Posted 05/18/2013 18:00:00

Yes, Mike just threw his cell phone out the window of a moving car. Given his track record, it's surprising there isn't a cop there to pull him over for littering.

And yes, Mike's version of the Back to the Future time machine triggers at 68 rather than 88 miles per hour, since he changed the trigger speed a while back.

Posted 05/11/2013 18:00:00

Just to be clear, the lab I work in does not have plutonium in the fridge. There is a bottle of heavy water that has been there a long time, though...

Oh, and there's no food in the chemical storage fridge. We have a separate fridge for horrors of the spoiled-milk variety.

Posted 05/04/2013 18:00:00

Oh Ashley, get your mind out of the gutter.

Posted 04/27/2013 18:00:00

For any youngsters that may be in the audience, Microsoft Bob was a user interface released for Windows in 1995, shortly before the release of Windows 95. Rather than representing programs using icons as in other versions of Windows, the interface was a picture of a house in which, for example, you could access the Calendar application by clicking on a calendar on the wall. It was criticized for being overly simplistic and is considered to be a complete failure. But, hey, if it weren't for Bob, the MS Comic Sans font wouldn't have been created, and the CERN announcement of the Higgs Boson wouldn't have been able to use Comic Sans. That gives me an idea for a time travel storyline. :)

Posted 04/20/2013 18:00:00

Oklahoma has had an unusually large amount of seismic activity over the past couple of years, peaking with a 5.6 magnitude earthquake in 2011. The first time I felt an earthquake here, I absentmindedly thought to myself that the coal mines must be blasting again (a natural thought to someone who grew up in the Appalachians, a mile or so from an active coal mine. It took me a moment to realize I was in Oklahoma, nowhere near a strip mine, and what I had felt was actually an earthquake.

One of the students in a lab section I taught once listed "an earthquake might have happened" as an experimental error in his lab report. I marked it wrong, with a sarcastic comment about this not being California. This was before I had actually experienced an earthquake here. If I got another student giving a similar comment on their lab report, however, I'd still mark it wrong, but I might leave out the sarcastic comment.

The title for this comic comes from a meme that circulated around the Internet after the 2011 earthquake. There actually was some effect from the 2011 earthquake in the physics department: it damaged the pendulum in the physics building when some ceiling tiles fell on it. Plus, it misaligned my MOT. Stupid earthquakes.

Posted 04/13/2013 18:00:00

This actually happened a few weeks ago... it cost me $100 to fix my windshield. Stupid Oklahoma weather.

Posted 04/06/2013 18:00:00

Sometimes you just miss things in plain sight...

Posted 03/30/2013 18:00:00

This one is almost entirely true... except that my advisor hasn't noticed my versioning system. But yeah, as for the previous version that got wiped out, this is why you ALWAYS make backups. ALWAYS. Do it. Now. If you already have backups, make backups of your backups.

The image in the third panel is an actual screenshot from the program. I wouldn't recommend trying to read the timing sequence from the program though. Most of the labels are wrong.

Also, I've made an HTML5/Javascript version of the SimCity 4 terrain generator if you want to try it out and don't have Mathematica.

Posted 03/23/2013 18:15:00

Well, Bob may need some help remembering things, but at least he can help Mike remember pi.

Also, I tried to make a CDF version of my SimCity 4 terrain generator Mathematica notebook, and it didn't work (the free CDF player from Wolfram has no export capability, and it turns out copy/pasting images from the CDF player doesn't work, either.) So instead I've uploaded the original Mathematica notebook here.

Oh, and just as a warning, if you run an operating system with a Unix-like command line, don't run the command in the title of this comic unless you really want your data to be gone.

Posted 03/14/2013 08:00:00

Time for Mike to start over on memorizing pi... 3.14159...

Today's comic includes a cameo of Agent Scott from Thomas Overbeck's excellent (but currently NSFW) time-travel comic Times Like This. Thanks to Thomas for letting me use Agent Scott in my comic. Hopefully I've gotten the representation of him good enough.

