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Some background on this comic:
Transcript (sketch):
“Oooooo!.. Mr. Van Horn!.. The duck is back–staring at your back.”
Raymond could feel it…First a tingling at the base of his neck and then a cold sweat would quickly engulf his body–yes, the duck was staring at him again."
Transcript (commentary):
Another example of perhaps overworking a cartoon. In hindsight, I wish I had used the final drawing but with the second caption in the sketch above, which begins, “Raymond could feel it…” It just seems a little more interesting to me.
In coming up with the name for the phobia, I played around with words like “quackaphobia” and “duckalookaphobia” and so on. But then I got the bright idea to look up the scientific name for ducks, and discovered their family name is Anatidae. Ad so, I ended up coining a word that twelve ornithologists understood and everyone else probably went, “Say what?”
Some background on this comic:
Transcript:
THE WRONG NUMBER
Larry lived alone in his small inner-city apartment. He had no friends and most people ignored him at all costs.
Then one day, unexpectedly, the phone rang. And Larry was surprised to find himself talking to God.
“Is this 555-3178?” God asked.
“No, this is 555-7138.”
“Sorry.” And God hung up.
The chapter opened with:
Sometimes ideas have come out of short stories or ramblings I write just to shift gears once in a while. Cartoons are, after all, little stories themselves, frozen at an interesting point in time. What follows are several stories that either led to cartoons, could have led to cartoons, or were just ideas in and of themselves.
Interesting that this seems to have been published after its inclusion in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prehistory_of_The_Far_Side. Or maybe they just forgot to include the resulting comic. Some of the other short stories have the resulting comic included.
It’s a play on the term “La-Z-Boy”. The name comes from people being able to be lazy in it, but the joke is that the chair itself is no longer lazy.
There’s a quote I can’t find the source for, but is along the lines of “If you want to punish a cartoonist, give him daily syndication”
The coloring made it a little weird because it just looks unfinished. Here’s a B&W version that makes it IMO a little clearer:
I see now in the colored version that it’s supposed to be red at the end of the neck, but I thought that was the bottom part of the head. It looks like they redrew it a bit while coloring.
EDIT: Turned it into a comparison gif:
Some background on this comic:
Sketch Caption:
Mountain Businessmen
Transcript:
I just started thinking about mountain men and the wild frontier and Jeremiah Johnson and before long out came Seymour.
3·14 days agoI think we generally agree with each other. The existence of an omniscient AI or deity doesn’t change the “experience” of free will. It doesn’t “invalidate choice” from the point of view of the observed. It does “invalidate choice” from the point of view of the observer, who can now say “This thing exhibits no unpredictable behavior to me”. You and I both think we have free will, because we can’t predict our own behavior. Our experience is unchanged, whether or not some other observer exists or could exist that could predict our behavior.
Agreeing on a frame of reference is exactly my point. “Does something have free will?” requires the follow-up question, “According to whom?”. Just like “I’m far from that rock” requires the followup question, “According to whom?”. The ant might think you’re far from the rock, something else might think you’re near the rock.
To boil it down a bit more, my point is just that you can always replace the phrase “free will” in speech with “unpredictable behavior” without loss of meaning, because that is what people actually mean when they say it, whether they realize that or not.
We’re not “relieved” of free will. It’s not an intrinsic property that one “has”. It would be like having “big” or “near”. You don’t “have” big, it’s a relative term.
It’s simply a description of observed behavior. That’s all it really is in the end, even though people treat it as this super mysterious thing.
Why not? It might seem absurd, but can you prove they don’t “choose” to flit about here or there? A super-intelligent AI might also be able to “pierce the veil” and determine the underlying mechanics, like a video game character determining the math behind the random number generator that powers their world.
That’s also only one interpretation of quantum mechanics, mechanistic interpretations aren’t ruled out (though a number of variants have been).
Free will is incompatible with omniscience. People really want it to work, but it doesn’t.
Free will is observer-dependent, and is short for “I can’t predict the behavior of this thing”. For an omniscient observer, there is no thing that it can say that about.
Free will is not an inherent property of a thing, and that’s what trips people up so much.
To ponder it a bit, does a rock have free will? A dog? A human? A super-intelligent AI that we can’t hope to comprehend? Why or why not for each step?
The definition above explains it all. Of course a rock doesn’t, we can predict its behavior with physics! Maybe a monkey does, people disagree on that. Of course human do though, because I do!
Now ponder what the super-intelligent AI would think. “Of course the first three don’t have free will, their behavior is entirely predictable with physics”
This boils down to the best of all possible worlds argument, already well-skewered in Candide centuries ago.
Why create the world exactly the way it was? Is it impossible to create it, so that of their own free will, one more person makes the “right” choice? That’s some sorry omnipotence if so. If not one person, why not two? And so on, until you face the question of, “Why not create the world so that everyone, of their own free will, makes the ‘right’ decision”.
Calvinists are intellectually brave enough to accept the metaphysical consequences of their beliefs. Others, not so much.
Some background on this comic:
Transcript:
For me, the caption (if there is one) and the drawing are a simultaneous concept. In this case, however, I knew these bears would be pretty excited about their “find” but it took some time to decide how best to express it.
What jurisdiction? In the US, factual information that you simply compile likely isn’t copyrightable, there’s been some court cases about e.g. telephone books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.
Won’t stop big companies from harassing you if they feel like it, though. Nintendo is petty enough that they might
Yeah, turns out a lot of companies don’t really think about security, here’s a DEF CON talk where they find stuff that chokes on it:
Just in case it’s confusing, this was posted with today’s date because there’s no good way to automatically know the original posting date
That sort of exists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file
X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*
Plug for the !ccp@discuss.online community I started to celebrate the creative commons and public domain. I’ve been posting the wikimedia picture of the day there daily, and other sorts of posts including questions like this are very welcome!
Some background on this comic:
Transcript: