yeats
Original: yeats on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1: A man drawn to resemble W.B. Yeats (round glasses, bow tie) speaks.
Narration (top): "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart;"
Yeats (speech bubble): "...but then probably regress to the mean."
Caption (below panel): Shortly after William Butler Yeats' first stats class.
Votey: The same Yeats character, looking thoughtful.
Text: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst say 'it was a black swan.'"
Narration (top): "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart;"
Yeats (speech bubble): "...but then probably regress to the mean."
Caption (below panel): Shortly after William Butler Yeats' first stats class.
Votey: The same Yeats character, looking thoughtful.
Text: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst say 'it was a black swan.'"
Alt text
A comic captioned "Shortly after William Butler Yeats' first stats class." A man drawn as the poet Yeats solemnly recites the opening lines of his poem 'The Second Coming' — about a falcon that cannot hear the falconer and things falling apart — but then swerves into a statistics punchline, saying the situation will "probably regress to the mean." In the bonus panel, another grand line of the poem is rewritten so that instead of the worst being full of passionate intensity, the worst now blame "a black swan" — a statistics term for a rare unpredictable event. The joke pairs Yeats's portentous apocalyptic verse with dry statistical concepts.
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.