Last week was busy enough in mathematically themed comic strips. Some of these are pretty slight topics. But including them lets me do one of my favorite things, to have an essay that’s all comics from a single day. It’s my blog, I can use it to amuse myself.
Marcus Hamilton and Ron Ferdinand’s Dennis the Menace for the 27th shows the kind of slightness I’m dealing with. ‘Statistic’ has some nasty connotations in this sense. It suggests something dehumanizing has happened. But the word was maybe doomed to that. The word came about in the 18th century, to describe the systematic collection and study of information about whole populations. They started out being the gathering of information about the state.
But gathering information about a whole state implies, first, that the thing one finds interesting about a people are some measured and recorded aspect. Not the whole of their person-hood. Second, it implies that you wish to approximate the diversity of a whole people with some smaller set of numbers. There’s compelling reasons for a state to want to have statistics. They make it more plausible to know what the state can do. They make it plausible to forecast the results of a policy. Ideally, this encourages wisdom in policy-making. If the tools are used well.
Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup Classics for the 27th is the slightest of the comic strips I’m featuring this week. Really it should have been just a mention, but I wanted to have at least three comics shown for today’s essay. Making and counting change is constantly held up as the supreme purpose of teaching arithmetic. This though most any shop has a cash register that will calculate change faster and more accurately than even someone skilled in arithmetic will. I understand the crankiness of people who give the cashier $15.13 for their $12.38 bill, and get the thirteen cents handed back to them before it’s rung up. It’s not evidence that civilization is collapsing. It’s loose change.
Paul Trap’s Thatababy for the 27th continues the strip’s thread of turning geometry figures into jokes. This one is less useful than the comic featured Tuesday, which might help one remember what a scalene triangle or a rhombus looks like. Still might be fun.
And with that, last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips are fully discussed. This week’s comics will get discussion at an essay linked from here. Please visit soon and we’ll see what I have to say, and about what.
nebusresearch 