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Yeah, it sucks for the actual Nigerian finance minister.

If I were Domino's, I would consider offering a reward (less than 30000 Euros but still significant) for information leading to the arrest and conviction of these hackers.

Asimov's Trantor had, if I remember correctly, 40 billion at its peak and that was basically one planet-wide city. Or you could go up an order of magnitude or two and use Coruscant at a trillion people. Of course if you do that, you run into a problem or two or three. If you're wondering if a webcomic author is a good authority on the physics of a fictional city, he's not just a webcomic author.

Of course, we COULD use that science to send some of those billions of people to planets or celestial bodies other than Earth. Keep a few billion folks on Earth, send a couple million to orbiting habitats, and put the rest on Mars and its moons as well as Earth's moon.

Asimov's Trantor had, if I remember correctly, 40 billion at its peak and that was basically one planet-wide city. Or you could go up an order of magnitude or two and use Coruscant at a trillion people. Of course if you do that, you run into a problem or two or three. If you're wondering if a webcomic author is a good authority on the physics of a fictional city, he's not just a webcomic author.

Of course, we COULD use that science to send some of those billions of people to planets or celestial bodies other than Earth. Keep a few billion folks on Earth, send a couple million to orbiting habitats, and put the rest on Mars and its moons as well as Earth's moon.

Asimov's Trantor had, if I remember correctly, 40 billion at its peak and that was basically one planet-wide city. Or you could go up an order of magnitude or two and use Coruscant at a trillion people. Of course if you do that, you run into a problem or two or three. If you're wondering if a webcomic author is a good authority on the physics of a fictional city, he's not just a webcomic author.

Of course, we COULD use that science to send some of those billions of people to planets or celestial bodies other than Earth. Keep a few billion folks on Earth, send a couple million to orbiting habitats, and put the rest on Mars and its moons as well as Earth's moon.

On the other hand, Peter Jackson spends a lot of time working out -- It's hobbit-firming.

And he can't stop taking bubble baths -- They're hobbit-foaming.

Did I mention that he's always out planting crops? It's hobbit-farming.

And that Chinese vase in his dining room? A fake. It's hobbit faux-ming.

(Blame David Morgan-Mar for these. I would throw a fireball at him, but that would be hobbit-fooming.)

Or make a cool web comic and garner fame and fortune!

Oh dear, you actually do need a refresher course in mathematics.

What do you call an abelian group with an associative, distributive secondary operator and the power to corrupt mortals?

Answer here: http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/470.html

Apples and oranges are age 5 concepts of counting, at which point children aren't necessarily learning even to subtract yet. As a child I lived at #17, so #13 was two doors to the left, and #21 was two doors to the right. They were two doors away from my house, and from each other they were four doors! But my house was no doors from my house, it was (in more formal mathematical terms) O, the Origin, for me.

Next thing you will be telling me that Quaternions are a purely mathematical construct, with no physical analogue. Oh wait, how about Spacetime, you know, the natural universe we live in?

Now, defining Zero to be the equivalent of the empty set {} and then using the Peano axioms, THAT is a mathematical construct which can help us (mathematicians) to be rigorous (at least until Kurt F.ing Goedel comes along) without a direct physical analogue.

What confused you in your previous post is that the Romans had a perfectly good CONCEPT of zero (nullus) but lacked the notation for it, because they were (in CS terms) overloading their alphabet to do numbers too. Just as hexadecimal notitation does, feed face?

The reason that calculus is so common (not that I did it in my CS diploma, but then I have an M.A. in natural philosophy) a requirement is that Euler's formula brings together many of the (non-discrete) mathematical topics. I'm not sure to what degree (ha!) multiple differentiation (let alone integration) is relevant to a CS student, but a sound mathetical grounding is most certainly to be expected, just as biology and chemistry are to medical students, language to law and arts student, and ouija board usage to economists.

Furthermore, in a liberal (arts/science) degree, if you choose to be a science major of any kind, it would make sense that there is some sort of core curriculum which you are expected to be aware of at least, and where say a medical student might get away with slightly less on the maths front, I'd certainly hope they'd be able to understand that none/zero is one less than one in much the same way as one is one less than two.

Perhaps you are confused between ordinals and cardinals. It makes sense to say "I ate my first apple, then my second apple." It makes significantly less sense to then say "But before that, I ate my zeroth apple". If I have an apple, and you have an orange, then in the vector space of apples and oranges, I have (1, 0) and you have (0, 1). Those look remarkably different to me. However, if we both had 42 apples and 13 oranges, then the difference between our possessions would be NONE.

