Comics about mathematics, science, and the student life.

Briefly Explain

A graph showing the relationship between understanding and the length of an answer. Decent knowledge can be shown with concise answers, but there comes a huge cliff in which students start writing a lot to cover up their ignorance.

Let’s hope the teacher is impressed by the amount of writing I’ve given. Surely that’s a signal for quality!

16 Oct 2019

Law of Bad Timing

In the first panel, there is one minute left on the test, and the student can't quite figure out the solution. As they walk out, the solution strikes them.

“Professor, can you come touch my test?”

“Okay, I can collect it if you want.”

“No! I just want to stimulate my brain to think the test is over, so I can get some better ideas.”

14 Oct 2019

Discounting

There is a big opportunity for a student with plenty of positives, but they choose instead to focus on the small negative part.

My specialty is magnifying the negative part of any opportunity by a huge amount.

11 Oct 2019

Postcard Knowledge

A physicist gives a postcard to their friend that contains the field equations for general relativity, and exclaims how awesome that is. The friend doesn't understand any of it, and the physicist isn't surprised, since you need a huge textbook to decode it.

The information is hidden in plain sight. You just have to go through years and years of education to decode it!

09 Oct 2019

No Minus Signs

A physicist presents their new breakthrough: a way to do physics without minus signs.

The Nobel Prize of 2019 is awarded for the astonishing advances in the language of physics, removing the need for pesky signs that vex both students and seasoned researchers alike.

07 Oct 2019

Welcome Sign

A door of a theorist with a sign that says: Theorist at work. NO INTERRUPTIONS (Unless you have data supporting my theory)

I’m not joking. If you have questions about the homework, go pester a grad student. Isn’t that what they are there for?

04 Oct 2019

Experimentalist Woes

Two physicists discuss the huge experimental effort needed to detect a particle, while theorists can postulate ten more in the meantime. One reassures the other by saying that at least the data they are working to acquire will likely last much longer than those wacky theoretical ideas.

If you want to feel better, I’d suggest creating a small bump in the next data dump. You will make the theorists go crazy trying to predict what’s going on!

02 Oct 2019

Risky Path

In the top panel, a student digs a hole, wondering if it's worth continuing on this path. Then, the bottom two panels show the student hitting either treasure or fallling into a trap. A visual metaphor for trying something new on the test.

Why do I always get an urge to be adventurous at the riskiest of times?!

30 Sep 2019

Code Hygiene

A student hands in his thesis, and the supervisor is impressed by the formatting of it. They comment that the student must have very clean code. In the second panel, we see the student struggling to get a figure aligned, and looking for a hack that will fix it, not caring about the code looking ugly.

I’ve said this before. You can tell a lot about a person by how their LaTeX code looks.

27 Sep 2019

Homework Time

A graph depicting the proportion of time spent on homework. A small part is for doing the assignment itself, while the bulk is in fixing mistakes, cleaning up the work, and hunting down minus signs.

I’m notorious for spending far too much time on little details that ultimately aren’t important. I just can’t stand having something slightly wrong when it could be fixed!

25 Sep 2019