10/9/09 PHD comic: 'Softball, the thrilling conclusion'

[Greg Bernhardt]

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com
<imgsrc="http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd100909s.gif" border="0" align="top"> title: "Softball, the thrilling conclusion" - originally published 10/9/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE! (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php)




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[Borek]

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd100909s.gif

[DaveC426913]

I don't get it.

I get neither the strip nor the reason it's been posted.

Can I report this Greg guy?

[Office_Shredder]

The grad students are intentionally trying to lose to avoid humiliating their professors, who for some reason take this game semi-seriously. The one guy accidentally wins the game at the end, so the professors are mad that they lost, and the grad students are mad that they won. Lost in the conversation is the decay of the human spirit and the positive creative energy in the form of a competitive environment for which sports was developed in the first place. Phd students are no better than the AI on your Madden '10 game set to easy mode, responding solely to the in-game input of the professor's team and programmed to ensure a loss, ensuring a further generation of sheeple!

Maybe. I'm not really sure

[DaveC426913]

The grad students are intentionally trying to lose to avoid humiliating their professors, who for some reason take this game semi-seriously. The one guy accidentally wins the game at the end, so the professors are mad that they lost, and the grad students are mad that they won.


No way. There's no way that 4 panel toon is trying to communicate all that.

I guess you have to be a regular follower.

[Office_Shredder]

You have to apply a heuristics of suspicion coupled with an in depth analysis of the author's previous works and experiences.

In `1994 Jorge led the high school intramural basketball team to a stunning 42-41 upset over the teacher's saturday afternoon get-together team, captained by his math teacher. Two weeks earlier Jorge had failed a test in that very same teacher's class, but Jorge is a proud and historically revisionist man, so claims he won the basketball game and then failed the test the next week.

[BobG]

No way. There's no way that 4 panel toon is trying to communicate all that.


Are you blind?! There's a fifth "panel" that extends along the bottom that's essential to understanding the entire strip.

The strip is based on the real-life experiences of Jorge Cham.

It should be noted that prior to scoring the winning run in the student-faculty game, Cham published such papers as "Fast and Robust: Hexapedal Robots via Shape Deposition Manufacturing" and "Stride Period Adaptation for a Biomimetic Running Hexapod"

Since the winning the game, Cham was forced to "graduate" and has been unemployed since 2005 (unless you can call publishing a comic strip actual employment). His publications since "graduation" have included "An Analysis of Sketching Skill ....." and "Dynamic Stability of Open-loop Hopping".

[DaveC426913]

Are you blind?! There's a fifth "panel" that extends along the bottom that's essential to understanding the entire strip.

The strip is based on the real-life experiences of Jorge Cham.

It should be noted that prior to scoring the winning run in the student-faculty game, Cham published such papers as "Fast and Robust: Hexapedal Robots via Shape Deposition Manufacturing" and "Stride Period Adaptation for a Biomimetic Running Hexapod"

Since the winning the game, Cham was forced to "graduate" and has been unemployed since 2005 (unless you can call publishing a comic strip actual employment). His publications since "graduation" have included "An Analysis of Sketching Skill ....." and "Dynamic Stability of Open-loop Hopping".

So I'm callin' this an in in in joke.

[seycyrus]

So I'm callin' this an in in in joke.

What's going on here? Greg has been posting PhD comics for some time now.