Reading the Comics, December 13, 2015: More Nearly Like It Edition

This has got me closer to the number of comics I like for a Reading the Comics post. There’s two comics already in my file, for the 14th of December, but those can wait until later in the week.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 11th of December has a mathematics topic. The quotes in the final answer are the hint that it’s a bit of wordplay. The mention of “subtraction” is a hint.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 11th of December, 2015. The link will probably expire in mid-January 2016. Also somehow I’m writing about 2016 being in the imminent future.

Brian Kliban’s cartoon for the 11th of December (a rerun from who knows when) promises an Illegal Cube Den, and delivers. I’m just delighted by the silliness of it all.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 11th of December reprints the 1987 Luann. “Geometric principles of equitorial [sic] astronomical coordinate systems” gets mentioned as a math-or-physics-sounding complicated thing to do. The basic idea is to tell where things are in the sky, as we see them from the surface of the Earth. In an equatorial coordinate system we imagine — we project — where the plane of the equator is, and we can measure things as north or south of that plane. (North is on the same side that the Earth’s north pole is.) That celestial equator is functionally equivalent to longitude, although it’s called declination.

We also need something functionally equivalent to longitude; that’s called the right ascension. To define that, we need something that works like the prime meridian. Projecting the actual prime meridian out to the stars doesn’t work. The prime meridian is spinning every 24 hours and we can’t publish updated star charts that quickly. What we use as a reference meridian instead is spring. That is, it’s where the path of the sun in the sky crosses the celestial equator in March and the (northern hemisphere) spring.

There are catches and subtleties, which is why this makes for a good research project. The biggest one is that this crossing point changes over time. This is because the Earth’s orbit around the sun changes. So right ascensions of points change a little every year. So when we give coordinates, we have to say in which system, and which reference year. 2000 is a popular one these days, but its time will pass. 1950 and 1900 were popular in their generations. It’s boring but not hard to convert between these reference dates. And if you need this much precision, it’s not hard to convert between the reference year of 2000 and the present year. I understand many telescopes will do that automatically. I don’t know directly because I have little telescope experience, and I couldn’t even swear I had seen a meteor until 2013. In fairness, I grew up in New Jersey, so with the light pollution I was lucky to see night sky.

Peter Maresca’s Origins of the Sunday Comics for the 11th of December showcases a strip from 1914. That, Clare Victor Dwiggins’s District School for the 12th of April, 1914, is just a bunch of silly vignettes. It’s worth zooming in to look at. It’s got a student going “figger juggling” and that gives me an excuse to point out the strip to anyone who’ll listen.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 13th of December enters another counting-sheep joke into the ranks. Tying it into angles is cute. It’s tricky to estimate angles by sight. I think people tend to over-estimate how big an angle is when it’s around fifteen or twenty degrees. 45 degrees is easy enough to tell by sight. But for angles smaller than that, I tend to estimate angles by taking the number I think it is and cutting it in half, and I get closer to correct. I’m sure other people use a similar trick.

Brian Anderson’s Dog Eat Doug for the 13th of December has the dog, Sophie, deploy a lot of fraction talk to confuse a cookie out of Doug. A lot of new fields of mathematics are like that the first time you encounter them. I am curious where Sophie’s reasoning would have led, if not interrupted. How much cookie might she have cadged by the judicious splitting of halves and quarters and, perhaps, eighths and such? I’m not sure where her patter was going.

Shannon Wheeler’s Too Much Coffee Man for the 13th of December uses the traditional blackboard full of symbols to denote a lot of deeply considered thinking. Did you spot the error?

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