Cool teamwork! And Max-The-Artist having fun with the light and shadow on top of all the effects.
Figures that Crisis Strike HQ would be a place with some liquid nitrogen on hand. And while it’s not quite as ideal as CO2 for firefighting (since it remains a liquid as long as it’s cold enough) that doesn’t prevent our pair of on-site science geeks from spontaneously generating a down-and-dirty delivery mechanism. A little back-and-forth banter doesn’t hurt the budding relationship, either.
I have to admit I went back-and-forth a dozen times with myself over whether Madison’s line should be “fourth-dimensional” or “four-dimensional.” Technically, I knew it should be “four-dimensional.” He immediately follows it with “two-dimensional,” and had it been any other dimension, such as “three-dimensional” or “nine-dimensional” I would have gone with cardinal rather than ordinal, no question. But dammit, when I actually wrote it into the word balloon as “four-dimensional” it just felt wrong. Lost all the impact and slightly creepy overtones that we’ve come to associate with the fourth dimension. So I went with what felt right. Read it in Rod Serling’s voice and you’ll see what I mean.
(You’ll also find a high-rez version on Max’s Gumroad page in case you want all the pixels. A few coins in the hat would be most gracious.)
PLUS! A big plug for Joseph Kelly’s Pepperpot Piper, posting multiple holiday-themed pages and a fun fundraiser. Awesome stuff!
And more below!
Bobservations
Homework Sucks
I cannot believe the amount of homework kids get these days. It’s been some time since I’ve had to exert any Parental Supervision over the matter, but I know that both my boys had far more homework than I ever had as a kid, and I am fairly certain the situation has not diminished in the interim.
Back when I was in high school, we had homework, sure. You were supposed to do it, and you got in trouble if you didn’t. But they wouldn’t flunk you or anything. Good thing, too, because I did damn little of it. I liked school. I enjoyed classes. I used to take summer school voluntarily just because you could get a solid four hours of biology or chemistry and really get somewhere in the lab work. But I considered most homework to be pointless busywork and/or a tedious grind even back then, and from what I can see it’s even worse now. I think schools get panicky over falling student scores and think assigning more homework will somehow help, or at least shift the blame to the students and their parents.
Both my boys were bright kids. I knew that. They knew that. But both of them only got through high school by the skin of their teeth, despite their having received a better education than I got and despite them doing quite well on tests. See, they wouldn’t do their homework, and I – not about to be a hypocrite – refused to make them.
Yeah, my bad.
Max squeaked through with I believe two points to spare and got the hell out. His younger brother John was bringing home great test scores, so I figured things were fine until the administration called me in and told me they were holding him back from graduating for another year. When I asked why, they said it was because he hadn’t done his homework. Yes, he aced his tests. Yes, he obviously understood all the material. Didn’t matter. Under the new rules, homework was 70% of his grade, and he wouldn’t be allowed to graduate.
I thanked the administration and drove John straight to the GED offices, where of course he absolutely smoked the tests, coming in at the top 1/10th of 1%. He got his certificate and never looked back. I will give the school credit – both boys did get a very good education. Despite not doing their homework. So I’m grateful to the school and their teachers.
But homework still sucks.
— Bob out
The current strip was going just fine with good colour and contrast, and then got botched on the last panel. It is as if Max-the-artist phoned in the last panel. Pale and little contrast. Where are the flames? The explosions?
(Just kidding.)
The way those two were carrying on, there may some “explosions” a bit later 😛
Or actual explosions.
So the lunatics spray liquid nitrogen everywhere, and all the air in the room is replaced with pure nitrogen gas. Everybody suffocates, including the fire. Hooray!
Nah. The Doc will just bust out the oxygen shots.
My thoughts exactly. My friends once worked at a lab where they were testing a robot loading arm for LNG terminals, using liquid nitrogen (because if you mess up at least it’s not flammable). But when the robot had completed a test it would have to bleed off the LN2 in the hose. That was quite literally a LN2 dump, sirens went on, everyone had to clear out of the lab, and then they had to wait for the ventilation to clear out the LN2 otherwise you’d happily suffocate inside. Literally, the lack of oxygen makes you dimwitted an euphoric before you die.
I always worry when people start squirting around LN2 with dangerous abandon. We had to take a cryogenic gasses safety course at work after a different branch of our research unit in Edinburgh had fatalities due to mishandled nitrogen. The problem is that it tends to sink, so if you pass out and fall down it’s game over. At least Helium rises, so if you pass out you fall into cleaner air. I just hope they’ve got some good ventilation. One other minor detail, LN2 sits at below the liquefying point of Oxygen, so if it cools stuff down in the room, you can end up with liquid oxygen running around the place. If that hits an ignition source then even non-flammable stuff will go up like a rocket.
There’s a typo in the first panel; ‘safeties’ is missing an ‘e’.
