Captain Occam: Episode 6

[Aggie]

I’ve finally finished the sixth episode of my comic series, but I'm not putting this one on the main page of Captainoccam.com because my FTP there has stopped working for some reason, and as a result I’ll probably be moving my comics to a new server fairly soon. So for now, I guess I’ll just post the comic directly like I was doing last summer.

This episode is probably the longest I’ve ever spent on a single piece of visual art. It’s on four separate pages, each of which took me around 15 hours; I spent around 60 hours on the episode in total. It also uses an idea that I’ve been saving for the right place since 2001, although you have to be somewhat familiar with dinosaur paleontology in order to get the joke it involves.

I won’t spoil it, though.

Captain Occam and the Prattmaster will return, but probably not for another few months. After working on nothing art-related other than this since November, I’d kind of like to spend more time doing other types of art.

 

[shadowmage36]

Awesomeness and win. Incarnate.

You win several internets. And reps!

 

[Herman Hedning]

W00t!!11!1one

That was seriously incredulous. And prattilicious. Reps!

 

[us38]

XD

 

[AdmiralBell]

hehehe, very nice,

 

[Parmenio]

I feel kinda silly asking this... but what, exactly, is a PRATT. I suppose I've gathered what it is... but what does it stand for? Where did it come from?

 

[Aggie]

I feel kinda silly asking this... but what, exactly, is a PRATT. I suppose I've gathered what it is... but what does it stand for? Where did it come from?

It stands for Point Refuted A Thousand Times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRATT

As for where PRATTs come from, the fourth episode of my comic specifically answers that question.

 

[shernren]

Actually, Reverend Zedekiah may have stumbled upon a new fundamental law of nature that could have tremendous ramifications. It must take a lot of energy to construct a lie, as a convincing lie involves constructing a strawman convincing enough to be mistaken for the truth yet flawed enough to be easily refuted, selectively analyzing evidence to find a small enough subset of data to support the lie (hence severely reducing the entropy of the dataset), and tremendous amounts of sheer willpower (and enough tinfoil) to ignore or reject all contrary evidence.

Now, the First Law of Thermodynamics states that this energy must go somewhere instead of being destroyed. Reverend Zedekiah must have discovered how this energy is stored within the lie itself, and hence how it can be re-extracted by converting it back into truth. Doubtless this is how PRATT-cars are powered.

If Reverend Zedekiah's astonishing mechanism for the extraction of lie-energy can be replicated, creationism could spell the end of all of humanity's environmental problems, as it would provide a near-infinite source of pollution-free lie-energy for the world. Hopefully the good Reverend has so little confidence in human laws that he has neglected to patent the PRATT-engine, because I want to!

(In other news: awesome comic, Aggie.)

 

[Aggie]

Actually, Reverend Zedekiah may have stumbled upon a new fundamental law of nature that could have tremendous ramifications. It must take a lot of energy to construct a lie, as a convincing lie involves constructing a strawman convincing enough to be mistaken for the truth yet flawed enough to be easily refuted, selectively analyzing evidence to find a small enough subset of data to support the lie (hence severely reducing the entropy of the dataset), and tremendous amounts of sheer willpower (and enough tinfoil) to ignore or reject all contrary evidence.

Now, the First Law of Thermodynamics states that this energy must go somewhere instead of being destroyed. Reverend Zedekiah must have discovered how this energy is stored within the lie itself, and hence how it can be re-extracted by converting it back into truth. Doubtless this is how PRATT-cars are powered.

If Reverend Zedekiah's astonishing mechanism for the extraction of lie-energy can be replicated, creationism could spell the end of all of humanity's environmental problems, as it would provide a near-infinite source of pollution-free lie-energy for the world. Hopefully the good Reverend has so little confidence in human laws that he has neglected to patent the PRATT-engine, because I want to!

(In other news: awesome comic, Aggie.)

Perhaps in a subsequent comic, I ought to explain in detail how PRATT power works.

Did anyone here get any of this comic's in-jokes? A couple of them are specific to this forum: The phrase "drive-by creationist" being used in a literal sense, and the Prattmaster using what's probably the most famous PRATT ever posted here.

There's also one about the two main theories regarding how dinosaurs evolved flight, and this particular aspect of the comic is the one that I came up with in 2001. Because of that, though, I'd rather not explain it and risk ruining it. Can anyone get it on their own?