Some of you cite your favorite strips. I will too.
Dilbert comes down to the caves where trolls (accountants) reside and gets a tour. The guide points to a troll sitting behind a desk, and mumbling in a stupor: "nine, nine, nine...".
Guide: And this is our random numbers generator.
Dilbert: Are you sure those are random?
Guide: That's the problem with randomness - you can never be sure.
Links to archive.org always last longer – that’s the point. But they are not the most convenient to use: The web site as viewed through archive.org is slow, and any external links are also to the old archived version of the linked-to site. Therefore a live link, if such a thing exists, is better.
There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins and Dilbert says he won't know until he's done eating.
I remember reading this one in the late nineties. Never been able to find it again. It was probably in one of his books:
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pointy haired boss making making a presentation:
"research shows that customers want high-quality products at low-prices.
but we make low-quality products.
so we are going to sell them at high-prices and call it a strategy"
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If anyone has a link to the original comic, please share it, I would like to see it again. It captures so many themes succinctly, and was very very astute for the late nineties when corps were doing crazy things and calling it a "strategy".
Stray thought: Why 4 and 9? Because the joke is funniest if the number is completely ordinary.
0 and 1 are special and so are all prime numbers. 6 is out because it's the maximum die throw. And one figure is more ordinary than two figures, or negatives, or decimals. That leaves 4 and 9.
Yeah. Alternative explanation: I'd say 3 and 7 are out because they often come up in fairy takes etc as magical. 5 is out because it's half of ten and the number of fingers. 2 is out because it is too small.
Dilbert comes down to the caves where trolls (accountants) reside and gets a tour. The guide points to a troll sitting behind a desk, and mumbling in a stupor: "nine, nine, nine...".
Guide: And this is our random numbers generator.
Dilbert: Are you sure those are random?
Guide: That's the problem with randomness - you can never be sure.
Edit: Found it here: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-quest-for-rand....
And thank you, Scott - many laughs thanks to you.