Reading the Comics, April 15, 2016: Remarkably, No Income Tax Comics Edition

I’m as startled as you are. While a couple comic strips mentioned United States Income Tax Day, they didn’t do so in a way that seemed on-point enough for this Reading The Comics post. Of course, United States Income Tax Day happens to be the 18th this year. I haven’t seen Sunday’s comics yet.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 11th of April one again uses arithmetic puns for its business. Also, if some science fiction writer doesn’t take hold of “Gribth” as a name for something they’re missing a fine syllable. “Tahew” is no slouch in the made-up word leagues either.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 11th of April, 2016. The link will probably expire sometime before the year 2112.

Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics for the 12th of April obviously originally ran sometime in mid-March. I have similarly ambiguous feelings about the value of Pi Day. I suppose it’s nice for people to think of “fun” and “mathematics” close together. Utahraptor’s distinction between “Pi Day” of March 14 and “Approximate Pi Day” of the 22nd of July s a curious one, though. It’s not as though 3.14 is any more exactly π than 22/7 is. I suppose you can argue that at some moment on 3/14 between 1:59:26 and 1:59:27 there’s some moment, 1:59:26.5358979 et cetera going on forever. But that assumes that time is a continuous thing, and it’s not like you’ll ever know what that moment is. By the time you might recognize it, it’s passed. They are all Approximate Pi Days; we just have to decide what the approximation is.

Bill Schorr’s The Grizzwells for the 12th is a silly-homework problem question. I know the point is to joke about how Fauna misunderstands a word. But if we pretend the assignment is for real, what might its point be? To show that students know the parts of a right triangle? I guess that’s all right, but it doesn’t seem like much of an assignment. I don’t blame her for getting snarky in the face of that.

Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott’s Baby Blues for the 13th is a gag about picking random numbers for arithmetic homework. The approach is doomed, surely, although it’s probably not completely doomed. I’m not sure Hammie’s age, but if his homework is about adding and subtracting numbers he probably mostly gets problems that give results between zero and twenty, and almost always less than a hundred. He might hit some by luck.

Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott’s Baby Blues for the 13th of April, 2016. It’s only after Hammy walks away that Zoe wonders why he needs five random numbers?

I’ve mentioned some how people are awful at picking “random” numbers in their heads. Zoe shows off one of the ways people are bad at it. People asked to name numbers “randomly” pick odd numbers more than even numbers. Somehow they just feel random. I doubt Kirkman and Scott were thinking of that; among other things, five numbers is a very small sample. Four odds out of five isn’t peculiar, not yet. They were probably just trying to pick numbers that sounded funny while fitting the space available. I’m a bit surprised 37 didn’t make the list.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 13th is Mark Anderson’s Andertoons entry for this essay. I like the teacher’s answer, though.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 14th just uses arithmetic as the most economic way to fit several problems on-screen at once. They’ve got a compactness that sentence-diagramming just can’t match.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 14th of April, 2016. No fair wondering why his more distant eye is always the larger one.

Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 15th amuses me with its use of coin-tossing as a way of making choices. I’m also amused the coin might be wrong only about half the time.

John Deering’s Strange Brew for the 15th is a visual puzzle. It’s intending to make use of a board full of mathematical symbols to represent deep thought. But the symbols aren’t quite mathematics. They look much more like LaTeX, a typesetting code used to express mathematics in print. Some of the symbols are obscured, so I can’t say exactly what’s meant. But it should be something like this:

At the risk of disappointing, this appears to me gibberish. The appearance of words like ‘minPixels’ and ‘maxPixels’ suggest a bit of computer code. So does having a subscript that’s the full word “connected”. I wonder where Deering drew this example from.