Exposure Models
Exposure Models
[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk typing on his laptop as Megan walks in.] Cueball: I built another COVID exposure model to help me limit my risk.
[Megan stands behind Cueball, who has turned in his chair to face her. He is leaning his arm on the back of the chair.] Megan: Any new insights? Cueball: Yeah: "If you spend all day debugging models, you don't have close contact with a lot of people."
[Cueball turns away from Megan to type on his laptop again. The back of his chair has disappeared.] Megan: Well, I guess it worked. Cueball: According to my meta-model, the end of the pandemic is only four more models away. Megan: So close!

This is another comic in a series related to the COVID-19 pandemic .
Cueball (or Randall ) created another COVID exposure model to help lower his risk of catching COVID-19 in the pandemic. Megan inquires about the model's result, to which Cueball admits that he's been sitting at his computer continuously debugging models, and draws the conclusion that debugging COVID-19 models lessens close contact with other people. This is similar to the premise of 1445: Efficiency and 1708: Dehydration , except with the situation reversed — where before, researching a situation made the situation worse, here Cueball's time "wasted" has actually benefited him.
By "model," Randall likely means a manually crafted model, since he describes debugging it, but he may also mean the form of automatically generated software that is used in modern machine learning.
Cueball is too busy making models to figure out how to actually lower his risk other than sitting around repeating the work of others and improving his model-building skill. He has also created a meta-model, reporting the number of models Cueball has to create to wait the pandemic out. The fact that Megan refers to having to wait for the time that it would take Cueball to create four more models as "so close" implies that Cueball goes through models quickly, which makes sense because he spends all of his time working on new ones.
In the title text Randall mentions that he is dangerously close to making a spreadsheet about how many spreadsheets about coronavirus he has made cumulative over time. This would be a recursive graph, a recurring theme on xkcd.
[Cueball is sitting in an office chair at a desk typing on his laptop as Megan walks in.] Cueball: I built another COVID exposure model to help me limit my risk.
[Megan stands behind Cueball, who has turned in his chair to face her. He is leaning his arm on the back of the chair.] Megan: Any new insights? Cueball: Yeah: "If you spend all day debugging models, you don't have close contact with a lot of people."
[Cueball turns away from Megan to type on his laptop again. The back of his chair has disappeared.] Megan: Well, I guess it worked. Cueball: According to my meta-model, the end of the pandemic is only four more models away. Megan: So close!
