Technical Humor
Comedy is my favorite type of performance, and I enjoy working in the domain of data and tech. And when the two combine, I enjoy it even more.
Humor is a powerful tool. It brings a smile to the hardest hearts, and can make friends out of enemies. And most importantly, it can be a fun way to learn.
Today, I want to use humor as a teaching tool, so as to instill a sense of enthusiasm around math and science. And I’ll do that by sharing some of my favorite sources of STEM humor, and the dorky takes that come from them.
Whether or not you’re tech-inclined, I hope that you find these as amusing as I did. But if you know what to look for, then that makes them so much more enjoyable.
XKCD
xkcd is easily one of my favorite webcomics. Every comic is a different scientific in-joke.
On the flipside, the topics tends to be so subtle or obscure that there’s another website dedicated entirely to exhaustively explaining the joke in every different webcomic.
As a data scientist, this is one of my favorite comics from xkcd. At face value, it demonstrates a ridiculous scenario. But this does highlight a known phenomenon in experiment design known as “p-hacking”. Basically, any time an experimental study is done, there’s a chance of the results being a false positive. And the more tests that are run in sequence, the higher the chance that least one of the tests will show a false positive.
This also reflects a bias in research towards positive results. Negative results don’t attract attention from the media or academics, which creates pressure to report positive results in any experiment. And as I’ve mentioned before, even the most well-principled researcher can be influenced by that pressure.
SMBC
In comparison to xkcd, I find Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) to be less mathematical and more philosophical and existential.
One of my favorite data-themed comics from here reflect a classic saying from Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But there do exist people who misinterpret data in order to support weak arguments. One example of this is cherry-picking data, where data is ignored if it doesn’t support a specific conclusion.
This comic takes it to a humorous extreme, but imagine someone manipulating research and data concerning the health benefits of consuming sugar. That’s totally ridiculous, right?
Futurama
This is easily one of my favorite TV shows ever. Humor aside, it portrays a world where virtually everything can be solved through science.
Several of the writers were mathematicians, so a crapton of math in-jokes are scattered across the show.
In one particular episode, one of the writers (who also happened to have a PhD in math from Harvard) designed a mathematical proof for the problem that’s encountered regarding irreversible body swaps.
Silicon Valley
The entire show is dedicated to all the hijinks that come up in the tech industry. The humor is wildly crude, but that is unfortunately just another reflection of certain parts of tech culture…
One scene features a backdrop with a bunch of binary. Binary is literally the language of computers. And like any other language, it can be translated. And when translating the seemingly random string of 1’s and 0’s, it translates to an almost insulting plea.
