Reading the Comics, December 17, 2016: Sleepy Week Edition

Comic Strip Master Command sent me a slow week in mathematical comics. I suppose they knew I was on somehow a busier schedule than usual and couldn’t spend all the time I wanted just writing. I appreciate that but don’t want to see another of those weeks when nothing qualifies. Just a warning there.

John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 12th of December, 2016. I appreciate the desire to pay attention to continuity that makes Rose draw in the coffee cup both panels, but Snuffy Smith has to swap it from one hand to the other to keep it in view there. Not implausible, just kind of busy. Also I can’t fault Jughaid for looking at two pages full of unillustrated text and feeling lost. That’s some Bourbaki-grade geometry going on there.

John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 12th is a bit of mathematical wordplay. It does use geometry as the “hard mathematics we don’t know how to do”. That’s a change from the usual algebra. And that’s odd considering the joke depends on an idiom that is actually used by real people.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 12th uses mathematics as the classic impossibly hard subject a seven-year-old can’t be expected to understand. The worry about fractions seems age-appropriate. I don’t know whether it’s fashionable to give elementary school students experience thinking of ‘x’ and ‘y’ as numbers. I remember that as a time when we’d get a square or circle and try to figure what number fits in the gap. It wasn’t a 0 or a square often enough.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 12th of December, 2016. Granting that Todd’s a kid dinosaur and that T-Rexes are not renowned for the hugeness of their arms, wouldn’t that still be enough space for a lot of text to fit around? I would have thought so anyway. I feel like I’m pluralizing ‘T-Rex’ wrong, but what would possibly be right? ‘Ts-rex’? Don’t make me try to spell tyrannosaurus.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 12th uses one of those great questions I think every child has. And it uses it to question how we can learn things from statistical study. This is circling around the “Bayesian” interpretation of probability, of what odds mean. It’s a big idea and I’m not sure I’m competent to explain it. It amounts to asking what explanations would be plausibly consistent with observations. As we get more data we may be able to rule some cases in or out. It can be unsettling. It demands we accept right up front that we may be wrong. But it lets us find reasonably clean conclusions out of the confusing and muddy world of actual data.

Thanks, but a correction: 121.834%. https://t.co/cgnT7N90LR

— John Allen Paulos (@JohnAllenPaulos) December 14, 2016

Sam Hepburn’s Questionable Quotebook for the 14th illustrates an old observation about the hypnotic power of decimal points. I think Hepburn’s gone overboard in this, though: six digits past the decimal in this percentage is too many. It draws attention to the fakeness of the number. One, two, maybe three digits past the decimal would have a more authentic ring to them. I had thought the John Allen Paulos tweet above was about this comic, but it’s mere coincidence. Funny how that happens.