Reading the Comics, January 19, 2019: Not Making The Cut Edition

I’m trying to be a bit more rigorous about comic strips needing mathematical content before I talk about them. So, for example, Maria Scrivan had a Half Full that’s a Venn Diagram joke. But I feel like that isn’t quite enough for me to discuss at greater length. There was a Barney Google where Jughead explains why he didn’t do his mathematics homework. And I’m trying not to bring up Randolph Itch, since I’ve been through several circuits of the short-lived strip already. But it re-ran the one that renders Randolph as a string of numerals. If you haven’t seen that before, it’s a cute bit of symbols play.

Now here’s the comics that did make the cut:

Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 18th is an anthropomorphic numerals joke. It’s part of Holbrook’s style to draw metaphors as literal happenings. It’s also a variation on a joke Holbrook used just last month, depicting then the phrase “accepting his numbers”. What I said about “accepting numbers” transfers over naturally to “trusting numbers”. It’s not that a number itself means anything. It’s that numbers are used to represent some narrative. If we can’t believe the narrative, we don’t believe the numbers. And the numbers used to represent something can give us reasons to trust, or reject, a narrative.

Eric the Circle for the 18th I can dub an anthropomorphic geometry joke for the week. At least it brings up one of the handful of geometry facts that people remember outside school. The relationship between the circumference and the diameter (or radius, if you rather) of a circle has been known just forever. It has the advantage of going through π, supporting and being supported by that celebrity number. … I’m not quite sure about the logic of this joke, though. My experience is that guys at least are fairly good about knowing their waist size (if you don’t know, it’s 38, although a 40 can feel so comfortable, and they’re sure they can wear a 36). Radius is a harder thing to keep in mind. But maybe it’s different for circles.

Russell Myers’s Broom Hilda for the 19th is a student-and-teacher problem. One thing is that Nerwin’s not wrong. It’s just that simply saying something true isn’t enough. We want to say things that are true and interesting.

But “you add two numbers and get a number” can be interesting. It depends on context. For example, in group theory, we will start by describing groups as a collection of things and an operation which works like addition. What does it mean to work like addition? Here, it means if you add two things from the collection, you get something from the collection. The collection of things is “closed” under your operation. And mathematical operations defined this abstractly — or defined this vaguely, if you don’t like the way it goes — can be great. We’re introduced to vectors, for example, as “ordered sets of numbers”. And that definition works all right. But when you start thinking of them instead as “things you can add to vectors and get other vectors out” you gain new power. You can use the mechanism developed for ordered sets of numbers to describe many things, including matrices and functions and shapes. But when we do that we’re saying things about how addition works, rather than what this particular addition is.

You know, on reflection, I’m not sure that Eric the Circle was more worthy of discussion than that Barney Google was. Hm.

And I should be back with more comics on Sunday. They should appear at this link when it’s all ready.

My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Jokes

For today’s entry, Iva Sallay, of Find The Factors, gave me an irresistible topic. I did not resist.

Jokes.

What’s purple and commutes?
An Abelian grape.

Whatever else you say about mathematics we are human. We tell jokes. I will tell some here. You may not understand the words in them. That’s all right. From the Abelian grape there, you gather this is some manner of wordplay. A pun, particularly. It’s built on a technical term. “Abelian groups” come from (not high school) Algebra. In an Abelian group, the group multiplication commutes. That is, if ‘a’ and ‘b’ are any things in the group, then their product “ab” is the same as “ba’. That is, the group works like ordinary addition on numbers does. We say “Abelian” in honor of Niels Henrik Abel, who taught us some fascinating stuff about polynomials. Puns are a common kind of humor. So common, they’re almost base. Even a good pun earns less laughter than groans.

But mathematicians make many puns. A typical page of mathematics jokes has a whole section of puns. “What’s yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice? Zorn’s Lemon.” “What’s nonorientable and lives in the sea?” “Möbius Dick.” “One day Jesus said to his disciples, `The Kingdom of Heaven is like 3x2 + 8x – 9′. Thomas looked very confused and asked peter, `What does the teacher mean?’ Peter replied, `Don’t worry. It’s just another one of his parabolas’.” And there are many jokes built on how it is impossible to tell the difference between the sounds of “π” and “pie”.

It shouldn’t surprise that mathematicians make so many puns. Mathematics trains people to know definitions. To think about precisely what we mean. Puns ignore definitions. They build nonsense out of the ways that sounds interact. Mathematicians practice how to make things interact, even if they don’t know or care what the underlying things are. If you’ve gotten used to proving things about $aba^{-1}b^{-1}$, without knowing what ‘a’ or ‘b’ are, it’s difficult to avoid turning “poles on the half-plane” (which matters in some mathematical physics) to a story about Polish people on an aircraft.

If there’s a flaw to this kind of humor it’s that these jokes may sound juvenile. One of the first things that strikes kids as funny is that a thing might have several meanings. Or might sound like another thing. “Why do mathematicians like parks? Because of all the natural logs!”

Jokes can be built tightly around definitions. “What do you get if you cross a mosquito with a mountain climber? Nothing; you can’t cross a vector with a scalar.” “There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary mathematics and those who don’t.” “Life is complex; it has real and imaginary parts.”

