But he's got the label and arrow wrong!

The psychologist looks a bit like Richard Wiseman.

I think it's a wonderful thing that Biologist has become synonymous with "has a cephalopod" in popular culture. Way to leave your mark PZ!

On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.

Says the photo comment.

And that's not even how you hold an octopus! Everyone knows you grab it by the scruff of it's neck... just like the mothers do to the babies. Duh.

Y'know, I actually just read a book describing how the humanities go off on the left.

Ha! Except that when biology needs to really get to grips with the details of complexity it turns itself into mathematics - and then only usually stuff happening in finite dimensional spaces (pfft trivial). Face it biologists, we own your squid-hugging arses.

As a hopeful-physicist, I must say this puts into comic form exactly how I always thought.

*runs*

Could be a bit more discriminating among the mathematicians - after all, a proof theorist or category theorist isn't going to dirty their hands with actual numbers!

I love XKCD. This is one of my favorites: http://xkcd.com/327/ :)

By the way, if you hover your mouse over the comic, you get a little extra

Engineers should be at the bottom, we are the true bastard children.

Whoo, XKCD! Now I've seen that one twice in the same day!

(Yes, I'm a fanboy...)

Looks about right to us mathematicians. If I had any friends I'd send a copy to the ones who are sociologists.

Thank goodness none of those dirty-handed applied mathematicians slipped in there!

Nick Gotts @#8 Well if they can get away with number theorist avoid mentioning SPECIFIC numbers. Category theory has the problem of leaking into computer-sciencey usefulness.

I particularly enjoy (and am representitive of)

http://xkcd.com/386/

If I had any friends I'd send a copy to the ones who are sociologists.

Having friends is just applied sociology!

#16 wins.

Thread over.

This is just the kind of thing my engineer brother always says to taunt my biologist self. My Mom once shot back with, "Fine. Next time you get sick, I'm taking your ass to a physicist, since they're so much better."

That, and he's always emailing me for aquarium advice. Couldn't he just apply some of his physics?

And fiction is just applied sociology.

Lit majors rule!

@#19: Dammit! Maths is applied fiction: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism-mathematics/

x is applied y isn't transitive!

Shouldn't the thread title be "Someone is wrong on the internet" ?

http://xkcd.com/386/

Richbank wrote:

I love XKCD. This is one of my favorites: http://xkcd.com/327/ :)

Hey, that's my favorite! Information security is my field.

No cephalopods, you say?

Well, that's not *entirely* true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID

It's disgusting that Engineers are left out. It's all very well being a theorist, but unless Engineers put the theory to practice, human society would still effectively be in the Middle Ages.

There, that felt better.

I love irony. The Google Ads that are embedded in some webpages are too perfect.

At the freedictionary webpage for SIWOTI (http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/Someone+Is+Wrong+on+the+Internet+…), the first two ads are for "Proof for Creation: 301 Startling Proofs and Prophecies Proving that God Exists" and "Creation Science: Visual PowerPoint presentations proving Earth was Created by God"

Yes indeed, someone is wrong on the internet.

Sorry PZ, Randall has it right again, just like in http://xkcd.com/242/

At the freedictionary webpage for SIWOTI (http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/Someone+Is+Wrong+on+the+Internet+…), the first two ads are for "Proof for Creation: 301 Startling Proofs and Prophecies Proving that God Exists" and "Creation Science: Visual PowerPoint presentations proving Earth was Created by God"

i'm just getting loads of ads for "Myers' Mattresses".

intriguing.

I'm with Zeno on this. And also with PZ. Anything to wind up those damn physicists - they even had a go at Charles Darwin.

I had a mathematician friend who always told me that statistics is just the bastard child of probability theory.... I think we biologists always get the short end of the stick.

Engineers may at the the bottom of that ladder, but keep in mind how the rest of them starve and freeze to death without us ;)

Looking at the chart....fuck all y'all.

[/grumpy sociologist]

Note the sociologist ignoring them all entirely. She clearly has more important things to do :).

