Talk:2207: Math Work

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 14:50, 27 September 2019 by 198.41.231.85 (talk) (FIXED COMMENT FINAL EDIT)
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This makes me think of my profession (software engineer) - Normie: "Oh wow, that looks complicated!" Me: wires two pre-existing libraries together and calls it a day Baldrickk (talk) 09:39, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Image of Blackboard

I was looking at the blackboard and was wondering if there were any Easter eggs on it. Here is the result of my badly cropped photoshopping skills. [1] idk if it would help to sharpen the image. --DarkAndromeda31 (talk) 01:25, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

The only thing that really jumps out at me are the wedges, as portions of pie charts where radius also controls area, evoking the climate stabilization wedge game from Princeton where the total area of the disk needing to be mitigated is something like 38 gigatons of atmospheric carbon, and the various mitigation solutions have angles representing potential and radius indicating uptake, the proportion of which represents gigatons mitigated as the wedge area. We can offer that game as an example of a bivariate optimization problem which might not have to be manually solved by anyone, if we assume that the local market for surplus potable water, carbon-neutral liquid transportation fuel, and carbon-negative composite lumber for centuries-to-millenia scale sequestration along with wood timber displacement for reforestation represents locally satisfiable economic demand for N shipping containers of Project Foghorn plants and M shipping containers of power-to-gas upgrades for natural gas power plants. That's an example of how a locally market-driven system can solve a bivariate optimization without anyone doing the actual math work in a spreadsheet or otherwise. The economic solution is not necessarily optimal, because even as powerful as the free market can be, it isn't necessarily going to find the bivariate optimums for every point on the planet (although it will likely converge asymptotically in some sense) and defectors such as fossil fuel producers are interested in delaying the optimum solution.
Is that nontangential enough? 172.68.143.18 20:49, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
Yes that was far out :-) I'm sure there is nothing interesting hidden in the image. --Kynde (talk) 08:36, 27 September 2019 (UTC)


Does Wolfram Alpha constitute such a problem solver? Cause both Randall and this site has used it on several occasions. But I have not ever really used such things, and do not know if Wolfram can be used as Cueball thinks about in the comic. But if it could, it could be worth mentioning as a method sometimes used by Randall. --Kynde (talk) 08:43, 27 September 2019 (UTC)


I only just now noticed that Randall always puts the crossbars on the I in the word "I" and not otherwise. Looking back, he has always done this, even since the first few comics. That's quite a principled yet subtle stance on letterforms. (He stopped doing it for a period, however, starting from comic #150. I wonder if it would be too typography-nerdy to put them all in a category.) 198.41.231.85 14:47, 27 September 2019 (UTC)