The past week had a fair number of comic strips mentioning some aspect of mathematics. One of them is, really, fairly slight. But it extends a thread in the comic strip that I like and so that I will feature here.
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Little Oop for the 10th continues the thread of young Alley Oop’s time discovering numbers. (This in a storyline that’s seen him brought to the modern day.) The Moo researchers of the time have found numbers larger than three. As I’d mentioned when this joke was first done, that Oop might not have had a word for “seven” until recently doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have understood that seven of a thing was more than five of a thing, or less than twelve of a thing. At least if he could compare them.
Sam Hurt’s Eyebeam for the 11th uses heaps of mathematical expressions, graphs, charts, and Venn diagrams to represent the concept of “data”. It’s spilled all over to represent “sloppy data”. Usually by the term we mean data that we feel is unreliable. Measurements that are imprecise, or that are unlikely to be reliable. Precision is, roughly, how many significant digits your measurement has. Reliability is, roughly, if you repeated the measurement would you get about the same number?
Nate Fakes’s Break of Day for the 12th is the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week.
Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics for the 12th talks about immortality. And what the probability of events means when there are infinitely many opportunities for a thing to happen.
We’re accustomed in probability to thinking of the expectation value. This is the chance that something will happen, given some number N opportunities to happen, if at each opportunity it has the probability p of happening. Let me assume the probability is always the same number. If it’s not, our work gets harder, although it’s basically the same kind of work. But, then, the expectation value, the number of times we’d expect to see the thing happen, is N times p. Which, as Utahraptor points out, we can expect has to be at least 1 for any event, however unlikely, given enough chances. So it should be.
But, then, to take Utahraptor’s example: what is the probability that an immortal being never trips down the stairs? At least not badly enough to do harm? Why should we think that’s zero? It’s not as if there’s a physical law that compels someone to go to stairs and then to fall down them to their death. And, if there’s any nonzero chance of someone not dying this way? Then, if there are enough immortals, there’s someone who will go forever without falling down stairs.
That covers just the one way to die, of course. But the same reasoning holds for every possible way to die. If there’s enough immortals, there’s someone who would not die from falling down stairs and from never being struck by a meteor. And someone who’d never fall down stairs and never be struck by a meteor and never fall off a cliff trying to drop an anvil on a roadrunner. And so on. If there are infinitely many people, there’s at least one who’d avoid all possible accidental causes of death.
More. If there’s infinitely many immortals, then there are going to be a second and a third — indeed, an infinite number — of people who happen to be lucky enough to never die from anything. Infinitely many immortals die of accidents, sure, but somehow not all of them. We can’t even say that more immortals die of accidents than don’t.
My point is that probability gets really weird when you try putting infinities into it. Proceed with extreme caution. But the results of basic, incautious, thinking can be quite heady.
Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 12th has Paige cramming for a geometry exam. Don’t cram for exams; it really doesn’t work. It’s regular steady relaxed studying that you need. That and rest. There is nothing you do that you do better for being sleep-deprived.
Bob Weber Jr and Jay Stephens’s Oh Brother for the 12th has Lily tease her brother with a story problem. I believe the strip’s a rerun, but it had been gone altogether for more than a year. It’s nice to see it returned anyway.
And while I don’t regularly cover web-only comics here, Norm Feuti has carried on his Gil as a Sunday-only web comic. The strip for the 10th of May has Gil using a calculator for mathematics homework, with a teacher who didn’t say he couldn’t. I’m surprised she hadn’t set a guideline.
This carries me through half a week. I’ll have more mathematically-themed comic strips at this link soon. Thanks for reading.
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