2013-06-08

A four-panel SMBC comic. Panel 1: a brown-haired student sits across from a woman and says, "I'm not doing well on this exam. How about you show me the answer first, and I tell you why it was the answer, and then grade myself?" The woman replies, "Maybe you're not cut out for physics. May I make a recommendation?" Panel 2: the student walks down a hall carrying a folder, passing a wall sign that reads "ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT." A caption reads "LATER..." Panel 3: the student sits across a desk from a male professor, holding out a paper, and says, "I figured out a justification for pre-emptive war." The professor notes, "This assumes time and money are infinite as value of life goes to zero," the student says "Let me see," and the professor adds, "Yeah, it really simplifies things." Panel 4: the student walks down a hall again, this time passing a wall sign reading "PHYSICS DEPARTMENT" — the joke being that economics' willingness to assume away inconvenient values (like the value of human life) is what physics rejected her for. Votey (aftercomic): a hand-drawn panel shows the equation "dead(∀people) = True as t → ∞," i.e. for all people, dead equals true as time goes to infinity — the morbid economics-style approximation that everyone is eventually dead.