gradient

A woman with curly brown hair and glasses pushed up on her head holds both hands up, palms out, looking nervously up at a man whose shoulder is in the foreground. She says, "Good morning. I have followed your chemical gradient in the direction of increasing intensity." A caption below reads: "Biologists are no longer welcome in my coffee shop." The joke: she has described tracking down the smell of coffee in stiff, technical biology terms (chemotaxis), as if she were a microorganism moving toward a stimulus. Votey: a rough line-drawn figure standing in a doorway declares, "I will procreate here, where resources are plentiful" - another over-literal biological framing, this time of deciding to settle down somewhere with good resources.