So after a couple dismal months my ratings appear to be up. The number of page views and of visitors, in fact, seem to be at all-time highs. At least they’re at highs for the past twelve months. I would like to think that the depressed readings of September and October — 708 page views and 381 visitors; 733 page views and 405 visitors, respectively — are behind me. November saw 1,215 page views and 519 visitors.
Some of this is an accident. My humor blog got a tidal wave of readers courtesy The Onion AV Club. The AV Club wrote up a piece about the sad end of the comic strip Apartment 3-G, and I’ve written a shocking amount about the soap strip. They mentioned me. And as I’ve used my comic strip posts there to mention my Reading the Comics series here, some curious people followed along.
That said, I’m not sure how many of those readers were AV Club curiosity-seekers. A crude estimate suggests somewhere a little over two hundred were. So even discounting that something near a thousand regular-style reders came in and looked around, and that’s nice to see. It’s back up to about where the readership was before the mysterious dropoff, in July, that many suspect results from mobile devices being incorrectly read.
For the roster of countries, well, the top was the United States as always, with some 837 page views. The United Kingdom came in with 62. The Canada appears third at 50 views, and the Philippines next at 20. The Singapore and the Australia tie at 19.
Single-reader countries this past month were Algeria, Argentina, Belgium, Egypt, Finland, Israel, Jamaica, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, Romania, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam. Belgium, Nigeria, and Thailand are repeats from October. No country’s on a three-month streak.
The Reading the Comics posts are as ever the most popular group and I’ve bundled them under the one category tag. But my Ramsey Theory question turned out to be slightly more popular than any of them in November. After grouping together all the comics posts, the most popular articles look like:
How Antifreeze Works, one of my little pointers to someone else’s interesting writing.
Nothing really dominated my search term queries this month. Some of the things that turned up were:
illustration of electromagnetic wave theory scientist comics strip
james clerk maxwell comics (I’m not sure I have any of these; this suggests I ought to be finding some.)
origin is the gateway to your entire gaming universe. (I’ve had this explained to me, but I forget what it means.)
places 1975 miles from charlotte nc (I know of none specifically 1,975 miles away.)
if i got 70 percent in all exams what grade do i need on final to pass course? (This I can help with.)
December starts with my blog here at 30,298 page views, and with 543 WordPress followers. I expect it’ll be overtaken in page views by my humor blog sometime soon.
By rights, if this installment has any title it should be “confident ignorance”. That state appears in many of the strips I want to talk about. But according to WordPress, my little mathematics blog here reached its 30,000th page view at long last. This is thanks largely to spillover from The Onion AV Club discovering my humor blog and its talk about the late comic strip Apartment 3-G. But a reader is a reader. And I want to celebrate reaching that big, round number. As I write this I’m at 30,162 page views, because there were a lot of AV Club-related readers.
Bob Weber Jr’s Slylock Fox for the 23rd of November maybe shouldn’t really be here. It’s just a puzzle game that depends on the reader remembering that two rectangles put against the other can be a rectangle again. It also requires deciding whether the frame of the artwork counts as one of the rectangles. The commenters at Comics Kingdom seem unsure whether to count squares as rectangles too. I don’t see any shapes that look more clearly like squares to me. But it’s late in the month and I haven’t had anything with visual appeal in these Reading the Comics installments in a while. Later we can wonder if “counting rectangles in a painting” is the most reasonable way a secret agent has to pass on a number. It reminds me of many, many puzzle mysteries Isaac Asimov wrote that were all about complicated ways secret agents could pass one bit of information on.
Bob Weber Jr’s Slylock Fox for the 23rd of November, 2015. I suppose the artist is lucky they weren’t hiding out at number 38, or she wouldn’t have been able to make such a compellingly symmetric diagram.
Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics for the 23rd of November is a rerun from goodness knows when it first ran on Quantz.com. It features T Rex thinking about the Turing Test. The test, named for Alan Turing, says that while we may not know what exactly makes up an artificial intelligence, we will know it when we see it. That is the sort of confident ignorance that earned Socrates a living. (I joke. Actually, Socrates was a stonecutter. Who knew, besides the entire philosophy department?) But the idea seems hard to dispute. If we can converse with an entity in such a way that we can’t tell it isn’t human, then, what grounds do we have for saying it isn’t human?
T Rex has an idea that the philosophy department had long ago, of course. That’s to simply “be ready for any possible opening with a reasonable conclusion”. He calls this a matter of brute force. That is, sometimes, a reasonable way to solve problems. It’s got a long and honorable history of use in mathematics. The name suggests some disapproval; it sounds like the way you get a new washing machine through a too-small set of doors. But sometimes the easiest way to find an answer is to just try all the possible outcomes until you find the ones that work, or show that nothing can. If I want to know whether 319 is a prime number, I can try reasoning my way through it. Or I can divide it by all the prime numbers from 2 up to 17. (The square root of 319 is a bit under 18.) Or I could look it up in a table someone already made of the prime numbers less than 400. I know what’s easier, if I have a table already.
The problem with brute force — well, one problem — is that it can be longwinded. We have to break the problem down into each possible different case. Even if each case is easily disposed of, the number of different cases can grow far too fast to be manageable. The amount of working time required, and the amount of storage required, can easily become too much to deal with. Mathematicians, and computer scientists, have a couple approaches for this. One is getting bigger computers with more memory. We might consider this the brute force method to solving the limits of brute force methods.
Or we might try to reduce the number of possible cases, so that less work is needed. Perhaps we can find a line of reasoning that covers many cases. Working out specific cases, as brute force requires, can often give us a hint to what a general proof would look like. Or we can at least get a bunch of cases dealt with, even if we can’t get them all done.
Jim Unger’s Herman rerun for the 23rd of November turns confident ignorance into a running theme for this essay’s comic strips.
Eric Teitelbaum and Bill Teitelbaum’s Bottomliners for the 24th of November has a similar confient ignorance. This time it’s of the orders of magnitude that separate billions from trillions. I wanted to try passing off some line about how there can be contexts where it doesn’t much matter whether a billion or a trillion is at stake. But I can’t think of one that makes sense for the Man At The Business Company Office setting.
Reza Farazmand’s Poorly Drawn Lines for the 25th of November is built on the same confusion about the orders of magnitude that Bottomliners is. In this case it’s ants that aren’t sure about how big millions are, so their confusion seems more natural.
The ants are also engaged in a fun sort of recreational mathematics: can you estimate something from little information? You’ve done that right, typically, if you get the size of the number about right. That it should be millions rather than thousands or hundreds of millions; that there should be something like ten rather than ten thousand. These kinds of problems are often called Fermi Problems, after Enrico Fermi. This is the same person the Fermi Paradox is named after, but that’s a different problem. The Fermi Paradox asks if there are extraterrestrial aliens, why we don’t see evidence of them. A Fermi Problem is simpler. Its the iconic example is, “how many professional piano tuners are there in New York?” It’s easy to look up how big is the population of New York. It’s possible to estimate how many pianos there should be for a population that size. Then you can guess how often a piano needs tuning, and therefore, how many full-time piano tuners would be supported by that much piano-tuning demand. And there’s probably not many more professional piano tuners than there’s demand for. (Wikipedia uses Chicago as the example city for this, and asserts the population of Chicago to be nine million people. I will suppose this to be the Chicago metropolitan region, but that still seems high. Wikipedia says that is the rough population of the Chicago metropolitan area, but it’s got a vested interest in saying so.)
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons finally appears on the 27th. Here we combine the rational division of labor with resisting mathematics problems.
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