Posted 03/09/2013 18:00:00

Who cares why the robot knows how to build a time machine, where did that little TARDIS come from? I wonder...

I'm planning on updating the comic early next week so the update can be on Pi Day. And I finally figured out how to make Mathematica programs work in the free version of the CDF player, so my football throw calculator actually works in the free version now. The trick turned out to be to move all the code into the Manipulate command.

Posted 03/02/2013 18:00:00

I had to have the time machine be used for something irresponsible... The original version I made of this comic had the conversation reversed and Mike being the one to travel to Wichita, but I changed it after a friend pointed out to me that Ashley hadn't yet gotten to choose a way of using the time machine. Plus, I would think that Ashley would be savvy enough to catch onto Mike suggesting they use the time machine to win the lottery. If you want you can see the original version here.

Posted 02/23/2013 18:00:00

Either Mike gets the secret of time travel, or all his students fail the exam. It's a win-win situation!

In case you ever want to know how far you can throw a football on Ceres, I wrote a Mathematica notebook that calculates trajectories of objects around various planets and asteroids in the Solar System. If you have the free Mathematica CDF player you can try out the notebook.

Posted 02/16/2013 18:00:00

What did you THINK it was going to say?

This comic was inspired by this tweet from the OU Daily's Twitter account. The editorial Mike is talking about is this one, and it's as silly as Mike makes it sound. This comic was also a chance to play with focal blur in POV-Ray.

Posted 02/09/2013 18:30:00

Be kind to your robot; upgrade him away from Windows ME already.

Posted 02/02/2013 18:00:00

TV rots your mind and circuit boards.

Posted 01/26/2013 18:00:00

This comic is inspired by a story my dad enjoyed telling, based on something that happened with my half-brother before I was born. With the last panel, I'm figuring Mike was quoting a story that his dad also enjoyed telling.

Posted 01/19/2013 18:00:00

Bluegills are delicious, if you can catch one large enough to bother with.

Posted 01/12/2013 18:00:00

Any excuse to go fishing!

This storyline, where Mike goes fishing with his father, is inspired by my experiences of going fishing with my dad as a kid. My dad passed away in 2011, but if I had a time machine that allowed me to go to the past, you can bet that I would do what Mike is doing.

Posted 01/05/2013 18:10:00

The title of this comic is in reference to Idiocracy, in case you haven't seen it. It's a quote from Not Sure, during a moment of confusion about how the Time Masheen works.

For the time travel rules in this comic, I'm using a rigid timeline rule: namely, that even if Mike had decided to pay the ticket, something else would have prevented him from doing so (or his payment would simply not be recorded). The storyline I have planned out should be consistent with the time travel rule, but if I mess up, feel free to call me on it!

Posted 12/29/2012 18:00:00

There is an in-joke among my family that the smoke alarm is actually the "it's done" alarm...

For these highway scenes, I made a POV-Ray library that contains various types of road signs that are used in the United States. I looked around on the internet before starting it and the only previously existing library I could find was for British road signs. I haven't had much time to make it user-friendly, but in case anyone would want to make U.S. road signs in POV-Ray, here's a copy of the road sign library.

Posted 12/22/2012 18:00:00

HERE KITTY KITTY!

Posted 12/15/2012 22:20:00

Sorry this comic is a bit late. It took me longer than I expected it would to create the Povray scene for this comic.

And, just in case anyone would ever want to put a Big Wheel into a Pov-Ray scene, here's the code that I wrote for it. It produces a Big Wheel, with front wheel size 12.

#declare bwfrontwheel=union{
     difference{
      cylinder{0,1.5*z,6}
      cylinder{-.1*z,1.6*z,4}
      pigment{color Black}
     }
     cylinder{0,1.5*z,4}
     pigment{color Yellow}
     translate 6*y
    }; 
    
#declare bwsidewheel=object{bwfrontwheel scale <.5,.5,2>}
#declare bwforkspoke=cylinder{0,8*y,1 pigment{color Yellow} rotate 45*z translate 6*y};
	
#declare bigwheel=union{
     object{bwfrontwheel}
     object{bwforkspoke translate 2*z}
     object{bwforkspoke translate -2*z} 
     cylinder{2*z,-2*z,1 pigment{color Yellow} translate 8*y rotate 45*z translate 6*y}
     cylinder{0,-10*x,2 pigment{color Red} translate 8*y rotate 45*z translate 6*y}
     cylinder{0,-2*x,6 pigment{color Red} translate 4*y rotate 45*z translate 8*y translate -10*x rotate 45*z translate 6*y}
     difference{
       torus{6,1. rotate 90*z} 
       plane{y,0 inverse}
       translate 14*y rotate 45*z translate 6*y
       pigment{color Yellow}
     }
     cylinder{0,-2*x,4 translate 8*y-20*x pigment{color Blue}}
     object{bwsidewheel translate -8*z-17*x}
     object{bwsidewheel translate -8*z-17*x scale -z}
     cylinder{-4*z,4*z,.25 translate 6*y texture{Aluminum}}
     cylinder{0,-2*x,.25 translate 6*y-4*z texture{Aluminum}}
     cylinder{0,2*x,.25 translate 6*y+4*z texture{Aluminum}} 
     cylinder{-4*z,-8*z,.25 translate 6*y-2*x texture{Aluminum}}
     box{<-3,5.5,-6>,<-1,6.5,-9> pigment{color Black}}
     cylinder{4*z,8*z,.25 translate 6*y+2*x texture{Aluminum}}
     box{<3,5.5,6>,<1,6.5,9> pigment{color Black}}
     
   };

Posted 12/8/2012 21:10:00

The next several comics are going to have a fun storyline.

This week's comic is loosely based on an actual experience I had with a car-rental company (one that also happens to share its name with a famous physicist). The guy told me he couldn't rent a car to me because his computer said I didn't exist, which was news to me. I ended up finding another car rental company that was willing to rent to a ghost.

Posted 12/1/2012 21:45:00

My precious...

Posted 11/24/2012 18:20:00

I've actually done this to someone in my lab.

Posted 11/17/2012 21:50:00

The idea for this some comes from a Facebook post I saw a few days ago. The person who wrote it tried to get reimbursement for a conference and the university (not OU, it was a different university) complained that she had failed to provide sufficient proof that she had attended the conference despite provinding evidence that she had won an award at the conference.

Luckily, whenever I've had to apply for reimbursement, the university has always accepted the conference brochure as evidence of attendance. I would hate to have to go to further extremes just to prove I was there...

Posted 11/10/2012 19:40:00

The last panel, for anyone who has been under a rock for the past year and thus hasn't been hearing about U.S. politics, contains a Mitt Romney joke. It's the last one I'll use, I promise. Unless, you know, his son Tagg does actually get elected president in the future.

Posted 11/3/2012 20:00:00

The final panel contains a reference to this Questionable Content comic. After rereading it, I noticed the title of that comic. Just assume that the robot's video has bypassed Jenna Bush in the rankings.

The idea of a robot-driven car isn't all that far from reality. In fact, prototypes exist, and are street-legal in Nevada, California, and Florida, with a decent safety record thus far. Nonetheless, remind me to avoid roads in those states...

Posted 10/27/2012 17:15:00

There is no escape from the robot. He is eternal.

Posted 9/29/2012 16:00:00

Trying a different panel layout with this comic. Probably won't stick with this layout, though.

Posted 9/22/2012 19:05:00

I nerd-sniped myself a bit on the first of the two questions on the exam. I calculated that the trains would meet after 2 hours and 13 minutes, about 10 miles north of Ardmore, and then found the location on Google Maps. The railroad runs a couple miles east of I-35, and the spot where the trains would meet is around its crossing with state route 53.

In terms of physics, the second question is actually more interesting. It's a question commonly given in classical mechanics courses, though it might be a bit above these students' heads. For those who aren't physicists or don't want to work through the math, the answer is about 42 minutes, and that the time is the same regardless of where you drill the hole to.

Posted 9/15/2012 23:30:00

For the third panel, I cheated a bit and used a model from Google Earth for the stadium, and the Blob Man macro for the people.

Somehow I doubt Iron Chef would use a non-edible ingredient like cesium as the secret ingredient, but if they did, I'd watch the hell out of it!

As for the football game, a Division 1 team vs. a Division 3 team might be a bit of a stretch, but this season has had a few ridiculously lopsided games so far (e.g. OSU vs. Savannah State). But enough about football. This is supposed to be a nerdy comic strip.

Posted 9/8/2012 19:10:00

He corrected the pi error, but the other errors are only minor corrections...

Posted 9/1/2012 18:30:00

Emphasizing the most important details, of course.

Posted 8/25/2012 22:00:00

Just for the record, I don't actually know whether a Taurus will make it to 88 mph. The speedometer on mine maxes out at 85 mph, but the fastest I've ever taken it to was 75 mph, on the uphill strech of I-68 between LaVale and Frostburg, Maryland. I'd suspect that it probably could make it to 88 if I actually tried.

Posted 8/18/2012 18:40:00

Yeah, the countryside in Oklahoma pretty much looks like that...

Posted 8/12/2012 00:30:00

This comic is the beginning of what will be a fun sequence of comics for me to make...

Posted 8/5/2012 01:05:00

This is based on something my current roommate did to me. When he put his dishes into the cabinet, he somehow loaded them so that when I opened the door, a couple of my glasses fell out of the cabinet and shattered. I ended up with cuts on my hand from the broken glass. I wanted to kill him. Fortunately, however, it is not illegal to kill a robot...

So far I haven't discussed much how I make these comics. I use POV-Ray 3.6 to do the rendering of the images, and almost all the code I use I write myself. A prominent exception is the trees that occur in some scenes. I use the "maketree" macro by Gilles Tran for those. In this comic, I needed to make glasses and plates shatter. I'm sure it's probably been done before, but I decided to write my own macro, that I called "makeshatter", to do the job:

#macro shatter(obj,maxnpcs,pieces,sd,tex)
 #local breakingobj=obj;
 #declare pieces=array[maxnpcs];
 #local pc=1;   
 #local rng=seed(sd);
 #local maxex=max_extent(obj);
 #local minex=min_extent(obj);
 #local siz=maxex-minex;
 #local vol=siz.x*siz.y*siz.z; 
 #local rad=pow(vol/maxnpcs,1/3);
 #while (pc*(maxex-minex);
  #local endpt2=maxex-*(maxex-minex); 
  #local endpt3=maxex-*(maxex-minex);
  #local endpt4=maxex-*(maxex-minex);
  #local blb=blob{threshold 0.6
             cylinder{endpt1,endpt2,rad,1}
             cylinder{endpt3,endpt4,rad,1} 
             texture{tex}
             };
  //#warning str(pc,5,0)
  #declare pieces[pc] = intersection{object{breakingobj} object{blb}};
  #local breakingobj= difference{object{breakingobj} object{blb}};
  
  #local pc=pc+1;
 #end 
  

#end 

//makeshatter:
// Parameters:
//   obj        input   object    Object to shatter
//   numpc      input   integer   Number of pieces to break into
//   sd         input   integer   Random number generator seed
//   debrisdiam input   float     Maximum distance from center to scatter debris
//   tex        input   texture   Texture for edges of shattered object    
//
#macro makeshatter(obj,numpc,sd,debrisdiam,tex)
union{
      //#local numpc=20;
      #local pieces=array[numpc];
      shatter(obj,numpc,pieces,sd,tex)
      #local rng=seed(sd*25+3);
      #local pc=1;
      #while (pc} 
       #local pc=pc+1;
      #end
}
#end

Another note on this comic: I included the song that the robot is singing as a bit of an homage to Questionable Content, one of the more popular webcomics out there. The song that comic is quoting is this one, which sort of sounds like it's being sung by a robot to me.

Posted 7/28/2012 17:30:00

This one is based on an actual email I received from someone in the physics department last year.

