T w e n t y S i d e d
I sort of indulged myself with this one. If the joke made no sense, then you can read this. The joke still won’t make sense, but at least you’ll be distracted.
I’ve wanted to make this joke for ages. Long before DM of the Rings, I used to think this way when dice would bounce away and fall in some hidden corner.
When I was a little kid I remember my dad trying to explain Schrödinger’s cat to me. It mostly went over my head. I took the idea of putting a cat in a box as literal (in my mind it was cardboard) and my main takeaway was that Schrödinger was an idiot and probably shouldn’t be in charge of anyone’s cats.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Starcraft 2: Rush Analysis
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
It’s one of my pet peeve when people think that if you can’t see what happens in the box it means that the cat is both alive and dead. That’s the definition of self centered, not of quantum physics. To Shamus’ credit though I’m pretty sure he knew the difference, but still wanted to make the joke.
As Zaxares said, Schrödinger also didn’t believe that the cat was both. But the thing is, that is very much derived from the quantum mechanics. If you do the math, you will find an equation, the wave function, where a particle (or the cat) can have either state, but also a third term that describes a combination with contributions from both states. So, the cat is either alive, dead, or a combination / a little bit of both. That is at least one of the interpretations – literally doesn’t have anything to do with you. The observer only comes at a later point, because under observation the wave function collapses, the third term vanishes and the cat takes either state
The irony about Schrodinger’s Cat is that when he made the example, Schrodinger was well aware that it is impossible for a cat to be both alive and dead. The whole thought exercise was supposed to demonstrate the foolishness of the whole scenario, but somehow popular consciousness warped it into its current form where it’s like “NO, the cat CAN be both alive and dead! Schrodinger said so!” :P
This is, without a doubt, always and forever, my favorite comic in the DM of the Rings back catalog. I waited so excitedly for it to be remastered, and you’ve far and away delivered on that expectation. Thank you.
This is my new favorite comic strip of DM of the Rings.
Just wanted to say thanks for remastering these and reposting them. I was 10 when they first came out and didn’t know Shamus or this site existed, so being able to read them sequentially has been nice.
I think this was the comic that introduced me to DM of the Rings (and D20). Somebody on another site I was perusing made a joke about uncertainty liches and linked this as a source. The link took me here a bit after he finished DMotR (he was still working on his next project at the time though).
This was an absolute classic.
(And still is; DM of the Rings wound up being a notable contributor to TVropes which is rather hilarious.)
I do quite like the joke in this one, a combination of a plausible situation while gaming and some lighthearted ribbing. Though a friend just 3D-printed me a gorgeous dice tower for my birthday, so hopefully my rolls will remain confined to the table.
My favorite
The best “explanation” of Schrodinger’s Cat I ever heard was in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. When Dirk says he was working with some scientists who were doing the experiment, the main character responds “You DON’T actually DO that experiment! It was just a thought experiment to illustrate an absurd conclusion in quantum theory!” Adams doubles-down on this at the end of the book by having Dirk explain OF COURSE doing the experiment is rubbish, he just needed to make sure the main character was “in his right mind,” so to speak.
Hang on, hang on, hang on…
Is that a VGA adapter I spy?