Reading the Comics, December 23, 2017: Slow Week Edition

Comic Strip Master Command apparently wants everybody to have a quiet time ahead of Christmas. How quiet? Quiet enough that I’m including a strip I skipped last week and probably shouldn’t have. Here goes.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 15th was an installment of Uncle Cap’n’s Puzzle Pontoon, an activity puzzle that’s always about Uncle Cap’n running some low-competence scam. In this case the scam is bitcoins, which makes me wonder how old this particular panel rerun is. (I thought I saw a bitcoin joke in Barney Google, mind, although I can’t find the reference to prove it.)

I don’t feel confident that I understand the full mathematics behind the scheme, so I’ll pass on that. I can talk about the SHA-256 Hash Function and what it’s for, though. To be part of the bitcoin process your computer needs to do two things: it has to do some computing work, and it has to convince other computers that it’s done that. The trick is to prove it was done without giving the original work away. The answer is one that humans have known for centuries. Probably millennia. Possibly since the invention of secrets. To show you’re in on a secret, publicize something that makes no sense except to other people who know the secret. A hash is one way to do it.

It’s a function which matches a string of numbers that represent your original message to the real numbers. It should be easy to make the hash from the original string. But it should be hard to go from the hash back to the original string. So then you can publicize the hash of whatever your secret is. And someone else can know that they have the same secret by checking whether it hashes to the same number. (I’m reminded of how Galileo secured his priority of the discovery that Venus shows phases by writing a short sentence describing the phenomenon, and then publicizing an anagram of it. The anagram made no sense, but if you knew his original message you verify that yes, indeed, he did publicize that string of letters. I suppose that’s not properly a hash, but it serves much the same role.) It’s an easy enough way to add some authentication to a message, and to make it more tamper-proof. Hash functions for this kind of security are believed to be reasonably collision-proof. It might be possible to find two original messages with the same hash. But we believe it would take so long to do that it would be more effective to just break into your target’s house and steal their computer instead of counterfeiting the message.

Hilary Price (w/KG)’s Rhymes with Orange for the 17th of December, 2017. I’m not sure who KG is. Daily strips lately have been co-signed by Rina Piccolo, formerly of Tina’s Groove.

Hilary Price’s Rhymes with Orange for the 17th is a joke about the uselessness of Algebra 2. It’s a joke of a kind with jokes about philosophy professors having jobs training students to be philosophy professors (a joke mathematicians get too, come to think of it). I’m a bit more sympathetic to joking about Algebra 2, rather than Algebra at all. There are some classes with a purpose that doesn’t seem quite clear. I’m more likely to name pre-algebra as a course whose purpose I can’t quite pin down. Algebra 2 I would, generically, expect to cover stuff like functions of several variables that you’re prepared for the first time you take Algebra, and you should be comfortable with before you start Calculus (or Pre-Calculus), but that aren’t essential to knowing algebra in the first place.

Sam Hurt’s Eyebeam for the 18th is the anthropomorphic numerals segment for this slow week and makes literal an ancient joke. Incidentally, has anyone else been seeing the follow-up joke on their social media feeds? I don’t remember seeing it before about two months ago. (The follow up is, why was it that seven ate nine? … Because one should eat three-square meals a day.)

Brant Parker and Johnny Hart’s Wizard of Id Classics for the 21st mentions mathematicians, engineers, and wizards as the epitome of intelligence and ability. Flattering thought. My love’s father just yesterday proclaimed his confidence that as a mathematics PhD I could surely figure out how to do something mechanical. Related note: in three decades of being in an adult-like state I have never once successfully changed my car’s tire without outside aid. The strip originally ran the 25th of December, 1967.

There’s no Andertoons this week. I told you it was slow.

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