Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2022 September 21

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September 21

Old French (?) educational comic book

Can anyone tell me the name of an old (mid-to-late 1980's) French (I think) educational comic book about robotics? Here's the plot (as far as I can remember): an independent inventor (possibly loosely based on Grey Walter) tinkers with animal-like robots in his living room and accidentally makes a mess when the boiler of his steam pelican springs a leak, and his wife (who is skeptical of his experiments in general) chews him out for this, so he makes a punch tape-controlled robot vacuum to clean the house automatically -- but, being rigidly programmed, it eventually has a run-in with the house cat and sucks in its tail, causing the cat to flail around the room and smash everything in the process and then run away from home, so the inventor turns the vacuum into a mouse-catching robot (now controlled by an infrared sensor to seek out rodents and catch them with its claw) -- until, being unable to discriminate among sources of heat, it mistakes a cup of coffee for a mouse and crushes it, which further prompts the inventor to add image recognition capabilities to its programming. At this point, as I remember, there was a bit of a slow part in the plot (or maybe it was just over my head at that time, I was just a preschooler then) and I lost track of it, but I do dimly remember it involved the robot (and other robots and computers) acquiring more and more sophisticated capabilities, until near the end something unexpected happens -- robots start running away to avoid having their software updated, software logic develops double binds causing it to crash, and eventually when the inventor's wife tries to request a solution to a complex mathematical problem from a mainframe computer, the latter refuses her request, calling it "absurd" (or some similar term) -- vindicating her intention to scrap the whole thing (on the last page she is pictured holding two sledgehammers and saying to her husband, "OK, let's go!" or some similar phrase). Oh, and the original robot the inventor made is named "Khodos" (Greek for "Turtle"), because it looks like one. So, can anyone tell me the name of this comic book, or at least its author? 2601:646:8A81:6070:41FF:240D:DE47:411C (talk) 12:22, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Are you sure about the robot's name? Khodos is not an Ancient Greek word; the word for turtle is khelus/khelys or khelōnē.  --Lambiam 13:45, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

I had read the book in Russian translation, but yes, I'm 100% sure. 2601:646:8A81:6070:A103:BB4E:831E:438B (talk) 02:49, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Why do many football helmets have a stripe splitting left from right?

(American football) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 13:07, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Decoration. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:01, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Because a racing stripe makes you faster. 41.246.128.131 (talk) 15:04, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

So there's absolutely no chance they get mistaken for the Bungles? Clarityfiend (talk) 22:49, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Part of the reason is that back in leather helmet days, the stripe was a structural element of the helmet, and was often colored a distinctive color to stand out from the rest of the helmet. That's also how the traditional Michigan helmet design was started. See Here for example. --Jayron32 23:24, 21 September 2022 (UTC)