Heehee! As a mathematics & physics student, I wholeheartedly agree with every aspect of this comic. ;)

And, there's a difference between Fictionalism and Fiction, #20. Fictionalism is, IMO, crackheaded anyway because it assumes that mathematical ideas must be tangible. (Look ma, look at that 4!) Well, not really. But it just seems like a big cult of mathematicians who try to screw up the rules of math by claiming that since it's a set of abstract principles, it cannot exist in this universe.

As a pure mathematician, I can not find any fault with the cartoon...except maybe they should have put an applied mathematician next to the physicist.

Biologist may have cephalopods, but topologically cephalopods are just spheres, which are kind of boring.

If you drew a bell curve over the line, you'd have a pretty accurate representation of popularity at parties.

Matt Heath@14. *Sigh* True. Surely there must be some branch of mathematics which has no applications whatever? Ah! I have a proof!

Define uselessness theory as the branch of mathematics which studies the relationships between all those branches of mathematics that have no application. Then:
(1) Assume there are no branches of mathematics which have no applications whatever.
(2) Then uselessness theory has nothing to study
(3) Hence uselessness theory has no applications whatever, contradicting (1).
(4) Therefore (1) is false, since assuming it leads to a contradiction.
(5) Therefore there is some branch of mathematics which has no applications whatever, QED.

Nicole, I'd been looking for that one for a while, I just didn't have the patience to go through all of them - thanks!

I always thought it was:
sociology is practical psychology,
psychology is practical biology,
biology is practical chemistry,
chemistry is practical physics,
physics is practical maths,
maths is practical philosophy
and philosophy is bullshit.

But as a geologist, I can pretty much add time and sit at any point on the line. My chosen point is next to the chemist.

#35: So being a geochemist makes me especially popular at parties :)

If you drew a bell curve over the line, you'd have a pretty accurate representation of popularity at parties.

Provided popularity is maximized with the cephalopod, I can get behind that. (Why does Firefox think "cephalopod" is a spelling error?)

Interesting. When I was in college there was a steam tunnel system that could be used to get between some of the buildings. In one of the larger sections on the floor was a similar reduction. I believe it actually started "Anthropology is applied sociology" and continued along as this one did but added two more after math. "Mathematics is applied philosophy" and "Philosophy is applied b***s***".

Take from that what you want. 8^)

If you drew a bell curve over the line, you'd have a pretty accurate representation of popularity at parties.

Yes, I understand that those naughty chemists can be quite popular party guests....

Chironex@#33: Honestly, I just wanted to make a joke about transitivity. I like jokes about transitivity.

Pshaw! Clearly, since geology uses elements of biology, chemistry, physics, math, and (if you're into hazard management or public outreach) sociology and psychology, we're so far beyond the mathematicians that we're off the screen. :)

I studied meteorology and atmospheric chemistry in grad school, so I guess that would have put me somewhere between the chemist and the physicist.

Now I just write about scientists, so I don't know where I sit now...

@#36,
But then #2 is false, and the whole thing falls apart anyway. Good example of the Liar's Paradox :)

And for all you haters, I like my Applied Math.

@Tuff Cookie #43: Nah, we're completely mixed up, using everything, so therefore landing us at the exact median point and therefore making us the life of the party (#35). Our science does, after all, rock by definition.

Chemists have unfair advantages at partying.

Unless you're one of those perverts who get high on non-manifold spaces.

Argh, now I just write about science, though I suppose that includes writing about scientists too...

Russell and you are BOTH right, PZ. With the arrow pointing right and the label being Purity, or the arrow pointing left and the label being Complexity, either way the characters are lined up correctly.

Attributed to Dave Barry:

"Psychology is really biology, biology is really chemistry, chemistry is really physics, physics is really math, and math is really hard."

topologically cephalopods are just spheres

Don't you at least want to start with a torus? Mollusks have a through gut.

If you drew a bell curve over the line, you'd have a pretty accurate representation of popularity at parties.

What are parties?

#45: Actually in the form of proof I don't think that matters because 2 only appears as a consequence of 1. It is indeed the usual form of a proof by contradiction.

So I don't think it's a Liar's Paradox. It's more like the proof that there is something interesting about each natural number; it fails to hold because it refers to things which aren't well defined in set theory.

