Katy Dickinson

Sun Labs Comics

Here in the Sun Labs area of the Menlo Park Campus is a coffee bar bulletin board which has been accumulating comics for years. Some are cut or torn out of papers or magazines or comic-a-day calendars, others are printouts. Most are either from Dilbert, XKCD, or Doctor Fun. Since XKCD is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License, the original comics can be included in this blog. Old Dilbert cartoons are harder to search for and are very restricted in how they can be reproduced. Doctor Fun is no longer published but there is a good Dr.Fun's Cartoon Search page.

One of my favorite postings is the list of Merged Book Contest Winners, including:

• "Green Eggs and Hamlet" -
  Would you kill him in his bed? Thrust a dagger through his head? I would not, could not, kill the King. I could not do that evil thing. I would not wed this girl, you see. Now get her to a nunnery.
• "Rikki-Kon-Tiki-Tavi"-
  Thor Heyerdahl recounts his attempt to prove Rudyard Kipling's theory that the mongoose first came to India on a raft from Polynesia.
• "Paradise Lost in Space"-
  Satan, Moloch, and Belial are sentenced to spend eternity in a flying saucer with a goofy robot, an evil scientist, and two annoying children.

The most melancholy cartoon is by Sipress from the 3/23/2009 New Yorker, showing the head of a company speaking to a large group of employees gathered in his office: "We're still the same great company we've always been, only we've ceased to exist." One of the funniest is a chart comparing How the HR department reads your resume vs. How a programmer reads your resume. (I haven't been able to tell where this comes from, but I found copies all over the net.) My addition to this board was a page from The New Yorker (9/21/2009) with a story by Paul Simms called "Attention, People of Earth".

Below is a sample of what some very educated geeks think is funny.

Doctor Fun

• Hiram P. Doodle and some of his many patents
• The HP DittoJet

XKCD

The Board

Images Copyright 2009 by Katy Dickinson

Posted at 03:47PM Nov 03, 2009 by katysblog in News & Reviews  |  Comments[1]