Argh. Shoulda done my homework. 🙂 I’ll fix that.
I know the feeling, back in the UK we were given a rather nasty logic diagram came up that I completely failed to note down accurately & it never came up again in any coursework.
Come the exam…..a shift register….. has been designed….
Q: What are the states\error conditions that could occur & design a suitable…..?
Everyone else was sat there redesigning the thing from memory, I worked it out purely from the error states (mostly in my head) that could occur & of course I had no working for extra points (& was sat there twiddling my thumbs over why everyone else was having such a hard time finishing the paper). Overall course mark was 85% for a distinction & I got 84% because of the lack of working out.
Not quite as bad as the question relating to a XS3 code, that everyone had heard explained & noted, then answered except the guy that hardly ever showed his face in class & mid way through the exam, had the balls to stand up & ask what it was, despite the collective groan that clearly stated yes we all knew the answer because we had put in the lecture hours & how can you have the nerve to stand up & ask a question mid exam due to your own lack of consideration, the lecturer actually stood up & gave a brief outline to the answer.
Meanwhile Striking Sparks are striking & igniting, while the rest of the room……
For some reason I feel dirty reading that dialog…
Also I love the line “How am I supposed to put fourth-dimensionnal algorithms in a two dimensionnal medium?” I had a mad scientist character with a origami theme in a rpg once, he had to deal with spatial geometry in more than four dimensions, he managed the equations and algorithms by using three folding whiteboard and four color of markers. Just looking at the things gave headaches to normal people, but he had an advantage over Madison: since he was a mad scientist the stuff he wrote did not have to make sense.
That… is freaking genius! I may have to steal that or at least hint at it.
Thanks, I try. Feel free to steal it, if you manage to do something with it I will take confort in the fact that at least one of my idea contributed to something.
I had the same problem back in School way back when (ironically my mother had the same when she was young) in that I can do complex long division in my head but suck when writing it down. What was worse was when the teacher didn’t believe me as they couldn’t do it either and made me come to the front of the class and do it on the chalkboard. I stood there worked it out in my head while he then after did the whole break it down. Got marked down 15% off my exam for doing that. What I don’t get is they think more of the working out even if the answer is WRONG compared to if you give the RIGHT answer and no workings. Go figure
Yeah my nieces have the same teacher types – the methodology is more important than getting it right.
Should make all those teachers and administrators ride in cars, live in houses, take prescription medicines where the engineers / medical researchers used the right methodology despite all else.
Me? My opinion is that all those method over answer people have their diplomas from grade school on up revoked and start over so that they get the right answers or spend their days asking if you want a double Double.
I remember a teacher of mine in primary, second half. Reminded me several times to not just write the solution on the answer sheet in math exams, but also copy the midsteps from my notes.
I told him there were no notes for those answers, I did it all in my head.
So he told me to jot down what those notes would be if I’d needed them.
I got full points anyway though. He just wanted written proof that I actually understood the whole thing and solved it myself. Not just copied a neighbours results.
No. The method is important. If the student gets it wrong, with no work shown, it is difficult to tell where he went wrong.
I tutor math, and if I can see where my student went wrong, it saves time in debugging.
I’m with you Lukkai. My teachers always complained that I never showed my work, and one was convinced (almost to the point of calling my parents in) that I was cheating. So I asked him to write up a test just for me, on the same sort of material, and put it on the spare whiteboard in the back. Then he watched me take the test, without a single note, and ace it.
He stopped asking where my work was after that.
Otherwise, I just don’t do homework. Never have, never will. (Labwork on my home computer though, that’s different). The only time I show my work is circuit design, where I need to show where everything is (SOOOO much easier to find the problem in microcircuit when you have a diagram of which of the 200+ pins is in the wrong place).
I’ve been working as a TA at a university, and let me tell you, students who do a terrible job of showing their work are impossible to help.
The method is more important than the right answer, because you won’t always be right. You’re going to forget to carry the seven, or divide by 2 instead of multiplying by 2. It happens; we’re human. But, if you show your work, I can point out where you get wrong, and give you partial credit. If you don’t show your work, or I can’t read your work, you’re going to get a big fat 0 on that question because I have no idea where you went wrong.
And I, too, TA grad labs. If the student provides only the answer and it is correct, great! The issue is when the answer is totally wrong! If they’ve shown their work, and were on the right track, but ended up with the wrong answer = partial credit; they understood the concept! Not understanding the concept is where it all breaks down… (Obviously copying the answers = Not even attempting to understand the concept = Points off/ Academic Misconduct Report)
And unfortunately, so many are making no effort to study/ understand the concept. …What’s really disappointing is the number of undergrads who don’t know how to read off cm on a ruler…
Yeah, doing the work is more important than getting the correct answer.
That’s like lifting off to go to the moon and going to the sun instead.
