Recent Comments

1. about 10 hours ago on Zack Hill

   It’s true that you can defeat the coriolis effect (it’s relatively weak) but pretty much any water in quantity “circling a drain” will follow the effect, in my observation. It doesn’t require anything like laboratory conditions.

2. about 10 hours ago on Super-Fun-Pak Comix

   Indeed, but over the centuries the debate has raged over whether children are born innocent or are born reeking of sin (original—not in the Bible, a post-scriptural theological construct) or else are somewhere in between, an empty vessel as it were.

   It does seem to me that children under the age of about four are natural sociopaths, which is neither here nor there on the “sinfulness” scale.

3. about 11 hours ago on Mike Luckovich

   Natural Selection, get cracking. You have a heap of work to do!

4. about 11 hours ago on The Knight Life

   I dunno, a control-freak at a cook-out is pretty funny. The incongruity of it and the irony.

   What the Brits call a “send-up” isn’t necessarily funny, but sending up yourself is a familiar genre of comic Shtick.

5. about 11 hours ago on FoxTrot

   Not long ago someone actually looked up Dr Franklin’s account of the kite in the electrical storm, and noted that it’s all in subjunctives: (paraphrasing) “if one were to fly a kite in a lightning storm with a wire attached to, say, an iron key, and if one could handle it through an open window, it should be possible to ascertain whether lightning is electricity”, etc. etc. He doesn’t actually say he did any such thing. (And a good thing, too; everyone who’s actually tried it has come to grief, as in, being killed.)

6. about 11 hours ago on The Big Picture

   Ohhh dear. The really cringe-making part of this story is how apparently clueless Mr Peterson was.

7. 1 day ago on Working Daze

   LOVE the “midcentury” formica table!

8. 1 day ago on Pearls Before Swine

   Actually, desire is indispensable for action. That doesn’t rule out altruism and so on, a desire to help someone or to prevent or mitigate harm is surely a “desire”.

9. 1 day ago on Luann

   As Ox would say, “Bone Appetee”.

10. 1 day ago on Dilbert Classics

    I think Adams slipped a cog, here. There are plenty of writing systems without vowels (which would be a nuisance for writing English) but the idea of an orthography without consonants, even Elbonian, is silly, not “funny”.