Um, the question was about friends. There was no stated gender interest. I take this to mean Liz is pan. I realize this response is nearly a duplicate of Jamie’s, but it’s less obtuse.
I mean the strip submissions are due today (as in, the in-universe “today”) so I get the distinct feeling that if it’s happening it’s gonna happen soon.
I… think that the “him” Sarah’s referring to here is Jacob?
I doubt that. Sarah didn’t know Joyce already knew Liz, so I doubt Liz has visited prior to this while Joyce and Jacob were in School.
Daibhid C
On my first reading, I thought this was Jacob, and they were talking in hypotheticals because Liz had heard about Jacob. On rereading, it does sound more like a Past Incident we know nothing about.
But the subject under discussion was friends who were hot.
nothri
“Objection! Your honor, the topic of conversation is irrelevant. My client clearly stated that the woman was single, not that she was hot. Any further speculation on her intended meaning in mere hearsay.”
khn0
Many people tend to answer to only the last part of any question
Julia will confess her feelings to Doris but while she will reciprocate them she will instead leave her forever to engage in president training on the Moon.
Oh, I meant on the sun, but yours is also technically true
Suet
Summers and Santa don’t look like they mix, but it sure does.
Reltzik
But not right after winter break.
… also, technically speaking, I think the sun is one of only two spherical bodies in the solar system that DON’T experience summer.
(MAYBE you can argue that the other one does experience summer, but it’s such a minor difference that no, it doesn’t. And I’m not covering the non-spherical bodies because I don’t care to track down a table of axial tilts for every last comet and asteroid.)
milu
*reads facts*
ooooh you mean Mercury because it’s always facing the sun at the same angle? —wait you’ve actually checked the axial tilts of all of the moons in the solar system???
Reltzik
Not all of them. Just the ones with sufficient gravity to become nearly-spherical. Small ones like Phobos and Demos don’t count.
Erm, and not directly. Looked up the facts. Didn’t confirm with a telescope.
milu
that will be acceptable.
Decidedly Orthogonal
And here I would argue that aside from the sun, they all experience _summer_, but not necessarily seasonal variation that is meaningfully distinguishable from the day/night cycle. Another question is if there are two periods (overlapping) for moons, especialy Jupiter’s, since they get energy radiated at them from both Sol and Jove. For those that don’t understand yet, the wikipedia article has a great animation showing axial tilt.
okay i sprained my brain trying to visualize a moon being tilted relative to its orbit around the sun, and under what that means for its seasonality depending on its speed of rotation, forget i brought this up i hate it now. (i was gonna joke that Mercury’s axis is decidely orthogonal to its orbit or whatever but i’m too exhausted now, please, assemble your own joke; thank you)
re: earworms: heheh =) i think something like that happens in Animorphs also, as i recall from the dozen or so books i read in the span of a couple weeks when i was circa 12 years old.
So, cool, but kinda boring from a potential multi-periodic seasonal weather cycle analysis perspective.
Reltzik
A moon’s path around the sun is basically its planet’s path around the sun, with a tiny bit of wobble added that doesn’t change much about its summers and winters.
milu
wait, but… ok, but… since moons rotate around their planet, wouldn’t their axis tilt back and forth relative to the sun at each rotation?
what am i missing here? could it be, and i am just spitballing, a basic understanding of astronomy?
milu
oooook i think i get it now.
a body’s axis of rotation basically stays at the same angle to its orbital plane right? there’s no force that acts on the axis of rotation itself, there’s just two essentially independent movements: an object’s rotation on itself, like a top, and its orbit around a heavier object, like a hand twirling a slingshot. and so, logically enough, some tops happen to gyrate at a greater or lesser angle to the ellipsis the slingshot is describing around the hand.
ok don’t ask me why, but modelling it like this helps, somehow
(at least i think it does, unless i’m still getting it wrong)
thank you for your patience
Reltzik
Pretty much? If you’re switching in the word rotating (the object spinning in place) for revolving (the object twirling around something else) then that sounds correct. The key point is that the axes of revolution and rotation should be treated as independent.
And yes, the moons revolutions relative to the sun would wobble back and forth a bit due to their revolution around their planet. But it’s a pretty small factor. Taking the worst case as an illustration:
The largest known orbital distance for a moon in the solar system is Neptune’s moon Neso. At its most extreme, it’s over half an AU (distance from Earth to the sun) away from Neptune. It’s axis of revolution around Neptune is also severely inclined relative to Neptune’s orbit around the sun — about 45 degrees off (and also it’s rotating backwards, but that doesn’t matter here). If it were instead purely perpendicular to Neptune’s orbit, producing the maximum difference possible… then the angular distance between it and Neptune, seen from the sun, would at its most extreme, be less than .005 degrees. In other words, its path around the sun is basically Neptune’s path, plus a tiny bit of wobble that doesn’t matter much.
Reltzik
Erf, misread your reply, you WEREN’T mixing up rotation and revolution and had it pretty much right. (TECHNICALLY there are things where the axis of revolution has a long-term affect on the access of rotation, which is how we end up with tidally locked bodies like Luna and Mercury, but they’re not relevant to this conversation.)
milu
thank you for your explanation!
Decidedly Orthogonal
A lot of this is redundant following the new comments, but to share what I’ve written anyways…
So planets orbit on their own ‘disk’ all generally close to the celestial disk from the sun’s equator or the center of angular momentum of the stellar system. This is called orbital inclination.
Moons also have an inclination compared to their parent planet. None of this however, affects their seasons. The seasons will be primarily affected by the axial tilt (spinning axis) of the planet or moon to the orbit around the sun. For the planet, their seasons are only affected by the this tilt, because this makes their poles face toward or away from the sun.
But my curiosity was about the moons specifically, because Jupiter is quite hot. As it turns out, three of the Galilean moons do have an axial tilt to their orbit around Jupiter, but it’s not huge. And since Jupiter is only tilted 3deg, there isn’t really a meaningful tilt.
However, should the moon’s oribtal inclination and/or axial tilt result in a significant shift from the parent planet’s orbit around the sun, that would induce solar seasons in the moon. Further, if the moon’s axial tilt is significantly deviated from it’s orbital inclination around a hot parent planet (like jupiter), that could presumably cause planetary induced seasons in the moon. And given the moon’s and planet’s respective orbits would probably be very different, could presumably produce a doubly-periodic season variation.
Lastly, to respond to a specific question here: “wouldn’t their axis tilt back and forth relative to the sun at each rotation?” No. The axis would wobble (as all spinning bodies do) but not because it’s orbiting around a planet.
milu
thanks! that’s very clearly put.
Reltzik
Jupiter does emit some radiation, but it’s so tiny compared to what the Jovian moons get from the sun that it really shouldn’t count for things like seasons. A much bigger factor in how Jupiter warms its moons is tidal forces, which don’t much depend on which side is facing Jupiter at any moment.
“It’s weird, everyone keeps getting better looking all the time, almost as if we’re being drawn by an artist who has steadily refined his style over the course of many years. But that’s silly, and I’m an atheist now anyway.”
The end of DoA will be Joyce founding a new religion devoted to the Almighty Willis.
As a way to not say Joe. That’s really what this is about, Joyce is WAY more into Joe than she’d ever admit.
And now Liz is going to hook up with Joe, because we’re talking about Willis here.
…. and I just realized that there’s little chance that, if Liz is anything other than straight, she’d have told Joyce prior to today. Her facebook is public- and stepmom-facing and she wasn’t yet out of the closet to Joyce about not being Christian.
Also, Joyce knows Dorothy’s straight, so she’s probably not taking the possibility seriously.
Also, Jacob is single, so the hot married person Sarah previously dated was not Jacob.
Thag Simmons
The read I had was that Liz tried to (and probably succeeded) at dating Sarah’s boyfriend, although she apparently didn’t know they were dating.
I’m not sure where you got the married part from.
Decidedly Orthogonal
There it is. I think Thag thought this thoroughly through.
Sarah was dating a non-Jacob dude. She *didn’t* tell her sister, because it seems her sister pilfering or fawning over boyfriends has been an issue, and it happened again anyways. “so you wouldn’t want to see him.”
milu
ok. yes. yes. thank you. that makes very sense.
maybe i shouldn’t sleep-comment at (for me) 6 in the morning; maybe.
Reltzik
I think Sarah’s concept of dating is “at-most-once-a-year one-night-stand with candied beefcake”.
Another possibility: Sarah secretly pined after a guy and was absolutely without a doubt going to ask him on a date someday eventually once she built up the nerve. Before that time came, Liz (the more outgoing of the two) asked him out, inadvertently clamjamming Sarah.
milu
my god. as an older sibling with a much more outgoing, 1 year younger sibling, my skin crawls to imagine something like that happening when i was in my late teens. i would have felt murderous.
165 thoughts on “Picky eater”
Ana Chronistic
I appreciate Joyce disregarding gender in her answer, for multiple reasons
milu
Shit yeah!
Rose by Any Other Name
Likewise.
Jamie
I just spent an hour looking for this strip and I don’t remember what I was going to say about it.
Hoboturtle
That the system update is working as intended?
Kaidah
Her system has finally adapted to the variable increase and is once again running smoothly. Maybe she installed more RAM or something.
Dana
I read a few strips back then and now I miss Mike. Did not expect that.
Some Ed
Um, the question was about friends. There was no stated gender interest. I take this to mean Liz is pan. I realize this response is nearly a duplicate of Jamie’s, but it’s less obtuse.
Doctor_Who
Aaand Joyce admits that she thinks Dorothy’s hot, at long last.
Next phase is hooking up Julia Gray and Doris while still vehemently denying that they are based on anyone.
RassilonTDavros
I mean the strip submissions are due today (as in, the in-universe “today”) so I get the distinct feeling that if it’s happening it’s gonna happen soon.
I… think that the “him” Sarah’s referring to here is Jacob?
Doctor_Who
I mean, let’s face it, it would be the one thing that would GUARANTEE Daisy would pick her strip over Walky’s.
Thag Simmons
I doubt that. Sarah didn’t know Joyce already knew Liz, so I doubt Liz has visited prior to this while Joyce and Jacob were in School.
Daibhid C
On my first reading, I thought this was Jacob, and they were talking in hypotheticals because Liz had heard about Jacob. On rereading, it does sound more like a Past Incident we know nothing about.
StClair
Technically, Joyce only said that Dorothy was single.
>.>
Clif
But the subject under discussion was friends who were hot.
nothri
“Objection! Your honor, the topic of conversation is irrelevant. My client clearly stated that the woman was single, not that she was hot. Any further speculation on her intended meaning in mere hearsay.”
khn0
Many people tend to answer to only the last part of any question
RowenMorland
Julia will confess her feelings to Doris but while she will reciprocate them she will instead leave her forever to engage in president training on the Moon.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Or Joyce just switched search parameters from hot=true to single=true without union/concatenation.
Eyebrow
And Joyce also deliberately omits Joe, and hasn’t admitted to herself exactly why.
LiterallyJustSomeGuy
Because Joe and Joyce are only shallow acquaintances and not close friends worth listing. /sarcasm
Thag Simmons
Oh dear, that’s… not ideal.
Suet
IIIIIIIIIIInteresting choice.
Do people really get hotter after summer break?
RassilonTDavros
Pretty sure it’s winter break, in this case.
Reltzik
Typically, they get colder after winter break.
milu
It’s summer somewhere
Wizard
In the southern hemisphere.
milu
Oh, I meant on the sun, but yours is also technically true
Suet
Summers and Santa don’t look like they mix, but it sure does.
Reltzik
But not right after winter break.
… also, technically speaking, I think the sun is one of only two spherical bodies in the solar system that DON’T experience summer.
(MAYBE you can argue that the other one does experience summer, but it’s such a minor difference that no, it doesn’t. And I’m not covering the non-spherical bodies because I don’t care to track down a table of axial tilts for every last comet and asteroid.)
milu
*reads facts*
ooooh you mean Mercury because it’s always facing the sun at the same angle? —wait you’ve actually checked the axial tilts of all of the moons in the solar system???
Reltzik
Not all of them. Just the ones with sufficient gravity to become nearly-spherical. Small ones like Phobos and Demos don’t count.
Erm, and not directly. Looked up the facts. Didn’t confirm with a telescope.
milu
that will be acceptable.
Decidedly Orthogonal
And here I would argue that aside from the sun, they all experience _summer_, but not necessarily seasonal variation that is meaningfully distinguishable from the day/night cycle. Another question is if there are two periods (overlapping) for moons, especialy Jupiter’s, since they get energy radiated at them from both Sol and Jove. For those that don’t understand yet, the wikipedia article has a great animation showing axial tilt.
Finally, and totally unrelated, I wanted to draw attention to my contribution to yesterday’s musical earworm debate.
milu
okay i sprained my brain trying to visualize a moon being tilted relative to its orbit around the sun, and under what that means for its seasonality depending on its speed of rotation, forget i brought this up i hate it now. (i was gonna joke that Mercury’s axis is decidely orthogonal to its orbit or whatever but i’m too exhausted now, please, assemble your own joke; thank you)
re: earworms: heheh =) i think something like that happens in Animorphs also, as i recall from the dozen or so books i read in the span of a couple weeks when i was circa 12 years old.
Decidedly Orthogonal
A quick search does turn up this:
“””Jupiter spins nearly upright so that the planet, as well as Europa and Jupiter’s other dozens of moons, do not have seasons as extreme as other planets do.”””
Decidedly Orthogonal
So, cool, but kinda boring from a potential multi-periodic seasonal weather cycle analysis perspective.
Reltzik
A moon’s path around the sun is basically its planet’s path around the sun, with a tiny bit of wobble added that doesn’t change much about its summers and winters.
milu
wait, but… ok, but… since moons rotate around their planet, wouldn’t their axis tilt back and forth relative to the sun at each rotation?
what am i missing here? could it be, and i am just spitballing, a basic understanding of astronomy?
milu
oooook i think i get it now.
a body’s axis of rotation basically stays at the same angle to its orbital plane right? there’s no force that acts on the axis of rotation itself, there’s just two essentially independent movements: an object’s rotation on itself, like a top, and its orbit around a heavier object, like a hand twirling a slingshot. and so, logically enough, some tops happen to gyrate at a greater or lesser angle to the ellipsis the slingshot is describing around the hand.
ok don’t ask me why, but modelling it like this helps, somehow
(at least i think it does, unless i’m still getting it wrong)
thank you for your patience
Reltzik
Pretty much? If you’re switching in the word rotating (the object spinning in place) for revolving (the object twirling around something else) then that sounds correct. The key point is that the axes of revolution and rotation should be treated as independent.
And yes, the moons revolutions relative to the sun would wobble back and forth a bit due to their revolution around their planet. But it’s a pretty small factor. Taking the worst case as an illustration:
The largest known orbital distance for a moon in the solar system is Neptune’s moon Neso. At its most extreme, it’s over half an AU (distance from Earth to the sun) away from Neptune. It’s axis of revolution around Neptune is also severely inclined relative to Neptune’s orbit around the sun — about 45 degrees off (and also it’s rotating backwards, but that doesn’t matter here). If it were instead purely perpendicular to Neptune’s orbit, producing the maximum difference possible… then the angular distance between it and Neptune, seen from the sun, would at its most extreme, be less than .005 degrees. In other words, its path around the sun is basically Neptune’s path, plus a tiny bit of wobble that doesn’t matter much.
Reltzik
Erf, misread your reply, you WEREN’T mixing up rotation and revolution and had it pretty much right. (TECHNICALLY there are things where the axis of revolution has a long-term affect on the access of rotation, which is how we end up with tidally locked bodies like Luna and Mercury, but they’re not relevant to this conversation.)
milu
thank you for your explanation!
Decidedly Orthogonal
A lot of this is redundant following the new comments, but to share what I’ve written anyways…
So planets orbit on their own ‘disk’ all generally close to the celestial disk from the sun’s equator or the center of angular momentum of the stellar system. This is called orbital inclination.
Moons also have an inclination compared to their parent planet. None of this however, affects their seasons. The seasons will be primarily affected by the axial tilt (spinning axis) of the planet or moon to the orbit around the sun. For the planet, their seasons are only affected by the this tilt, because this makes their poles face toward or away from the sun.
But my curiosity was about the moons specifically, because Jupiter is quite hot. As it turns out, three of the Galilean moons do have an axial tilt to their orbit around Jupiter, but it’s not huge. And since Jupiter is only tilted 3deg, there isn’t really a meaningful tilt.
However, should the moon’s oribtal inclination and/or axial tilt result in a significant shift from the parent planet’s orbit around the sun, that would induce solar seasons in the moon. Further, if the moon’s axial tilt is significantly deviated from it’s orbital inclination around a hot parent planet (like jupiter), that could presumably cause planetary induced seasons in the moon. And given the moon’s and planet’s respective orbits would probably be very different, could presumably produce a doubly-periodic season variation.