Getting the correct answer is important, but without the work behind it, how do you or anyone else know that the answer you came up with is correct?
You yourself know it, because you’ve done the work. You’ve just done it in your head and (if you’re doing it right) did it a second time, checking your answer before handing it in.
I see the problem for anyone else though. Hence why I considered my aforementioned teacher’s request to write down at least basic notes even if I was doing it all in my head to be reasonable.
However: If the problem is not very complicated, jotting down your work versus only the answer does not make much of a difference. Even in finding the mistake.
And if it’s more complicated, I jotted down mid-steps of my thought process anyway to countercheck my work later and in case I’d get sidetracked and forget something halfway through. And those are enough to find the exact moment where you went off track in case of a wrong answer.
As to Rycan above: If you’re going for at least partial points in case of a wrong answer, you must jot down what way you went. That’s pretty much obvious. Or at least it should be.
I do say though that someone not writing down the method but obviously being able to use it due to his mostly perfect track record in getting the right answers should end up with a better mark than someone who is great in jotting down the method, but can’t really use it correctly. And thus frequently ends up with the wrong answer.
You can’t always anticipate that you’re getting a wrong answer – sometimes, you don’t know what the right answer looks like, and you’re just one little mistake away from getting no credit if you don’t show your work.
As for showing your work vis-à-vis moon landings – if nobody ever showed their work in NASA, then nobody would be checking anybody’s work, meaning that you’re going to have significant human error given how many people worked on the space programs. Significant enough to endanger the success and survival of some humans strapped on top of a tower filled with rocket fuel who will be launched into space on top of said rocket, then survive the blistering heat of reentry.
Actually, I had a bad time in one class because I was getting the right answer using the wrong method, and I didn’t realize it until I started getting wrong answers.
I’ll start by saying I really enjoy this comic and have for nearly its whole run. Loved it all, then had a visceral reaction at “why don’t you have six PhDs durr.” I am only posting to help with future strips in some small way.
Once you have on PhD in the sciences, very rarely do you do (or need) a second. At that point, you’ve developed enough to pick up the material you need to learn, without (and certainly faster than) 4-6 more years of school. Not always true, but you get the idea. I’ve heard people talk about the idea of >2 PhD’s, but… well, they aren’t the people in this strip.
A counter-case could be that this is a new field, and that early fields (see astrobiology, for instance) will sometimes nucleate dual PhDs. But I bet suggesting six PhDs would ring false in many PhD’s ears.
Actually, if I hadn’t been sidetracked by homework as a topic, I was going to rant about that – the tendency in shows like “Bones” or “Scorpion” for all the brilliant characters to constantly engage in dick-swinging about how many PhDs they have, how smart they are, etc. When I used to hang around brilliant scientists (because my dad was one) they never did that. They’d talk about sports, or Firefly, or (if they were actually working on a project together) about how they wished they could bring in a (scientist in a related field not their own) because whatever they were doing was going to be a bitch without some help. So yes, I agree with you. But as with the TV writers I’m sure, sometimes it’s the fastest way to remind the audience that the characters have mad skills.
Please, please, PLEASE! Let these two fall in love! I’m ‘shipping this couple almost as hard as Bunny and Kyoto!
These two are such awesome and adorable nerds! 😀
Laying it on a bit THICK, aren’t we?
Honestly, how much of that terminology is accurate, and how much is just dirty? 🙂
“…kick like a BFG 9000!” Oh, lord! XD
It’s pretty funny how they’re doing all this complex setup in order to… spray liquid nitrogen everywhere? At least, I think that’s the case. The Leidenfrost effect is commonly seen with liquid nitrogen, and one of them is “pressurizing” the liquid nitrogen. That last point is kinda silly, too – liquid nitrogen builds up tremendous pressure all on its own. Tanks of liquid nitrogen have been known to explode because somebody sealed the safety valve, in fact.
So yeah, this looks like very chilly and ridiculously dangerous foreplay more than anything.
I cheated on ‘homework’. Lunch time was busy when you had gathered a study group/tutorial support of almost a whole given class to annihilate the stuff.
Anyone else want these two to tackle the next crisis just to see the ‘how’ of it?
Homework explains the differences between my siblings and I in our grades. Technically, I have the highest IQ, got very good test scores, but rarely bothered with homework. I was probably lucky to make the top third of my class. My brother, far my superior in work ethic, always did the homework and finished just out of the top tenth. Our sister matched both attributes and graduated Magna Cum Laude in three and a half years with a double major.
But I still kick everyone’s tail at Trivial Pursuit.
Yeah, it’s not the smart who excel – it’s the hard workers (who are also smart, don’t get me wrong). Wish I was one of the latter, really.