@Nick #36

No, your #3 could be, Thus uselessness theory does not actually exist.

It doesn't exist just because you defined it.

Oops, there I go being all applied-math again. O well, I am in InfoSec and 327 is the best XKCD of all time, yes.

"Anthropology is applied sociology"

Nah. Anthropology is a branch of biology.

The problem is there's a lot of scientific/theoretical disciplines that don't fit on the scale. This is an emotionally painful subject to us linguists, because most people would group us with the sociologists, when really we have more math than most biologists (which is arguable, but we certainly have a better logical foundation than psychologists, by my experience with cross-listed classes). And then there's natural language processing...

Maybe it shouldn't be a scale, but a loop, like the horseshoe they tell you about in high school history: extreme fascism and extreme socialism bend around to be nearly the same thing. Sociology would be at the wishy-washy bottom, hanging off the horseshoe, and the side opposite the current scale would step through anthropology, speech & hearing, linguistics, speech & language processing, computer science, and finally computer engineering looping back to depend on physics. Other disciplines could be added in the third dimension.

@45 - Not so! It is (1) that leads to the contradiction, so (1) is false and from this it follows that (2) is false, but everything fits if we assume that there is some branch of mathematics for uselessness theory to study other than itself.

I thought about emailing this to you when I saw it this morning, but I figured you'd already have received it about 16,201 times. I'll have to wait till PZ references pop up in the more obscure web-comics I read.

Pshaw! Clearly, since geology uses elements of biology, chemistry, physics, math, and (if you're into hazard management or public outreach) sociology and psychology, we're so far beyond the mathematicians that we're off the screen. :)

uhm...YES

(and of course we could go into the fact that the biology that we deal with in paleontology has been mucked around with and...well it goes on)

@#52
You're right, it is a proof by contradiction, but I think it's also a form of the Liar's Paradox in a sense because it's self-referencing (since Uselessness Theory is a branch of Mathematics). But it's a bit tangled and I could be wrong. It's happened before.

Well, I'm not sure that complexity would order things in exactly reverse order. Humans aren't necessarily any more complex than other species, and the study of the human brain itself is not necessarily more complex than the study of how humans interact with society.

However, if you used "increasing bias" to order them, the order would be exactly reversed from "purity". I've become pretty convinced that the closer we get to studying how humans interact with one another, it becomes more and more difficult to remove our biases that have been built into us by millions of years of evolution. My argument is thus: because evolution doesn't care that what we think is accurate, but instead only cares that the actions that we perform lead to reproductive success, it only makes sense that some of the time, we will have evolved to see things not as they are, but in a way that improves our reproductive success.

For example, consider this: there is no such thing as free will. And yet, we consider criminals as having chosen their actions, and find excuses if we think that their actions were somehow unchosen. This is a really good evolutionary trick, as it means that we are likely to be angry at people that are likely to be repeat offenders. But it isn't really true: free will is simply an illusion. This belief, though a good trick for reproductive success, is simply incorrect.

Because of this and other examples, I'm convinced that our own evolution has made it really, really difficult for people studying human behavior, in particular, to remove their own biases. It becomes easier as things get further and further from humans, and more and more abstract.

What's the joke? What's so funny about a bunch of nerds standing in a field?

And why are they standing on those soybean rows?

If the mathematician in the village does the calculations for everyone who doesn't do his own calculations, then who does the mathematician's calculations? Is that useless enough?

@ #56
Ah, now you've gone and fixed it all up! Now what I am gonna argue about on the internet when I should be doing solving equations for my adviser!

Nah. Anthropology is a branch of biology.

Uh-nuh. Anthropology is a branch of stamp collecting.

I'm pretty sure an amendment to Godwin's Law was passed outlawing the use if the phrase "stamp collecting" when discussing academic disciplines.

@#62

The engineer.

XKCD doesn't like when someone is wrong on the internet:
http://xkcd.com/386/

I'd guess applied mathematicians aren't visible because they --- the fools! --- went a-playing with i (the imaginary unit, not I) and are now located three feet behind the head of whoever's looking at the picture.

Approximately, that is.

Just a thought from the right side of the scale.