Posted 7/21/2012 20:45:00

Next week on Cesium Comics: Mike straps a bomb to Bob the Robot in an attempt to kill his boss. Bob goes off-course and blows up an orphanage instead. Close enough.

Posted 7/14/2012 19:05:00

Of course that's where the robot goes first. Perhaps Dan is hiding in another room, controlling the robot...

Posted 7/7/2012 18:05:00

This one was kind of fun to make. It was based on my advisor's actual reaction on the 4th of July last year when nobody showed up to the lab, after he told everyone he didn't expect them to show up that day. This is the leading hypothesis for the cause of his reaction.

Posted 6/30/2012 19:30:00

Unlike the "clone in Pennsylvania" one from a few weeks back, I've never been dumb enough to try this line in real life. For the non-physicists (i.e. normal people) in the audience, Efimov trimers are quantum mechanical states formed from three bodies. Knowing that, I'll let you figure out the meaning of the pickup line on your own.

Posted 6/23/2012 20:50:00

This one was inspired by this clip from the Suze Orman Show in which a graduate student asks how to open a retirement account, and is told not to bother since he isn't actually earning the money he makes.

Posted 6/16/2012 21:25:00

This conversation actually happened at a conference I was at a couple years ago. In retrospect, it was not as good of a conversation starter as I thought it was at the time.

Posted 6/10/2012 00:47:00

The idea for this conference came when I was looking around at a poster session and saw a physicist who could have passed for a hobo were he out on the street instead of inside a physics conference. From what I have seen, physics conferences tend to have an unusually relaxed dress code. The day I presented my talk, I started out wearing a tie, but felt so out of place that I ended up taking it off. Later I realized the only people at the conference who did wear ties were people who were selling things.

Anyway, I'm rambling there. Back from California, back to work...

Posted 6/2/2012 20:05:00

My mom suggested the idea for this comic (the part about the students wanting to go to Disneyland at least). I'm headed to Anaheim this week. It'll be fun.

Posted 5/26/2012

I think she's just messing with him. Poor undergrad.

Posted 5/19/2012

With apologies to the people who designed the Pokemon games...

For non-physicists, or at least anyone who hasn't had to deal with a dye laser, the woofer is a piece of glass in the laser that is used to slowly adjust the wavelength of the light from the laser (as opposed to the tweeter, which is used for quick adjustments). In my experience it is always the filthiest part of the laser.

Posted 5/12/2012

Obviously "Wolf News" in this comic is a reference to Fox News, which has referred to U.S. Secretary of Energy and Nobel Prize in Physics winner Steven Chu as "an incompetent experimental physicist" and claimed that Chu "couldn't find his, you know, butt with either hand." Considering Chu won the Nobel Prize for implementing the first magneto-optical trap, I felt it would only be fitting if the guy who said those things could go to the lab and show us experimental physicists how it's done. The Fox News reporter's line in panel 4 is of course a reference to the "fact" that Steven Chu invented the Scroll Lock key that appears on most keyboards.

Posted 5/5/2012

Ah, exam week. That magical time of the semester when by day the undergrads complain about "dead week" (a concept they made up as an excuse for why they shouldn't have any homework the week before finals), and by night they stand outside my window drunkenly screaming.

Posted 4/28/2012

I came up with the idea for this one while cleaning the laser on Easter...

Posted 4/21/2012

The woofer in our 699 dye laser is always unclean, no matter how many times I try to clean it. It bothers me...

Posted 4/15/2012

This one took a lot longer to render than I anticipated (and I'm still not particularly satisfied with how it came out... I may rerender it later).

As for the quotes in the comic, it is fortunate for my faith in humanity that only one of those quotes is real.

Posted 4/7/2012

Back in college, my roommate had a snapping turtle as a pet. His name was "Meah" and he was awesome.

Posted 3/31/2012

Tornadoes are a fact of life in this part of the country (and the obvious namesake for the name "tornado alley"). After a while of being here, I've noticed that, at least as far as the locals are concerned, the tornado siren seems to mean "go outside and look up at the sky" rather than the "duck and cover" that I thought it meant. As far as I'm concerned, it means the power is going to go out in the lab, and I'm going to have to fix the stuff that goes wrong...

