optimal

A purple-toned comic panel shows a woman with long dark hair sitting at a table, holding hands with a man who has reddish hair and glasses. With a worried look she tells him: "Lately when we make love, there's a lot of touching and kissing and all that, but I never feel like you're treating sex as an optimization problem with a narrow set of easily-quantified parameters you're trying to maximize. Is... something wrong?" A caption beneath reads: "Engineers have the saddest breakups." The joke flips the usual relationship complaint: she misses being treated like an engineering optimization problem. Votey (aftercomic): a crudely sketched, anguished face confesses, "I've been out... exploring my Pareto frontier" -- an engineer's version of cheating, framed as multi-objective optimization.