I have no idea how many or how few comic strips on Saturday included some mathematical content. I was away most of the day. We made a quick trip to the Michigan’s Adventure amusement park and then to play pinball in a kind-of competitive league. The park turned out to have every person in the world there. If I didn’t wave to you from the queue on Shivering Timbers I apologize but it hasn’t got the greatest lines of sight. The pinball stuff took longer than I expected too and, long story short, we got back home about 4:15 am. So I’m behind on my comics and here’s what I did get to.
Tak Bui’s PC and Pixel for the 8th depicts the classic horror of the cleaning people wiping away an enormous amount of hard work. It’s a primal fear among mathematicians at least. Boards with a space blocked off with the “DO NOT ERASE” warning are common. At this point, though, at least, the work is probably savable. You can almost always reconstruct work, and a few smeared lines like this are not bad at all.
The work appears to be quantum mechanics work. The tell is in the upper right corner. There’s a line defining E (energy) as equal to something including 
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons! Where would I be without them? Besides short on content. The strip for the 10th depicts a pollster saying to “put the margin of error at 50%”, guaranteeing the results are right. If you follow elections polls you do see the results come with a margin of error, usually of about three percent. But every sampling technique carries with it a margin of error. The point of a sample is to learn something about the whole without testing everything in it, after all. And probability describes how likely it is the quantity measured by a sample will be far from the quantity the whole would have. The logic behind this is independent of the thing being sampled. It depends on what the whole is like. It depends on how the sampling is done. It doesn’t matter whether you’re sampling voter preferences or whether there are the right number of peanuts in a bag of squirrel food.
So a sample’s measurement will almost never be exactly the same as the whole population’s. That’s just requesting too much of luck. The margin of error represents how far it is likely we’re off. If we’ve sampled the voting population fairly — the hardest part — then it’s quite reasonable the actual vote tally would be, say, one percent different from our poll. It’s implausible that the actual votes would be ninety percent different. The margin of error is roughly the biggest plausible difference we would expect to see.
Except. Sometimes we do, even with the best sampling methods possible, get a freak case. Rarely noticed beside the margin of error is the confidence level. This is what the probability is that the actual population value is within the sampling error of the sample’s value. We don’t pay much attention to this because we don’t do statistical-sampling on a daily basis. The most normal people do is read election polling results. And most election polls settle for a confidence level of about 95 percent. That is, 95 percent of the time the actual voting preference will be within the three or so percentage points of the survey. The 95 percent confidence level is popular maybe because it feels like a nice round number. It’ll be off only about one time out of twenty. It also makes a nice balance between a margin of error that doesn’t seem too large and that doesn’t need too many people to be surveyed. As often with statistics the common standard is an imperfectly-logical blend of good work and ease of use.
For the 11th Mark Anderson gives me less to talk about, but a cute bit of wordplay. I’ll take it.
Anthony Blades’s Bewley for the 12th is a rerun. It’s at least the third time this strip has turned up since I started writing these Reading The Comics posts. For the record it ran also the 27th of April, 2015 and on the 24th of May, 2013. It also suggests mathematicians have a particular tell. Try this out next time you do word problem poker and let me know how it works for you.
Julie Larson’s The Dinette Set for the 12th I would have sworn I’d seen here before. I don’t find it in my archives, though. We are meant to just giggle at Larson’s characters who bring their penny-wise pound-foolishness to everything. But there is a decent practical mathematics problem here. (This is why I thought it had run here before.) How far is it worth going out of one’s way for cheaper gas? How much cheaper? It’s simple algebra and I’d bet many simple Javascript calculator tools. The comic strip originally ran the 4th of October, 2005. Possibly it’s been rerun since.
Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 12th is a bunch of gags about a mathematics fighting game. I think Amend might be on to something here. I assume mathematics-education contest games have evolved from what I went to elementary school on. That was a Commodore PET with a game where every time you got a multiplication problem right your rocket got closer to the ASCII Moon. But the game would probably quickly turn into people figuring how to multiply the other person’s function by zero. I know a game exploit when I see it.
The most obscure reference is in the third panel one. Jason speaks of “a z = 0 transform”. This would seem to be some kind of z-transform, a thing from digital signals processing. You can represent the amplification, or noise-removal, or averaging, or other processing of a string of digits as a polynomial. Of course you can. Everything is polynomials. (OK, sometimes you must use something that looks like a polynomial but includes stuff like the variable z raised to a negative power. Don’t let that throw you. You treat it like a polynomial still.) So I get what Jason is going for here; he’s processing Peter’s function down to zero.
That said, let me warn you that I don’t do digital signal processing. I just taught a course in it. (It’s a great way to learn a subject.) But I don’t think a “z = 0 transform” is anything. Maybe Amend encountered it as an instructor’s or friend’s idiosyncratic usage. (Amend was a physics student in college, and shows his comfort with mathematics-major talk often. He by the way isn’t even the only syndicated cartoonist with a physics degree. Bud Grace of The Piranha Club was also a physics major.) I suppose he figured “z = 0 transform” would read clearly to the non-mathematician and be interpretable to the mathematician. He’s right about that.
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