Posted 3/25/2012

In case anyone in the physics community actually reads this (highly unlikely...), I would just like to add the disclaimer that I've never actually fallen asleep in the lab. Well, except for that one time when I was working on electrodynamics homework at 1 AM and the lights gnome woke me up...

Posted 3/17/2012

Considering some events in history, it is not completely unbelievable that a guy armed only with a spear could defeat a tank. It doesn't make it any less frustrating when it happens in Civilization, though.

Posted 3/10/2012

Seriously, when I first heard this song ("Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, for anyone who hasn't heard it), I thought they were actually singing about maps. Which, in my nerdy mind, would have made the song awesome. Maybe I just need to get out more.

Posted 3/3/2012

This one is based on an actual conversation that I overheard once on a bus in Norman. Unlike Michael, I didn't have the guts to speak up. The upside of that is that not saying anything meant I didn't say something stupid.

Posted 2/25/2012

Comments about this comic:

1. That robot needs to watch less TV.
2. If the radar image on TV is the current one, Dan probably shouldn't go outside.

Posted 2/18/2012

Mercifully, the robot would not understand the pun in the title.

Posted 2/11/2012

The characters introduced in this comic are the first to show up that aren't at least partially inspired by actual people (or robots), but I think they'll have some very amusing storylines.

The sort of personality I have in mind for the robot (robotality?) is one that falls a lot closer to the modern day reality of artificial intelligence than most webcomic robots. Basically what I have in mind is that this robot would be what you would get if you could fit something like Watson (the IBM artificial intelligence that can win at Jeopardy) into a PC that an engineering grad student could afford, and fit it with voice recognition, a webcam to see with, and an artificial voice. This is not possible with current technology (in particular Watson currently requires a supercomputing cluster, though with ten or fifteen more years of the development of computer technology this could change).

Even with technology beyond what we have now, I do not see Bob the Robot as being particularly intelligent or sentient. Mike's roommate Dan, on the otherhand, may disagree with me. What we can agree on, however, is the hope that the last light on Bob's panel should never turn on.

Posted 2/5/2012

Distance from the physics building to the clock tower: 3060 inches.

Posted Jan. 28, 2012

This is going to be the last "in the lab" comic for a little while. I don't want it to be run into the ground, plus I'd like to advance the storyline of the comic a bit...

Posted Jan. 25, 2012

So first I'm going to make an amendment to what I wrote yesterday. Thinking about it some more, it would make more sense for me to post my comics as I write them, rather than one a week, leaving (as is the case now), the possibility of more than a month passing in between when I write a comic and when I post it. So, this means that the updates of my comic will likely be more irregular, but I'll actually be posting the comics much closer to the time when I write them, and I think it may work out better that way.

Second, I should note, since it sort of comes up in comic number 3, the names of the characters at this point. I've decided the two characters introduced so far are going to be named Michael and Chris. Not that it really matters much, but writing the script for comic number 3 would have been more difficult had I tried to avoid naming anyone.

Also, in case anyone actually eventually reads this comic, I should note that the events and characters portrayed are fictional. Although I may occasionally base a comic on events that have actually occurred to me, for the most part the storylines I'm planning are entirely fictional. This will likely become a lot clearer as time goes on, but I wanted to make sure it was clear from the beginning.

Posted Jan. 25, 2012

So first I'm going to make an amendment to what I wrote yesterday. Thinking about it some more, it would make more sense for me to post my comics as I write them, rather than one a week, leaving (as is the case now), the possibility of more than a month passing in between when I write a comic and when I post it. So, this means that the updates of my comic will likely be more irregular, but I'll actually be posting the comics much closer to the time when I write them, and I think it may work out better that way.

Second, I should note, since it sort of comes up in comic number 3, the names of the characters at this point. I've decided the two characters introduced so far are going to be named Michael and Chris. Not that it really matters much, but writing the script for comic number 3 would have been more difficult had I tried to avoid naming anyone.

