromaniac who has good relations with Satan.
So, what do we do about this?
@ Waynetut:
There’s no report comment button? Dammit, I need one of those.
Novil, you need to add a few words to the blacklist…
Sorry to break it to you, but your neurons and a few other types of cells don’t get replaced.
…The brain actually lasts the entire life…
Actually, I’m pretty sure this doesn’t raise any philosophical or legal questions at all. Your neurons rarely reproduce, and they don’t die like other cells do. So even if all the other cellls in your body are replaced after a period of time, the ones you think with are still the same.