Last week’s story arc was a lot of fun for me. I hope you enjoyed it! A few notes for the more pedantic readers:
- In Part 2, Elaine and Dr. Knuth are not competing to calculate the time-complexity of a known algorithm. They’re each trying to develop an algorithm to solve a particular problem. His “lower bound” comment is referring to his lower bound on how fast the problem can be solved (akin to saying “the lower bound on comparison sorts is n log n”), and she proves him wrong with her counterexample.
- In the interest of time-continuity, panel #2 in the same strip is a montage showing the two children at different times. Bobby is quite a bit younger than Elaine (although he doesn’t strictly have to be — “drop table” has been in the SQL standard since at least the start of the 90’s).
- Nick Oliver writes in to suggest that Elaine should have played in the band Perl Jam.
- By 2002, Richard Stallman had grown frustrated with the direction of the blogosphere’s construction. He detached his airship and took it to parts unknown.
- Upside-Down-Ternet is here. It seems to me that you could do an awful lot of pranks with it — turning everything upside down is just the beginning.
If you want to order a shirt for Christmas, you may want to do it soon. We can guarantee Christmas delivery to the US if you order by December 7th (and probably for the week after that) but we may go out of stock in some shirts/sizes before that.
xkcd 