Jetée

vault 326: Let us compare mythologies


Unspeakable Vault of Doom

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

LordEden

Jetee, I need you to put your author finding skills to good work. Where did this come from?



Summon Jetée!

Use Skill: Research!

It's super effective!

Buttersafe.

[The Detour.]

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Vice-President of the CinnamonGirl Fan Club - The Meat of the Zombiesquirrel and CinnamonGirl Sandwich

Jetée

Buttersafe.

Tags and attribution to the image are found on the image itself, though very tinily, so needed to embiggen.

[The Detour.]

- - -

I doubt this is a webcomic. But still...

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

LordEden

Mighty Wombat

Check out his Podcast "BoneBag Show", it's funny and worth the listen.

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Vice-President of the CinnamonGirl Fan Club - The Meat of the Zombiesquirrel and CinnamonGirl Sandwich

Jetée

(The Sentry) by Guy & Rodd

Brevity Comic Strip

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

Foreword: There are certain things that can bring even the most confident people to their knees with crushing self-doubt and insecurity. These are some of those things.


author's comments:

"If you find yourself listening to someone else talk for a long period of time, you are going to need something to do with your hands so that you can maintain the appearance of being attentive yet relaxed. Usually, putting your hands in your pockets works beautifully in this situation. But what happens when you are wearing something that doesn't have pockets?

First, you grope anxiously at your sides where your pockets should be. They aren't there, but you look for them anyway. Once you realize that there are no pockets and there never will be any pockets no matter how much you wish for them, you begin futilely cycling through a series of increasingly awkward hand positions; hands on your hips like a superhero, arms folded lightly over your chest like an insecure preteen, arms folded purposefully over your chest like an angry farmer, hands dangling limply at your sides - they all make you feel insecure and unnatural.

You become so focused on choosing the least awkward position for your hands that you lose track of the conversation entirely. This only adds to the problem because now you also have to worry about whether the stance you choose is appropriate for the conversation. You don't want to be standing there with your hands squarely on your hips like Superman if your friend was just talking about his dead grandmother."

Hyperbole and a Half - it's a webcomic with words.
(or, more like angry drawings alongside maybe-relatable anecdotes?)

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

Rex Babin, The Sacramento Bee



AAEC - Political Cartoons

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

Pacman on twitter, by Scott Hampson

Comics and Illustrations by Agent-X (a.k.a. Scott Hampson)

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

Maneggs

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Sion

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He's the best, of course, of all the worst.
Some wrong been done, he done it first. -fz

I jus' want ta thank you...falettinme...be mice elf...agin...

Jetée

originally posted May 16, 2008

author's comments:
I'm sure that many of you are familiar with Schrödinger’s cat but I still feel compelled to
give a short description here. However, please note that I will only be explaining enough to
make sense of the comic and that many details will be omitted.
The idea of “Schrödinger’s cat (paradox)” was put forth by the Austrian physicist Erwin
Schrödinger in 1935 as a thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of (what has come
to be known as) the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics when applied to the
“real” world of common sense and macroscopic objects.

Imagine a box that is so perfectly sealed that no physical influence can get in or out.

Now imagine that a cat is inside the box along with a device that can kill the cat when
triggered by some “quantum event”. That is the setting for Schrödinger's cat. In
Schrödinger's original version, the quantum event was the decay of a radioactive atom.
Schrödinger asserted that the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains in a
"superposition" of states: (both alive and dead) until the box is opened.
I used a bit of jargon in the previous paragraphs so let's backtrack a little with a miniscience
lesson. First of all what is quantum mechanics? To put it simply, quantum
mechanics is the theoretical framework that describes the universe at the “smallest” scales:
atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, etc. At such small scales, the “rules” are very different
from the rules of the macroscopic world which is described by classical mechanics. Take,
for example, an ordinary baseball. According to classical mechanics, the baseball has a
definite trajectory (position and momentum) at any given time and we can theoretically
predict the position of the baseball at a later time if we know its trajectory at an earlier time.

This seems to conform to our common sense notion about how everyday objects that we
see around us should behave. However, when we are dealing with small objects (e.g.
electrons), quantum physics tells us that such common sense no longer applies. At the
quantum level, we must describe an object by its state vector.
Suppose, for example, that we wanted to know the position of such a microscopic object.

According to quantum physics, the object has no definite position until it is measured. In
fact, before its position is measured, we can think of the object as having a probability of
being in any possible position available to it (this idea, by the way, is one of the central
tenets of the Copenhagen interpretation). This probability distribution is described by the
state vector which, by convention, is represented by the Greek letter Ψ (psi). In this case,
Ψ describes the object's possible positions.

As you may have surmised from the name, state vectors are examples of mathematical
objects called vectors. To be more precise, they are vectors in a complex vector space
called a Hilbert space, but we won't get into that here. The important point is that different
vectors can be added together to give another vector. So for example, if Ψ and Χ are two
different vectors, then Ψ + Χ would be another vector. Vectors can also be multiplied with a
(complex) number to give another vector so if Ψ is a vector, then cΨ would be another
vector (where c is a number). Physicists have adopted a notation for these state vectors
(called bra-ket notation) in which each vector is denoted by a symbol in angled brackets can
be written as ΙΨ> + ΙΧ> and the multiplication of a vector by a number can be written
as c ΙΨ>.

Now let's see this bra-ket notation in action for a simple example. Suppose we have a
microscopic particle whose state vector for position is Ψ and it is expressed as the
weighted sum of two other vectors

ΙΨ> = c ΙA> + d ΙB>.

