I apologize for a post rougher than my norm. It has not been a gentle week. I am carrying on as best I can, but then, who isn’t? There is a common element to three of the strips featured this time around, so I have a meaningful name.
Steve McGarry’s KidTown for the 22nd of July is a kids-information panel. It’s a delivery system for some neat trivia about numbers. I’d never encountered the bit about the factorial of 10 (10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1) being as many seconds as there are in six weeks. I’m curious how I missed that. But it’s definitely one of those slightly useful bits of calendar mathematics to keep around. Some other useful ones are that three years is about 1100 days, and that a century is about three billion seconds. That line about 12 + 3 – 4 + 5 + 67 + 8 + 9 is probably a useful answer to some mathematics riddle such as might beset Nancy.
John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 23rd depicts Maria misunderstanding what it is to be bad at mathematics. The Star Wars movie episode numbers show a quirky indexing scheme, yes. But the numbers in this case are mostly nominal variables. If we spoke of the movies only by their titles … well, it would be harder to guess whether The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi came first. All the names suggest is that they ought to follow on something else happening beforehand. And people would likely use numbers for shorthand anyway. Star Trek fans talk still about the odd- and even-numbered movies, even though no Star Trek movie’s had a number attached to it since 1991.
A nominal variable is as the … er … name suggests. It’s a way to reference something, but the value doesn’t mean very much. We see these, often with numbers attached, often enough to not notice it. We start to realize it when we have those moments of thinking, isn’t it odd that the office building starts numbering rooms from 101, rather than, say, 1? Or that there’s no numbers between (say) 129 and 201? Using a number carries some information, in that it suggests we think there is a preferred order for things. But your neighborhood would be no different if all the building addresses were 1000 higher, and the Star Wars movies would be no different if the one from 1977 came to be dubbed Episode 14 instead.
(I am open to an argument that the Star Wars episode numbers are ordinal variables. This is why I hedged by calling them “mostly” nominal. An ordinal variable describes some preferred order for the things. The difference between numbers isn’t particularly meaningful, just the relationship between them. And, yeah, it would be peculiar if The Empire Strikes Back had a higher episode number than did Return of the Jedi. Viewing the movies in that order would create several apparent continuity errors. But there are differences between internal chronology and production order and other ways one might watch the movies. But it seems to me the ordinary use for the numbers, if someone uses them at all, is as a label.)
Mell Lazarus’s Momma for the 23rd is another strip built on people being bad at mathematics. Arithmetic, anyway. I’m not sure this quite counts as an arithmetic joke. Granting the (correct) assumption that an episode of 60 Minutes is ordinarily 60 minutes long, is not recognizing how long the show will take really a use of mathematics? Isn’t it more reading comprehension? … And to be fair to the ever-beleaguered Francis, it’s rather more likely 60 Minutes just had one segment about grown men incapable of doing arithmetic. Asking how long that is likely to take is a fair question.
Adrian Raeside’s The Other Coast for the 23rd is another strip conflating arithmetic skill with intelligence. And intelligence with fitness. It’s flattering stuff, at least for people who are good at arithmetic and who feel flattered to be called intelligent. But there’s a lot of presumption here. And a common despicable attitude: merry little eugenicists (they’re always cheery about it, aren’t they?) always conclude they are fit ones.
Other essays that discuss topics raised in KidTown are on this link. When I’ve had cause to discuss Maria’s Day those essays are here. Other times I’ve talked about Momma should be on this link. And other essays that mention The Other Coast should be on this link. It’s a new tag, so it might take some time to get other entries.
As ever, the whole set of Reading the Comics posts should be at this link.
nebusresearch 
MST3K: “Why Study Industrial Arts?”
Crow: “Because you’re bad at math…”
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Heh … and yeah, that’s just the aura mathematics gets. I love the field, but it’s not as if everything else people do doesn’t take as much intelligence and cleverness and imagination to do well.
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