Lastly, to respond to a specific question here: “wouldn’t their axis tilt back and forth relative to the sun at each rotation?” No. The axis would wobble (as all spinning bodies do) but not because it’s orbiting around a planet.
milu
thanks! that’s very clearly put.
Reltzik
Jupiter does emit some radiation, but it’s so tiny compared to what the Jovian moons get from the sun that it really shouldn’t count for things like seasons. A much bigger factor in how Jupiter warms its moons is tidal forces, which don’t much depend on which side is facing Jupiter at any moment.
Doctor_Who
“It’s weird, everyone keeps getting better looking all the time, almost as if we’re being drawn by an artist who has steadily refined his style over the course of many years. But that’s silly, and I’m an atheist now anyway.”
The end of DoA will be Joyce founding a new religion devoted to the Almighty Willis.
Reltzik
… I don’t think she’s ready to tithe via slipshine participation.
Decidedly Orthogonal
Huh, I would have gone Cartesian, and assumed DoA would end when Joyce proves god doesn’t exist. Just for shits and giggles.
alongcameaspider
I love how Dorothy is where Joyce’s mind immediately goes when asked “are any of your friends hot and/or single?”
milu
I mean I think it went to Jacob first, then judging by Sarah’s reaction she decided she needed to change the subject
She still thought of Dorothy second, which is still a thing that happened that we need to talk and/or squee a little bit about
milu
JOE Joe she was thinking about Joe
not Jacob
yesssss yes yus yup ha-yup dee-yup
Anastasia
:O
OMG FINALLY JOYCE SAYS IT
Victor
As a way to not say Joe. That’s really what this is about, Joyce is WAY more into Joe than she’d ever admit.
And now Liz is going to hook up with Joe, because we’re talking about Willis here.
Reltzik
Oooooooo backstory.
…. and I just realized that there’s little chance that, if Liz is anything other than straight, she’d have told Joyce prior to today. Her facebook is public- and stepmom-facing and she wasn’t yet out of the closet to Joyce about not being Christian.
Also, Joyce knows Dorothy’s straight, so she’s probably not taking the possibility seriously.
newlland(Henryvolt)
I’m sensing some history there.
Zachary R
Wait wait wait.
There’s no way Jacob would sleep with Sarah’s little sister… right?
Thag Simmons
Almost certain this happened in the past, maybe first year but probably high school, and the boy in question is probably not a character we’ve met.
I think the two options here are Liz hit on Sarah’s boyfriend (bad) or Sarah’s boyfriend cheated on her with her own sister (much worse)
milu
Oooooh good catch!
milu
Wait does that mean Sarah is currently dating Jacob???
Thag Simmons
Her relationship advice is “don’t” so I am gonna go out on a limb and say probably not.
milu
Ah, right. Guess not then!
Clif
Also, Jacob is single, so the hot married person Sarah previously dated was not Jacob.
Thag Simmons
The read I had was that Liz tried to (and probably succeeded) at dating Sarah’s boyfriend, although she apparently didn’t know they were dating.
I’m not sure where you got the married part from.
Decidedly Orthogonal
There it is. I think Thag thought this thoroughly through.
Sarah was dating a non-Jacob dude. She *didn’t* tell her sister, because it seems her sister pilfering or fawning over boyfriends has been an issue, and it happened again anyways. “so you wouldn’t want to see him.”
milu
ok. yes. yes. thank you. that makes very sense.
maybe i shouldn’t sleep-comment at (for me) 6 in the morning; maybe.
Reltzik
I think Sarah’s concept of dating is “at-most-once-a-year one-night-stand with candied beefcake”.
Needfuldoer
Another possibility: Sarah secretly pined after a guy and was absolutely without a doubt going to ask him on a date someday eventually once she built up the nerve. Before that time came, Liz (the more outgoing of the two) asked him out, inadvertently clamjamming Sarah.
milu
my god. as an older sibling with a much more outgoing, 1 year younger sibling, my skin crawls to imagine something like that happening when i was in my late teens. i would have felt murderous.
RassilonTDavros
We seem to be getting a lot of Joyce/Dorothy hints lately…
Heavensrun
I mean, I ship it, but honestly they feel more like taunts than hints to me.
Diane
I hurt every time Joyce says shit when it should clearly be fuck.
RassilonTDavros