Editing 316: Loud Sex

{{comic
| number    = 316
| date      = September 14, 2007
| title     = Loud Sex
| image     = loud_sex.png
| titletext = Spherical or parabolic reflectors would of course lead to aberrant behavior.
}}

==Explanation==
[[Cueball]]'s neighbor likes to engage in loud sex, which keeps Cueball awake at night, and she pretends to apologize for it as a way of bragging, so Cueball wants to get revenge. A simple way would be to inflict the same to her in retaliation by having loud sex when she is not. But Cueball adds a science nerd's touch to it, with an elliptical reflector dish. As shown on the schema, such a dish reflects the sound waves in a way that all waves originating from a specific point (the first focus of the ellipse the dish's shape is based on) converge after reflection to a specific other point (the second focus of the same ellipse).<ref group=note>That is actually the behaviour of an ''{{w|ellipsoid}}al'' reflector dish, or an elliptic one in two dimensions; but in 3D an elliptic one works similarly, only converging waves from a line to another line, instead of points.</ref> Cueball calibrates and installs his elliptical dish in such a way that all the sound coming from his loud girlfriend's head during sex is concentrated after reflection to his neighbor's head in her bed. This makes his loud sex far louder to her than hers was to him.

The title text makes a {{w|double entendre}}. A spherical mirror can cause the signal from across the reflector to not focus at the same spot -- {{w|spherical aberration}} -- but the play on words leads the reader to believe that aberrant sexual behavior would occur. (Parabolic mirrors do not suffer from this kind of aberration.)

<references/>

==Transcript==
:My neighbor has loud sex.
:[Cueball in bed, covering his head with a pillow. There is sound coming from outside.]
:''OHHHHH''
:''GASP''
:''AAAAAAA''
:Good for her and all, but it keeps me up at night.

:And she's so smug about it.
:[Cueball and neighbor coming out of their apartments.]
:Neighbor: Sorry, could you hear us last night? Oh, you know how it gets sometimes.
:Cueball: Not really...

:But tonight I finally get my revenge. Because now I have a loud girlfriend too.
:[Megan with "LOUD" and an arrow pointing to her.]

:And an elliptical reflector dish.
:[Diagram of an elliptical reflector dish.]

:[Cueball and Megan having sex, with the dish behind them reflecting the sex sound effects, in a way that they focus, through walls, on his neighbor sitting up in bed while holding her head in pain.]

==Trivia==
*This comic is referred to in [[368: Bass]], where [[Black Hat]] mentions in the title text that he is annoyed by "the guy upstairs with the loud girlfriend and the elliptical dish."
*Cueball doesn't have hair in the first and second panels, but he does in the last.
{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Hairy]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Sex]]
[[Category:Physics]]