A web comic of romance,
sarcasm, math, and language.
what-if.xkcd.com
This week: What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?
Scene: A dark cave, profuse with spiderwebs, bones hanging in some of them. A stick figure in a long flowing robe holds up a lantern in one hand; the One Ring is dangling from a necklace in the other. In a large web before the figure, presumably written by the spider, are the words, “SOME PIG.”
Hover text: My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: “Charlotte’s Web is a children’s novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.
Warning: This comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).
Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook