Eye of the beholder

The other day, this comic was posted on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Would you believe those crazy conservatives at the National Organization for Marriage — those blinkered bozos who think letting gays marry will destroy the fabric of society — posted it on their forums?

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It’s rather strange — the comic shows a bunch of kids who are aghast at the weird old fashioned way babies used to be made. The humor in it is that you have to realize that they aren’t at all horrified by their technology, but find the old ways incomprehensible. It’s actually mocking the rigid antiques, but NOM just thought it was saying something awful about future developments. Today’s comic is on the same theme.

Zach Weiner handled it beautifully. It turns out the NOMers were hot-linking the image, making it easy for the SMBC crew to swap in a new image promoting equality, so the NOMers discovered a liberal message from Thomas Jefferson and a rainbow tainting their blog.

I’m smarter than that. I am not hot-linking the image at all, so Weiner won’t be able to change it on me when he discovers that I have a very different interpretation of his cartoon.

It’s obvious. The cartoon is telling us that in the future, scientists will resurrect, or build robot duplicates of, Isaac Asimov to teach our children about sex ed. I, for one, welcome our Asimovian sex instructors, and am pleased that Zach Weiner won’t be able to modify the illustration above to praise Arthur C. Clarke, instead. Neener neener.

How homeopathy works

Follow this link to the amusingly bizarre webcomic about homeopathy behind it. I’ll just share with you the story behind the artwork:

So this might seem to make very little sense at all. Fair enough, it’s sort of supposed to. But this did actually happen to me at work — A guy came in to buy some homeopathic tablets, and was quite insistent that I not let them touch the large tub of ice-cream that he was also purchasing. Assuming that it had something to do with astronomically minute quantities of poison that such remedies are reputed to contain (they don’t, by the by — it is entirely water,) I assured him that there was no threat of contamination.

He then proceeded to explain to me, as a primary school teacher would an infant, that homeopathy works due to molecular vibration. Being a mere layman, I will try to explain this process to the best of my limited ability. The water molecules vibrate with the same resonance as the poisons that give them their efficacy. This in turn causes human molecules to vibrate upon ingestion, curing one’s ills. Close contact with the tub of ice-cream will cause the vibrations to shift to the new medium, resulting in an ineffective medicine.

The comic does not explain the specific details of homeopathy — it’s more like an artistic rendering of the spirit of homeopathy. And like all great art, it reveals the deeper truth. In this case, that homeopathy is gullet-gibbering, brain-blitzing insanity that has gone beyond evidence into the realm of childish delusions.