2010-09-03
Explanation
This comic follows a woman who realizes she is the only woman in her computer science department and dreads the inevitable romantic attention from her male peers. When someone immediately asks, "Wanna get a coffee?!" she mentally invokes "import nerdSort" -- framing her approach to dealing with suitors as a programming problem. The comic then visualizes a merge sort algorithm being applied to photographs of the men, sorting them from least to most attractive through successive comparisons and merges.
After completing her sort, she announces which one she has selected using her merge sort. A male peer objects: "Merge sort? For only five parameters? Why didn't you use insertion sort?" The crowd erupts in laughter and someone says, "Women are adorable." The final panel, labeled "Later...," reveals that the woman is now dating a guy in the history department, with her former CS peers lamenting, "But they won't appreciate her!" The comic skewers multiple aspects of nerd culture: the gender imbalance in CS, the tendency to over-engineer solutions to simple problems, the condescension women face in technical fields, and the oblivious entitlement of men who assume a woman in their field owes them romantic consideration.