Reading the Comics, December 11, 2017: Vamping For Andertoons Edition

So Mark Anderson’s Andertoons has been missing from the list of mathematically-themed the last couple weeks. Don’t think I haven’t been worried about that. But it’s finally given another on-topic-enough strip and I’m not going to include it here. I’ve had a terrible week and I’m going to use the comics we got in last week slowly.

Hector D Cantu and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 10th of December uses algebra as the type for homework you’d need help with. It reads plausibly enough to me, at least so far as I remember learning algebra.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 10th reprints the strip of the 10th of December, 1989. And as often happens, mathematics is put up as the stuff that’s too hard to really do. The expressions put up don’t quite parse; there’s nothing to solve. But that’s fair enough for a panicked brain. To not recognize what the problem even is makes it rather hard to solve.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 10th is an installation of Quantum Mechanic, playing on the most fun example of non-commutative processes I know. That’s the uncertainty principle, which expresses itself as pairs of quantities that can’t be precisely measured simultaneously. There are less esoteric kinds of non-commutative processes. Like, rotating something 90 degrees along a horizontal and then along a vertical axis will turn stuff different from 90 degrees vertical and then horizontal. But that’s too easy to understand to capture the imagination, at least until you’re as smart as an adult and as thoughtful as a child.

Maria Scrivan’s Half Full for the 11th features Albert Einstein and one of the few equations that everybody knows. So that’s something.

Jeff Stahler’s Moderately Confused for the 11th features the classic blackboard full of equations, this time to explain why Christmas lights wouldn’t work. There is proper mathematics in lights not working. It’s that electrical-engineering work about the flow of electricity. The problem is, typically, a broken or loose bulb. Maybe a burnt-out fuse, although I have never fixed a Christmas lights problem by replacing the fuse. It’s just something to do so you can feel like you’ve taken action before screaming in rage and throwing the lights out onto the front porch. More interesting to me is the mathematics of strands getting tangled. The idea — a foldable thread, marked at regular intervals by points that can hook together — seems trivially simple. But it can give insight into how long molecules, particularly proteins, will fold together. It may help someone frustrated to ponder that their light strands are knotted for the same reasons life can exist. But I’m not sure it ever does.

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