You know, I had picked these comic strips out as the ones that, last week, had the most substantial mathematics content. And on preparing this essay I realize there’s still not much. Maybe I could have skipped out on the whole week instead.
Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 1st is mostly some wordplay. Jason’s finding ways to represent the counting numbers with square roots. The joke plays more tightly than one might expect. Root beer was, traditionally, made with sassafras root, hence the name. (Most commercial root beers don’t use actual sassafras anymore as the safrole in it is carcinogenic.) The mathematical term root, meanwhile, derives from the idea that the root of a number is the thing which generates it. That 2 is the fourth root of 16, because four 2’s multiplied together is 16. That idea. This draws on the metaphor of the roots of a plant being the thing which lets the plant grow. This isn’t one of those cases where two words have fused together into one set of letters.
Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 1st is set up with an exponential growth premise. The kid — I can’t figure out his name — promises to increase the number of push-ups he does each day by ten percent, with exciting forecasts for how many that will be before long. As Frazz observes, it’s not especially realistic. It’s hard to figure someone working themselves up from nothing to 300 push-ups a day in only two months.
Also much else of the kid’s plan doesn’t make sense. On the second day he plans to do 1.1 push-ups? On the third 1.21 push-ups? I suppose we can rationalize that, anyway, by taking about getting a fraction of the way through a push-up. But if we do that, then, I make out by the end of the month that he’d be doing about 15.863 push-ups a day. At the end of two months, at this rate, he’d be at 276.8 push-ups a day. That’s close enough to three hundred that I’d let him round it off. But nobody could be generous enough to round 15.8 up to 90.
An alternate interpretation of his plans would be to say that each day he’s doing ten percent more, and round that up. So that, like, on the second day he’d do 1.1 rounded up to 2 push-ups, and on the third day 2.2 rounded up to 3 push-ups, and so on. Then day thirty looks good: he’d be doing 94. But the end of two months is a mess as by then he’d be doing 1,714 push-ups a day. I don’t see a way to fit all these pieces together. I’m curious what the kid thought his calculation was. Or, possibly, what Jef Mallett thought the calculation was.
![Kid: 'I'm not gonna be an accountant like you, dad! [Holding guitar] I'll become a musician so I don't have to work a real job!' [In front of computer, in suit.] 'I can just sit with my guitar, optimizing search results and maximizing click velocity and ... ' [ Realizing he's studying spreadsheets, clicks-per-ad-dollar; curses himself ]](https://nebusresearch.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/saturday-morning-breakfast-cereal_zach-weinersmith_2-december-2019.gif)
Zach Weinersmith’s for the 2nd has a kid rejecting accounting in favor of his art. But, wanting to do that art with optimum efficiency … ends up doing accounting. It’s a common story. A common question after working out that someone can do a thing is how to do it best. Best has many measures, yes. But the logic behind how to find it stays the same. Here I admit my favorite kinds of games tend to have screen after screen of numbers, with the goal being to make some number as great as possible considering. If they ever made Multiple Entry Accounting Simulator none of you would ever hear from me again.
Which may be some time! Between Reading the Comics, A to Z, recap posts, and the occasional bit of filler I’ve just finished slightly over a hundred days in a row posting something. That is, however, at its end. I don’t figure to post anything tomorrow. I may not have anything before Sunday’s Reading the Comics post, at this link. I’ll be letting my typing fingers sleep in instead. Thanks for reading.
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