915: Connoisseur

2014-01-08T20:26:03Z

108.162.238.7: /* Explanation */ "jus" is not the appropriate word; "just" is

{{comic
| number = 915
| date = June 22, 2011
| title = Connoisseur
| image = connoisseur.png
| titletext = Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.
}}

==Explanation==
[[White Hat]] is fond of good wine, and he can
distinguish slight differences in different types of wine.
On the other hand, [[Cueball]] doesn't mind a kind of wine or another,
all of them taste the same for him.
When White Hat tells Cueball that he should pay more attention
to types of wine, Cueball answers that wine is not different than
anything else in this respect, and chooses pictures of
{{w|Joe Biden}}, {{w|Vice President of the United States}},
eating a sandwich as an example.

In the last panel, apparently White Hat and Cueball are actually
running an experiment to see if people will concentrate on
slight differences among pictures of Joe Biden eating a sandwich,
just in the same way that White Hat concentrates on
slight differences among kinds of wine.
The result of the experiment is clearly going to Cueball's side.

The title text present 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.

==Transcript==
:[White Hat is standing with Cueball. They each hold a wine glass in one hand, White Hat is holding a bottle of wine in the other. He looks at the label.]
:White Hat: How do you stand this cheap wine?
:Cueball: Wine all tastes the same to me.

:[Close-up of White Hat.]
:White Hat: You've just never had ''good'' wine. If you paid more attention, you'd realize there's a whole world here.

:[Close-up on the other man, who spreads his arms, sloshing his wine slightly.]
:Cueball: But that's true of ''anything!'' Wine, house music, fonts, ants, Wikipedia signatures, Canadian surrealist porn—
:Cueball: Spend enough time with any of them and you'll become a snobby connoisseur.

:[This panel has no border and is next to but aligned further down than the first three panels.]
:[The full frame of the two characters again. White Hat now has the bottle at his side.]
:White Hat: But some things do have more depth than others.
:Cueball: If you locked people in a box for a year with 500 still frames of Joe Biden eating a sandwich, by the end they'd be adamant that some were great and some were terrible.
:White Hat: You're exaggerating.
:Cueball: Oh yeah?

:[This panel is below the others, and is indented about a third of the way to the right. It is wide.]
:A YEAR LATER:
:[A box. Voices emanate from inside.]
:Voice #1: Sure, most closed-mouth frames are boring, but in #415, the way the man's jaw frames the mayo on his hand is pure perfection, and—
:Voice #2: What a surprise- ''you'' praising a mayo frame. Listening to you, I'd think there was nothing else in The Sandwich. Frankly, the light hitting J.B.'s collar through the lettuce would put #242 in my top ten even if he had ''no'' mayo on his hand at ''all''.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring White Hat]]
[[Category:Politics]]

Talk:810: Constructive

2013-11-12T12:08:27Z

108.162.238.7:

I know just the guy to create this system. I'm going to PM him now :D {{unsigned ip|184.11.73.88}}

No guys, if spammers invent a bot which can give constructive comments, that will be an ***AI***, i.e. a major breakthrough in itself. {{unsigned ip|173.245.53.200}}

Mission. A-Fucking. Complished.

explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

915: Connoisseur

Talk:810: Constructive