Development
by Jeff
Image text: Funding was quickly restored to the NHC and the APA was taken back off hurricane forecast duty.
First some definitions, NHC is the National Hurricane Center and the APA is American Psychological Association.
The reference to Piaget Stage 5 in the comic is a reference to Piaget's Stages of Development in which stage 5 is where (to quote Wikipedia and Gruber, H.E.; Voneche, J.J.. eds. The essential Piaget.)
"Infants become intrigued by the many properties of objects and by the many things they can make happen to objects; they experiment with new behavior." This stage is associated primarily with the discovery of new means to meet goals. Piaget describes the child at this juncture as the "young scientist," conducting pseudo-experiments to discover new methods of meeting challenges."
Which is exactly what the comic is describing in sustained interest in objects and their properties and the handy "?"s around the picture behind the newscaster in this comic.
So, with all that out of the way, this comic is a pun on the classification of hurricanes which are also classified in categories from 1 to 5. Piaget's Stages go from 1-6. The comic is making a joke that if the APA was on hurricane forecast duty instead of the NHC, that the hurricanes would be classified with Piaget's stages instead of categories.
Hurricane Names
by Jeff
Image text: After exhausting the OED, we started numbering them. When overlapping hurricanes formed at all points on the Earth's surface, and our scheme was foiled by Cantor diagonalization, we just decided to name them all "Steve". Your local forecast tomorrow is "Steve". Good luck.
This comic is a response to Hurricane Irene, which hit the East Coast of the United States over the weekend. In the picture in the comic is the southeastern United States, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
Additionally, this comic is correct in that they have a list of names every year. Here is a list of the names for 2011-2016 from the National Weather Service. Also, this comic is correct in that they follow that list of names with the Greek letters. From the NWS again:
In the event that more than 21 named tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic basin in a season, additional storms will take names from the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on.
This comic postulates what would happen if they went through the Greek Alphabet as well. The comic, as a joke says that they will use random word generators, which is how they came up with "Eggbeater".
In the image text, the Cantor diagonalization is (from wikipedia) "was published in 1891 by Georg Cantor as a mathematical proof that there are infinite sets which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the infinite set of natural numbers. Such sets are now known as uncountable sets"
So, in this comic, because there were so many hurricanes, the National Weather Service went from Names, the Greek letters, to numbers, but when there were infinite hurricanes, they had to start calling everything "Steve".
Weather Radar
by Jeff
Image text: Ever notice how there aren't as many thunderstorms now as there were when you were a kid? Much like 'the shuffle on my MP3 player has a bias', this is occasionally true but universally believed. Brains are so interesting!
This one is pretty self explanatory. However, I think that the weather sites rig the "future" button to make the weather seem more scary to ensure repeat visitors.
Additionally, the problem outlined in this comic is only a problem for people who like thunderstorms.