The dog on the left is such a strawman lol. Those who would say such a thing are few and far between. I know plenty of DMs and players who think the PCs' combat encounters should be challenging and even lethal.

I'm no academic, but it seems wrong to me that any field would require the use of a particular proprietary software in order to do one's homework assignments.

May Excel or SPSS be the best tool for the job? In many cases, sure! But students should be allowed to use whatever other software can also get the job done, as long as the software exports the assignment in a data format that the professor can reasonably ingest (e.g.: turning in a CSV file, which can be understood by many different kinds of software, not just Excel).

I understand professors have limited time to check homework and thus don't want to spend time learning how to do anything but open a single, specific filetype, but that's besides the point.

Derivatives started making more sense to me after I started learning their practical applications in physics class. d/dx was too abstract when learning it in precalc, but once physics introduced d/dt (change with respect to time t), it made derivative formulas feel more intuitive, like "velocity is the change in position with respect to time, which the derivative of position" and "acceleration is the change in velocity with respect to time, which is the derivative of velocity"

I think the point of the joke is that the yellow character has fundamentally misunderstood the statement provided by the blue character. They erroneously interpret, "All squares have four sides" as "Squares are the only shape with four sides" because they are not good at parsing rigid, scientific statements (since most people are not particularly scientifically literate).

I think OP's comics are meant to reflect the frustrations of conversing with people who simply don't understand what science/research/studies/etc actually say.

I definitely don't want to downplay a crisis, but I feel like I've been seeing headlines saying "all the bees are dying and we don't know why" every year for nearly 20 years now.

I'm no bee expert. Just seems to me, based on the headlines, bees would've been extinct 10 years ago.

Some cursory searching led me to Colony Collapse Disorder which seems to have no agreed-upon cause. It appears devastating losses to honey bee colonies started being reported around 1900. But it also mentions:

In 2024, the United States Census of Agriculture reported an all-time high in commercial honey bee hives (mostly in Texas), making them the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country.[38]

Link to the source cited there: https://archive.is/nfeb2

Apparently last year saw the largest honey bee populations in US history. Though they write that huge boom in honey bee population is a threat to other native pollinators, so I guess that presents its own unique problems.

Reminds me of this old gem:

It doesn't exactly unsettle me, but pondering the mind-boggling scale of celestial bodies and the cosmos can certainly be... humbling, I guess?

I had a co-worker a while back who couldn't talk about the great scale of the universe cause he'd get freaked out. It didn't come up much, but when it did, he'd be like, "Please stop, it's stressing me out" so we'd change the subject.

You don't have to thank me.

Edited in GIMP.

These "moderators" should be ashamed of themselves. They couldn't be more transparently treating one participant with kid gloves and letting him talk as much as he wants.

It's what I expected, but I am still disappointed.