Angry Puppy

September 10th, 2008Charmed, I’m Sure

Posted by Lee

Do any of you read xkcd? Here’s today’s panel, referencing the Large Hadron Collider which is going to destroy us all.

Are they just naming quarks in that last panel, or is that physics grad student a dude with emo hair. He’s a bit forward, though, no?

Marc’s favorite, with a Star Wars theme, of course, is here.

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Comments to “Charmed, I’m Sure”

Ron

Says:
September 10th, 2008 at 11:53 am

Empirically based on comic history, the seated person is a woman.

xkcd has a ton of non-straight readers, though, so I wouldn’t say it’s purely a physics joke.

Lee

Says:
September 10th, 2008 at 12:16 pm

Hey, good to see you, Ron!

I figured as much. The longer hair tends to indicate the female love interest in what I’ve seen of the strip, but one can hope!

Not that I’m into emo hair. Surely that look has run its course.

Anthony

Says:
September 10th, 2008 at 2:36 pm

Whether male or female, pegging or SM-ing, this strip is definitely queerly, ambiguously inclusive.

Megh

Says:
September 10th, 2008 at 5:17 pm

I’m biased: I admit that I assumed it was a woman. But come to think of it, I’ve known my fair share of physics grad students, and some of them had very interesting and unpredictable hair (a former roommate actually works, or at least worked, at CERN, and he had a bit of an Alan Moore thing going on).

Ron

Says:
September 10th, 2008 at 9:25 pm

Sorry I’ve been silent so long, Lee. Too much time spent grading papers; not enough time spent using internets.

You should definitely read through the archives if you’re into science, math, computing, sci-fi, gaming, or otherwise nerd jokes. (Yeah, like you’d like any of those. Heh.) It’s pretty intense, and quite often “gay-friendly.”

Lee

Says:
September 11th, 2008 at 6:56 am

Megh - The thought of an Alan-Moore-lookalike physics grad students is more intriguing to me than I feel it ought to be… I got your CERN rap video via e-mail, and I’m putting it together with some other fun music stuff I’ve found lately for a post this weekend. :)

BTW, you sent me that Nagi Noda poodle video originally, right? Did you see the sad news about her passing away after a traffic accident last week? :(

Lee

Says:
September 11th, 2008 at 6:59 am

Ron - I can sympathize with that. I’m sure that what you’re grading is more complicated technically, but I remember straining for hours over handwritten work by students in first-year Russian back in the day. The mistakes are immediately obvious, but the penmanship, oh, the penmanship.

And the banality of the assignments! Page after page of the same drivel. I guess I have to take responsibility for that since I did the assigning too. :D

SemiColon

Says:
September 11th, 2008 at 11:10 pm

You know, I assumed it to be a woman, but the more I think about it, the more I think it’s deliberately ambiguous. I remember Randall Munroe posting in his blag about gender in his comic. He talked about often wanting to include same-sex couples in the strip. However, he felt that, as the comic is so minimal, it would make the homosexuality the focus, and pull away from the joke.