Reading the Comics, December 23, 2015: Richard Thompson Christmas Trees Edition

Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac for the 19th of December (a rerun, alas, from the 18th of December, 2010) gives me a name for this Reading the Comics installment. Just as in a Richard’s Poor Almanac mentioned last time he gives us a Christmas tree occupying a non-Euclidean space. Non-Euclidean spaces do open up the possibility of many wondrous and counterintuitive phenomena. Trees probably aren’t among them, but I don’t know a better shorthand way to describe their mysteries. And if you’re not sure why so many people say this was the greatest comic strip of our still-young century, look at little Pete in the last panel. Both his expression and the composition of the panel are magnificent.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am for the 21st of December is a rerun. And it’s one that’s been mentioned around here as recently as August. I don’t care. It’s still a good funny slapstick joke. The kicker at the bottom is also a solid giggle.

Richard Thompson’s Poor Richard’s Almanac for the 21st of December justifies my theme with its Platonic Fir. The Platonic Ideals of objects are, properly speaking, philosophical constructs. If they are constructs, anyway, and not the things that truly exist, and yes, we must be careful what we mean by ‘exist’ in this context. But Thompson’s diagram shows this Platonic Fir drawn as a mathematical diagram. That’s another common motif. Mathematical constructs, ideas like “triangles” and “circles” and “rotations”, do suggest Platonic Ideals quite closely. We might be a bit pressed to say what the quintessence of chair-ness is, the thing all chairs must be aspects of. But we can be pretty sure we understand what a triangle is, apart from our messy and imperfect real-world approximations of a true triangle. When mathematics enthusiasts speak of the beauty of pure mathematics it does seem like they speak of the beauty of approaching Platonic Ideals.

John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not for the 21st of December continues its Rubik’s Cube obsession. Graziano spells Rubik correctly this time.

Don Asmussen’s Bad Reporter panel for the 23rd of December does a joke that depends on the idea of getting to be “more than infinity”. Every kid has run into the problem of trying to understand “infinity plus one”. The way we speak of “infinity” we can’t really talk about getting “more than infinity”. But we are able to think meaningfully of ways to differentiate sizes of infinity. There are some infinitely large sets that, in a sensible way, are bigger than other infinitely large sets. That’s a fun field of mathematics. You can get to interesting questions in it without needing much background or experience. It’s almost ideal for pop-mathematics essays and if you don’t believe me, then look at how many results you get googling for “Cantor’s Diagonalization Argument”. It’s not an infinite number of results, but it’ll get you quite close.

Brian and Ron Boychuk’s Chuckle Brothers for the 23rd of December is the anthropomorphic-numerals joke for this time around.

Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 23rd of December is built on the idea that it’s absurd to develop an algorithm that could predict earning potential, hairline at 50, and fidelity. It sounds silly at first glance. But if we’ve learned anything from sabermetrics it’s that all kinds of physical traits can be studied, and modeled, and predicted. With a large and reliable enough data set, and with a mindfully developed algorithm, these models can become quite good at predicting things. The underlying property is that on average, people are average. If we know what is typical, and we have reason to think that “typical” is not changing, then we can forecast the future pretty well based on what we already see. Or if we have reason to expect that “typical” is changing in ways we understand, we can still make good forecasts.