Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith for March 30, 2021

That’s true. The people replacing me after restructuring, and my supervisors, keep getting younger and younger. Fortunately, not overly smarter and smarter…

They are both two dimensional shapes.

I don’t get this at all. Neither the sign, nor the diagram.

Ah… so maybe this explains the purpose for the ‘new math’ that is being taught in schools nowadays.

“by dumbing your future competition” ?

Also, we won. By a landslide.

The good old ‘false equivalency’, so popular these days.

Some decades ago, I read of a real-world situation which would be relevant to this cartoon.

A supposedly “culture-independent” IQ test — one without words or (it was thought) cultural references — was administered to some Pacific islanders, and they all scored way below “average”. Further examination revealed that virtually every test taker had given the same “wrong” answers to the same questions.

It turned out that when asked to group geometric figures as “similar” or “different”, the islanders classified them according to topology of the lines making up the figures rather than what we view as “shape”. Well, the two figures above are identical, topologically, each being enclosed by a single continuous line and with no other lines either touching or separate.

It was concluded that to the islanders — who wove nets, baskets, etc. from rope, — the most important feature of an object was lines and how they interacted, not shapes, which could be easily changed by bending, stretching, etc.