In my estimation, Ginny is as sane as they come. Consider her statement in the last panel; it smacks of Kris Kringle in “Miracle on 34th. Street”.
How should sanity be defined? She fits in to her society performing valuable functions regardless of labels such as “good” or “evil”. She forms functional attachments with others. She is focused on the task at hand. She shows admirable determination, like when she rescued Nick’s brain. She’s a survivor.
If Dr. Lee is mad or Mad, then it’s such a fine madness we’d all do well to aspire to it!
That’s different. Kris Kringle in “Miracle on 34th Street” *was* Santa Claus—the Post Office said so.
We’ve spoken about “mad” but ignored some of the characteristic behavior as laid down in “Narbonic.” For instance, when someone *goes* mad, it usually involves casualties among the nearby. I don’t think Dr. Lee has done that, but there’s still some hope…
If my theory is correct, and she did cross over when she was only a year old, she was far too young – and small – to wreak havoc on the level of, for example, a young woman in an Italian restaurant.
Her statement in the last panel: How does saying that suggest that she’s sane? It’s true. Nick is a helicopter. But how many sane people do you know who are dating a helicopter?
“She fits in to her society performing valuable functions regardless of labels such as “good” or “evil”. She forms functional attachments with others. She is focused on the task at hand. She shows admirable determination, like when she rescued Nick’s brain. She’s a survivor.” Everything you said there could easily apply to Helen Narbon, who we know for sure and for certain is Mad.
So, how again does any of that indicate that Virginia is not Mad (or mad)?
While I don’t currently know any people who *are* dating a helicopter, judging by the kind of discussions on my Twitter timeline, I know tons of people who *would* eagerly date a helicopter.
Now you may ask, are they sane? And I would answer, compared to who?
P.S. I’m married and neither guys nor helicopters are my gender preference, but I’d probably consider dating a helicopter if he had gone through some personal growth and also had a really snarky sense of humor.
I wonder if she’s a latent mad, the mad science has made her a bit mad, or if she had a very rare controlled breakthrough through reverse engineering all of that mad tech.
It has been my theory for some years that her breakthrough occurred when she was a year old. Her entire upbringing and education were carried out under the assumption that she was a perfectly normal – albeit gifted – child. She doesn’t think she’s Mad because it’s always been a part of her. Her parents brought her up to deal with her peculiar eccentricities in constructive ways.
Awgiedawgie, I really can’t argue with your position. Fundamentally we are united in our admiration for Dr. Lee and your hypothesis has the advantage over my null argument of offering an explanation for her genius.
You can be an evil (or morally vacuous [1]) scientist without being a _mad_ scientist. If Nazi scientists actually had access to mad science, they no doubt would have at least _tried_ to apply it to creating secret technologies for the forces of evil.
Eh. Given some of the stuff some of them experimented with, I’m not sure you can call all of them sane. Witness Substance N: https://youtu.be/ckSoDW2-wrc
And then there was always Porche and his… contraptions…
I actually knew what this stuff was before the video named it, just from the description! Good ol’ chlorine triflouride!
—
An excerpt from Derek Lowe’s blog “Things I Won’t Work With”:
I have not encountered this fine substance myself, but reading up on its properties immediately gives it a spot on my “no way, no how” list. Let’s put it this way: during World War II, the Germans were very interested in using it in self-igniting flamethrowers, but found it too nasty to work with. It is apparently about the most vigorous fluorinating agent known, and is much more difficult to handle than fluorine gas. That’s one of those statements you don’t get to hear very often, and it should be enough to make any sensible chemist turn around smartly and head down the hall in the other direction.
The compound also a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen itself, which also puts it into rare territory. That means that it can potentially go on to “burn” things that you would normally consider already burnt to hell and gone, and a practical consequence of that is that it’ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile. It’s been used in the semiconductor industry to clean oxides off of surfaces, at which activity it no doubt excels.
There’s a report from the early 1950s of a one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I’m sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks.
I’ll let the late John Clark describe the stuff, since he had first-hand experience in attempts to use it as rocket fuel. From his out-of-print classic Ignition! we have:
”It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”
Sound advice, indeed. I’ll be lacing mine up if anyone tries to bring the stuff into my lab.
The most common trope, and with some truth to it, is the researcher who gets so caught up in making something neat that they don’t bother to think about the applications.