@65, What, now we can't talk of anything other than physics eh? Well that suits me just fine hehe.

"We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world -- temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. Once in a while one comes on the other kind -- what used in the university to be called a "dry-ball" -- but such men are not really biologists." ... "Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics."

The truth is, geologists don't care about purity. They care where the beer is. So the reason they're 'off the scale' is that they're in the kitchen, raiding the fridge.

Chris Rowan said:

The truth is, geologists don't care about purity. They care where the beer is. So the reason they're 'off the scale' is that they're in the kitchen, raiding the fridge.

. . . only to trip over the unconcious paleontologists who got there first!

Notice that the Sociologist is looking left at someone.... an Economist, perhaps?

People, please. There is no need to argue.

Psychology is the supreme science from which to base an accurate understanding of reality. If you don't understand how people think and percieve the world, how can you be sure they are coming up with accurate representatons of the universe?

Mathematicians use their cognitive ability to...do whatever the hell it is they do. Psychology, as the study of cognition, is therefore superior, as it enables you to discern how exactly it is that mathemeticians use their brains to fiddle with numbers. :-)

I'm pretty sure an amendment to Godwin's Law was passed outlawing the use if the phrase "stamp collecting" when discussing academic disciplines.

Nah, Bush refused to sign it.

#68: Hmm some of the people to the left of the picture will be getting all Lacanian over "playing with i".

Joke:

So this British civil servant who has held the same job for over a decade finally storms red-faced and trembling into his supervisor's office. "That's IT!" he cries, "I am filing a grievance!! My career has been held back because, when I filled out my employment papers, I put my political affiliation as 'socialist!'"
His supervisor looks at him in horror, and finally stammers out, "Oh. Dear. There has been a terrible mistake. We thought you said 'sociologist'!"

Note to self: found field of cephalosociology.

The truth is, geologists don't care about purity. They care where the beer is. So the reason they're 'off the scale' is that they're in the kitchen, raiding the fridge.

Chris, shut up...
Don't remind them that we control the beer...there is hardly enough for us.

Of course many would say that philosophy is prior to all of those. Which is why psychology and biology count with respect to math and physics (good philosophy takes account of our being animals), as well.

Regardless of all that, it would seem to me that the DI IDiots would mostly approve of the cartoon. Dembski seems to think that math without biological data really should dictate what biology does. Some IDiots would agree with what I said about philosophy as well, although I'd count their philosophy as little more than ancient gibberish, the stuff we studied primarily to understand what was wrong with philosophy in the past (and we studied Heidegger to find out what is wrong with so much present philosophy--the profs didn't present it that way, though).

It would be nice if sociology and psychology were just applied biology, as they'd be more exact that way. Not yet.

But biology is hardly just chemistry (anybody who recognizes the importance of evolution should know that), as huge as that is. It's physics in the region of the electromagnetic force, with some gravity thrown in. Applied physics it may be, yet physicists are finding the application of physics to biology more intriguing as time goes by. To be fair, that's partly because physics per se is not at all in its most interesting time period.

Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

This is the funniest xkcd for a while, and ah loves it!

I'd say reversing the direction of the arrow and labelling it as complexity doesn't work - why, for anything supposedly more complex than maths (no imaginary unit jokes, honest), just model it mathematically and by gum, you've got something just as "complex" however, you want to define it.

(...can you tell I'm a mathematician?)

Well, without artists there's be no damned cartoon! Yay for artists! We rule!

@ #72 (and 71): We science journalist would've already gotten hammered, passed out, woken up with the hangover, and reaching for the beer the beer to stop the pounding in our heads.

'doesn't have a cephalopod': ha! It's the new 'hasn't got a clue' 'doesn't know his arse from his elbow' or 'doesn't know where his towel is.'

Dangit, #38 beat me to it - I came here specifically to point out that mathematics is merely applied philosophy.
(Mathematicians sure as smug about that tautological language[1] they spend their time studying, aren't they?...)
[1] (Wait, is "tautological language" redundant? Is there such a thing as a non-tautological language?)

Of course Biologists should be on top, as obviously if you did not have Biology you would not have the others.

windy (#70), would you mind sourcing those quotes? My first two guesses are Steinbeck and Carr.

