Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey
Godel, Escher, Kurt Halsey
Drawn during an unending NASA lecture [Two people are talking, one in a hat.] Cueball: it's just so hard to compare kids now with kids in the past. you can't help but to belong to one group or the other.
Cueball: and of course every generation seems awful to the one before it. look at quotes from throughout history.
Hatted: yeah, and it sure would be nice to have some historical perspective on some of this stuff. I just don't know what to make of it. [Circles are appearing--maybe snow?]
Cueball: i guess you do what you can to help the people around you and hope it turns out okay.
Cueball: in the end, what else can you do?
Hatted: lead a crusade?
[We can no longer see the people, just the circles.] it's presentism, man. the idea that historical context is irrelevant, that we understand it
all that we need take no warnings from the follies of the past. that we're facing something new.
socrates couldn't imagine the internet. but people don't change. [We can start to see a darker circle in the lower right corner.]
(The borders between the three panels on this line are cracking.) have you seen those collections of historical pornography? talk about historical context.
did you know the first porn photo was bestial in. [inside a circle:] nature?
at least that stuff was out of the mainstream [each word in one circle:] no just in history
(the three panels have merged into one on each row.)
i don't know about you, but [circled] I [uncircled] never
even once seen
[The circles are highly variable in size now, and pressed up against a larger one on the right side.]
[There is mass of circles of different sizes, with some dark fissures in between, against the side of a large circle which we can see part of in the right half of the panel. They look like cells. There's a tiny square in the center of the giant cell.]
[We see only the tiny square, centered. It has a few marks inside it.]
[Closer, the square is divided into rectangles of different sizes, each of which has text in it.]
[Much closer, we can see fragments of the text. Some are sideways, some are cut off, some are too small to read.] machine language translated by principles of isomorphism it is a consequence of the Church-Turing thesis that ... but how do you select the channel you wish to se- thou ... shou ... palin ... stri ... it is a ... crab ... be obvious to one-s ... your great intellectual achievements ... Tortise. Why ... you give this old Tortise ...
[Closer still, we can just see a huge sideways s and h.]
[Those letters are faded and mixed with a faded version of the next panel.]
girls take boys away ... never be further than a phone call and a goosebumped shiver away ... drove all night listening to mix tapes ... the past is just practice [There is a heart at the bottom and, in the lower left, the name Kurt.]
[The same as the previous panel, but with the words blurred out to scribbles.]
[Jagged, shaded shapes and strands start to fall. Faint panel borders appear again. There is a person on the far right.]
(Back to three panels per row.) [Cueball and Megan are standing amid the fragments.]
Cueball: There's too much. And so little feels important.
[The jagged edge of the shaded area is encroaching on the sides of the panel.]
What do you do?
[We see them from farther away through a rough hole in the shaded area. Bits continue to fall around them.]
[They are holding hands.]
"One of a series of strips I drew during a long and boring NASA lecture. It careens wildly from intellectual to chaotic to Godel, Escher, Bach to Kurt Halsey to chaotic and sappy. The whole series is here . "

At the time xkcd was created, Randall was working on robotics at NASA 's Langley Center. This drawing was apparently made during that period, while attending a talk that he didn't like.
The name of the comic is a portmanteau-like play on the following:
The comic is drawn in the form of a storyboard and is clearly intended to be visualized as an animated sequence.
In the first part of the comic, two people discuss the difficulty of comparing past and present generations, since the person making the comparison invariably belongs to one of the two groups.
It's unclear whether the behatted guy is Black Hat , as Randall hadn't standardized his character designs yet, though the sarcastic comment suggests that it is. If it is, then this would be his first appearance. (He also appears in 12: Poisson , but that comic was released about 3 months later, but the numbering did not follow the release day on LiveJournal when the comics were transferred to xkcd - see the trivia for that comic.) Actually due to the order of release on LiveJournal, this, being number 6, was the first releases to use both stick figures, Cueball , Black Hat and Megan , as well as Multiple Cueballs ! See the trivia below.
The assembly of text panels found in the middle of the strip is similar to 124: Blogofractal .
The philosophy of Kurt Gödel is also a theme in 468: Fetishes .
Drawn during an unending NASA lecture [Two people are talking, one in a hat.] Cueball: it's just so hard to compare kids now with kids in the past. you can't help but to belong to one group or the other.
Cueball: and of course every generation seems awful to the one before it. look at quotes from throughout history.
Hatted: yeah, and it sure would be nice to have some historical perspective on some of this stuff. I just don't know what to make of it. [Circles are appearing--maybe snow?]
Cueball: i guess you do what you can to help the people around you and hope it turns out okay.
Cueball: in the end, what else can you do?
Hatted: lead a crusade?
[We can no longer see the people, just the circles.] it's presentism, man. the idea that historical context is irrelevant, that we understand it
all that we need take no warnings from the follies of the past. that we're facing something new.
socrates couldn't imagine the internet. but people don't change. [We can start to see a darker circle in the lower right corner.]
(The borders between the three panels on this line are cracking.) have you seen those collections of historical pornography? talk about historical context.
did you know the first porn photo was bestial in. [inside a circle:] nature?
at least that stuff was out of the mainstream [each word in one circle:] no just in history
(the three panels have merged into one on each row.)
i don't know about you, but [circled] I [uncircled] never
even once seen
[The circles are highly variable in size now, and pressed up against a larger one on the right side.]
[There is mass of circles of different sizes, with some dark fissures in between, against the side of a large circle which we can see part of in the right half of the panel. They look like cells. There's a tiny square in the center of the giant cell.]
[We see only the tiny square, centered. It has a few marks inside it.]
[Closer, the square is divided into rectangles of different sizes, each of which has text in it.]
[Much closer, we can see fragments of the text. Some are sideways, some are cut off, some are too small to read.] machine language translated by principles of isomorphism it is a consequence of the Church-Turing thesis that ... but how do you select the channel you wish to se- thou ... shou ... palin ... stri ... it is a ... crab ... be obvious to one-s ... your great intellectual achievements ... Tortise. Why ... you give this old Tortise ...
[Closer still, we can just see a huge sideways s and h.]
[Those letters are faded and mixed with a faded version of the next panel.]
girls take boys away ... never be further than a phone call and a goosebumped shiver away ... drove all night listening to mix tapes ... the past is just practice [There is a heart at the bottom and, in the lower left, the name Kurt.]
[The same as the previous panel, but with the words blurred out to scribbles.]
[Jagged, shaded shapes and strands start to fall. Faint panel borders appear again. There is a person on the far right.]
(Back to three panels per row.) [Cueball and Megan are standing amid the fragments.]
Cueball: There's too much. And so little feels important.
[The jagged edge of the shaded area is encroaching on the sides of the panel.]
What do you do?
[We see them from farther away through a rough hole in the shaded area. Bits continue to fall around them.]
[They are holding hands.]
"One of a series of strips I drew during a long and boring NASA lecture. It careens wildly from intellectual to chaotic to Godel, Escher, Bach to Kurt Halsey to chaotic and sappy. The whole series is here . "