Nick calls himself a helicopter. Everyone else in-comic calls him a helicopter. So what a similar aircraft would be called in our universe is irrelevant.
Been rereading Narbonic which set the rules on madness in this universe… And I gotta say… Whether or not she realizes it, she seems to be close to the edge of Mad.
Dr. Lee isn’t mad. In fact, she’s very, very sane. In fact, perhaps too sane.
Now I’m curious if she’s ever complained about something being impossible. It seems to me the mad hallucinate what’s not there, while normal people block out what is there (reality blindness); it would take a third type of person to just accept and understand what’s real and then use that, even if what’s real is mad science.
There was that weird episode where Finn went to a pillow universe and married a sapient pillow lady, but I’m not sure if there was a pillow princess. Not sure if it’d even count since it was all just a dream in the end.
This reminds me of Artie confronting the hamsters. (Paraphrasing because I’m not going through the Narbonic archives for it and I couldn’t find it with a quick search.)
Artie: This is madness!
Hamster: No, our plan is well thought out with consideration for strategy and forward planning.
Artie: This is sanity!
Just because something is well thought out doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not madness…. or Madness, for that matter. It also doesn’t mean that it’s fully or properly thought out.
And the super-genius gerbil, of all people, should have known that.
Aside from Madblood, who acknowledged his unusual nature, one of the hallmarks of Mad Science in the Narboniverse is a lack of redundancy, backups, or forward planning. Mad scientists just think of something and run with it. That describes someone like Tip a lot more than it describes Dr. Lee.
This weeks site tags, or whatever they’re called, seem to spell out the beginning of an announcement of some kind. “Hey hey guys guys / guess what happens / this week thats…”
@Robert – it’s not just this week’s; *every* strip since the beginning has had those, and they actually all spell out a single, continuous story. (I’m pretty sure it’s compiled somewhere so you don’t have to read it one URL at a time)
Having a break like that does mean that anyone who chooses to can see the rest of this weeks’ strips now. I think we should be back to normal on Monday, though.
Starting to reread the filename story gave me a sudden moment of cultural whiplash.
When this cartoon started, as the sixth paragraph says you could get kicked out of the Army for being gay. Today you can be openly gay as officer or enlisted in any of the US Armed Forces and be married to your same-sex partner. We’ve got a ways to go yet, but we have come some distance.
“Do that thing again where you convince us you’re not mad.”
Note Dr. Lee’s use of past tense. One would hope it sticks.
Her work for A-sig is definitely over. Bad enough they tried to put her brain in a jar – worse yet, they tried to kill her boyfriend!
And Ira hit on her, too.
I think Remy has just seen what many of us SH fans have seen. Dr. Lee is not actually fully sane (if at all.)
“Doesn’t conform to the diagnostic criteria for hypercognitive dementia” is, of course, not the same as “sensible and mentally stable”.
I would describe Dr Lee as “sane” in the same way a spinning top is stable, even though both wobble a bit occasionally.
What happens when the spinning stops is a different matter …
She’s clearly mad. Whether or not she’s Mad is much less clear.
In my estimation, Ginny is as sane as they come. Consider her statement in the last panel; it smacks of Kris Kringle in “Miracle on 34th. Street”.
How should sanity be defined? She fits in to her society performing valuable functions regardless of labels such as “good” or “evil”. She forms functional attachments with others. She is focused on the task at hand. She shows admirable determination, like when she rescued Nick’s brain. She’s a survivor.
If Dr. Lee is mad or Mad, then it’s such a fine madness we’d all do well to aspire to it!
That’s different. Kris Kringle in “Miracle on 34th Street” *was* Santa Claus—the Post Office said so.
We’ve spoken about “mad” but ignored some of the characteristic behavior as laid down in “Narbonic.” For instance, when someone *goes* mad, it usually involves casualties among the nearby. I don’t think Dr. Lee has done that, but there’s still some hope…
If my theory is correct, and she did cross over when she was only a year old, she was far too young – and small – to wreak havoc on the level of, for example, a young woman in an Italian restaurant.
Let’s analyze that a bit…
Her statement in the last panel: How does saying that suggest that she’s sane? It’s true. Nick is a helicopter. But how many sane people do you know who are dating a helicopter?
“She fits in to her society performing valuable functions regardless of labels such as “good” or “evil”. She forms functional attachments with others. She is focused on the task at hand. She shows admirable determination, like when she rescued Nick’s brain. She’s a survivor.” Everything you said there could easily apply to Helen Narbon, who we know for sure and for certain is Mad.
So, how again does any of that indicate that Virginia is not Mad (or mad)?
While I don’t currently know any people who *are* dating a helicopter, judging by the kind of discussions on my Twitter timeline, I know tons of people who *would* eagerly date a helicopter.
Now you may ask, are they sane? And I would answer, compared to who?
P.S. I’m married and neither guys nor helicopters are my gender preference, but I’d probably consider dating a helicopter if he had gone through some personal growth and also had a really snarky sense of humor.
One great thing about access to electron microscopes is that it makes hair-splitting much easier.
Of course they are both mad, you can see there eyes, through their glasses!
Interesting observation, but irrelevant. The opaque/transparent glasses transition only applied to Dave.
Ah, yes, Virginia… The waters of de Nile run deep, don’t they.
I wonder if she’s a latent mad, the mad science has made her a bit mad, or if she had a very rare controlled breakthrough through reverse engineering all of that mad tech.
It has been my theory for some years that her breakthrough occurred when she was a year old. Her entire upbringing and education were carried out under the assumption that she was a perfectly normal – albeit gifted – child. She doesn’t think she’s Mad because it’s always been a part of her. Her parents brought her up to deal with her peculiar eccentricities in constructive ways.
Awgiedawgie, I really can’t argue with your position. Fundamentally we are united in our admiration for Dr. Lee and your hypothesis has the advantage over my null argument of offering an explanation for her genius.
I maintain she might not be sane, clinically speaking, but she doesn’t rant about Those Fools Who Mocked Her nearly enough to be capital-M Mad.
“relatively sane for a mad scientist” didn’t mean you are model of perfect sanity, dr. lee.
Eh, people who think they’re sane are the most depraved of all anyway.
You can be an evil (or morally vacuous [1]) scientist without being a _mad_ scientist. If Nazi scientists actually had access to mad science, they no doubt would have at least _tried_ to apply it to creating secret technologies for the forces of evil.
[1] Depraved? Indifferent? True Neutral?
Eh. Given some of the stuff some of them experimented with, I’m not sure you can call all of them sane. Witness Substance N: https://youtu.be/ckSoDW2-wrc
And then there was always Porche and his… contraptions…
Granted, the Nazis decided chlorine trifluoride was too dangerous to use in the field.
“The concrete was on fire!” Doesn’t exactly make one want to use a chemical compound.
I actually knew what this stuff was before the video named it, just from the description! Good ol’ chlorine triflouride!
—
An excerpt from Derek Lowe’s blog “Things I Won’t Work With”:
I have not encountered this fine substance myself, but reading up on its properties immediately gives it a spot on my “no way, no how” list. Let’s put it this way: during World War II, the Germans were very interested in using it in self-igniting flamethrowers, but found it too nasty to work with. It is apparently about the most vigorous fluorinating agent known, and is much more difficult to handle than fluorine gas. That’s one of those statements you don’t get to hear very often, and it should be enough to make any sensible chemist turn around smartly and head down the hall in the other direction.
The compound also a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen itself, which also puts it into rare territory. That means that it can potentially go on to “burn” things that you would normally consider already burnt to hell and gone, and a practical consequence of that is that it’ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile. It’s been used in the semiconductor industry to clean oxides off of surfaces, at which activity it no doubt excels.
There’s a report from the early 1950s of a one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I’m sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks.
I’ll let the late John Clark describe the stuff, since he had first-hand experience in attempts to use it as rocket fuel. From his out-of-print classic Ignition! we have:
”It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”
Sound advice, indeed. I’ll be lacing mine up if anyone tries to bring the stuff into my lab.
Derek Lowe is always a win!
Getting back to Virginia, she’s not morally vacuous. She just has moral ADD.
The most common trope, and with some truth to it, is the researcher who gets so caught up in making something neat that they don’t bother to think about the applications.
Tsk. Tsk. Dr. Lee calling her boyfriend the wrong vehicle.
