The combining of red, green, and blue into white demonstrates additive color theory. That’s how light combines to form colors, like in your computer monitor. It is how RGB colors are formed. If you take red, green, and blue paint and mix them all together you’ll probably get paint on your carpet. The paint on your carpet will be a sickly yuck color. This is because the more paints you put together the darker things get. This would be subtractive color theory. This is what’s used in printing with the CMYK process. So using RGB versus CMYK colors is not just people being picky about nomenclature.

Mixing colors of light will produce different results than mixing the same colors of paint. Mixing insults, niche reference, and oversimplification in the right proportions will cause belly ache from laughter.

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Some people say that there are, “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” but that’s just like saying words or photos (it’s PHOTOSHOPPED!) tell lies. Sure, they can, or they can be used to convey true information. The amount of information that can be conveyed through statistics is amazing. Often a good way to get your head around a bunch of data and turn it into useful information is to make a relational graph of the data set.

Today’s strip shows a somewhat unusual type of relational graph, since the data points themselves contain information. They serve the dual purpose of showing the caffeine consumed and silly kitten videos watched, as well as what happens at those specific levels of caffeine and kittens.

If you like hearing about this sort of stats stuff, you’d find The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
by Edward Tufte a good read. That’s where I saw an example of this sort of graph, and where I got  the idea for today’s strip.

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