3 – Done to death

The originality of my scripts sometimes manages to stagger even my very self. Seriously, simply lay your eyes upon the latest strip. It has everything: the loser that can’t get a date, his sister, the guy that’s WITH the loser’s sister and coincidentally also the loser’s personal bully, literal interpretation of what is obviously an overused encouraging expression everyone has heard of, violent rejection, twin Asian girls, Darth Vader, Star Wars quotes, a “what?” joke and a personally-devised item called “That joke that comes after a character saying what and someone smacks him over the head and that’s pretty much the punchline”. Truly amazing. I have made this strip into a monument of human creativity and I commend myself for it.

Of course, I hardly think it’s fair that while Silv gets to be thrown around and smacked Loosh gets to leave with two Japanese girls. Twins, even. The implications of this are immeasurable. Allow me to explain:

Cute girl: 10 hotness points

Hot girl: An additional 50 hotness points

Asian girl: 200 hot points

Twins: Fuck, I don’t even know this one. It goes into overflow even for the human mind’s infinite ability to conceive numbers. Adding the twins yields an exponential growth in hawt. An equation trying to calculate the combined hotness of these factors would defy the very foundations of mathematics. The consequences could be catastrophic:

Yes, I’m afraid so. Division by zero. Game over. Luckily, this will never happen because the events depicted in today’s strip are purely fictional and will never come to pass. I know this because I bet Loosh doesn’t know shit about quadric surfaces in reality. A disaster has been narrowly averted and the delicate fabric of the Universe is once more preserved and safe from falling into eternal Chaos.

Oh, by the way…we have a Cast of Characters page now. It’ll be updated whenever new characters are introduced.

Recent Search Engine Queries include “velociraptor xkcd” and “velociraptor comics”. You know…I’m starting to feel sort of guilty. We’re leeching a lot of traffic that’s supposed to go to xkcd.

Well, seeing how the destruction of the known Universe has been prevented I guess we can all go back to having a very generic day. Don’t divide by zero.

~Silverbolt

 

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Once again I am forced to prove Silverbolt wrong. In mathematics, a quadric, or quadric surface, is any D-dimensional hypersurface defined as the locus of zeros of a quadratic polynomial. In coordinates , the general quadric is defined by the algebraic equation where Q is a (D + 1)-dimensional matrix and P is a (D + 1)-dimensional vector and R a constant. The values Q, P and R are often taken to be real numbers or complex numbers, but in fact, a quadric may be defined over any ring. In general, the locus of zeros of a set of polynomials is known as an algebraic variety, and is studied in the branch of algebraic geometry.

There is more but I can’t be bothered. Anyway, this week I have discovered the World of Warcraft, and as such alot of time has been spent in Kalimdor killing troll shamans with my Dwarf Warrior Grimnir. In a few hours (about 10) of playing I’d reached level sixty before deciding it was time to go to bed.

At some point between Sunday and Monday, this comic was created. One half it (the first half) was written by me, whilst the other half (the unfunny bits), were written by Silv. However I do think that credit is due, and Stormy gets the “Person who has slapped Silv this week” award.

Wear it with pride you crazy foreigner*. In other news, I seem to have accidently created a religion. Looshism as it is known by my worshippers is about respecting me and doing everything I say. Personally, I’ve always known I was a god, but it’s about time you lowly mortals started acknowledging me as one.

Ah well, life goes on.

~ Looshkin

*Anyone who doesn’t live in Wales, is a foreigner to me. If I ever refer to you as a foreigner, it’s because it’s true.

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I was almost impressed, my dear Looshkin, by your mathematical knowledge and nearly decided to congratulate you in spite of your endangering of the world’s integrity. However, I did one check before doing so and found out that your vast knowledge of quadrics is not similar, but identical to the Wikipedia article on the topic. Even the equation you posted (the image) still has the URL of the Wikipedia uploads folder. Nice try, my adversary, but you’ll have to go a longer way before you manage to trick me in such a manner. The world is still safe.

And I so TOTALLY wrote the first half mostly by myself.

