I didn’t have even some good nonsense for this edition’s title and it’s a day late already. And that for only having a couple of comics, most of them reruns. And then this came across my timeline:
Please let it not be a big milkshake duck. I can’t take it if it is.
Larry Wright’s Motley for the 21st uses mathematics as emblem of impossibly complicated stuff to know. I’m interested to see that biochemistry was also called in to represent something that needs incredible brainpower to know things that can be expressed in one panel. Another free little question: what might “2,368 to the sixth power times pi” be an answer to? The obvious answer to me is “what’s the area of a circle of radius 2,368 to the third power”. That seems like a bad quiz-show question to me, though. It tests a legitimate bit of trivia, but the radius is such an ugly number. There are some other obvious questions that might fit, like “what is the circumference of a circle of radius [ or diameter ] of (ugly number here)?” Or “what is the volume of a circle of radius (similarly ugly number here)?” But the radius (or diameter) of those surfaces would have to be really nasty numbers, ones with radicals of 2,368 — itself no charming number — in it.
And “2,368 to the sixth power times pi” is the answer to infinitely many questions. The challenge is finding one that’s plausible as a quiz-show question. That is it should test something that’s reasonable for a lay person to know, and to calculate while on stage, without pen or paper or much time to reflect. Tough set of constraints, especially to get that 2,368 in there. The sixth power isn’t so easy either.
Well, the biochemistry people don’t have an easy time thinking of a problem to match Debbie’s answer either. “Hydro- ” and “mono- ” are plausible enough prefixes, but as far as I know there’s no “nucleatic acid” to have some modified variant. Wright might have been thinking of nucleic acid, but as far as I know there’s no mononucleic acid, much less hydromononucleic acid. But, yes, that’s hardly a strike against the premise of the comic. It’s just nitpicking.
![[ During his first day at Math Camp, Jim Smith learns the hard way he's not a numbers person. ] Coach: 'The ANSWER, Mr Smith?' (Smith's head pops open, ejecting a brain, several nuts, and a few screws; he says the null symbol.)](https://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/charlie-podrebarac_cowtown_22-june-2018.gif)
Charlie Pondrebarac’s CowTown for the 22nd is on at least its third appearance since I started reading the comics for the mathematics stuff regularly. I covered it in June 2016 and also in August 2015. This suggests a weird rerun cycle for the comic. Popping out of Jim Smith’s mouth is the null symbol, which represents a set that hasn’t got any elements. That set is known as the null set. Every set, including the null set, contains a null set. This fact makes set theory a good bit easier than it otherwise would be. That’s peculiar, considering that it is literally nothing. But everything one might want to say about “nothing” is peculiar. That doesn’t make it dispensable.
Julie Larson’s Dinette Set for the 22nd sees the Penny family’s adults bemoaning the calculator their kid needs for middle school. I admit feeling terror at being expected to buy a hundred-dollar calculator for school. But I also had one (less expensive) when I was in high school. It saves a lot of boring routine work. And it allows for playful discoveries about arithmetic. Some of them are cute trivialities, such as finding the Golden Ratio and similar quirks. And a calculator does do essentially the work that a slide rule might, albeit more quickly and with more digits of precision. It can’t help telling you what to calculate or why, but it can take the burden out of getting the calculation done. Still, a hundred bucks. Wow.
Tony Carrillo’s F Minus for the 23rd puts out the breaking of a rule of arithmetic as a whimsical, inexplicable event. A moment of two plus two equalling five, whatever it might do for the structure of the universe, would be awfully interesting for the philosophy of mathematics. Given what we ordinarily think we mean by ‘two’ and ‘plus’ and ‘equals’ and ‘five’ that just can’t happen. And what would it mean for two plus to to equal five for a few moments? Mathematicians often think about the weird fact that mathematical structures — crafted from definitions and logic — describe the real world stunningly well. Would this two plus two equalling five be something that was observed in the real world, and checked against definitions that suddenly allowed this? Would this be finding a chain of reasoning that supported saying two plus two equalled five, only to find a few minutes later that a proof everyone was satisfied with was now clearly wrong?
That’s a particularly chilling prospect, if you’re in the right mood. We like to think mathematical proofs are absolute and irrefutable, things which are known to be true regardless of who knows them, or what state they’re in, or anything. And perhaps they are. They seem to come as near as mortals can to seeing Platonic forms. (My understanding is that mathematical constructs are not Platonic forms, at least in Plato’s view of things. But they are closer to being forms than, say, apples put on a table for the counting would be.) But what we actually know is whether we, fallible beings comprised of meat that thinks, are satisfied that we’ve seen a proof. We can be fooled. We can think something is satisfactory because we haven’t noticed an implication that’s obviously wrong or contradictory. Or because we’re tired and are feeling compliant. Or because we ate something that’s distracting us before we fully understand an argument. We may have a good idea of what a satisfactory logical proof would be. But stare at the idea hard enough and we realize we might never actually know one.
If you’d like to see more Reading the Comics posts, you can find them at this link. If you’re interested in the individual comics, here you go. My essays tagged with CowTown are here. Essays tagged Dinette Set are at this link. The essays that mention F Minus since I started adding strip tags are here. And this link holds the Motley comics.
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