2013-09-29
Original: 2013-09-29 on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Professor (lecturing, in a suit): According to the fundamental law of media graph construction, any two things that look correlated on a graph are causally related in real life.
Panel 2:
Professor: It follows that any two things can be made to have a causal relation by naming two functions on one graph with two X-and-Y axes and scaling the X-axis until they kinda look like each other.
Panel 3:
Professor (at a chalkboard with the equation "A = (c × k) B"): By this means, any two trends can be forced into causal relation for the purposes of an article, book, or speech.
Panel 4:
Student (a woman in a classroom audience): Why do you think people trust the news less than ever?
Panel 5:
Professor (pointing at a chalkboard graph; axes labeled "TRUST," "TIME," and "PENG..." with two declining curves): According to this graph, penguins are at fault.
Votey:
Caption: Old man Weinersmith shakes his cane at you, media!
(A grumpy old man with wild hair and a mustache.)
Professor (lecturing, in a suit): According to the fundamental law of media graph construction, any two things that look correlated on a graph are causally related in real life.
Panel 2:
Professor: It follows that any two things can be made to have a causal relation by naming two functions on one graph with two X-and-Y axes and scaling the X-axis until they kinda look like each other.
Panel 3:
Professor (at a chalkboard with the equation "A = (c × k) B"): By this means, any two trends can be forced into causal relation for the purposes of an article, book, or speech.
Panel 4:
Student (a woman in a classroom audience): Why do you think people trust the news less than ever?
Panel 5:
Professor (pointing at a chalkboard graph; axes labeled "TRUST," "TIME," and "PENG..." with two declining curves): According to this graph, penguins are at fault.
Votey:
Caption: Old man Weinersmith shakes his cane at you, media!
(A grumpy old man with wild hair and a mustache.)
Alt text
A five-panel SMBC comic satirizing media use of misleading graphs. A bespectacled professor in a suit lectures: "According to the fundamental law of media graph construction, any two things that look correlated on a graph are causally related in real life." He continues that any two things can be made causally related by naming two functions on one graph with separate X-and-Y axes and scaling the X-axis until the curves look alike, so any two trends "can be forced into causal relation for the purposes of an article, book, or speech" — shown writing the equation "A = (c × k)B" on a chalkboard. A student in the audience asks, "Why do you think people trust the news less than ever?" In the final panel the professor points at a chalkboard graph with declining curves labeled TRUST and TIME (and a partial label PENG...) and concludes, "According to this graph, penguins are at fault." Votey panel: a grumpy old man with wild hair and mustache, with the caption "Old man Weinersmith shakes his cane at you, media!"
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.