XKCD: It's more than a comic

"You cannot count the one in South Bend; he died of pneumonia." "He wouldn't have died of pneumonia if I hadn't shot him!" —Arsenic And Old Lace

"You killed him!" "No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him." —Collateral

edited 11th Sep '09 2:21:10 PM by Fighteer

About the squirrel, all we find out is that Valentine saw the dried up corpses of the squirrels, cut open. The Peter that Ender created remembers doing it for the fun of it, but speculates that's because Ender only knew Peter when Ender was very young and only saw morality in black and white. When he learns about morality in the events of the first book, he develops enough understanding to guess that Peter was dissecting squirrels for the same reason Da Vinci dissected human corpses, self education. However, he never overcomes that on an emotional level.

I really need to read Ender's Game...

Believe me, it's much less interesting after you turn seventeen or so.

Well then I still have a year.

I read some parts of both the novel and the original short story that got expanded into the novel. I found it entertaining and interesting. I still think "the enemy's gate is down" idea was genius.

I was never that impressed with the whole "The enemy gate is down" thing, since I was already applying reasoning like that when I was hardly any older than Ender. One of the first computer games my family owned was a business simulator. It gave you scenarios with goals like "Become the most popular chicken meat retailer." I was able to win most scenarios faster than my dad, who has an MBA, because he insisted on running his virtual companies like actual businesses, whereas my solutions looked more like "Buy a bunch of high quality chicken meat and sell it for a price of one cent per package, thereby winning the scenario almost instantly without ever having to turn a profit."

edited 11th Sep '09 10:58:51 PM by Desertopa

I never cared all that much for Ender's Game myself. *shrug*

This comic is like a ammenonite it lives in the bottom of an ocean and has tentacles

Ouch. That must hurt.

Alt-text saves the day!

Our love is like a brontosaurus: People talk about it pretty much solely because they don't like the name "apatosaurus".

Yeah, the recent comic was full of "what? Haha.

I likes the alt-text. Reassuring to see Randall is starting to overcome some of his neuroses.

Calling all non-neurotic humor. Appear on the TV Tropes stage now.

I thought about this one. My answer is this: During the first two panels...

And that's when he discovered the horrible truth: she was a creationist.

edited 14th Sep '09 3:36:18 PM by GoggleFox

Okay, how many of you went away from the computer to go and try that? Seriously? Raise your hands.

I didn't go away from my computer, my DS was right here because I'm liveblogging the game.

I got the sloooow shipping, so no.

Really, they should have (unless they did) made the game internet-updateable, so it can stay current with the latest memes / references.

[1] Why we will find it hard to find aliens.

Ants actually do know we exist.

Or at least, they can smell us and the odours we leave behind.

They know "something" exists, if they can be said to "know" anything, but since they communicate through pheromones, it's reasonable for them to assume that if we don't leave pheromones, we have no means of communicating.

It's really a nice tight analogy: we're looking for specific means of communication within a fairly limited region of an enormous area, and since we aren't finding that particular trace in that particular region, we're assuming that there's nothing out there at all.

Let's be fair here: we aren't assuming there's nothing out there; we're assuming that there's nothing out there transmitting in the band of frequencies we're capable of detecting, sufficiently close to our region of space to be discernible from background radiation. The speed of light and the inverse square law are deadly enemies of interstellar communication.

Ants, assuming they were sentient, would have plenty of hard physical evidence of the existence of humans: at a minimum, the giant feet that incidentally squish them from time to time. Whether they'd regard us as anything even vaguely comprehensible would be a matter of speculation. But laboratory science would (in theory) be capable of identifying patterns of ant behavior that might serve as attempts at communication, and (again in theory) creating targeted responses.

edited 18th Sep '09 9:06:39 AM by Fighteer

Ok, then, for a lot of people, the fact that SETI and other projects like it aren't finding the signals they're looking for is taken to be de facto proof that there's nothing put there. Similarly, a lot of people (including some scientists who should know better) are assuming that any life will be carbon-based, oxygen breathers who require liquid water, because that's what we are.

No argument there. Anthropocentrism (or even organocentrism — is that a word?) is alive and well among scientists and laymen alike.