Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for May 16, 2010

Lassie, is Timmy in there?

At least its not gushing oil or lava.

wishing well diplomacy …

No one in China tosses coins in wells or fountains - if they did all the beggars would drown.

Well, well. This is a very deep subject.

Actually, for the United States, if you go straight through the earth, you wind up just south of Australia, in the water.

There is some Freshman physics I somehow forgot, that says this is impossible. Was it gravity? Or some old joke that money doesn’t go so far? Currency exchange rate? Greenspan floating the dollar? Greasing the Euro before throwing it down a hole?I can’t remember. A pretty redhead sat before me.

What I’m seeing (physics possibilities aside) is each (to humor the illusion, the Chinese chap is following the same superstition) is throwing his coin in the well, and out pops - the other’s coin a moment later.

OK, so it would take a while to fall 4000 miles, accelerating all the way to the center, then *de*-celerating the rest of the way up the other 4000 mile half of the trip.

And the second law of thermodynamics (“you can’t even break even”) says it wouldn’t quite make it, and would zip back and forth until it finally settled at rest in the middle. They’d both lose their coins.

Quite aside from drilling a well through the molten core of Earth, and location of appropriate antipodes (Argentina and China?) See Antipodes Map.

But it’s still a cute use of the cliche.

Why does everyone here have to overthink the plumbing?

pbarnrob - you forgot to add the every changing effects of the magnetic flux lines on the metal coins, combine with the principals of hot air rising in a chimney. Add a bit of centrifugal force because of the rotation of the earth and the orbital mechanics involved with planet going around the sun. If you also add in effects of the the dark matter in the middle and apply its similarities to the human head, the result are Glowingly Reasonable Intellectual Non Sequiturs (GRINS)

Gees Wiley, did you know all this science before doing this strip?

What’s the exchange rate??

very happy I failed physics but passed Humor Appreciation 101 with a very strong A

ImaginaryFriend: Thank you! You da Man. (Er, um, Politically Correct Gender-Neutral Referent.)

try to find one that comes even close to obeying the laws of physics

…or human anatomy. Who goes thru life with noses as big as Darryl McPherson (Baby Blues)?

As I scrolled down, I thought this would be something about the Gulf Coast oil spill

ITS JUST A COMIC FOR CRYIN OUT LOUD. GET A LIFE

ITS JUST A COMIC FOR CRYIN OUT LOUD. GET A LIFE

Once again showing how men aren’t all that observant! Otherwise one would think they would start to wonder why their coin sometimes comes back as foreign. Of course, I might be too distracted by the fact that a coin keeps popping up at me as well :)

That was worth saying twice, sidl

I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed both the comic and pbarnrob’s commentary. And I have bookmarked the antipodes map. Haven’t you always wondered exactly where you’d come out if you could dig a hole “to China?”

go read all the people crying about old uncle Walt getting ready to ship off to the comic hereafter. methinks that the folks that read gasoline alley attach a bit too much reality to it and get a bit too much emotionally attached to the characters.

now… of Joe Cobb and his new partner start hitting it off… that would be some story line… poor Marcy…

Time to remind everybody of the laws of cartoon physics. They’re completely separate from serious physics. Google them, or just look at http://remarque.org/~doug/cartoon-physics.html

Thus proving the saying “All’s well that ends well.”

I just read ‘em to be amused…great job Wiley! To the rest of you….it’s a comic…things that I read with a sense of adventure when i was growing up…obviously too many of you did just that….you grew up.

Nice website dtut. I love it! Thanks! But here’s one for those of you who did make it through Physics 101. If potential energy due to height will equal the kinetic energy of the coin at Earth’s center then, why won’t that velocity carry it all the way to China or Australia or wherever?

The foundation of Geopolitics!

Wiley, you’re right. No one reads science for laughs, but I used to read “Physical Chemistry” when I had trouble falling asleep.

As always Mr. Miller; your humor and art is superlative. Very cool link pbarnrob……………..

Has everybody forgotten the Woozle effect. The frump-van-hinky phenomena and snorts-a-bean hypothesis?

Any one of these could easily throw you calculations off by at least 32.66 maxawinkies.

A big agree cfimeiatpap !

What a great link … thanks pbarnrob !

Why don’t they echo at the wishing well through between USA and China loud enough?

Wiley, you brought this upon yourself for drawing cartoons during science classes.

So it’s true then! IF you dig far enough you get to China! LOL!

I can attest to the accuracy of this particular because I just went out into the yard and dug such a well, found a two-bit piece and chucked it down the well and just as Wiley has theorized, out popped a five jiao.

Not too bad return on the investment except that daggone hole cost me a pretty penny to put in. Maybe if they keep it up, I can get my sunk cost back…

“Let’s see… Math… Physics… Oh, look! There’s a squirrel outside my window!”

Son of a gun! Good thing my digging to China as a young boy was never actually completed - I would have come up in the Indian Ocean, NOT China. Drowned! Whew! Close call - thanks, pbarnrob. (And thank YOU, Wiley - another good one.)

(I believe I only ever got down about two feet - digging to what I THOUGHT was China was hard work…and my dad was upset about his yard)

All I can say is, “Hahaha!” It’s just plain funny to think about!

Really he should hold on to the yuan and keep throwing soon to be valueless U.S currency down the hole. Which is where we’ve been throwing it for years…

It looks like the exchange rate is about a thousand miles a second.

“It’s OK. They’re speaking Chinese.”

My tame native Chinese speaker informs me that it reads something like “Chinese air”. Making it a contender for the most surreal punchline of the year in a mainstream comic strip.

@ baslimthebegger a colleague travelling in China was upset by spitting all round him so when he felt a tickle in his sinuses carefully took out his hanky, blew his nose thoroughly and put it back in his pocket.

Immediately, everyone round him recoiled in horror - ‘was he really going to keep THAT in his pocket?’

@Poindexter – I don’t know if you’re seriously asking or just testing us. (Your bio says you teach high school physics.) Baslim’s post contains the answer. In case you didn’t spot it, you are right in a perfect world. But the world is not perfect. Consider:

Air resistance would remove enough energy (thus velocity) from the coin that it would not make it up to the surface on the other side. That’s the primary and most obvious reason. But there are other things. Any significant difference in altitude at the two ends would make one direction or the other fail. And I don’t know (and won’t bother to figure out) whether the earth’s rotation would have the coin bouncing off the walls of the hole. Plus the fact that it would have to be directly through the center of the earth – which means it isn’t USA to China.

you also have to consider that the center of the earth is probably molten metal, so if you dug down deep enough your shovel and whatever is keeping the sides of the hole from collapsing would melt…

you might want to look up Project Mohole just for laughs…

where’s the Mon 17 comix?

while i wait for TODAY’S COMIC (hint)… a shaft 3 feet in diameter through (mean average) 7926 miles of earth.. you would have a pile of over 73 million cubic yards of fill. Now if you calculate that the material closer to the core would be denser and expand proportionately with the decrease in applied gravity and mantle pressure… need funnies now! Daaaanae…

Deja Vu…first Housebroken doesn’t update, now this..hope this isn’t some kind of trend..

jsprat - I came up with about 10 million cubic yards. Although the pressures deep in the earth are extreme, I don’t think they’d compress solids to a density much greater than that at sea level…

zev.farkas, who cares we have a Monday comic!

Hey, yeah, the physics wouldn’t work, and the other end would be in the ocean, not in China. But it’s still funny.

Suspend that disbelief! I know you can, if you put your mind to it!