605: Extrapolating

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Extrapolating
By the third trimester, there will be hundreds of babies inside you.
Title text: By the third trimester, there will be hundreds of babies inside you.

Explanation[edit]

This comic is a joke about the incorrect application of linear extrapolation. By connecting two points without any context, we can come up with incredibly funny and absurd results. Here, connecting a bride's number of spouses yesterday (zero) and today—her wedding day—(one) can result in a linear extrapolation to hundreds of spouses a year. Cueball presents the accumulation of husbands as though it were a phenomenon beyond the bride's ability to control. Using similar points for pregnancy (yesterday: no babies, today: one), we can get 200+ children inside a single person by the seventh month of pregnancy.

This is another comic in the infrequent My Hobby series.

This particular hobby has later been explored in 1007: Sustainable, 1204: Detail, 1281: Minifigs and 2892: Banana Prices.

Transcript[edit]

My Hobby: Extrapolating
[There is a graph. Time runs along the horizontal axis; Number of Husbands on the vertical graph. Yesterday and today are labeled in time, 0 and 1 in number of husbands. Points are plotted with 0 at yesterday, 1 at today. A straight line is fitted through them.]
[Cueball is holding a pointer to the graph, and looking at Megan wearing a bridal train and veil.]
Cueball: As you can see, by late next month you'll have over four dozen husbands.
Cueball: Better get a bulk rate on wedding cake.


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Discussion

If I post a comment on this page, this page will someday consume all the bandwidth of the world. Eh, what the heck.108.162.216.158 02:45, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Don't worry. That's not how bandwidth works. And even it was, its growth can also be extrapolated. flewk (talk) 09:59, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

What is we extrapolate at the time point just before she has one husband? 108.162.222.75 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Why does doing this with my paycheck / payday never work? Though it seems this is the logic bills follow. 108.162.216.166 19:25, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

This reminds me of the Steven Wright joke: "When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year. I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety."

This comic also demonstrates the problem with not using enough data points. If all the days of her life were to be plotted on the x-axis, then adding a value 1 on her wedding night could look like an outlier and would be ignored. Even if the one different data point was included, the line of best fit for extrapolation would still be very close to 0. Nutster (talk) 22:53, 7 March 2021 (UTC)