Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

2011-12-19

2011-12-19 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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2011-12-19
Votey panel for 2011-12-19
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Explanation

This comic depicts two men noticing an attractive woman walking by. One nudges the other and says "Look at her ass." But instead of the typical crude response, the comic zooms in on the second man's sunglasses, revealing a thought bubble filled with advanced mathematics. He's mentally modeling her rear end as an ellipse and calculating its circumference using the seam of her pants as a reference point for the semiminor axis, complete with an elliptic integral formula.

The punchline comes when the first man rates her "an 8" (using the conventional attractiveness scale), and the mathematician responds "8.6. Why are we using decimeters?" -- revealing that his "rating" is actually a precise physical measurement of circumference rather than a subjective attractiveness score. The joke plays on the nerd stereotype of over-analyzing everything through a mathematical lens, turning what would normally be a crude catcalling scenario into an exercise in applied geometry.

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