Express yourself!

I would like to thank Karl for supporting me for my failed joke answer submission. Second I want to know if Skip was a Monopoly piece, which one would he be?

You should update your copyright notice on your pages...it's not 2001 anymore. Someone might take advantage of it.

So sad. Instead of typing a paper, I went through the archives. It is officially Friday, now, however (12:47 a.m. CDT) and NO new comic yet. What's WITH you guys?

Great job, by the way. If I weren't colorblind, I'd probably be more apt to appreciate it.

Lavender??? You came up with lavender for the guy's space suits? Come on! Get real!

At least Al has his priorities in order with the black shirt and white pants...

Wednesday's comic was a hoot! However, doesn't it seem a bit implausible? *dusting the ol physics book off* 1) If the station was spinning to provide the 'artificial' gravity, the ball would eventually slam into the floor (same reason no one is floating), probably within the first 90 degrees of arc of the station...2) If it isn't spinning, and the boys are using something like gravity boots (You know, Star Trek stuff) with little or no gravity, the ball would go in a straight line, directly into the curved floor, within the first 90 degrees of curve...Essentially your ball went into orbit around the center hub, which is probably impossible...Please note I wrote to Charles Schulz over the implausibility of a bird and dog being friends....Take care. --Mike Leatherwood

I should have known better than to doubt that anything depicted in your strip would be less than physically accurate! Upon reflection I realize that everything in the baseball strip is indeed plausible and compliant with the laws of physics.

A ball held in the hand of someone standing in your space-station, when "dropped", will move in a straight line tangental to the circle of the station, in the direction of the rotation. This straight line trajectory, being as the ball starts inside the outside circle of the station, will intersect with the outside circle, the "floor" of the station. Since the station continues to rotate while the ball moves along its straight-line trajectory, the point where the ball intersects the "floor" of the station will be more or less directly "below" the point from which it was "dropped" in the first place: the upshot is that from the point of view of the original person holding the ball, the ball will seem to have dropped down to the floor, though in a slightly weird way.

I will not go into what this implies for the art of pitching aboard your space station, other than to note that Mitch must have a wild repetoire of none-intuitively-moving pitches available to him!

So anyway, what obviously happened in the strip is that Will, having mastered the odd apparent-trajectories a pitched ball can take, succeeded in connecting with one, and hit it in such a way as to exactly cancel out any velocity it had relative to the center of the space station, especially the forward tangential velocity. (Mitch is obviously pitching in the direction of the rotation of the station.)

So now you have the ball with exactly zero velocity in any direction with regards to the center of the station. (I will assume here for purposes of simplicity that the station rotates on a plane perpendicular to the radius of the Earth so that I don't have to deal with orbital mechanics...) The ball and the space station are both in equal orbits around the Earth, one slightly ahead of the other. They will not move relative to each other (ignoring any microgravity effects, of course). However, the station is still rotating, and the ball is within the radius of the station. So the circular part of the station will be rotated AROUND the baseball which will just stay there, motionless with regard to the center of the station (ignoring the effects of friction of air moving past on the ball).

So from the point of view of someone standing in the station, the ball will seem to move all the way around the circle of the station, in the direction opposite the station's rotation, and come back around to its starting point (and keep going, of course)..

So Will, though having mastered odd tajectory pitches (or maybe just having gotten extremely lucky), still has not mastered the odd effects encountered in fielding on a space station, which Al obviously has, and unwisely suggests chasing a ball which will just eventually come around the station back to them (or more accurately, they will be rotated back to where the ball is). Or maybe Will is smarter after all, and knows that the station is not in a plane perpendicular to the radius of the Earth, and that orbital mechanical effects will cause the ball in a lower orbit to move faster than the center of the station in a higher orbit and thus the ball will intersect with the "floor" before coming all the way around, or he knows that in a station of circumference N, pressurized to one atmosphere, the air resistance on the ball will accelerate it, causing it to intersect with the floor long before it they make it back around to it.

Al, the idealist, lives in a simple Newtonian universe of no frictional effects, perfect elasticity, and all those other things only found in the classroom and not in the real world. Will, the realist, knows that things never behave as the authors of the exercise sections of Physics text books would like them to.

I live to torture Mac users. Therefore, I submit the following link for your bemusement.

Two things. Okay, three.

One: If Greg Dean of Real Life Comics can do a full-color comic every day, why can't you?

Two: Ally McBeal is ending in about a month. Is there hope for humanity?

Three: I still love your comic. Keep up the good work, please.

Two: Ally ending in and of itself proves there's hope for humanity.