R2D2 could understand speech but not speak.

Completely and satisfactorily explained here:
http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1521.html

I dinnae say we wuren't crazy!

No historical fiction? Would that include Irregular things like Web Comics?

Start at the beginning, then work your way through the middle until you reach the end. Then stop.

And then keep coming back every MWF for the updates. :-) That is one of my favorite comics ever; very well-written/drawn, and almost never misses an update.

To keep this from just being a "+1," I'll share a few of my other favorites to lift OP's spirits:

http://www.dorktower.com/
http://irregularwebcomic.net/
http://www.basicinstructions.net/
http://nodwick.humor.gamespy.com/index.htm
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/ootslatest.html
http://xkcd.com/ (obligatory)

Then there's www.failblog.org and its sister sites. YMMV with individual items, but overall there's fun material there.

Lots of archive material to trawl with those. Enjoy!

The only thing nicer than seeing women smile is hearing them laugh.

Indeed.

Having never actually served on a jury, how exactly would a juror go about learning what a phrase means if everyone was acting like it's supposed to be common knowledge? Do they just, like, raise their hand and ask?

David Morgan-Marr (creative force behind Irregular Webcomic and Darths & Droids) has an account of service on a jury in which the jury asks for clarification on a point. It's quite an interesting read in total, but the sections regarding jury confusion are found on page 12 (at the end of witness 26 and end of witness 29), page 19 (most of witness 50), page 20 (not much happened with the jury that day) and concluding at the top of page 22.

While this jury trial occurred in Austrailia, the basic tenets are the same.

Unless battery technology makes a quantum leap

If it makes a quantum leap, it'll be the same as not changing at all.

The Irregular Webcomic guy has the answer:

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/393.html

So, each USB iteration offers the smallest possible increments in speed?

So small, in fact, you can't tell the difference.

Which always reminds me of this.

You think this wasn't intentional?

http://irregularwebcomic.net/2597.html

So it only applies when the Pope (who is after all fallible) says it applies? Yeah that fucking makes sense. So if he's prone to error what the fuck prevents him from evoking his infallibility in a situation where he is wrong. That's right the magical holy spirit that flies around and tells him that he should use it. Give me a fucking break. The stupidity and logical fallacy so permeates the religion that recognising the stupidity requires that you are not religious.

You and the GP are both completely wrong when it comes to Papal infallibility! There are four specific requirements that must be met for that doctrine to apply. Of all places, one of the best non-theologically heavy explanations can be found on the author comments of this webcomic. I'll repost it below, and pay specific attention to the fourth requirement and that it's only been used once or twice since the doctrine was promulgated:

Catholic dogma states that the Pope is incapable of making an error when he makes a formal declaration to the Church regarding certain matters of faith or morals, provided he attaches to the declaration the requisite conditions and formalities. This doctrine is known as Papal infallibility.

To those not fully versed in the doctrine, this may at first sight seem ridiculous. After all, what if the Pope says that elephants are pink?

Infallibility comes with several conditions:

1. The Pope must be speaking in his official capacity as head of the Catholic Church. While the Pope might well say that elephants are pink, for some reason or other (hey, stranger things have happened), he probably wouldn't do so as an official statement.
2. The statement must be worded as an explicit definition of truth. So even if the Pope was speaking in an official capacity, merely stating that elephants are pink is not good enough. He'd have to say something like, "The Church solemnly declares, decrees, and affirms the absolute and inviolable fact that elephants are pink."
3. The statement must be accompanied by an additional statement that this teaching is absolute and binding to all members of the Catholic Church, and that any who disagree with it are immediately outside the realms of the Catholic faith. So the Pope has to say something, in an official capacity, like:

The Church solemnly declares, decrees, and affirms the absolute and inviolable fact that elephants are pink. If anyone, God forbid, should question or deny the self-evident truth of this teaching, or cause doubt of it to any member of the faithful, then let it be known to all that that person has fallen from the Catholic faith, may God have mercy on his miserable misguided soul.

Now I don't know about you, but I reckon the Pope is highly unlikely to say anything like this about the colour of elephants. But still, he potentially could, which brings up the final condition:
4. The statement must concern the revelation of matters of faith or morals. This is the real killer. The Pope can rave about the colour of elephants all he likes, but it will never count as an infallible statement, because the colour of elephants is not a matter of faith or morals. (It would be an interesting religion in which this was a matter of faith, and an even more interesting one in which it was a moral issue.)

