There’s several comics from the first half of last week that I can’t perfectly characterize. They seem to be on-topic enough for my mathematical discussions. It’s just how exactly they are on-topic that I haven’t quite got. Some weeks are like that.
Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 28th circles around being a numerals joke. It’s built on the binary representation of numbers that we’ve built modern computers on. And on the convention that “(Subject) 101” is the name for an introductory course in a subject. This convention of course numbering — particularly, three-digit course numbers, with the leading digit representing the year students are expected to take it — seems to have spread in American colleges in the 1930s. It’s a compromise, as many things are. As college programs of study become more specialized there’s the need for a greater number of courses in each field. And there’s a need to give people some hint of the course level. “Numerical Methods” could be a sophomore, senior, or grad-student course; how should someone from a different school know what to expect? But the pull of the serial number, and the idea that ’01’ must be the first in a field, is hard to resist.
Anyway, the long string of zeroes and ones after the original ‘101’ is silliness and that’s all it has to be. The number one-hundred-and-one in binary would be a mere “1100101”, which doesn’t start with the important one-oh-one, and isn’t a big enough string of digits to be funny. Maybe this is a graduate course. The number given, if we read it as a single long binary number, would be 182,983,026,468. I’ve been to schools which use four-digit course codes. Twelve digits seems excessive.
John Deering’s Strange Brew for the 29th circles around being an anthropomorphic numerals joke. At least it is a person using a large representation of the number eight. I’m not sure how to characterize it, or why I find the strip amusing. It’s a strange one.
Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 1st is, finally, a certain anthropomorphic numerals joke. With wordplay about prime numbers being unavoidably prime suspects. … And when I was a kid, I had no idea what “numbers rackets” were, other than a thing sometimes mentioned on older sitcoms. That it involved somehow literally taking numbers and doing … something … that the authorities didn’t like was mysterious. I don’t remember what surely hilarious idea the young me had for what that might even mean. I suspect that, had I seen this strip at the time, I would have understood this wasn’t really whatever was going on. But I would have explained to my parents what a prime number was, and they would put up with my doing so, because that’s just what our relationship was.
Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 1st is more or less the Venn Diagram joke for this essay. It’s a bit of a fourth-wall-breaking strip: the joke wouldn’t really work from the other goldfish’s perspective. Anyway, only two of those figures are proper Venn diagrams. The topmost figure, with five circles, and the bottommost, with three, aren’t proper Venn diagrams. Only some of the possible intersections between sets exist there. They are proper Euler diagrams, though.
Wayno’s WaynoVision for the 1st is the pie-chart joke for the essay. It’s not as punchy as that Randolph Itch strip I kept bringing back around. But it’s on the same theme, mixing the metaphor of the pie chart with literal pies.
There’s one more Reading the Comics post before I’ve got all last week’s strips covered. That, I hope to have published and available at this link for Tuesday.
nebusresearch 