Reading the Comics, April 17, 2020: Creating Models Edition

And now let me close out a week ago, in the comics. It was a slow week and it finished on a bunch of casual mentions of mathematical topics.

Gary Larson’s The Far Side compilation “Hands Off My Bunsen Burner” features this panel creating a model of how to get rights out of wrongs. The material is a joke, but trying to find a transformation from one mathematical object to another is a reasonable enough occupation.

Gary Larson’s The Far Side, a compilation for April 2020. Essays which feature some mention of The Far Side are gathered at this link.

Ted Shearer’s Quincy rerun for the 15th is one in the lineage of strips about never using mathematics in later life. Quincy challenges us to think of a time a reporter asks the President how much is 34 times 587.

Ted Shearer’s Quincy rerun for the 15th of April 2020. It originally ran, looks like, the 19th of February, 1981. The essays where I discuss something brought up by Quincy should be at this link.

That’s an unpleasant multiplication to do. But I can figure some angles on it. 34 is just a bit over one-third of 100. 587 is just a bit under 600. So, 34 times 587 has to be tolerably near one-third of 100 times 600. So it should be something around 20,000. To get it more exact: 587 is 13 less than 600. So, 587 times one-third of a hundred will be 600 times one-third of a hundred minus 13 times one-third of a hundred. That’s one-third of 130, which is about 40. So the product has to be something close to 19,960. And the product has be some number which ends in an 8, what with 4 times 7 being 28. So the answer has to be one of 19,948, 19,958, or 19,968. And, indeed, it’s 19,958. I doubt I could do that so well during a press conference, I’ll admit. (If I wanted to be sure about that second digit, I’d have worked out: the tens unit in 34 times the ones in 587 is three times seven which is 21; the ones unit in 34 times the tens unit in 587 is four times eight which is 32; and the 4 times 7 being 28 gives me a 2 in the tens unit. So, 1 plus 2 plus 2 is 5, and there we go.)

Brian Anderson’s Dog Eat Doug for the 15th uses blackboards full of equations to represent deep thinking. I can’t make out what the symbols say. They look quite good, though, and seem to have the form of legitimate expressions.

Terri Liebenson’s The Pajama Diaries for the 17th of April, 2020. It originally ran the 20th of April, 2007. Essays inspired by something mentioned in The Pajama Diaries are at this link.

Terri Liebenson’s The Pajama Diaries for the 17th imagines creating a model for the volume of a laundry pile. The problem may seem trivial, but it reflects an important kind of work. Many processes are about how something that’s always accumulating will be handled. There’s usually a hard limit to the rate at which whatever it is gets handled. And there’s usually very little reserve, in either capacity or time. This will cause, for example, a small increase in traffic in a neighborhood to produce great jams, or how a modest rain can overflow the whole city’s sewer systems. Or how a day of missing the laundry causes there to be a week’s backlog of dirty clothes.

And a little final extra comic strip. I don’t generally mention web comics here, except for those that have fallen in with a syndicator like GoComics.com. (This is not a value judgement against web comics. It’s that I have to stop reading sometime.) But Kat Swenski’s KatRaccoon Comics recently posted this nice sequence with a cat facing her worst fear: a calculus date.

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And that’s my comics for a week ago. Later this week I’ll cover the past week’s handful of comics, in an essay at this link. Thanks for reading.

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