Thanks for sticking around as I finally got to the past week’s comic strips. There were just enough for me to divide them into two chunks and not feel like I’m cheating anyone of my sparkling prose.
Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 4th is another entry in this strip’s string of not-quite-Venn-Diagram jokes. As will happen, the point of the diagram seems clear enough even if it doesn’t quite parse. And it isn’t a proper Venn diagram, of course; a Venn diagram for five propositions has to have 31 regions, representing all the possible ways five things can combine or be excluded. They can be beautiful to look at, but start losing their value as ways to organize thought. This is again a Euclid diagram, which doesn’t need to show every possible overlap.
Michael Jantze’s The Norm 4.0 for the 5th is the other Venn Diagram joke for the week. Again properly the first one, showing the complete lack of overlap between two positions, is an Euler rather than a Venn diagram. The second, the “Amity Venn diagram on planet X”, is a Venn diagram and showing the intersection of blue and yellow regions as green is a nice way to show that. (I’m not fond of the gender stereotyping here, nor of the conflation of gender and chromosomes. But the comic strip does have to rely on shorthands or there’s just not going to be the space to compose a joke.)
Harry Bliss’s Bliss for the 6th name-checks tetrahedrons. These are the shapes the rest of us would probably call pyramids or perhaps d4. It’s a bit silly to suppose a hairball should be a tetrahedron. But natural processes will form particular shapes. The obvious example is the hexagonal prisms of honeycombs, which come about for reasons … I’m not sure biologists are completely agreed on. Hexagons do seem to be efficient ways to encompass a lot of volume with a minimum of material, at least. But even the classic hairball looks like that for reasons, related to how it’s created and how it’s expelled from the cat. They just don’t usually have corners.
Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 9th has you common blackboard full of symbols to represent mathematical work. It also evokes a well-worn joke that defines a mathematician as a mechanism for turning coffee into theorems. The explosion of creativity though is true to mathematicians, though. When inspiration is flowing the notes will get abundant and start going in many different wild directions. The symbols in the comic strip don’t mean anything. But that’s not inauthentic. The notes written during an inspired burst will be nonsensical. The great idea needs to be preserved. It can be cleaned up and, one hopes, made presentable later.
This and other Reading the Comics posts are at this link. I should have a fresh one on Thursday, wrapping up the past week.
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