2013-01-15
Explanation
This comic is formatted as a physics exam answer rather than a traditional comic strip. The problem asks students to calculate when a 5-kilogram ball, shot horizontally at 20 meters per second from a height of 10 meters and losing 1 joule on each bounce, will stop bouncing -- with the stipulation to "assume no air resistance."
The student'''s answer takes the "no air resistance" assumption to its horrifying logical extreme. If there is no air, the student reasons, every living thing on Earth'''s surface would die. The surface would therefore be "littered with the bodies of the dead," and the ball would simply come to a halt when it hits "the first still-warm husk of a snuffed-out life it encounters." The student then sets up the standard kinematic equation to calculate when the ball first hits the ground (about 1.4 seconds), since it would stop on that first impact with a corpse rather than bouncing at all. The answer ends with the deadpan moral judgment: "You monster" -- directed at the professor who cavalierly assumed away the atmosphere.
The votey shows a cartoonist character saying "that was easier to draw than a graph joke!" while another character responds with an expletive, breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge that Weinersmith chose this exam-paper format partly because it required less illustration work than his usual graph-based humor.