Reading the Comics, April 14, 2018: Friday the 13th Edition?

And now I can close out last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. There was a bunch toward the end of the week. And I’m surprised that none of the several comics to appear on Friday the 13th had anything to do with the calendar. Or at least not enough for me to talk about them.

Julie Larson’s Dinette Set rerun for the 12th is a joke built on the defining feature of (high school) algebra. The use of a number whose value we hope to figure out isn’t it. Those appear from the start of arithmetic, often as an empty square or circle or a spot of ____ that’s to be filled out. We used to give these numbers names like “thing” or “heap” or “it” or the like. Something pronoun-like. The shift to using ‘x’ as the shorthand is a legacy of the 16th century, the time when what we see as modern algebra took shape. People are frightened by it, to suddenly see letters in the midst of a bunch of numbers. But it’s no more than another number. And it communicates “algebra” in a way maybe nothing else does.

Julie Larson’s Dinette Set rerun for the 12th of April, 2018. Don’t be thrown by the side bits like the show on the TV or the rather oversized Nutty Professor DVD box. They’re just side jokes, not part of the main gag.

Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug rerun for the 12th is one of the God-Man stories. I’m delighted by the Freshman Philosophy-Major Man villain. The strip builds on questions of logic, and about what people mean by “omnipotence”. I don’t know how much philosophy of mathematics the average major takes. I suspect it’s about as much philosophy of mathematics as the average mathematics major is expected to take. (It’s an option, but I don’t remember anyone suggesting I do it, and I do feel the lost opportunity.) But perhaps later on Freshman Philosophy-Major Man would ask questions like what do we mean by “one” and “plus” and “equals” and “three”. And whether anything could, by a potent enough entity, be done about them. For the easiest way to let an omnipotent creature change something like that. WordPress is telling me this is a new tag for me. That can’t be right.

Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug rerun for the 12th of April, 2018. Yes, basically every God-Man installment is the same strip, but it works for me every time. (It helps that there’s only a couple each year.)

Mike Thompson’s Grand Avenue for the 13th is another resisting-the-story-problem joke, attacking the idea that a person would have ten apples. People like to joke about story problems hypothesizing people with ridiculous numbers of pieces of fruit. But ten doesn’t seem like an excessive number of apples to me; my love and I could eat that many in two weeks without trying hard. The attempted diversion would work better if it were something like forty watermelons or the like.

Mike Thompson’s Grand Avenue for the 13th of April, 2018. And I realize this is like the complaint I raised about the Grand Avenue earlier this week. But Gabby is assuming that Sally is carrying around ten apples, when the problem hasn’t said anything of the sort. Ten isn’t a ridiculous number of apples to carry to start with, but to simply have them in one’s possession? That’s just not peculiar.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 13th has Heart and Dean complaining about their arithmetic class. I rate it as enough to include here because they go into some detail about things. I find it interesting they’re doing story problems with decimal points; that seems advanced for what I’d always taken their age to be. But I don’t know. I have dim memories of what elementary school was like, and that was in a late New Math-based curriculum.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 13th of April, 2018. One of the things I do appreciate about Heart of the City is that while Dean is a nerd and mostly likes school, he’s not one-note about it and gets as tired of it as anyone else does. Nerd kids in comic strips have a tendency to take their pro-school agenda a bit far.

Nick Galifianakis’s Nick and Zuzu for the 13th is a Venn diagram joke, the clearest example of one we’ve gotten in a while. I believe WordPress when it tells me this is a new tag for the comic strip.

Nick Galifianakis’s Nick and Zuzu for the 13th of April, 2018. First, this is some of the nicest grey-washing I’ve seen in these Reading the Comics posts in a while. Second, my experience is that spite with integrity is some of the most fun and delightful that spite ever gets to be. The integrity lets you add a layer of smugness to the spite. And if anyone protests, you get to feel smugly superior to them, too.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 14th is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. It starts at least with teaching ordinal numbers. In normal English that’s the adjective form of a number. Ordinal numbers reappear in the junior or senior year of a mathematics major’s work, as they learn enough set theory to be confused by infinities. In this guise they describe the sizes of sets of things. And they’re introduced as companions to cardinal numbers, which also describe the sizes of sets of things. They’re different, in ways that I feel like I always forget in-between reading books about infinitely large sets. The kids don’t need to worry about this yet.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 14th of April, 2018. The kid appears often enough I feel like I should know his name. Or assign one in case the strip doesn’t have a canonical name for him. I’ll take nominations if anyone wants to offer them.

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