Reading the Comics, November 18, 2015: All Caught Up Edition

Yes, I feel a bit bad that I didn’t have anything posted yesterday. I’d had a nice every-other-day streak going for a couple weeks there. But I had honestly expected more mathematically themed comic strips, and there just weren’t enough in my box by the end of the 17th. So I didn’t have anything to schedule for a post the 18th. The 18th came through, though, and now I’ve got enough to talk about. And that before I get to reading today’s comics. So, please, enjoy.

Scott Adams’s Dilbert Classics for the 16th of November (originally published the 21st of September, 1992) features Dilbert discovering Bell’s Theorem. Bell’s Theorem is an important piece of our understanding of quantum mechanics. It’s a theorem that excites people who first hear about it. It implies quantum mechanics can’t explain reality unless it can allow information to be transmitted between interacting particles faster than light. And quantum mechanics does explain reality. The thing is, and the thing that casual readers don’t understand, is that there’s no way to use this to send a signal. Imagine that I took two cards, one an ace and one an eight, seal them in envelopes, and gave them to astronauts. The astronauts each travel to ten light-years away from me in opposite directions. (They took extreme offense at something I said and didn’t like one another anyway.) Then one of them opens her envelope, finding that she’s got the eight. Then instantly, even though they’re twenty light-years apart, she knows the other astronaut has an ace in her envelope. But there is no way the astronauts can use this to send information to one another, which is what people want Bell’s Theorem to tell us. (My example is not legitimate quantum mechanics and do not try to use it to pass your thesis defense. It just shows why Bell’s Theorem does not give us a way to send information we care about faster than light.) The next day Dilbert’s Garbageman, the Smartest Man in the World, mentions Dilbert’s added something to Bell’s Theorem. It’s the same thing everybody figuring they can use quantum entanglement to communicate adds to the idea.

Tom Thaves’ Frank and Ernest for the 16th of November riffs on the idea of a lottery as a “tax on people who are bad at math”. Longtime readers here know that I have mixed feelings about that, and not just because I’m wary of cliché. If the jackpot is high enough, you can reach the point where the expectation value of the prize is positive. That is, you would expect to make money if you played the game under the same conditions often enough. But that chance is still vanishingly small. Even playing a million times would not make it likely you would more earn money than you spent. I’m not dogmatic enough to say what your decision should be, at least if the prize is big enough. (And that’s not considering the value placed on the fun of playing. One may complain that it shouldn’t be any fun to buy a soon-to-be-worthless ticket. But many people do enjoy it and I can’t bring myself to say they’re all wrong about feeling enjoyment.)

And it happens that on the 18th Brant Parker and Johnny Hart’s Wizard of Id Classics (originally run the 20th of November, 1965) did a lottery joke. That one is about a lottery one shouldn’t play, except that the King keeps track of who refuses to buy a ticket. I know when we’re in a genre.

Peter Mann’s The Quixote Syndrome for the 16th of November explores something I had never known but that at least the web seems to think is true. Apparently in 1958 Samuel Beckett knew the 12-year-old André Roussimoff. People of my age cohort have any idea who that is when they hear Roussimoff became pro wrestling star André the Giant. And Beckett drove the kid to school. Mann — taking, I think, a break from his usual adaptations of classic literature — speculates on what they might have talked about. His guess: Beckett attempting to ease one of his fears through careful study and mathematical treatment. The problem is goofily funny. But the treatment is the sort of mathematics everyone understands needing and understands using.

John Deering’s Strange Brew for the 17th of November tells a rounding up joke. Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater told it back in August. I suspect the joke is just in the air. Most jokes were formed between 1922 and 1978 anyway, and we’re just shuffling around the remains of that fruitful era.

Tony Cochrane’s Agnes for the 18th of November tells a resisting-the-word-problem joke. I admit expecting better from Cochrane. But casting arithmetic problems into word problems is fraught with peril. It isn’t enough to avoid obsolete references. (If we accept trains as obsolete. I’m from the United States Northeast, where subways and even commuter trains are viable things.) The problem also has to ask something the problem-solver can imagine wanting to know. It may not matter whether the question asks how far apart two trains, two cars, or two airplanes are, if the student can’t see their distance as anything but trivia. We may need better practice in writing stories if we’re to write story problems.