Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for October 14, 2014

No point in dwelling on one’s insignificance for too long.

… or what the comics are about today. ;-)

Calvin and Python!

Your are a fluke of the universe, You have no right to be here. And, whether you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind your back.

http://www.songlyrics.com/national-lampoon/deteriorata-lyrics/

Then there’s that galaxy for seniors: the non-fat Milky Way.

I have to strain to see three stars in Orion’s belt here in Houston. Light pollution sucks.

Think universally, act loca—OOH SQUIRREL!!!!!

Wonder what my fellow subatomic particles are up to tonight.

Calvin, it is a lot to take in, but stay with it and know that small as you are, He will never forget you.

Ok Calvin, now what is 2+5?

Not only are there infinities in the material world, but some infinities are bigger than other infinities!

I would not touch this subject with a ten foot pole, but …Hmmmm … I believe. Touch ………Hee Hee

On TV, Calvin can watch the stars that have been created by us.

There you go again. I, for one, am tired of your rants; they don’t belong here.

There are an infinite number of infinities, each one massively larger than the one preceding it. Start with your basic infinite set, i.e. {1,2,3…}. Let n represent the number of items in this set. In this case, n equals infinity. Now, take the set of all the subsets of this set. For this set, n equals an infinity on a scale incomprehensibly larger than the first. To get your infinite number of infinities, just keep repeating the process forever.

There exists a line of infinite length that can be contained within a finite area. Don’t believe me? Start with a circle. Inside this circle, draw an equilateral triangle, each point touching the boundary of the circle. Now, on each side of the triangle, draw another equilateral triangle, placed at the middle of the side. On each of these 3 triangles, draw two more triangles, placed the same way as before. Keep repeating forever. The boundary of this shape will never stop getting longer, therefore it is infinitely long. Yet it will never leave the boundary of the original circle.

And the relevancy here would be……. ?

Oh Mr. Python how your words endure and bring back fond memories :)

Way to put the universe in its place, Calvin

Wouldn’t it be funny if he turned on the TV to find “Cosmos”?

I know stupidity can’t be fixed but can you please refrain from putting it in writing? Look up these words: English has no singular neuter pronouns. Someone around you can probably explain that to you.

@Number Six

Thanks for the link. It’s beautiful. [Reply button isn’t working]

Nab, I don’t remember hearing anything about that in Oregon; how ghastly. Makes you wonder why Colorado didn’t consider that. We here in Perfectionland, the suburbs of Chicago where NOTHING bad could ever happen, are having a heroine epidemic among our well-to-do, college-educated young adults. Unfortunately, knowledge has nothing to do with possessing the wisdom to control appetites or the self-control to do so.

Whoa! This got waaaaay too heavy for me…

No. The surface of a balloon is finite, yet has no boundary. Mathematical models of the universe, including the “laws” of physics have no infinities (well, except for “singularities” – which are failures of the model to predict anything – like for black holes under classical relativity). There is, of course, no way to prove that the actual universe has none.

Birdie with a yellow billHopped upon my windowsill,Cocked his shining eye and says:.What did the ice cream do when it fell in the root beer — float?.Just to add some silliness to all the seriousness…

I have never been star gazing but I would love to.

xxx

@ACK! and @Dogday88: Sometimes a comment is a reply to a particular poster, but then the original poster deletes his/her comment. When that happens, the name of the original poster also disappears from the reply, so that it is no longer possible to determine to whom the reply was addressed. To avoid this, I always type in the name of the poster to whom I am replying, rather than using the “reply” option.

The same thing can happen when GoComics deletes an inappropriate comment after posters have replied to it.

I’m sure Watterson meant to provoke the reader with this one….. but I’m not sure he could have predicted this kind of response – and all these years later?

TV is all you ever think about.

I didn’t understand a word Calvin said in the second panel.

That’s the LAST thing I would be thinking of while going into a deep phylisophical reading.

One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips. I identified a lot with Calvin growing up and this strip is one of the ones I identified with the most because I spent a lot of time as a kid stargazing and contemplating philosophy and a lot of time wondering what was on TV (and watching TV of course).

FYI, if you are a stargazer with an android phone, the google sky map is a great free ap for amatures to use your GPS location to give you a star map of your current location with a quick search function to find specific stars and planets in the sky. My 10 yr old daughter and I love to go outside at night and use it to look for specific stars/planets as well as identifiy interesting things we see up there.