Editor ZBicyclist is on vacation, and taking a cue from comics that repeat old episodes is dipping back into the past: June 2021. This was originally posted by EditorM. Is modal fabric still around?
I only recently learned there is a newfangled fabric called “modal”, popular for linens[*] and underwear; which mostly explains the modal-logic joke for me. But some of the rest of these are still puzzling.
[*] No, linens are not presumptively made from linen. Though they can be. Oy!
Comics I Don't Understand 
Well, the fake barn is a famous example of the Gettier Problem, which is a pushback against the idea that knowledge is a justified, true belief. In it we observe a barn in a field. We believe we are seeing a barn, and indeed we are. But what we don’t know is that it’s the only real barn in the area, and all others are fake. The belief is justified, but it’s only true by coincidence. Is it knowledge?
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The sommelier may or may not be able to be described as of fine distinction, but she is certainly making a fine distinction between those two wines.
I’m not sure what that has to do with philosophy, though.
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I had a few minutes and went poking around, I think the statue thing is a reference to the puzzle of the statue and the clay, a question described as to what relationship the material constitution of an object has to its identity as an object. Is the statue the clay? Clearly they can be differentiated, but if you remove the clay from the statue there’s nothing left. This is related to the more famous Ship of Theseus thought experiment.
Also I only just noticed “to φ or not to φ” at the bottom. That’s your phi, which can be shorthand for philosophy as a whole (it’s the first letter), and in ethics is sometimes used to represent a generic action that need not be described. Either one kind of works.
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And thus the banner spells it Phhilosophy because of using phi as an aesthetic p.
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Come ponder the philosohical ramifications of questioning the presence or absence of a joke
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These comments about philosophy remind me of an old story.
In a rural one-room schoolhouse, the teacher is writing a fairly advanced arithmetic problem on the board. As she reduces each fraction to lowest terms, she erases and replaces the numbers. Jethro, the oldest and least-advanced student in the room, usually has a totally blank expression on his face, but today he is studying the board, absolutely fascinated.
The teacher finishes writing, notes Jethro’s interest, and asks, “Any questions?” Jethro immediately raises his hand.
“Yes, Jethro?”
“Miz Smith, where do all the numbers go when you rub them off the board?”
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Linens used to be made from linen as I understand it (hence their name).
From what I understand about fabrics in history (through the world of reenacting) – linen was much easier to produce than cotton originally. Cotton is apparently a rather hard crop to deal with – particularly in harvesting and in the past – it took a huge number of employees to harvest the cotton by hand and one would easily hurt their hands doing so.
(From the world of not so much needed info one learns while reenacting.)
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I remember hearing in school that someone invented something called a “Cotton Gin”, “gin” being short for “engine”, that efficiently did the hard part of processing cotton, which was picking out the seeds.
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I thought cotton gin was for very dry martinis.
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That’s true about the cotton gin, but IIRC that was after the period Meryl reenacts.
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