Comics about mathematics, science, and the student life.

The Good Stuff

A bar chart of "Information content" for different parts of a paper. The "Conclusion" has the lowest, followed by the "Intro" and the "Methods". The most informative part is the "Caveats" section.

Most papers would probably benefit from a dedicated “Caveats” section.

27 Jan 2023

Sawtooth

A graph of "Ambition" versus "Time". Ambition starts off high at the beginning of a semester and then linearly decreases until the end of the semester. There's a break where ambition is undefined, and then it begins the cycle anew at the beginning of the next semester.

Note to self: “Powering through” the breaks results in negative ambition at the beginning of the new semester.

25 Jan 2023

Punching Bag

A boxer is working out with a punching bag labelled "Math". Off-panel, a person shouts, "Come on Casual Conversation, it's time to go." The person (who is Casual Conversation) is punching the bag and says, "Just a few more punches..."

My heart breaks a little bit each time this happens.

23 Jan 2023

Work Radius

A dashed circle with an X in the centre marks your PhD. The symbol delta represents the small radius of all subsequent work you do. Caption: Changing is challenging.

Diving deep into one area your whole life can be very rewarding, but I think dipping into various fields can be great too!

20 Jan 2023

Model Warranty

Left panel: A person brings back a package marked "Model" to a store. He says, "Hi, I'd like to return this faulty mathematical model." The cashier replies, "What's the reason for returning it?" Right panel: The person says, "Well, the logical reasoning and results are fine, but the assumptions are terrible." The cashier says, "I'm sorry, but our Mathematical Warranty covers everything but the assumptions..."

In reality, the person would never return the model, because it gave the results they wanted anyway.

18 Jan 2023

Success

A graph of "Time spent doing X" versus "Success at X". As you get better at X, the time you have for doing X goes down.

This is another reason why working in obscurity can be useful.

16 Jan 2023

Appropriated

A graph of "Appropriated casual words" versus "Jargon". There's a positive linear relationship between the two. There's a label for the line at the top-right which says, "That word doesn't mean what you think it means."

“Hey, were you really expecting us to use our creativity to come up with new words when all of these old words were just sitting there?”

13 Jan 2023

Fact Check

A scientist and her friend are discussing. The friend is saying, "...I saw it in a scientific paper, so I *know* it's true!" The scientist has one hand on her head and says, "No. Just no."

“Wait, are you suggesting that scientists can sometimes get things wrong?!”

11 Jan 2023

Possibility of Failure

A graph of "Sense of possibility" versus "Fear of failure". As fear increases, the possibilities decrease.

Instead of seeing failure as a binary quantity (either it happened or it didn’t), perhaps it’s more healthy to adopt the view that there’s always going to be some amount of failure, and our job is to limit it as much as possible.

09 Jan 2023

Fun

A graph of "Fun" versus "Taking yourself too seriously". It's a negative, linear relationship.

“How much others enjoy being around you” is often a correlated variable here.

06 Jan 2023