The Far Side of Utopia

Comic for Monday, August 8th, 2022

Aug10

by PastUtopia on August 10, 2022 at 9:15 am

Comic. I did say it’d be late. Though this is slightly later than expected. Good night, by which I mean good morning, or maybe in some cases good afternoon.

22 Comments

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Discussion (22) ¬

Brother Parvus

August 12, 2022, 4:16 pm | # | Reply

The very brief introduction to this page brings vaguely to mind the opening scene of _The Hobbit_ with the conversation between Bilbo and the Dwarves going off at odd directions.
FrugalFred

August 12, 2022, 6:50 am | # | Reply

I like the format.

Last word bubble might be clearer if: “like” was changed to “don’t mind”, also if Peter doesn’t intend to stay there, but just view what happens change “get” to “leave it”.
- Ferrus
  
  August 12, 2022, 8:47 am | # | Reply
  
  I think it’s right as is. Peter is implying that he doesn’t like this company, so blowing up their building instead of one of his houses is preferable. He expects someone else to blow it up, so him leaving whatever it is there will “get” the place blown up.
  
  I don’t know, I could be wrong, but it makes sense to me as is. His actions will lead to a place he doesn’t like getting blown up.
Amaranth

August 11, 2022, 6:01 am | # | Reply

Bit late, but I also prefer the new format. I feel like there is no real downside to it, and more room for text and bigger text are both good things. My favorite page artistically made good use of panel spacing and I feel like that would work out in this new format better (the page where Mium temporarily took over the F10 prototype).

Seeing how casually Peter plays 4d chess is always interesting, though I wish we knew what he stole and is planting. Given that even Peter doe not know how it is being tracked and what he was talking about last time, it feels like it is almost certainly some kind of Kor’s World Tech (KorTech?).

As always, great comic and I appreciate getting comics at whatever pace they come out.
Jim

August 10, 2022, 2:29 pm | # | Reply

Anyone’s guess as to Peter’s IQ? I’m thinking somewhere in the low 200’s. (As if “low” means anything at that level.) He seems to have plans within plans and contingencies several levels deep. Manipulates countries, factions and worlds.
- Tgape
  
  August 10, 2022, 3:34 pm | # | Reply
  
  I’ve heard from numerous sources that IQ over about 120 to 130 doesn’t necessarily matter / it’s really hard to make a test that finds an actual qualitative difference over that point. Standardized intelligence tests never produce values that high simply because there isn’t an agreed understanding of how to rate someone that intelligent.
  
  Actual IQ tests tend to be things that are manually given. One part of the test I was given was a timed open ended vocabulary test. How does one handle the test giver not knowing all of the words that the person getting tested knows?
  
  In the case of the IQ test I took, I had a couple of words on my list that the test giver was unfamiliar with, and they asked about them during that timed portion. That had to count against my overall score. Admittedly, I did hit a wall where my mind just stopped giving words to spew.
  
  On a different aspect of that… How useful is it to know how many words someone can list starting with a particular letter? I’d suggest it isn’t. What matters is whether one knows the right word to use when one needs a word. That’s not necessarily going to be the most sophisticated word. Context matters, and part of that context is “what vocabulary does the audience understand?” But it’s really difficult to quantitatively evaluate how well someone can determine the relevant context and produce the best word given that context across a wide variety of contexts.
  
  A large part of actual intelligence is problem solving, but IQ tests are very poor at testing ones ability to solve real world problems. There’s a fundamental issue here, because there are about as many different focuses of expertise as there are people, and what’s challenging to one person may be trivial for another person simply because of their different background, rather than it being an intelligence difference. A third person might be able to give a solution that works because they’re very smart, but since their experience is completely orthogonal to the problem, their approach lacks any congruence with the appropriate industry standards and is therefore very awkward.
  
  There’s a video in which some company is asking somebody to figure out a solution to some arbitrary problem. “We want seven red lines, all strictly perpendicular. Some with green ink and some transparent.” At one point in time, that would seem insurmountable to most people. And then someone came out with a response video in which they showed that it was relatively easy to manage using red construction paper and a Mobius strip.
  
  Given the spread of that response video, someone having an immediate answer to that challenge no longer really shows intelligence per se, because it could just be that they had seen that response video.
  
  My guess is Peter has an IQ that’s high enough that anyone giving him an IQ test would rate him as less intelligent than he really is. He’d probably score at least 120, but less than 150. I’m not saying his actual IQ is necessarily less than 150, of course, just that someone testing him wouldn’t evaluate him as being over that threshold.
  - Glider
    
    August 10, 2022, 6:37 pm | # | Reply
    
    I am certain Tgape knows this, but for the sake of having more bits all together for the reader’s viewing pleasure…..
    
    There is not, contrary to popular opinion, a single IQ test. As Tgape described, there are quite a few different approaches, depending on exactly what you think you want to measure. They’re not even all on a similar scale, though many of them can be standardized to a base “100 is normal-ish” scale. Thus one psychologist using one approach might well rank Peter at 120, while another might rank him at 180. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that a third evaluator might look at this and say, “He needs a computer to tell him common sense social information? It’ll be a miracle if he scores better than 80 on my test.”
    
    Poor Peter! So misunderstood!
    - NavTrans
      
      August 11, 2022, 10:03 pm | # | Reply
      
      I wouldn’t be surprised if Peter had to do an IQ test as part of the Levenworth application process and if he scored exactly whatever deemed him useful.
Jim

August 10, 2022, 2:22 pm | # | Reply

Past, if you are mixing up night and morning, you are working too hard. I did that in my younger years but finally learned to slow down. Burning the candle at both ends wasn’t enough. I had to cut the candle in half and light both ends. Woke up at 3am to the beep-beep-beep of a keyboard buffer overrun. Pushing too hard can lead to health repercussions. Things will take as long as they take.
- Tgape
  
  August 10, 2022, 3:42 pm | # | Reply
  
  Sometimes that’s from working too hard, other times it’s just life craziness, and still other times, it could just be ones circadian rhythm doesn’t really match the planet’s.
  
  I don’t know what Past’s situation is. But I’ve had odd posting times sometimes for all three of those reasons. Also, it’s morning here, and I’m just about ready to go to bed after a reasonable day’s work. No, I’m not third shift, I’m just software development and my sleep cycle’s currently really messed up due to allergies.
- Just_IDD
  
  August 11, 2022, 11:38 am | # | Reply
  
  Another point of view could be that Past knows readers are from all over the world and their time upon reading today’s commentary could be completing that task at different relative times even if we are reading it right now. I used frequent wide area discussion forums and regularly said “Hope you have a great ToD!” ToD in this case is Time of Day.
- Brother Parvus
  
  August 12, 2022, 4:10 pm | # | Reply
  
  ” Pushing too hard can lead to health repercussions.”
  In the context from which this came, it’s true too. Those buffers can and do seem to get tired.
Josh S.

August 10, 2022, 1:22 pm | # | Reply

Not much in the way of windows, either! So, roof top entry seems likely.

This seems well within Kally’s abilities, for all that she’ll have to do some calculations. Peter seems unlikely to try running up the side of the building!\

There are definitely times when having Acalia be a good guy would be useful!
- Jim
  
  August 12, 2022, 3:58 am | # | Reply
  
  I’m fairly sure that Kally can fly both herself and Peter to the top of the building but she will need an invisibility spell.
  
  We know that levitating is possible since we have seen Arkady levitate/fly when he went off a rooftop to “rescue” ILA when she jumped off to protect Tyler from the assassin. This is just after Arkady had bought tasty food for ILA because her large denomination currency wouldn’t work in a vending machine. She gave Arkady the large bill and basically told him to keep the change. When Arkady arrives at Tyler’s room, ILA slam dunks him thinking he may be an assassin also. This first meeting of ILA and Arkady was hilarious!
  
  We know invisibility is possible since Aarron has been known to use it. It is not infallible since “Crowbar Tom” was able to sense Arron.
  - Jim
    
    August 12, 2022, 7:02 am | # | Reply
    
    Aarrgghh! It wasn’t Arkady that bought ILA tasty food. It was Ashian Canthi, Camilla’s brother. This is the second time I mixed up Arkady and Ashian about the tasty food and vending machine. One has salmon hair and one has lavender hair.
    - Ferrus
      
      August 12, 2022, 9:03 am | # | Reply
      
      To make matters worse (better?) they also seem to be friends, and Ashian is Arkady’s (future?) brother in law, and consequently are both often seen in the company of Camilla.
      
      Interestingly enough, they both can fly, though it’s only applied in Ashian’s case. We saw Arkady fly in a similar circumstance when jumped after Naomi when she fell (though, much like Ila, she clearly didn’t really need to help).
      
      In fact, I think Arkady is the only person other than Ila herself we’ve seen canonically fly (which I think he did by making himself lighter and manipulating the wind, rather than directly calculating velocity like Ila or Kally did). Ashian may be able to, or just have confidence in surviving/stopping a fall.
      
      Kally herself can definitely fly if we count Fluffy, but only sort of if we don’t. We actually saw her do it when she was racing Naomi to the roof top. She can fly, but only cannot infinitely change directions like Ila, meaning she has to land after few calculations or risk high velocity impacts with the ground.
      
      I also don’t think that Tom and Arron are strictly speaking invisible when using Ellipses. It mostly seems like it’s more like a mental inference that prevents people from paying attention to them or something.
      
      I don’t think Peter assumes that they won’t be seen at all though. He just doesn’t want them to be recognized at a distance, and Fluffy would be pretty easy to pick out of a line up of suspects. He objected to people thinking they were magic burglars because they weren’t going to burglar things.
      - Ferrus
        
        August 12, 2022, 9:05 am | # | Reply
        
        Though thinking about it, she probably doesn’t have to fly them up. Sophie was able to use an ethereal construct like a stair case. Kally could almost certainly do the same thing.
  - Josh S.
    
    August 13, 2022, 5:46 am | # | Reply
    
    In her contest with Naomi to get to the scene of conflict, it didn’t seem quite like she was flying, per se. Dec. 7th, 2020 she says “Three calculations should be enough to jump it… one for distance, one for positioning, one to stop…”
    
    I agree with Ferrus that a construct of stairs might do it – but it would be visible for quite a while, given the building’s height. I wonder if she could create a pneumatic lift. I mean, I am sure she could, but is it something she has enough understanding of to do on short notice.
    - Dave Howe
      
      August 13, 2022, 3:44 pm | # | Reply
      
      Depends on how you define “flying” I guess.
      Naomi has tried to get gravity to ignore her before now, without success; Kally seems to take the same approach as some other characters (Ila, the Suit that tried to kidnap Kally and jumped out of a moving aircraft, etc etc) by basically adding delta-v to their current positional vector, then adding negative delta-v to slow and stop. Ila uses the same principle when she simulates HVW strikes on, well, anything currently annoying her – it’s her go-to spell.
Deathbeams

August 10, 2022, 12:19 pm | # | Reply

Really liking the new art flow. Also, always happy to see Peter and Kally.
- Jim
  
  August 10, 2022, 2:15 pm | # | Reply
  
  I really, really like the new art flow. Sometimes the triangles and other shapes in the old format got a bit confusing. I really don’t need more confusion! LOL
Glider

August 10, 2022, 11:22 am | # | Reply

Guten tag. Danke.