(Only marginally related to linguistics.)
Two xkcd cartoons from the world of science (the fundamental forces of physics) and math/computer science (NP-complete problems):
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Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
xkcd on science and math
March 16, 2015Keister Island
March 16, 2015In the 3/16 New Yorker, this cartoon by Jack Ziegler:
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Giant buttocks instead of giant heads. And the outrageous pun keister on the rhyming Easter.
The fog of memory
March 15, 2015Today’s Doonesbury has Mark Slackmeyer interviewing Roland Hedley about Hedley’s reporting:
(Having Mark, an NPR reporter, turn to Twitter to check out the news is a nice touch.) The interview was touched off by the Brian Williams affair.
Miss Peach
March 14, 2015In response to my Zippy posting earlier today in which I looked for the source of the strip’s title, “Peachy Keen”, Drew Smith suggested that the peach part came from the strip Miss Peach rather than (my suggestion) the game character Princess Peach. At issue was the model or models for a grotesquely big-headed character in the Zippy. I wasn’t entirely convinced, but now I see that Miss Peach seems not to have come up on this blog, so it would be worth discussing.
From cute to creepy
March 14, 2015Today’s Zippy:
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The strip is both entertaining and instructive on its own, but then Bill Griffith would be unlikely to just invent a creepy cartoon character. And then there’s the title, “Peachy Keen”.
leg-jiggling
March 13, 2015At lunch one day last week, I realized that almost all the people around me (all men, Silicon Valley types talking about Silicon Valley matters, so far as I could tell) were jiggling their legs, apparently without any realization they were doing so. I’ve long been familiar with the behavior, though never in such a concentrated form; it was like I had fallen into a convention of leg-jigglers. (I am not one.)
Quite a number of variants: some one-legged (mostly the left, in this small accidental sample), some two-legged; and some subtle, a light bouncing off the ball of the foot, and others more vigorous, up to one guy who was pumping his left leg extravagantly.
Unfortunately, not a whole lot seems to be known about leg-jiggling / leg jiggling, leg shaking, foot jiggling, or sewing-machine leg, as it is variously known.
Today’s artistic pun
March 13, 2015
Diner at the summit
March 13, 2015Today’s Zippy takes us to Somerset, in southwestern Pennsylvania:
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There are lots of Summit Diners, but this is clearly the one in Somerset.
The Spirit of Geometry
March 12, 2015In today’s Zippy, Magritte goes on and on:
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Here, the Magritte The Spirit of Geometry is cartoonized, like the paintings in this posting of March 10th:
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Two things: about the Magritte; and about the title of my previous Zippy posting (alluded to above), “Magritte goes on”.
Magritte goes on
March 11, 2015Today’s Zippy continues the recent Magritte theme, but not with cartoonizations; instead it’s a riff on the famous The Betrayal of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe):
(On the original and plays on it, see this posting.)
Presumably things can iterate: This is not a pipe thinking about a pipe thinking about another pipe, etc.