Last week Comic Strip Master Command sent out just enough on-theme comics for two essays, the way I do them these days. The first half has some multiplication in two of the strips. So that’s enough to count as a theme for me.
Aaron Neathery’s Endtown for the 26th depicts a dreary, boring school day by using arithmetic. A lot of times tables. There is some credible in-universe reason to be drilling on multiplication like this. The setting is one where the characters can’t expect to have computers available. That granted, I’m not sure there’s a point to going up to memorizing four times 27. Going up to twelve-times seems like enough for common uses. For multiplying two- and longer-digit numbers together we usually break the problem up into a string of single-digit multiplications.
There are a handful of bigger multiplications that can make your life easier to know, like how four times 25 is 100. Or three times 33 is pretty near 100. But otherwise? … Of course, the story needs the class to do something dull and seemingly pointless. Going deep into multiplication tables communicates that to the reader quickly.
Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 26th is a spot of wordplay. Also a shout-out to my friends who record mathematics videos for YouTube. It is built on the conflation between the ideas of something multiplying and the amount of something growing. It’s easy to see where the idea comes from; just keep hitting ‘x 2’ on a calculator and the numbers grow excitingly fast. You get even more exciting results with ‘x 3’ or ‘x π’. But multiplying by 1 is still multiplication. As is multiplying by a number smaller than 1. Including negative numbers. That doesn’t hurt the joke any. That multiplying two things together doesn’t necessarily give you something larger is a consideration when you’re thinking rigorously about what multiplication can do. It doesn’t have to be part of normal speech.
John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee for the 27th uses the form of a word problem to show off Edison’s gluttony. Edison tries to present it as teaching. We all have rationalizations for giving in to our appetites.
Nate Frakes’s Break of Day for the 27th is the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. I don’t know that there’s anything in the other numerals being odds rather than evens, or a mixture of odds and evens. It might just be that they needed to be anything but 1.
All of my regular Reading the Comics posts should all be at this link. The next in my Fall 2018 Mathematics A To Z glossary should be posted Tuesday. I’m glad for it if you do come around and read again.
