Calvin and Hobbes Record Player - by Bill Watterson for June 05, 1990

This is full of win!

Love Calvin’s face in panel 4.

lmao

Dang!

I feel like that sum times.

He’s wrong, though. The record moves, not the needle, so the speed is constant.

The one time he says something factually accurate and Calvin is confused.

He’s not sleeping tonight.

This strip was reprinted in my high school geometry book.

Heck—railroad trains in motion have parts moving BACKWARDS at every instant!

Calvin.exe has stopped responding

Love this one! But it seems they never used any compact discs in this strip; just records and cassettes. To be fair, music CDs were still very new when the strip originally debuted in 1985, but by 1990, CDs were pretty much surpassing records as the main way to listen to music in the home (and cassettes still stayed around for quite a while.)

Love Calvin’s face in panel 4.

I suppose, each groove in a record player records a set amount of data, because of the way the information is stored. I would suggest, this means that as a record player plays a record, the grooves change as the record approaches the end and the needle travels the distance from the edge to the inner ring. As a result, the information imprinted on the edge is more “spread out” .. and the impressions near the center are different. The surface moving over the needle is moving faster as a record plays and approaches the center. This is one of the reasons why CD’s were so revolutionary, the recording medium didn’t change because the information was not a direct translation of sound, but a digital expression of it that was interpreted by the player.

No,no. the record doesn’t move, the earth spins around it.

In other words, the “point” on the outer circumference had to move faster just to keep up with the “point” on the inner circumference. See application in keirin.

Brain unblown. Sleeplessness averted.

I printed out this strip today to show to my 7-year-old granddaughter, who is learning about the satellite revolutions around the earth in her homeschool lessons.

I was sure Calvin’s dad was going to segue this into a lecture on how bicycle gears work.

Is the record moving, or are we?

I just noticed this strip has a specific title which also appears on the browser tab: “Calvin and Hobbes Record Player.” I wonder how many other dates do this.