Also, in case anyone actually eventually reads this comic, I should note that the events and characters portrayed are fictional. Although I may occasionally base a comic on events that have actually occurred to me, for the most part the storylines I'm planning are entirely fictional. This will likely become a lot clearer as time goes on, but I wanted to make sure it was clear from the beginning.

Posted Jan. 25, 2012.

So first I'm going to make an amendment to what I wrote yesterday. Thinking about it some more, it would make more sense for me to post my comics as I write them, rather than one a week, leaving (as is the case now), the possibility of more than a month passing in between when I write a comic and when I post it. So, this means that the updates of my comic will likely be more irregular, but I'll actually be posting the comics much closer to the time when I write them, and I think it may work out better that way.

Second, I should note, since it sort of comes up in comic number 3, the names of the characters at this point. I've decided the two characters introduced so far are going to be named Michael and Chris. Not that it really matters much, but writing the script for comic number 3 would have been more difficult had I tried to avoid naming anyone.

Also, in case anyone actually eventually reads this comic, I should note that the events and characters portrayed are fictional. Although I may occasionally base a comic on events that have actually occurred to me, for the most part the storylines I'm planning are entirely fictional. This will likely become a lot clearer as time goes on, but I wanted to make sure it was clear from the beginning.

Posted 1/25/2012

So first I'm going to make an amendment to what I wrote yesterday. Thinking about it some more, it would make more sense for me to post my comics as I write them, rather than one a week, leaving (as is the case now), the possibility of more than a month passing in between when I write a comic and when I post it. So, this means that the updates of my comic will likely be more irregular, but I'll actually be posting the comics much closer to the time when I write them, and I think it may work out better that way.

Second, I should note, since it sort of comes up in comic number 3, the names of the characters at this point. I've decided the two characters introduced so far are going to be named Michael and Chris. Not that it really matters much, but writing the script for comic number 3 would have been more difficult had I tried to avoid naming anyone.

Also, in case anyone actually eventually reads this comic, I should note that the events and characters portrayed are fictional. Although I may occasionally base a comic on events that have actually occurred to me, for the most part the storylines I'm planning are entirely fictional. This will likely become a lot clearer as time goes on, but I wanted to make sure it was clear from the beginning.

Posted 1/24/2012

Over the past several months, making art in POV-Ray has become a hobby of mine, displacing perhaps more useful ways to spend my time, such as playing computer games or (god forbid) working in the lab more than I already do. The idea of making a webcomic out of my POV-Ray images has come up several times, but now I'm actually sort of going through with that idea. Hopefully it is not a huge mistake.

My original idea for the webcomic was to write about funny things that occur in the lab. The first six comics I've written fit this pattern. After realizing that following this pattern I'd run out of ideas quickly, and probably produce a webcomic that isn't very funny, I've decided to take it in a different route, which should become apparent as the comic runs its course.

As for the art, I use POV-Ray 3.6 to generate the scenes, and Poser 2010 to generate the human characters. After generating the scenes (with characters) in POV-Ray, I use ImageMagick to combine the frames into the form of the comic strip (as well as add the title), and I use Inkscape to add the quote bubbles.

POV-Ray is capable of generating far better images than I am currently capable of producing with it (for some examples of what POV-Ray can do, go to their website and click on "Hall of Fame"). Part of this is that I still have much to learn about generating realistic scenes -- something I hope to improve with time. Another limitation is that the most realistic images take a very long time to render. Between work (which takes up most of my time), and keeping to an update schedule for my comic, spending weeks generating one image is unrealistic.

As for the update schedule for my comic, at first I'm going to go by the rule of thumb suggested by Jeph Jacques, author of Questionable Content: update one fewer time per week than you think you can do. I could reasonably do two comics per week (assuming I only spend a lot of time on it on Saturdays). So, for now I'm planning on updating once per week, on Sunday nights. If my queue ends up getting longer (it is currently five comic strips), then I may increase it to twice a week.