For anyone who works with data for a living, it doesn’t get much better than this:  Curve-Fitting from XKCD.

I’ve seen a surprising number of “Hey, I Did A Regression” plots over the years.  Lines, shallow slope, with R-squared values of 10-20%.

Sometimes we just want to believe.

XKCD is a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”  In other words, its a comic that appeals to engineers, a profession that exemplifies romance, sarcasm, math, and language, though not necessarily in that order.

Sometime before the turn of the century, for better or for worse, the spreadsheet replaced the scientific calculator as the engineer’s tool of choice.  Hence, spreadsheet humor amuses engineers.  So too does PowerPoint humor, though that is just as likely to make us cry.

So, for the engineers (and accountants), we have Making Progress from XKCD.