The good news is I’ve got a couple of comic strips I feel responsible including the pictures for. (While I’m confident I could include all the comics I talk about as fair use — I make comments which expand on the strips’ content and which don’t make sense without the original — Gocomics.com links seem reasonably stable and likely to be there in the future. Comics Kingdom links generally expire after a month except to subscribers and I don’t know how long Creators.com links last.) And a couple of them talk about rock bands, so, that’s why I picked that titel.
Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 17th of September is a subverted-fairy-tale-moral strip, naturally enough. It’s also a legitimate point, though. Unlikely events do happen sometimes, and it’s a mistake to draw too-strong conclusions from them. This is why it’s important to reproduce interesting results. It’s also why, generally, we like larger sample sizes. It’s not likely that twenty fair coins flipped will all come up tails at once. But it’s far more likely that will happen than that two hundred fair coins flipped will all come up tails. And that’s far more likely than that two thousand fair coins will. For that matter, it’s more likely that three-quarters of twenty fair coins flipped will come up tails than that three-quarters of two hundred fair coins will. And the chance that three-quarters of two thousand fair coins will come up tails is ignorable. If that happens, then something interesting has been found.
In Juba’s Viivi and Wagner for the 17th of September, Wagner announces his decision to be a wandering mathematician. I applaud his ambition. If I had any idea where to find someone who needed mathematics done I’d be doing that myself. If you hear something give me a call. I’ll be down at the City Market, in front of my love’s guitar case, multiplying things by seven. I may get it wrong, but nobody will know how to correct me.
Daniel Beyer’s Long Story Short for the 18th of September uses a page full of calculations to predict when prog-rock band Tool will release their next album. (Wikipedia indicates they’re hoping for sometime before the end of 2015, but they’ve been working on it since 2008.) Some of the symbols make a bit of sense as resembling those of quantum physics. An expression like (in the lower left of the board) 
Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 19th of September brings in another band to this review. It uses a more basic level of mathematics, though.
Percy Crosby’s Skippy from the 19th of September — rerun from sometime in 1928 — is a clever way to get a word problem calculated. It also shows off what’s probably been the most important use of arithmetic, which is keeping track of money. Accountants and shopkeepers get little attention in histories of mathematics, but a lot of what we do has been shaped by their needs for speed, efficiency, and accuracy. And one of Gocomics’s commenters pointed out that the shopkeeper didn’t give the right answer. Possibly the shopkeeper suspected what was up.
Paul Trap’s Thatababy for the 20th of September uses a basic geometry fact as an example of being “very educated”. I don’t think the area of the circle rises to the level of “very” — the word means “truly”, after all — but I would include it as part of the general all-around awareness of the world people should have. Also it fits in the truly confined space available. I like the dad’s eyes in the concluding panel. Also, there’s people who put eggplant on pizza? Really? Also, bacon? Really?
Alex Hallatt’s Arctic Circle for the 21st of September is about making your own luck. I find it interesting in that it rationalizes magic as a thing which manipulates probability. As ways to explain magic for stories go that isn’t a bad one. We can at least imagine the rigging of card decks and weighting of dice. And its plot happens in the real world, too: people faking things — deceptive experimental results, rigged gambling devices, financial fraud — can often be found because the available results are too improbable. For example, a property called Benford’s Law tells us that in many kinds of data the first digit is more likely to be a 1 than a 2, a 2 than a 3, a 3 than a 4, et cetera. This fact serves to uncover fraud surprisingly often: people will try to steal money close to but not at some limit, like the $10,000 (United States) limit before money transactions get reported to the federal government. But that means they work with checks worth nine thousand and something dollars much more often than they do checks worth one thousand and something dollars, which is suspicious. Randomness can be a tool for honesty.
Peter Maresca’s Origins of the Sunday Comics feature for the 21st of September ran a Rube Goldberg comic strip from the 19th of November, 1913. That strip, Mike and Ike, precedes its surprisingly grim storyline with a kids-resisting-the-word-problem joke. The joke interests me because it shows a century-old example of the joke about word problems being strings of non sequiturs stuffed with unpleasant numbers. I enjoyed Mike and Ike’s answer, and the subversion of even that answer.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 22nd of September tries to optimize its targeting toward me by being an anthropomorphized-mathematical-objects joke and a Venn diagram joke. Also being Mark Anderson’s Andertoons today. If I didn’t identify this as my favorite strip of this set Anderson would just come back with this, but featuring monkeys at typewriters too.
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