2012-10-31
Explanation
This comic is titled "Cosmology Does Weird Things to Your Brain" and shows a single-panel scene where a woman tells someone "Well, today sucked." When asked "Why?", she responds: "I stepped in dog shit, AND the universe will be entropic and dead infinitely longer than it was warm and life-bearing." The joke is that studying cosmology has so warped her perspective that she treats a minor everyday annoyance (stepping in dog poop) and the heat death of the universe as equally valid reasons for having a bad day, casually lumping them together in one complaint.
The humor captures a real phenomenon among people who study cosmology or astrophysics: the unsettling knowledge that on cosmic timescales, the universe will spend an incomprehensibly longer period as a cold, dead, maximum-entropy void than it will spend in its current life-friendly state. This existentially devastating fact, once internalized, has a way of creeping into everyday thoughts and making ordinary complaints feel both trivially small and cosmically justified at the same time.
The votey panel provides a perfect comedic capper: the woman adds, about the dog poop, "It got ALL over my shoe" -- emphasizing the mundane complaint with dramatic intensity, as if the shoe situation is genuinely competing with universal heat death for her attention. The juxtaposition underscores the comic's central joke about the cognitive dissonance of holding both cosmic and pedestrian concerns in one's head simultaneously.