Recent Comments

1. about 2 months ago on Breaking Cat News

   Oh, today’s strip is a true classic! Totally agree about AI. Laughing out loud in truth.

   And the little take on the Mona Lisa! True genius. Art is no longer found in museums. It is there every day on the comics page.

2. about 2 months ago on Get Fuzzy

   For those who didn’t live through the 60s, it was JFK who famously said “Ich bin ein Berliner”, intending to say he was a fellow resident of the city of Berlin and actually calling himself a pastry specialty. Some say a donut.

3. 2 months ago on Over the Hedge

   Sadly, it is impossible to play the blues on a bagpipe. Strictly pentatonic tones don’t include the “blue note”. Think “Amazing Grace” not “Kansas City Blues”. Having said that, some enterprising soul will probably figure out how to shorten one of the drones to get the needed note and make me wrong.

4. 2 months ago on Peanuts

   Probably written a long time before languages like C, Javascript and Python were invented. But definitely true in those languages! A stray bracket, parenthesis, curly brace or even an extra comma can crash the whole show!

5. 3 months ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

   Sadder than all that, I actually know what the sounds mean and why are in that sequence. Why a 56k modem sounds different than one of the earlier ones. And I’m only 73! The first time I connected remotely to a computer in 1972 it was a Really Fast 30 characters per second. On a teletype machine, 100% mechanical/electrical.

   You have to be in your 80s to understand the Telephone Operator skit from Laugh-in (Lily Tomlin – one ringy-dingy. two ringy-dingies and so on).

   Someday our children’s children will be baffled to hear that you actually had to type in keywords on a keyboard.

6. 6 months ago on Animal Crackers

   Ricky Nelson song, “Garden Party” >

7. 6 months ago on Get Fuzzy

   Well, George Boole was born in 1815 and Charles Babbage in 1791. The Difference Engine, a truly digital device though mechanical, 1823. I was using that kind of language in the early 70s. There were digital devices before the PC. I refer you to “The Soul of a New Machine” 1981.

   You may be right, I wasn’t paying much attention to popular culture in the 80s and 90s. But it sounds so similar to our casual engineering slang it is hard to believe there is no connection.

8. 6 months ago on Get Fuzzy

   Bit of electronics engineer trivia. A and not B makes perfect sense in Boolean algebra. You can also make a circuit with a 7404 and a 7408 that implements it in real life. In the older logic families of the 70s like DTL and TTL the inputs were asymmetrical. It only takes 40 microamps to pull them up but 1.2 milliamps to pull them down. So it became common to make switches and buttons that connected to ground, commonly referred to as “negative logic”. Saves a tiny amount of juice. To make this clear on schematics, some symbol like a bar over the name, a slash before it or a hashtag after it shows that it is negative logic.

   You could have a fire button for your video game, call it Fire. But if it switches to ground, you might write Fire# to make that clear. Pronounced aloud, “Fire not”. Negative logic is also indicated by a small circle called a bubble. Sometimes described as “active low”.

   Somehow this slipped into normal language in a stupid way that the cartoonist is parodying here. As in “I really love Politician A. NOT”. Maybe it was the “Big Bang Theory” that popularized it. At any rate it just sounds dumb to anyone who actually understands the terminology.

9. 7 months ago on Crabgrass

   Oddly a very appropriate question for a member of the Great Ape family. Most of the others in our family don’t have anything like the feet that allow us to walk erect for long distances. We can’t use them as hands to help with tree climbing, though oddly they still have claws of a sort (toes). Useless for grasping.

   Our modified hands at the ends of our legs allow a hunting strategy that is quite effective. Damage the prey to separate it from the herd, and just walk after it until it collapses. You can even walk down much stronger animals like horses, who can run much faster but eventually have to rest, allowing the hunter to catch up.

   Our non-handlike feet also allow us to travel great distances in search of better conditions. Humans travelled by foot from Africa all across Aisa and the Bering Strait into North and South America. Though it is estimated that the rate was around twenty miles per generation on average.

10. 8 months ago on The Argyle Sweater

    Actually the appendix does have a useful but somewhat disgusting job, according to some. Hosting gut bacteria in a film so it can be reconstructed after an illness. Now we find out that our friends, the bacteria in the gut, are vital to survival. Who knew? Now if we could just figure out the purpose of the coccyx…

    Other than to annoy folks who don’t believe in evolution.