What this expression says is that the particle can be in two possible positions, A or B.
Before measuring the position, the particle cannot be thought of as occupying any of the
two positions. We can only say that it has a probability of being in either of the two
positions. Physicists would say that the particle is in a quantum superposition of the two
positions. The numbers c and d are called probability amplitudes. The square of the
probability amplitudes (actually the squared moduli) gives the probability of finding the
particle in that position after measurement. In this case, if we measured the particle's
position, the probability of finding it in position A would be |c|2 and the probability of finding
it in position B would be |d|2. The amplitudes are usually “adjusted” so that their squares
sum to 1 but that's another detail which I won't get into here. The process by which the
state vector representing the superpostion of different states reduces to a single state is
referred to as state vector reduction (it can sometimes be referred to as wavefunction
collapse). The idea of the reduction of the state vector is another one of the central
aspects of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics.

Now let's apply what we've learned so far to poor Schrödinger's cat. We know that the
cat can be in two possible states: live or dead. Let ΙΨ> be the state vector and suppose
that the probability of finding a dead cat is ½ and that the probability of finding a live cat is
½. Then one possible way to express the state vector is

ΙΨ> = (1/√2) Ι live cat> + (1/√2) Ι dead cat>.

So there you have it. Now you understand the equation in the first panel of the comic;
but what about the equation in the last panel? The symbol є is generally used by
mathematicians to represent an infinitesimal quantity. Hence, the equation in the last panel
expresses the idea that there was an infinitesimal chance that an angry monkey could
have magically appeared in the box.

Abstruse Goose

- - - -

+ bonus: "Schrödinger’s Miscalculation - Part 2"

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

"The Red Button", originally posted on May 19, 2008

author's comments:
This comic is based on the idea of a fine-tuned universe. The notion of a fine-tuned
universe, in turn, is based on the idea that the universe is the way it is because of the
precise values of certain fundamental constants and that even slight variations of any of
these constants would result in a universe that is radically different. To be specific, it is
implied that any such universe would most likely not be conducive to the existence of
matter or elements as we know them and hence to the existence of life as we know it.
Many people (so I hear) consider this remarkable “fine-tuning” of the universe to be
evidence that suggests the existence of a divine being of some sort managing a cosmic
fine-tuning machine. I leave you, the reader, to draw your own conclusions, but whatever
your opinion may be, I hope that you will learn two very important lessons from this comic:
1.) Always obey the Lord, and 2.) beware of angry monkeys.

Abstruse Goose

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Redlemon

This one goes out to all my friends in TFP Politics...



from Wondermark , "An Illustrated Jocularity".

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I can't read your signature. Sorry.

Baraka_Guru

"It's so tragic it makes Hamlet look like 3-2-1 Contact!" That's a great line. I lol'd.

It's the best line I've read/heard since this one in Ironman 2:
Spoiler: "[This missile] is so smart it could write a book — a book that would make Ulysses look like it was written in crayon."

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Jetée

top secret

'Lunchbreath', as seen in Assorted Infotoons.

- - - - -

+ bonus webcomic drawing

* context of figure in bottom right:


by Lawrence Yang

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

LordEden

From Plan9. CROM!



Real Life Comics

__________________
Vice-President of the CinnamonGirl Fan Club - The Meat of the Zombiesquirrel and CinnamonGirl Sandwich

Jetée

author's comments:
IMMERSE YOURSELF IN THE JOY OF THESE SHALLOW TRIFLES TO FORGET THAT ONE DAY YOU WILL BE DIE AND BE FORGEOTTEN.


Wonderful comics by a terrible man. - Books Beers and Ballpoints

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

by jeremy vinar and mike fahmie

Virtual Shackles - I Never Promised You The Moon

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

"The Universal Analogy" by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins

Penny Arcade!

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

most likely originally posted on March 17, 2009...
Techno Tuesday

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

News and Head Lice

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

Illustrated by Graham Roumieu (click image for an easier reading time)

*context


[boingboing.]

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

La Guernica de Quino

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

tebe_interesno

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

ring

Jetée

Oh Nuts


AmazingSuperPowers: Webcomic at the Speed of Light

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

Chuck and Beans by Brian

Shoebox

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

Abstruse Goose

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

Generation Gap, written & illustrated by Bill Porter.

author's comments:
I signed a contract with San Min Book Co. to have my comic titled, 'Generation Gap' published in a Taiwan textbook called 'Consumers' Behavior'. This is the second time this image has been published in a textbook, the last time in France. Apparently this illustration translates across many cultures.


[wikinomics.]

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

by Mike Lester / The Rome News-Tribune

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Baraka_Guru

Jetée, I found your posts 108, 109, 111 to be particularly funny. Great finds.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Jetée

Dude, (a word I have not utilized in a few months now, by the by) all I need is a sprinkling more comments like these, spaced throughout the dozens upon dozens of microblogging-type threads I have adopted here, continued throughout the tenure in which I meticulously contribute toward & maintain them, for no discernible reason other than to just share exceptional quality pieces with a centralized theme to 'em, then have said comments be of general well-meaning kudos, finally will I feel all warm and glittery with praise, and perhaps feel actual accomplishment as well, as I do here, now, a little bit, after reading your response above.

As it is though, from the now half-year experiment I've undergone with this, do I now notice how significantly the vocal community here has shrunk over the years.
- - -


by Brad Neely

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

The Joy of Tech comic... laughter is the best tech support.

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

translated title: It Saves Lives!

personal commentary:
there's not much need to know what the characters above are saying (in Korean) as this webcomic's
in-joke is mostly visual in nature. Also, no, I have not found the author to the comic as of yet.

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

*context


Savage Chickens – Cartoons on Sticky Notes by Doug Savage

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

the comics and art of kc green.

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

FATAWESOME - Where Stupid Meets Genius

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As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

Strange Brew, by John Deering

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi

Jetée

__________________
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves.

—Mohandas K. Gandhi