Editing 915: Connoisseur

[[White Hat]] is fond of good {{w|wine}}, and he can probably distinguish slight differences in different types of wine, perhaps being the type that attends {{w|wine tasting}} parties. He doesn't like the cheap wine that Cueball has served for him (implying a cheap wine cannot be a good one, an opinion held by stereotypical wine snobs), looking with disgust at the label of the offending bottle.  

On the other hand, [[Cueball]] doesn't have a preference; all of them taste the same for him, so presumably he gets the cheaper ones. White Hat tells Cueball that if he just tried some really good wine and paid more attention he would discover a whole new world.

Cueball's answer is the main message of the comic. He says that wine is no different from anything else in this respect, and makes a list starting with the wine but then going past {{w|house music}}, {{w|fonts}}, {{w|ants}}, ending with {{w|Wikipedia:Signatures|Wikipedia signatures}} and {{w|Canadian}} {{w|surrealist}} {{w|porn}}. His point being if you spend enough time focusing on any one subject, then you'll become a snobby '''{{w|connoisseur}}''' on that topic.  

White Hat tries to defend wine by saying that some things have more depth than others (wine being among them), but Cueball challenges him on this by choosing something as obscure as 500 pictures of {{w|Joe Biden}}, then {{w|Vice President of the United States}} under {{w|Barack Obama}}, eating a sandwich as an example. He claims that if people were locked up in a box with those pictures for a year, they would end up being connoisseurs with the same vehemence regarding the best picture as wine tasters can be about the best wine.

 

 

The title text presents the same idea in a different wording. The "scale of our brains" refers to a concept similar to Richard Dawkins' {{w|Middle World}}, where things too small (say, smaller than the point of a pin) or too big (bigger than what we can see from a mountaintop) are just out of our comprehension, so the things our brains understand must be neither too small nor too big, i.e. the "middle world".

 

However, the title text goes further in this idea: When we find things too big (like the distance to the Moon), we shrink it so that it fits into the "middle world" we're used to. Conversely, when we find things too small (say, a mote of dust), we expand it for the same reason. In a quite similar way, if all we have is pictures of Joe Biden eating a sandwich, we "resize" that subject so that we can fill books with the details about the pictures.

*Specialized interests and the people involved in them are used again, with ants being the subject of [[1610: Fire Ants]],  typefaces in [[590: Papyrus]] and [[736: Cemetery]], plastic straws in [[1095: Crazy Straws]], porn-video quality in [[598: Porn]], and common colds in [[2535: Common Cold Viruses]].

 

*In [[1534: Beer]], Cueball also argue slight differences in alcohol brands don't make much difference (in 915 "Wine all tastes the same to me."; in 1534, "maybe we should just admit that all beer tastes kind of bad and everyone's just pretending?") and people just pretend due to social pressure.