2013-10-04
Explanation
In this comic, a father is talking to his toddler, asking "Hey lil''' monkey. Can you tell daddy how many fingers is this many fingers?" The child happily responds "two finga" in adorable baby-talk. The scene then cuts to "Later..." where the same father is at a social gathering bragging to other adults: "So my two-year-old calculated the pi-tau conversion constant."
The joke satirizes the well-known tendency of parents to wildly exaggerate their children'''s accomplishments. A toddler being able to count to two and say "two fingers" is a perfectly normal developmental milestone, but the father has somehow inflated this into a claim that his child performed an advanced mathematical calculation. The "pi-tau conversion constant" is a reference to the ongoing mathematical debate about whether tau (equal to 2*pi) is a more natural circle constant than pi. The conversion between the two is simply a factor of 2, which makes the father'''s boast even funnier -- the child literally just said the number two.
The votey panel shows a chalkboard with the formula for K(pi-tau) written as the square root of (e^(ln(tau/pi)))^2, which is an absurdly overcomplicated way to express the number 2. This adds another layer to the joke: even the "impressive" math, when you work through it, just reduces to 2.