In fact, Papal infallibility has rarely been invoked. The most recent instance was in 1950, when Pope Pius XII made the infallible statement in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus_Deus that:

By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the

Space isn't actually cold. There's nothing there to be cold. In order to transfer heat, you need something to transfer it into, and there's just nothing there.

See this excellent discussion of cooling problems for the Star Wars planet-city Coruscant.

Like this Cthulhu made from (I think) a dinosaur and an octopus. Some good laughs and very bad puns on that site.

They are already doing experiments on Time Travel, so why not?

They're building one of those "Habitat Houses" down the street from me, and I wondered to my daughter if all the workers had tattoos of hobbits on them.

"Why?" she asked.

"Hobbit tat for humanity".

David "Dangermouse" Morgan-Mar, is that you?

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/216.html

I think many people here would have voted Cthulhu.

You've been reading too much Irregular Webcomic again?

Yeah, Cthulhu definitely came out ahead in the debate with President Allosaur.

Already going on... and guess who's his opponent.

You mean putting the allosaurus in charge of the henhouse? Yeah, that's a bad idea. Vote Cthulhu!

But back to your point about how they knew what it was called, I have a related question. How do they know that Eastern Laurentia had crinkle cut coastlines like Canada? Weren't they formed by glacial activity? How does that happen at the equator?

Most likely, they don't know that, or even think that it did. Continental drift maps are usually drawn by moving around the outlines of the modern continents for the most part, probably because that best communicates which parts went where, rather than amorphous blobs labeled things like "p.s. this is actually Canada".

My understanding would be that the actual outline of the old continents looked nothing like that and we have no way to figure out what they actually did look like.

Actually, it seems to be quite a bit more complicated than just moving things around to see where they match. David Morgan-Mar had a nice rundown of one case as an annotation in irregular webcomic here (He must be really bored sometimes).

In this case, two separate places have geological and biological features that match despite being on opposite sides of the atlantic ocean, so you can well guess those features existed before separating.

I'm waiting patiently for Slashdot to post the Nigerian folks that always email for the millions they have to give away.

But what if it were true?

I'm waiting patiently for Slashdot to post the Nigerian folks that always email for the millions they have to give away.

But what if it were true?

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1960.html
I haven't studied maths in years, nor at a high level, but I was able to understand that very easily.

Good explanation here too:
http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1960.html

Here's a good use of custom parts in an unexpected way

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1525.html has a similar joke, but about fermions.

There's plenty of humour that doesn't rely on aggression or put-downs, but instead simply surprising the brain. Wordplay & punning come to mind, where the humour derives from the creation of an unexpected combination or juxtaposition of concepts. Who's the victim of aggression for a joke like this: http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1470.html

PBF has been a favorite of mine for a while, now. Here's some others(wiki pages. Paper comic sites(read: syndicate sites) suck more often than not):

Zits
Get Fuzzy
Pearls Before Swine
Lio

Schlock Mercenary
Something Positive
Erfworld
Penny Arcade
Irregular Webcomic!
There's a few others, but that's most of them.

Well, obviously it's because Jar Jar was clearly invented by a ten-year-old.

Really, it explains a lot, doesn't it?

Well, obviously it's because Jar Jar was clearly invented by a ten-year-old.

Really, it explains a lot, doesn't it?

I thought that something travelling at exactly the speed of light required infinite amounts of energy. No-one said anything about more than the speed of light.

Check out what happens when X-Rays pass the speed of "light" in water. check out Cherenkov radiation. Irregularwebcomic has a good explanation http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1636.html

B.

Too late to prepare... they're already here!

He qualifies, too.

Imperial galleons.

You might also enjoy Irregular Webcomic, which is written by a physics Ph.D and illustrated with LEGO minifigs. The subjects are weird and hilarious, and when there's a joke you might not get, the author provides annotations. Lately the annotations have gotten quite broad, catering to non-English-native readers, but in the beginning they only appeared for truly obscure jokes.

I went back to strip 1 and read the whole archive. It took me over a week, and I felt like I'd just attended a semester of school. The funny thing was, I truly wanted to learn all that stuff, because it was helping me appreciate humor. I think that's one of the strongest motivators ever.

IANAP, but I believe the laws of thermodynamics prevents efficient conversion of heat into work. This talks about it some more.

That's just because they cheat with the Force, which is also why, in the Star Wars universe, Coruscant is actually plausible.

Well, Adam could communicate with Jamie on the infinite featureless plane of Death.