Recent Comments

1. 27 days 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.

2. about 1 month 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.

3. 4 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.

4. 4 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.

5. 6 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.

6. 6 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.

7. 7 months ago on Ginger Meggs

   Strong possibility that LED lighting may be the culprit.

   The body clock Megs refers to is called the circadian rhythm. Blue light from the sky controls it, so that before the advent of artificial light your body would sync up with the daily round of the sun. Edison bulbs and candles put out very little blue light, but the newer LED bulbs put out lots of it. So do computer screens and so on.

   The book “Why We Sleep”, by Matthew Walker covers this. Easy strategies to cope: Turn off all lighting after a certain time each night or invest in colored lighting that can be set to orange or yellow. No screens after a certain time. If you read to relax at night, use paper books with yellow lighting or put your reader in night mode. Do not turn on the lights at all until a certain time in the morning. Take a walk outside in the real sun in the morning.

   It is exactly the same issue as “jet lag” and should be taken seriously. Chronic low sleep has truly horrific health implications.

8. 7 months ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

   Hope this story arc is not veering into the “Despicable Me” idiocy.

   There is such a thing as evil. But those who are truly devoted to it almost never think of themselves as such. The worst evils of all time were committed by people who thought they were doing good.

   In the comic world, the goblins etc. all have to turn out to be good in their own way. Otherwise. the strip is not suitable for children. But don’t children also deserve to know that there is real evil, and that they need to be wary of it?

   This strip comes closest to it by showing how obsessions, like Marigolds overweening self-absorption, can have consequences. That is why I keep reading it and have bought some of the books etc. To really get it, hit the double-left arrow to go back to the very first panels. The “creation story” if you will.

9. 8 months ago on Over the Hedge

   Oddly this is not a new idea. Origen in the second century wrote that all souls were already created at the beginning and are simply waiting in a kind of kindergarten purgatory to be born.

   Gets around the distasteful idea that a soul can be created by two teenagers in the back seat at a drive-in.

   But modern science more or less proves the teenager concept to be the right one. Your mileage may vary. (Not mocking anyone’s sincerely held beliefs, just pointing out the irony).

10. about 1 year ago on Pluggers

    To do it properly you need a “battery tester”, usually available at hardware stores. These put a little load on the cells to see if they drop when in use. You can also sometimes probe the cells in the actual unit and this will tell you what’s up.

    Just measuring the voltage of an unloaded cell tells you little about the state of the battery. It may rapidly dive to nothing when actually installed in the remote.