I'm surprised at how mathematically inclined people are hanging out on a biology website.

@#80,
I would agree with your point about physics. Anecdotally, a good number of the physicists I know work on or around biological phenomena. I'm currently sitting in the physics building (I'm a Math Student) in my office staring at a paper on the evolution of the ICK that I used in a group talk last week.

As for Dembski, well, good Math is never wrong, but garbage in gets garbage out.

windy (#70), would you mind sourcing those quotes? My first two guesses are Steinbeck and Carr.

I was hoping someone would take a crack at it... You got it, it's Steinbeck! In The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

That's not an Octopus, it's a chicken. No doubt the biologist can kill, gut, draw, pluck, quarter and fry the little capon before you could say "ontology recapitualtes gynocology". Or something like that.

... And logic is underneath them all digging a hole.

Steinbeck! In The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

Ah, thought so. There was a time when I loved that book like no other. If I could keep from moving long enough to unpack my books I think I'd enjoy it yet again.

"And fiction is just applied sociology."

No, that would be Economics.

Where do the theoretical biologists go? Are they just a probability distribution of impurity?

I like mark pilgrim's take on this:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/06/11/purity

Josh:

Chris, shut up...
Don't remind them that we control the beer...there is hardly enough for us.

Don't worry, Josh. Make friends with a microbiologist, we can make more beer!

Sven #87:
http://xkcd.com/285/

What's so great about being on top, PZ? Maybe you should ask your wife; or your daughter...

Do all of you beer swillers imagine the horse shit gets shoveled onto the hops vines by rocket scientists? ;)

What, no geologists?
Then again, I guess we use EVERYTHING else. OK, maybe not psychology.

Business analyst. I'm gettin out'a here!

Don't worry, Josh. Make friends with a microbiologist, we can make more beer!

*extends hand*

Hi, Mike. I'm Josh. I do rocks and dead shit.

I feel slighted. There's no linguist!

After reading the thread, I see this discussion has already taken place. Oops. (I should have read it before, but I wanted to be comment #100.)

I like that half of them, including the mathematician, are coded as women.

What are parties?

I understand that parties are a type of set, only with more music and beer, so they are obviously applied mathematics.

Of course, music is applied physics, and beer is applied biology.

@#106,

If it takes a Mathematician, a Physicist, and a Biologist to throw a party, then why do they always happen at the College of Business?

And the geographer wonders what processes led to the linear arrangement of these people and if he can use the magic acronym 'GIS' to score some sweet government funding to find out.

I like that half of them, including the mathematician, are coded as women.

How would a long-haired man be coded in the xkcd world? (I know these are supposed to be women, just wondering...)

*shakes Josh's extended hand*
I mostly do bacteria in shit. (Not really, but the joke was too easy, I'm marine micro.)
What's brewing if it ain't just a big yeast batch culture, right?
Kegerator's in the corner. The new ale came out nice and bitter, but there should be some of the last batch of lager left, too.

*turns to kegerator. selects ale. smiles approvingly*

If it takes a Mathematician, a Physicist, and a Biologist to throw a party, then why do they always happen at the College of Business?

Clearly because the Field of Business is at or near the maximum for impurity.

I'm reasonably certain pure mathematicians should be above the chart, with some clouds around them.

@#112

Wait, Business is a whole Field now?

It's not just near the maximum, it's the limit as the impurity function approaches infinity.

(Oh FSM, I'm making (very) bad math jokes now...)

Sven @ 92 You beat me to it! I knew the passage as good old John Steinbeck, but could not retrieve "The Log From the Sea Of Cortez" after doing that numbing survey! Read the book just last winter for the third time. Perhaps you know of a related book that I have and also read several times as it is a worthy read.

"Kayaking The Vermilion Sea: Eight Hundred Miles Down The Baja" by Jonathan Waterman Simon & Schuster 1995
He dedicates the book to John Steinbeck among others, and has some insightful remarks, one that I wrote down but cannot find at the moment. Check this book out; you will like it!

I love this cartoon. So many of the physicists that I meet think that their subject is at the top of the ladder, but they only think this because they're oblivious to real mathematics.

