Comic Strip Master Command started the summer vacation early this year. There have been even slower weeks for mathematically-themed comics, but not many, and not much slower. Well, it’s looking like a nice weekend anyway. We can go out and do something instead.
And I’m doing a little experiment to see what happens if I publish posts a bit earlier in the day. My suspicion is nothing that reaches statistical significance. But statistical significance isn’t everything. I can devote a month or two to a lark.
Piers Baker’s Ollie and Quentin for the 2nd is a rerun. The strip ended several years ago, and has not been one of those formerly syndicated comics gone to web-only publication. And it’s one that I’ve discussed before, in a 2014 repeat and briefly in 2015. I don’t know why it reran six months apart. Having a particular daily strip repeat so often is usually a sign I should retire the strip from this blog. Likely I won’t retire it from my reading. I like its style a bit too much.
The joke is built on Quentin hearing that only 50% of people are not happy. And as he is happy, and he and Ollie are two people, it follows Ollie can’t be. The joke builds on the logic of the gambler’s fallacy. This is the idea that the probability of some independent event depends on what has recently happened. Here “event” means what it does to statisticians, what it turns out something is. This can be the result of a coin toss. This can be finding out whether a person is happy or not. The gambler’s fallacy has a hard-to-resist logic to it. We know it is unlikely that a coin tossed fairly ten times will come up tails each time. We also know it is even more unlikely that a coin tossed fairly eleven times will turn up tails every time. So if the coin has already come up tails ten times? It’s easy in the abstract to sneer at people who make this mistake. But at some point or other we all think some unpredictable event is “due”.
There is a catch here, though. The gambler’s fallacy covers independent events. One coin’s toss does not affect whether the next toss should be heads or tails. But personal happiness? That is something affected by other people. Perhaps not dramatically. But one person’s mood can certainly alter another’s, just as the strip demonstrates. In past appearances of this strip I’ve written about it as though the mathematical comedy element were obvious. Now I realize I may have under-explored what is happening here.
Harley Schwadron’s 9 to 5 for the 3rd is a student-at-the-blackboard joke. And a joke about the uselessness of learning arithmetic if there are computing devices around. There have always been computing devices around, though. I’d prefer them for tedious problems, or for problems in which mistakes have serious consequences. But I think it’s worth knowing at least what to do. But I like mathematics. Of course I would.
Mike Baldwin’s Cornered for the 6th is another student-at-the-blackboard joke. This one has the student excusing his wrong answer, a number too high, as a tip. In the student’s defense, I’ll say being able to come up with a decent approximate answer, even one you know is a little too high, is worth it. Often an important step in a problem is knowing about what a reasonable answer is. This can involve mental-mathematics tricks. For example, remembering that 7 times 7 is just under fifty, which would help with a problem like 7 times 6.
And that’s all the comic strips I found worth any mention last week. There weren’t even any that rated a “there’s a comic that said ‘math class’, so here you go” aside. This bodes well for an interesting week of content around here. My next Reading the Comics post should appear next Sunday at this link. All the past comic strip discussion should, too. If you should find a comics essay that doesn’t appear in those archives please let me know. I’ll fix it.
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