Yeah , I was wondering if I was the only one not hit with Reality Blindness
Nick calls himself a helicopter. Everyone else in-comic calls him a helicopter. So what a similar aircraft would be called in our universe is irrelevant.
Tip did say something about “gamers” when Nick talked about “my people.”
I’m pretty sure you can identify as both a helicopter and a gamer.
“Gamer” is an occupation. It describes what he does, not what he is.
Does he? Thought he IDed as a plane.
It’s what got him on Skin Horse’s books.
http://skin-horse.com/comic/you-fail-the-test/
Been rereading Narbonic which set the rules on madness in this universe… And I gotta say… Whether or not she realizes it, she seems to be close to the edge of Mad.
Which is why she’s so fascinating as a character. Dr. Lee is dancing on the edge of Madness, and we’re so seeing when she will fall over.
Dr. Lee isn’t mad. In fact, she’s very, very sane. In fact, perhaps too sane.
Now I’m curious if she’s ever complained about something being impossible. It seems to me the mad hallucinate what’s not there, while normal people block out what is there (reality blindness); it would take a third type of person to just accept and understand what’s real and then use that, even if what’s real is mad science.
All. The. Time. It’s kind of her thing.
It’s been shown that people can be completely aware of reality without being or going mad.
“My boyfriend is a helicopter!”
Who you also helped to create…. 😛
These obscure sexual relationship terms sometimes puzzle me…
I’m now trying to remember if there was ever a Pillow Princess in “Adventure Time”…
There was that weird episode where Finn went to a pillow universe and married a sapient pillow lady, but I’m not sure if there was a pillow princess. Not sure if it’d even count since it was all just a dream in the end.
If Virginia & Nick have a child, at least one of them is well equipped to become a helicopter parent.
As long as he’s not a “helicopter parent” in the current sense of the term in our world.
This reminds me of Artie confronting the hamsters. (Paraphrasing because I’m not going through the Narbonic archives for it and I couldn’t find it with a quick search.)
Artie: This is madness!
Hamster: No, our plan is well thought out with consideration for strategy and forward planning.
Artie: This is sanity!
Just because something is well thought out doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not madness…. or Madness, for that matter. It also doesn’t mean that it’s fully or properly thought out.
And the super-genius gerbil, of all people, should have known that.
Aside from Madblood, who acknowledged his unusual nature, one of the hallmarks of Mad Science in the Narboniverse is a lack of redundancy, backups, or forward planning. Mad scientists just think of something and run with it. That describes someone like Tip a lot more than it describes Dr. Lee.
Apparently you’re forgetting about Helen Narbon. She did a fair amount of planning and repetition.
Backups, on the other hand? Yeah, I think Madblood is the only one who does that. I don’t even recall any indication that Virginia makes backups.
This weeks site tags, or whatever they’re called, seem to spell out the beginning of an announcement of some kind. “Hey hey guys guys / guess what happens / this week thats…”
@Robert – it’s not just this week’s; *every* strip since the beginning has had those, and they actually all spell out a single, continuous story. (I’m pretty sure it’s compiled somewhere so you don’t have to read it one URL at a time)
I think what he’s getting at is that this week’s are not part of the story.
As for the compiled version, I have an up-to-date copy here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/s9e62nuzq4gkooz/Skin%20Horse%20filename%20story.txt?dl=0
Yup, doesn’t seem to fit…though it could be Unity talking since she seems to be there.
It’s a break from the ongoing story. You can tell because it’s in the URLs, but not in the actual image file names.
The copy I’ve been compiling is here: http://www.ci-n.com/~jcampbel/skinhorse.txt
Having a break like that does mean that anyone who chooses to can see the rest of this weeks’ strips now. I think we should be back to normal on Monday, though.
Starting to reread the filename story gave me a sudden moment of cultural whiplash.
When this cartoon started, as the sixth paragraph says you could get kicked out of the Army for being gay. Today you can be openly gay as officer or enlisted in any of the US Armed Forces and be married to your same-sex partner. We’ve got a ways to go yet, but we have come some distance.
She doesn’t have Walton’s Disorder. She has a DIFFERENT form of hypercognitive dementia.
Or her mad science Theme (they all have one…) is making Mad Science sane.
And as I said some time ago, that makes her an even more dangerous Mad genius, because she makes it possible for any scientist to use Mad science.