"Psychology's standing within a hypothesized hierarchy of the sciences was assessed in a 2-part analysis. First, an internally consistent composite measure was constructed from 7 primary indicators of scientific status (theories-to-laws ratio, consultation rate, obsolescence rate, graph prominence, early impact rite, peer evaluation consensus, and citation concentration). Second, this composite measure was validated through 5 secondary indicators (lecture disfluency, citation immediacy, anticipation frequency, age at receipt of Nobel Prize, and rated disciplinary hardness). Analyses showed that the measures reflected a single dimension on which 5 disciplines could be reliably ranked in the following order: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology. Significantly, psychology placed much closer to biology than to sociology, forming a pair of life sciences clearly separated from the other sciences."

Reference

Simonton,D.K.(2004). Psychology's status as a scientific discipline: Its empirical placement within an implicit hierarchy of the sciences. Review of General Psychology, 8, 59-67.

That one's new to me, Holbach; thanks for the tip!

being the son of a mathematician, i found it pretty funny. and accurate to the math in-jokes.

And, as Farmer Joe would surely agree, agriculture is applied bullshit. Or at least it applies bullshit, yeah, to the hops and the barley and the pretzel bushes.

Looks like a Moebius ladder from over here.

..almost a couple of generations later, it's good to see that this inter-faculty needling still goes on. I was always happy to contribute to it.
A physicist friend on mine at college use to say that if they (the physicists) could only solve this one equation, all the chemists would be out of jobs. I guess he meant Schrödinger's equation.
Peter

Well, since others are doing it, Here is MY favorite XKCD.

http://xkcd.com/54/

What... what about History?

@Josh & Mike

Hi guys, trade you some home brew wine for some home brew beer. Extends a bottle of petite syrah.

"What... what about History?"

History is no longer relevant. We have Faux News to make it for us as we go. I think they have a new program aimed at pre-emptive history in the works too ....

"Biology is applied physics. Physics is applied mathematics. Mathematics is applied ---"

Whereupon a pure mathematician yells: "No it isn't, not as long as I'm here."

Also, this is my favourite bit of XKCD: http://xkcd.com/325/, or "Instead of office chair package contained bobcat. Would not buy again."

Does anyone know a place where I could find a cheap, preferably sedated bobcat?

According to Benjamin Franklin, wine is applied theology.

(tangental thought: grapevines+yeast do turn water into wine, and isn't the Dionysus mythos one of the "risen god" syncretisms that were folded into the Jesus mythos?)

(In other news, John Barleycorn is dead.)

An old cartoon showed a student (carrying books) standing in front of a very large computer and asks: "What is mathematics?" The computer replies: "What is NOT mathematics!?"

There's clearly a large cauldron offscreen for all us interdisciplinary folks. Sometimes when I'm staring at the thermocycler in case my death glare causes it to go faster, I ponder what I'm going to call myself when I grow up. Right now I'm going with "evolutionary psychogeneticist."

Where does computer science go?

#130: Computer science, being part of information technology, probably occupies equivalent spaces to biology (hardware) and psychology (software).

And dangit, I'm one from the end, right after bio! At least it looks like me.

The very theoretical type of computer science (the sort that looks at an iBook and sees a finite state Turing machine) is to the right of most physics. They even have one of the millennium prize maths problems.

#131. I think you underestimate computer science.

information technology, is actually applied computer science.
computer science. in computer science we study things like computability, logic, p vs np complete, etc. It's a bit mathy, but not exactly.

If that's a purity scale, just what is the biologist doing with that cephalopod?

The very theoretical type of computer science (the sort that looks at an iBook and sees a finite state Turing machine) is to the right of most physics. They even have one of the millennium prize maths problems.

There's a name for that discipline.

It's Mathematics.

Astronomy is in such a high position that it isn't even on the line, it is above the line in another dimension :)

When I first read the word "purity" I thought "sounds about right. Though I've known some psych people who get laid more than soc people. Not many though"

Then I realized that it wasn't what he meant.

The "complexity" version is what I have been saying for years, except I add "ecology" at the left (obviously includes sociology as a subset). The idea is to get people to realize math is simple.

