Let me get out of the way last week’s comic strips that I thought didn’t need much discussion. There’s discussion creeping into them anyway. This is why there’s such a rush.
Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 14th has a kid longing for help with algebra.
Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 15th is a percentages joke. It’s really tempting to just add and subtract percentages like this, when talking about sales and interest and such. If the percentages are small, like, one or two percent, this is near enough to being right. A sale of 15 percent and interest of 22 percent? That’s not close enough to approximate like that. A 15 percent sale with 22 percent interest charge would come to about a 3.7 percent surcharge. But how long the charge stays on the credit card will affect the amount.
Bob Scott’s Bear With Me for the 17th has one of Molly’s friends trying to print a mathematics assignment.
Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics for the 17th has one long message turn out to encode a completely unrelated thing. This is something you can deliberately build in to a signal. You might want to, in order to confound codebreakers working on your message. It’s possible in any message to encode a second by accident. As you’d think, the longer the unintentional message the less likely it is to just turn up.
Next Sunday should be the next time I do a Reading the Comics essay. Tomorrow and Thursday I hope to extend the A-to-Z sequence. I don’t know what’s going to happen here on Wednesday. I’m looking forward to finding out myself. See you then.
nebusresearch 