“I call that ‘the falling problem’. You encounter it when you first study physics. You realize that, if you were ever dropped from a plane without a parachute, you could calculate with a high degree of accuracy how long it’s take to hit the ground, your speed, how much energy you’ll deposit into the earth. And yet, you would still be just as dead as a particularly stupid gorilla dropped the same distance. Mastery of the nature of reality grants you no mastery over the behavior of reality. I could tell you your grandpa is very sick. I could tell you what each cell is doing wrong, why it’s doing wrong, and roughly when it started doing wrong. But I can’t tell them to stop.”
“Why can’t you make a machine to fix it?”
“Same reason you can’t make a parachute when you fall from the plane.”
“Because it’s too hard?”
“Nothing is too hard. Many things are too fast.”
(beat)
“I think I could solve the falling problem with a jetpack. Can you try to get me the parts?”
I wouldn’t call it a punchline, exactly… I mean, it’s not a joke. But in the comic it’s likely a parent and child talking, and the subtext I infer is that parenting is a process of giving one’s children the tools with which to construct superior solutions to life problems.
--SMBC
IDG the punchline...
I wouldn’t call it a punchline, exactly… I mean, it’s not a joke. But in the comic it’s likely a parent and child talking, and the subtext I infer is that parenting is a process of giving one’s children the tools with which to construct superior solutions to life problems.
How I would love to quote you next month. This is pretty much my approach in a sentence.
Thanks!
For me, the real punchline is in the ‘votey image’ you get by hovering over the red dot at the bottom.