But then there's the "Principle of Conservation of Difficulty": people keep working on a subject till they get stuck. After 5,000 years or so, quite a bit of maths has piled up, and there's a lot of simple material to go through, which makes it hard again. Mutatis mutandis, the others are similar.

So in the end, each subject is just has hard as any other.

Corollary: If you want to do multidisciplinary work, well, you'd like to think that would be harder yet - but the principle holds!

BTW applied maths goes anywhere in the diagram(*), not just next to the physicist. Have been reading theoretical evolution papers recently, and was surprised (smacks forehead) to have had to learn some more math (in this case game theory). And I'm pretty sure nautilus eyes will only be properly understood when the mathematics they use (hard-wired by evolution, naturally) is spelled out in detail...

So, as some commenters have said, more or less, a one-dimensional diagram just doesn't cut it...but I say xkcd still rules!

(*) Yes, you can "apply" one field of mathematics to another field, though only the purest of mathematicians thinks of that as "applied mathematics".

Following a link from the E. Coli post, I found this description of the DARPA project.

The Fundamental Laws of Biology (FunBio) Program has assembled a well-balanced team of biologists, mathematicians, and physicists...

I'm sure there is much humour to be found in considering this.

#34

topologically cephalopods are just spheres

It's those balloon animals again...

As usual, us anthropologists aren't even recognized, but we're there, taking our notes and trying to further harden our still young and ridiculouly complex science.
If represented, the anthropologist would be toting a small folding ladder, attempting to get some perspective. A good comment might be "I can do this ANYWHERE!"

If, as I understand it, (all?) cephalopods take in water through the mantle and expel it through the siphon, then they too, are topologically a torus.

Windy @ #70 Excuse the oversight, as you posted the passage from John Steinbeck's "Log From The Sea Of Cortez" which I recognized but which Sven DiMilo @87 almost had it. So just in case you did not notice my entry at 115, here is another related book which the author dedicates to John Steinbeck, among others:

"Kayaking The Vermilion Sea: Eight Hundredm Miles Down the Baja" by Jonathan Waterman Simon & Schuster 1995

I am sure you will find it a good read.

*wonders where the accountants fit in*

*decides she doesn't care and heads off to one of the business/commerce parties*

"It's not just near the maximum, it's the limit as the impurity function approaches infinity." So, it's beside the point?

Personally mathematics shouldn't even be in the same continuum... I'd have considered it to be a tool that can be used (to whatever extent) by all of the science disciplines. As such, I'd have stuck the mathematician off to one side ;-)

(Haven't read all the posts--too many...)

146 comments, and I can't believe that nobody noticed that "biol♥gists" has a heart in it.

Only biology has heart - the other fields are just at the fringes of diminishing significance.

As probably the only goldsmith gemmologist here (I'm lonely!) I guess I'll have say we use all of those inculing the psychology but are mostly just applied greed with an aesthetic twist.

Thankfully around here I might be able to pass for a geologist just long enough to get in on the beer..... *looks hop-ful*

Pft. Mathematics is a tool. Its most certainly useful, even integral, and capable of complexity; but to say mathematics is superior to any branch of science is like saying shoveling is superior to engineering. Heck, even certain disciplines within the humanities possess a greater ability to describe the world than mathematics does, unless there's some theorem out there that encapsulates the rise of the Hanseatic League that I don't know about.

Comparing the scholarly pursuits is silly though; all of them contribute to our knowledge when pursued seriously.

Excuse me, but as a philosophy student I really have to object to numbers 38 and 40. And now that I have, I also have to agree wholeheartedly with numbers 38 and 40 ;)

Pft. Mathematics is a tool. Its most certainly useful, even integral, and capable of complexity;

You sir have clearly not studied enough Mathematics. It can be a tool, yes, but in and of itself, the Science of Patterns is a subject of immense and tremendous beauty. It is an artform, and a pillar of civilization as strong as literature, verse and architecture. I agree with that all fields of scholarly pursuit have their value, but Mathematics is no mere shovel.

Jason Dick, #60

You're only saying we have no free will because you were fated to.

