modeling-3
Original: modeling-3 on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Child: Dad, why does Mom just sit and stare sometimes?
Panel 2:
Father: She's doing linear algebra with large matrices to explore possibility-space.
Panel 3:
Father: See, when you were born, your mom became a kind of supercomputer devoted to calculating solutions for scenarios where you might die.
Panel 4:
Father: Within the first few years she'd worked out the obvious ones - fallen in a lake, house on fire, swallowed a quarter, car wreck, et cetera.
Panel 5 (mother's face shown as a dark, intense computer-like image with binary code):
Father: Now the supercomputer works on edge cases - sharks on fire, accidental time travel, turkeys with knives, plane hijacked by the Pope...
Panel 6:
Child: Is there a way to make her stop?
Panel 7:
Father: No, not possible. But I think we can use her to make money.
Panel 8:
Father: Honey, I'm worried the girl could be killed if I don't have an optimal stock-picking strategy this morning.
Panel 9:
Mother: Modeling. Modeling. Hold for binary output.
Panel 10:
Father: What?
Panel 11 (mother outputs streams of binary):
Mother: 01100010... 01110101... 01111001... 00100000... 01100111... 01100001... 01101101... 01100101... 01110011... 01110100... 01101111... 01101011
Panel 12:
Father (reading from a paper): This is brilliant.
Votey:
Mother (worried, head in hand): Uh oh, I need to solve high temperature plasma confinement before the plasma gets loose on the kids!
Child: Dad, why does Mom just sit and stare sometimes?
Panel 2:
Father: She's doing linear algebra with large matrices to explore possibility-space.
Panel 3:
Father: See, when you were born, your mom became a kind of supercomputer devoted to calculating solutions for scenarios where you might die.
Panel 4:
Father: Within the first few years she'd worked out the obvious ones - fallen in a lake, house on fire, swallowed a quarter, car wreck, et cetera.
Panel 5 (mother's face shown as a dark, intense computer-like image with binary code):
Father: Now the supercomputer works on edge cases - sharks on fire, accidental time travel, turkeys with knives, plane hijacked by the Pope...
Panel 6:
Child: Is there a way to make her stop?
Panel 7:
Father: No, not possible. But I think we can use her to make money.
Panel 8:
Father: Honey, I'm worried the girl could be killed if I don't have an optimal stock-picking strategy this morning.
Panel 9:
Mother: Modeling. Modeling. Hold for binary output.
Panel 10:
Father: What?
Panel 11 (mother outputs streams of binary):
Mother: 01100010... 01110101... 01111001... 00100000... 01100111... 01100001... 01101101... 01100101... 01110011... 01110100... 01101111... 01101011
Panel 12:
Father (reading from a paper): This is brilliant.
Votey:
Mother (worried, head in hand): Uh oh, I need to solve high temperature plasma confinement before the plasma gets loose on the kids!
Alt text
A multi-panel SMBC comic. A young child asks her father why Mom just sits and stares sometimes. The father, a red-haired man, explains that Mom is doing linear algebra with large matrices to explore possibility-space: when the child was born, Mom became a kind of supercomputer devoted to calculating solutions for scenarios where the child might die. In the first years she solved obvious ones (fallen in a lake, house on fire, swallowed a quarter, car wreck), and now works on edge cases - sharks on fire, accidental time travel, turkeys with knives, plane hijacked by the Pope. A dark, computer-like panel shows the mother's intense staring face overlaid with binary code. The child asks if there's a way to make her stop; the father says no, but they can use her to make money. He tells Mom he's worried the girl could be killed if he doesn't have an optimal stock-picking strategy this morning. Mom, eyes glazed, says 'Modeling. Modeling. Hold for binary output,' then emits long strings of 1s and 0s. Reading the output on a paper, the father declares 'This is brilliant.' In the aftercomic (votey), the worried mother holds her head and says 'Uh oh, I need to solve high temperature plasma confinement before the plasma gets loose on the kids!'
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.