2011-09-15
Explanation
A woman is seen making a pinhole with her finger and peering through it. When asked what she is doing, she explains the "pinhole trick" -- by making a tiny opening with your finger and looking through it, you eliminate light that does not hit your pupil at a 90-degree angle, allowing you to see things clearly even without glasses. She then asks if the other person knows how you cannot focus on your own nose since it is inside your focal length.
The two of them begin demonstrating these optical tricks to each other, making odd gestures with their hands near their eyes. Soon, the entire room of people at what appears to be a party is doing the same thing -- everyone is squinting through pinholes and trying to focus on their own noses. The final panel reveals a flashback: a woman had asked her friend to "distract 23 nerds for half an hour" so she could steal a giant laser from the physics department.
The humor lies in the idea that sharing a cool physics fact is the perfect nerd bait. The pinhole trick is a real and genuinely interesting optical phenomenon, and the comic plays on the stereotype that scientifically minded people are so unable to resist a neat demonstration that they can be completely sidetracked from everything else. The elaborate heist subplot in the final panel recontextualizes the entire comic as a calculated distraction operation.