Yeah, so remember how like two weeks ago I noticed another Randolph Itch, 2 am repeat? And figured to retire the comic strip from my Reading the Comics routine? Well, then you’re better at this blog than I am. But this time I’ll retire it for sure, rather than waste text I wrote up already.
Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am for the 13th is the Roman Numerals joke for the week. IV is a well-established way to write four, although on clock faces IIII is a quite common use. There’s not a really clear reason why this should be. I’m convinced that it’s mostly for reasons of symmetry. IIII comes nearer the length of VIII, across it on the clock face. The subtractive principle, where ‘IV’ means ‘one taken away from five’, wasn’t really a thing until the middle ages. But then neither were clocks like that.
Bill Rechin’s Crock for the 14th is a joke about being bad at arithmetic. And yeah, most instructors wouldn’t accept “a lot” as the answer to 125 times 140. But we can go from approximations to something more precise. The number’s got to be more than 10,000, for example. 125 is more than 100, and 140 is more than 100. So 125 times 140 has to be more than 100 times 100. And then I notice: 125 is a hundred plus a quarter-of-a-hundred. So, 125 times 140 is a hundred times 140 plus a quarter-of-a-hundred times 140. A hundred times 140 is easy: it’s 14,000. A quarter of that? … Is a quarter of 12,000 plus a quarter of 2,000. That’s 3,000 plus 500. So 125 times 140 has to be 14,000 plus 3,000 plus 500. 17,500. My calculator agrees, so I feel pretty good. If this all seems like an ad hoc process, well, it is. But it’s how I can do this in my head.
Yes, the comments at ComicsKingdom include a warning that “using this obscenity called new math he may never be right, but he will never be wrong either”. I mention this for fans of cranky old person comics commentary.
Ted Shearer’s Quincy for the 21st of July, 1979 was rerun the 14th. It expresses the then-common wish for a calculator, which held such promise for making mathematics easy. It does make some kinds of mathematics easy. It especially takes considerable tedium out of mathematics. And it opens up new things to discover. Especially if the calculator lets you put the last thing calculated into a formula. That makes it easy to play with all sorts of iterative processes. They let you find solutions to weird and complicated problems. Or explore beautiful fractals. Figure out what limits work like. Or just notice what’s neat about 3.302775638. They let you get into different things.
Daniel Shelton’s Ben for the 14th has Nicholas doing mathematics homework. And something that couldn’t just be any subject; arranging fractions by size is something worth learning. They do have the peculiar and hard-to-adjust-to property that making the denominator larger, without changing the numerator, makes the entire fraction represent a smaller number. I mean a number closer to zero. So I think sorting fractions a reasonable homework project. Cutting them out and pasting them down seems weird to me. But maybe there’s some benefit in making the project tactile like that.
My Reading the Comics posts make up the bulk of this blog by volume. They should all appear at this link. I really this time mean to retiree Randolph Itch, 2am as a tag, but please enjoy the strip’s appearances at this link. This and other appearances by Crock are at this link. Ted Shearer’s Quincy appears in essays on this link And other appearances by Ben should be at this link. Also I’m surprised to learn there are other essays. I would have bet Ben was a new tag this essay.
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