Caption:
"And so, as you enter the adult phase of your life, you will thank God that these past 17 years of being stuck in the ground and unable to move are finally over. ... Congratulations, cicadas of ’94!”
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this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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The Far Side
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Hello fellow Far Side fans!
About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.
The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side
Hope you enjoy and feel free to contribute to the community with art, cool stuff about the author, tattoos, toys and anything else, as long it’s The Far Side!
Ps. Sub to all my comic strip communities:
Bello Bear !BelloBear@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/bellobearofficial
Bloom County !bloomcounty@lemm.ee https://lemm.ee/c/bloomcounty
Calvin and Hobbes !calvinandhobbes@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/calvinandhobbes
Cyanide and Happiness !cyanideandhappiness https://lemm.ee/c/cyanideandhappiness
Garfield !garfield@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/garfield
The Far Side !thefarside@sh.itjust.works https://lemmy.world/c/thefarside@sh.itjust.works
Fine print: All comics I post are freely available online. In no way am I claiming ownership, copyright or anything else. This is a not for profit community, we just want to enjoy our comics, thank you.
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I've heard that this type of cicada lives underground for 13 or 17 years, which immediately jumps out as being two different prime numbers.
It seems odd at first that a species seems to know about prime numbers, but there is a natural explanation. If there are ones that emerge in non-prime intervals, they are more likely to emerge at the same time due to their common factors. So those ones would tend to emerge in greater numbers, making them easier for predators to specialize in.
But staying underground for long intervals in prime numbers of years makes it difficult for those predators, so the prime cicadas would have an evolutionary advantage.
It's been borrowed into graphic design as the Cicada Principle:
https://lea.verou.me/blog/2020/07/the-cicada-principle-revisited-with-css-variables/
Looks like the original link is dead, but there's a newer examination of it. If you have a repeating pattern, you can maximize variation while minimizing file size by using multiple sequences with different prime lengths