Being a comic book nerd, I got it immediately!

The Riemann Hypothesis! But of course! It is a touchstone of popular culture, a cartoon icon as instantly recognizable as the drops of sweat or the lightbulb over the head.

This $300 million prize idea is so incredibly stupid it begs for some underlying conspiracy theory to justify it. Maybe they know the idea won't see the light of day due to upcoming plans and this is to compensate a friend? Maybe just payback for some favor in the past? Maybe it is just a nice big number to dazzle the masses with? I know these sound crazy but this idea is just do damn dumb, you gotta wonder.

...but I'm a goin for that gee-tar.

...devise a method for curing the moral corruption underlying modern politics. Priceless?!?

One of Ruben's best, I reckon.

Now everyone who has developed super battery technology in their basement is going to hold off on publicizing their results because they are waiting for this prize to actually come into existance.

Way to go John!

Oh and one criticism of the strip, it should have somehow included the line "For Fun, For Profit!" which was of course a mainstay of the old Grit and other ads. But otherwise Hilarious!

And the best part is, you just know at some point back when comics boasted "Still only 25 cents!" John McCain was selling GRIT from his wagon on saturdays.

you just know at some point back when comics boasted "Still only 25 cents!" John McCain was selling GRIT from his wagon on saturdays

Um... no. Comics sold for only 10 or 12 cents when I bought them as a kid, and I'm about 15 years younger than McCain.

Great cartoon, though. Ah yes, I remember the excitement when I acquired my first transistor radio. What a thrill to be able to play music while lying on the beach!

And sitting on my hippy ass doing nothing. I got a Salon Gold Star.

Think back to econ 101. If demand declines, eventually so does supply. EITHER WAY, the price goes down. Duh. When I was a kid I WALKED or biked everywhere. And I got a LOT of places. Ten miles? No problem. And I'm NOT overweight today. BP stays at about 116 over 69. Correlation? Hmmm.

I'm just sayin'....

I killed the electric car. My bad.

The lack of lightweight, energy-dense, inexpensive battery technology killed the electric car. If only someone would come up with some kind of incentive to stimulate and encourage research into this field...

But of course McCain's "prize" idea would never work. After all, Burt Rutan didn't design a cheaper way to get people into space to win $10 million. Lindbergh didn't win $25,000 for flying from New York to Paris. Breakthroughs in navigation that ushered in the modern era weren't made in pursuit of the British Longitude Prizes, and similar prizes didn't lead to similarly important developments in chemical engineering. Oh, wait, yeah, all of those things did happen.

Also, when Arianna Huffington inevitably mocks McCain's idea, everyone should remember that she sits on the Board of the X-Prize foundation, which is dedicated to EXACTLY this kind of thing.

Prizes to stimulate R&D are intended to cover areas of market failure. For example, no-one is going to make a fortune off cheap space travel; but in the long run, it could be very useful. So you set up a prize to give people an incentive to work on it, despite lack of immediate profitability, out of philanthropy.

Another area where such a strategy is sometimes recommended is drug development for diseases that affect the Third World. There's not much incentive in creating drugs that only poor people need, but the size of the problem means that it's worth working around this market failure by offering a prize to solve it.

Creating a revolutionary form of battery needs no extra incentives. There are many large corporations, universities, etc., working on this problem already.

Put it this way: if it was a condition of the contest that you had to give up the patent to claim the prize, no-one would enter, because such a patent is worth much more than $300 million. In the case of cheap space travel or a drug that only the poor need, though, you'd hand over the patent because you aren't going to get that much selling the product on the market.

So: it's an attention-getting gimmick.