Good lord, me too. I am cursed with just enough smarts that I never actually learned to work properly. Got through my education on a mix of being smart enough not to have to do the work or doing it easily and outright cheating for the things I did not want to do or couldn’t do without putting hours or work in it. It worked but my grades kept dropping, I went from top of the class to middle of it and now that I’m looking for a job I wish I’d learned to be a hard worker.
For my I had the smarts (lacked doing the homework and passed still) and I happen to be hard worker. For the job I do you need both and I do so object to the hard work will get you everywhere and smarts wont. I have also been in many a position where lack of hard work and smarts gets you places, all dependent on chumming up to the boss because you like the same Soccer team or watch certain reality shows. Regretfully (until recent years) I have see many cases where no matter how hard you put the effort in you aren’t rewarded and its too often in a lot of job roles. Gone are the days from my experience where working your ass off putting in extra hours unpaid to get a job done while others swan off at 5 to go to the pub and are treated as a good worker when you are picking up their crap to meet a deadline with their “well my contract says 9-5” attitude. As for showing workings to point out errors, what do you do when you always get the right answer but have problems trying to translate how your brain got it?
hmm. Six PhDs? I’ll let her off as she’s doesn’t exactly seem to have focused on the academic career path approach.
However, even doing a second doctorate implies that there was a problem with the first one, really. I know it’s a cliche of modern pop culture that highly intelligent people must have more doctorates, but in terms of academic progression the real work comes afterwards, whether in academe or out. The doctorate is just to show you can do your stuff.
Going back down the academic ladder to use undergraduate studies as an example, it would be a bit like repeating your first year. I instinctively read this conversation as an insult to Dr Madison – sort of “you had to do your first year twice, I thought it would take you six attempts”.
EDIT: just read the discussion on this above. Yeah, it’s one of those bad but useful tropes…
I do not know about PhDs but in collage for electives, I did classes in another degree, so when I graduated , I had 2 degrees.
But you have two BA/BSc degrees in different things, (or possibly you have a joint honours)?
With a PhD, regardless of the individual discipline you happen to be in, what you get is a doctorate in *philosophy*. For example, even though my girlffriend is a chemist and I’m a medievalist, we both actually have the same type of doctoral degrees and are technically philosophers.
Also, and this is to everyone, I want to add to my previous comment, that reads like I am an absolute a**hole (which may well be true, but I didn’t mean to be here!): There is NOTHING wrong with having to retake a year of uni. Or even the entire course. Or leaving to go and do different things.
I apologise profusely for writing something that suggested it.
Intelligence and academic success are not synonymous, frankly the overlap in the Venn diagram for the two is partial at best. There are *a lot* of priviliges that can come together in a person and make academia easier for them (white, cis-male, heterosexual, middle class, able-bodied, not suffering from mental illnesses, raised by or in close contact with an academic(s), etc.), it sure as Hel doesn’t make them better than someone who doesn’t have that same fortunate background and who doesn’t have the same relatively easy ride through.
Mental illnesses are in particular tricky, because people don’t see them. If you’re having difficulty coping, please talk to a student councilor, talk to your advisor/tutor, talk to your doctor. There are things that can be done.
And, please, don’t let an a**hole like me, riding on his privilidges and putting an alternative reading into the mouth of a character, get you down or shake your self-confidence to do the right thing for yourself.
No, but in education showing the method is far more important then whatever BS you write down for the answer. Getting the “correct” answer is barely relevant in learning the sciences, what matters is your understanding of and ability to implement the methods for *finding* the answer. You can pull an answer from anywhere – memory, the guy sitting next to you’s paper, an educated guess, your ass – it is anything but indicative of your ability to actually do the work in the field when it matters. And even when you’re out of school if you just set a “solution” down in front of your peers and claim that you’ve managed to rectify relativistic and quantum gravity, your answer is still irrelevant without a clear methodology for others to follow in replicating and confirming it.
No matter how tedious it may be, showing your work is vitally important in math and the sciences.
“Cuts into my cosplay time.”
Dammit, now I’m jealous as Hell. Of a fictional character. If I had a date that smart who said that, I’d wife her in a New York minute.
Smart, nerdy and smokin’ hot. I’d marry her in a New York SECOND. Seriously what’s not to love? Other than the fact that you might feel insecure if you can’t keep up with her but eh I’m okay with the fact that I’m far from being the best at everything, I certainly wouldn’t mind standing in her shadow…
Followed a link from Next Town Over. Great comic; read through the archive. The physicist in me was screaming for a little bit, but it’s over now… Really want a high-res image of the Max in the background -awesome artwork!
for me, in primairy school, I had a difficult time with grade because I didnt show my method, however i got better at being concise and now its to the point where i can get full mark by using a text to explain a math answer. Thats always funny to do.
Love the sci-fi references in the third panel. Anyone who watched Star Trek: The Next Generation should get the first one, and anyone who’s ever played Doom should get the second one.