(Must be nice to have such an easy and convenient way to avoid personal responsibility.)

#85, surely no language is tautologous in itself? A particular statement in a language might be a tautology, but I for one have been able to make many false statements in the language of math - I called them 'answers'.

Anyway, physicists make the best villains.

And in today's NYT letters column, we find this gem (link to full letter):
I was a full-time math teacher....I demonstrated to my students that mathematics, using statistics, probability and number magnitude, proves beyond the shadow of doubt that evolution is nonsense.

So yes, math wins on "purity", where "purity" is defined as "pulling assumptions out of your ass".

(yeah yeah, math *teacher*, not mathematician, still...)

PZ's contention that the biologist is superior because he's holding a cephalopod is ably refuted here.

http://failblog.org/page/13/

Nick @36,

Surely there must be some branch of mathematics which has no applications whatever?

There is! Specified complexity!

Thankfully around here I might be able to pass for a geologist just long enough to get in on the beer..... *looks hop-ful*

Oh fuck yeah. Common over.

Hmm some of the people to the left of the picture will be getting all Lacanian over "playing with i".
Posted by: Matt Heath

Surely you mean j. "i" is for current, as Trix are for kids.

Re # 157.

woo-hoo! :D

It should be "complexity", not "purity", and the arrow should point to the left.

Hey, when you can prove that it's possible to cut up a solid ball into 17 bits and stick them together into two balls of the same damn size, then you get to talk about complexity. At least in biology, when something appears to be batshit insane, there usually turns out to be a good reason.

I'm personally a fan of XKCD. I don't see anything wrong with this comment. In fact, it's a conversation my friends and I have had many times (I'm a Sociology major, my boyfriend is going to grad school soon for Psychology, and most of our friends are science, math and engineering majors). By purity, I really believe they just mean "up for less social influence" (which really would be pure, wouldn't it?).

I've thought this and reached that exact same order, I also think that the humanities start at the sociology border - first geography then history then the arts start at the history border, with language first then literature then drama then sculpting and painting, so these categories which seem arbitrary are really subdivisions of how much we have to generalize.

One change to my last post immediately before this one - geography is before sociology.

Gup frabrielle:

I really believe they just mean "up for less social influence"

They are referring to how much you have to take for granted in a given subject, you take for granted the stuff in the subjects that are "MORE PURE".

"According to Benjamin Franklin, wine is applied theology"

And are French whores applied biology?

A good way to illustrate what I said 4 and 3 posts back

I've thought this and reached that exact same order, I also think that the humanities start at the sociology border - first geography then history then the arts start at the history border, with language first then literature then drama then sculpting and painting, so these categories which seem arbitrary are really subdivisions of how much we have to generalize.

One change to my last post immediately before this one - geography is before sociology.

is that a sculptor sculpts a sculpture (sculpting and painting) centuries ago and when we look at it it reminds us of that period many centuries ago because because we know it has sentiments of that period (history) this is because our societies like to learn about their history (sociology) and this is because of the individuals desire to group in societies (psychology) that is only the result of our biological organ the brain and it's many biological parts and the biological process of evolution that created them all (biology) and is ultimately the result of loads of chemical reactions (chemistry) that are the result of the laws of the universe (physics) that can be displayed in equations (mathematics).

Admittedly I left some out but the scenario would have to be very convoluted to capture them all.

I wonder what fields he had to use to make this comic.

Just a FTFY: Sociology is in now way at all like psychology. In fact they disagree on countless theories and fundamental.

So when I switched from physics to applied math, I was moving in the direction of purity? Or was it in the direction of my (then future) wife, a mathematician? And what does it mean that we both ended up in computer science?

I just now stumbled across the following unattributed quote, and it seems appropriate to offer it here without further comment:

Psychologists think they're experimental psychologists.
Experimental psychologists think they're biologists.
Biologists think they're biochemists.
Biochemists think they're chemists.
Chemists think they're physical chemists.
Physical chemists think they're physicists.
Physicists think they're theoretical physicists.
Theoretical physicists think they're mathematicians.
Mathematicians think they're metamathematicians.
Metamathematicians think they're philosophers.
Philosophers think they're gods.