Unintended reference(s?)

[Occasional Sage]

I received an email today from a user at Erf Wireless (http://www.erfwireless.com/), which made me curious. I did some Googling and checked the Wikipedia disambiguation page to see what else "erf" might refer to. The best one is the error function (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_function), which deals with how much off from the norm any statistical point is. In other words, "Exactly how strange is this likely to be?"

Doubtless this wasn't something Rob and Jamie were thinking about when they named their brilliant work, but it's a nice second-level piece of humor. Has anybody else run across things that make them say "Naahhh, they couldn't have meant to do this!"? I remember somebody discovering (James?) Sizemore who invented a shovel, so there must be more discoveries out there.

Tinfoil Hat Brigade, assemble!

[Glome]

The problem is, how do you know what the authors intended as a pun or not? Maybe when they needed the name of a dirtamancer, they looked up the inventor of the shovel. And if that isn't where they got the name, why did they go with the name Sizemore? I'm going with the premise that they purposefully packed as many puns in the comic as possible.

As for Erf, that is slightly less likely. as it is closer to a joke I would find on XKCD, although the Redox pun suggest either Rob or Jamie might have took some higher math/engineering courses at some point. Also, I think that maybe the name Erf really does enlighten us as to the possible nature of Erf. Erf at its core seems to be a statistically unlikely joke.

Another one that got some argument was the maze on the back of the breakfast cereal, whether it was intentional foreshadowing that cartoon Parson was in what looks like a magma chamber, or whether that was just coincidence.

[ShinyBrowncoat]

Sometimes an Erf is just an Erf. :smallwink:

[dr pepper]

Dragon ==> Dwagon
Goblin ==> Gobwin
Earth ==> Erf

[Occasional Sage]

Dragon ==> Dwagon
Goblin ==> Gobwin
Earth ==> Erf

Right, thanks, got that. Doesn't change that the unintended overlap is interesting and amusing.