~Silverbolt

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Oh Silv, I used the wiki article to save time, but you’ve forced my hand. *Deep Breathe*

A surface defined by an algebraic equation of degree two is called a quadric. Spheres, circular cylinders, and circular cones are quadrics. By means of a rigid motion, any quadric can be transformed into a quadric having one of the following equations (where a,b,c0):

(1) Real ellipsoid x/a+y/b+z/c=1
(2) Imaginary ellipsoid x/a+y/b+z/c=-1
(3) Hyperboloid of one sheet x/a+y/b-z/c=1
(4) Hyperboloid of two sheets x/a+y/b-z/c=-1
(5) Real quadric cone x/a+y/b-z/c=0
(6) Imaginary quadric cone x/a+y/b+z/c=0
(7) Elliptic paraboloid x/a+y/b+2z=0
(8) Hyperbolic paraboloid x/a-y/b+2z=0
(9) Real elliptic cylinder x/a+y/b=1
(10) Imaginary elliptic cylinder x/a+y/b=-1
(11) Hyperbolic cylinder x/a-y/b=1
(12) Real intersecting planes x/a-y/b=0
(13) Imaginary intersecting planes x/a+y/b=0
(14) Parabolic cylinder x+2y=0
(15) Real parallel planes x=1
(16) Imaginary parallel planes x=-1
(17) Coincident planes x=0

The five nondegenerate real quadrics

Figure 1: The ellipsoid (1).

Figure 2: Left: hyperboloid of one sheet (3). Right: hyperboloid of two sheets (4).

Figure 3: Left: elliptic paraboloid (7). Right: hyperbolic paraboloid (8).

Surfaces with equations (9) –(17) are cylinders over the planes curves of the same equation. Equations (2), (6), (10), (16), have no real solutions, so they do not describe surfaces in real three-dimensional space. A surface with equation (5) can be regarded as a cone over a conic C (any ellipse, parabola or hyperbola can be taken as the directrix; there is a two-parameter family of essentially distinct cones over it, determined by the position of the vertex with respect to C). The real nondegenerate quadrics (1), (3), (4), (7), and (8) are shown in Figures 1–3.

The surfaces with equations (1) –(6) are central quadrics; in the form given, the center is at the origin. The quantities a, b, c are the semiaxes.

The volume of the ellipsoid with semiaxes a, b, c is . When two of the semiaxes are the same, we can also write the area of the ellipsoid in closed form.

Suppose b=c, so the ellipsoid x/a+(y+z)/b=1 is the surface of revolution obtained by rotating the ellipse x/a+y/b=1 around the x-axis. Its area is

The two quantities are equal, but only one avoids complex numbers, depending on whether a>b or ab, we have a prolate spheroid, that is, an ellipse rotated around its minor axis; when a+cz+2fyz+2gzx+2hxy+2px+2qy+2rz+d=0,

one can find out the type of conic it determines by consulting the following table:

The columns have the following meaning. Let

let and be the ranks of e and E, and let be the determinant of E. The column “k signs” refers to the nonzero eigenvalues of e, that is, the roots of

if all nonzero eigenvalues have the same sign, choose “same”, otherwise “opposite”. Similarly, “K signs” refers to the sign of the nonzero eigenvalues of E.

*sigh*

I told you not to force me.

In other news, WoW has got me in a big way, but fret not, the lulz are a coming.

~ Looshkin.

*Also where the text turns bold there is supposed to be a letter b with square brackets on either side, but because of html scripting, it sees them as actions, and so the equations may be wrong due to this fact.

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I still don’t buy it. However, I admit that there might be a slight possibility of you knowing what you’re talking about. And in that case…all could be lost. Each night I pray that you never get to have sex with two hot Asian twin girls. Well, to be honest, I prayed for that even before I’d realized the horrible danger, but that’s neither here nor there.

~Silverbolt

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HAH! Sorry Silv but I have to burst your bubble.

And yes, it was really good. I have the pics to prove it as well, however they are of a personal nature, and I don’t want my girlfriend to see them.

:D :D :D :D :D :D

~Looshkin