Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for May 16, 2010

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    Pacejv  over 14 years ago

    Lassie, is Timmy in there?

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    landshark67  over 14 years ago

    At least its not gushing oil or lava.

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    Faolain  over 14 years ago

    wishing well diplomacy …

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    ejcapulet  over 14 years ago

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

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    GROG Premium Member over 14 years ago

    Well, well. This is a very deep subject.

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    gjsjr41  over 14 years ago

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

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    lewisbower  over 14 years ago

    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.

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    pbarnrob  over 14 years ago

    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.

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    FlashfyreSP  over 14 years ago

    Why does everyone here have to overthink the plumbing?

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  10. Harvey
    ImaginaryFriend  over 14 years ago

    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)

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  11. Danae
    Wiley creator over 14 years ago

    @Kevin McFerren-

    Because they’re hoping to impress everyone with how smart they are, only to confirm the opposite by trying to apply physics to a cartoon. Look at every cartoon in today’s comics section and try to find one that comes even close to obeying the laws of physics. There’s a reason no one reads science text books for laughs.

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    Trebor39  over 14 years ago

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

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    Yukoneric  over 14 years ago

    What’s the exchange rate??

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    DBjorn  over 14 years ago

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

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    peter0423  over 14 years ago

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

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    YatInExile  over 14 years ago

    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

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    sidl  over 14 years ago

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

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    sidl  over 14 years ago

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

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    vexatron1984  over 14 years ago

    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 :)

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    GROG Premium Member over 14 years ago

    That was worth saying twice, sidl

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    Matthew Edwards Premium Member over 14 years ago

    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?”

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    comic-reader  over 14 years ago

    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…

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    dtut  over 14 years ago

    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

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    cleokaya  over 14 years ago

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

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    starman04  over 14 years ago

    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.

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  26. Poindexter
    JTGAM  over 14 years ago

    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?

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    rkorny  over 14 years ago

    The foundation of Geopolitics!

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    ottod Premium Member over 14 years ago

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

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    cfimeiatpap  over 14 years ago

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

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    poohbear8192  over 14 years ago

    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.

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    kirbey  over 14 years ago

    A big agree cfimeiatpap !

    What a great link … thanks pbarnrob !

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    Wildmustang1262  over 14 years ago

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

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    lazygrazer  over 14 years ago

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

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    Dry and Dusty Premium Member over 14 years ago

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

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  35. Danae
    Wiley creator over 14 years ago

    Guilty as charged, grazer. There was also algebra, history, english…. Ok, pretty much everything except art class.

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    T Gabriel Premium Member over 14 years ago

    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…

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    artybee  over 14 years ago

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

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    Ushindi  over 14 years ago

    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)

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    Barbaratoo  over 14 years ago

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

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    Joseph Krois  over 14 years ago

    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…

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    Coyoty Premium Member over 14 years ago

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

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    darat  over 14 years ago

    “It’s OK. They’re speaking Chinese.”

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    digitig  over 14 years ago

    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.

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    Faolain  over 14 years ago

    @ 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?’

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    dtut  over 14 years ago

    @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.

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    zev.farkas  over 14 years ago

    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…

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    shmlss  over 14 years ago

    where’s the Mon 17 comix?

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    jsprat  over 14 years ago

    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…

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    DevXIII  over 14 years ago

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

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    zev.farkas  over 14 years ago

    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…

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    jsprat  over 14 years ago

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

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    bmonk  over 14 years ago

    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!

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