There are more sophisticated jokes. Many of them are self-deprecating. “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.” “An introvert mathematician looks at her shoes while talking to you. An extrovert mathematician looks at your shoes.” “A mathematics professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep”. “Two people are adrift in a hot air balloon. Finally they see someone and shout down, `Where are we?’ The person looks up, and studies them, watching the balloon drift away. Finally, when they are barely in shouting range, the person on the ground shouts back, `You are in a balloon!’ The first passenger curses their luck at running across a mathematician. `How do you know that was a mathematician?’ `Because her answer took a long time, was perfectly correct, and absolutely useless!”’ These have the form of being about mathematicians. But they’re not really. It would be the same joke to say “a poet is a device for turning coffee into couplets”, the sleep-talker anyone who teachers, or have the hot-air balloonists discover a lawyer or a consultant.

Some of these jokes get more specific, with mathematics harder to extract from the story. The tale of the nervous flyer who, before going to the conference, sends a postcard that she has a proof of the Riemann hypothesis. She arrives and admits she has no such thing, of course. But she sends that word ahead of every conference. She knows if she died in a plane crash after that, she’d be famous forever, and God would never give her that. (I wonder if Ian Randal Strock’s little joke of a story about Pierre de Fermat was an adaptation of this joke.) You could recast the joke for physicists uniting gravity and quantum mechanics. But I can’t imagine a way to make this joke about an ISO 9000 consultant.

A dairy farmer knew he could be milking his cows better. He could surely get more milk, and faster, if only the operations of his farm were arranged better. So he hired a mathematician to find the optimal way to configure everything. The mathematician toured every part of the pastures, the milking barn, the cows, everything relevant. And then the mathematician set to work devising a plan for the most efficient possible cow-milking operation. The mathematician declared, “First, assume a spherical cow.”

This joke is very mathematical. I know of no important results actually based on spherical cows. But the attitude that tries to make spheres of cows comes from observing mathematicians. To describe any real-world process is to make a model of that thing. A model is a simplification of the real thing. You suppose that things behave more predictably than the real thing. You trust the error made by this supposition is small enough for your needs. A cow is complicated, all those pointy ends and weird contours. A sphere is easy. And, besides, cows are funny. “Spherical cow” is a funny string of sounds, at least in English.

The spherical cows approach parodying the work mathematicians do. Many mathematical jokes are burlesques of deductive logic. Or not even burlesques. Charles Dodgson, known to humans as Lewis Carroll, wrote this in Symbolic Logic:

“No one, who means to go by the train and cannot get a conveyance, and has not enough time to walk to the station, can do without running;
This party of tourists mean to go by the train and cannot get a conveyance, but they have plenty of time to walk to the station.
∴ This party of tourists need not run.”

[ Here is another opportunity, gentle Reader, for playing a trick on your innocent friend. Put the proposed Syllogism before him, and ask him what he thinks of the Conclusion.

He will reply “Why, it’s perfectly correct, of course! And if your precious Logic-book tells you it isn’t, don’t believe it! You don’t mean to tell me those tourists need to run? If I were one of them, and knew the Premises to be true, I should be quite clear that I needn’t run — and I should walk!

And you will reply “But suppose there was a mad bull behind you?”

And then your innocent friend will say “Hum! Ha! I must think that over a bit!” ]

The punch line is diffused by the text being so educational. And by being written in the 19th century, when it was bad form to excise any word from any writing. But you can recognize the joke, and why it should be a joke.

Not every mathematical-reasoning joke features some manner of cattle. Some are legitimate:

Claim. There are no uninteresting whole numbers.
Proof. Suppose there is a smalled uninteresting whole number. Call it N. That N is uninteresting is an interesting fact. Therefore N is not an uninteresting whole number.

Three mathematicians step up to the bar. The bartender asks, “you all want a beer?” The first mathematician says, “I don’t know.” The second mathematician says, “I don’t know.” The third says, “Yes”.

Some mock reasoning uses nonsense methods to get a true conclusion. It’s the fun of watching Mister Magoo walk unharmed through a construction site to find the department store exchange counter:

5095 / 1019 = 5095 / 1019 = 505 / 101 = 55 / 11 = 5

This one includes the thrill of division by zero.

Venn Diagrams are not by themselves jokes (most of the time). But they are a great structure for jokes. And easy to draw, which is great for us who want to be funny but don’t feel sure about their drafting abilities.

And then there are personality jokes. Mathematics encourages people to think obsessively. Obsessive people are often funny people. Alexander Grothendieck was one of the candidates for “greatest 20th century mathematician”. His reputation is that he worked so well on abstract problems that he was incompetent at practical ones. The story goes that he was demonstrating something about prime numbers and his audience begged him to speak about a specific number, that they could follow an example. And that he grumbled a bit and, finally, said, “57”. It’s not a prime number. But if you speak of “Grothendieck’s prime”, many will recognize what you mean, and grin.

There are more outstanding, preposterous personalities. Paul Erdös was prolific, and a restless traveller. The stories go that he would show up at some poor mathematician’s door and stay with them several months. And then co-author a paper with the elevator operator. (Erdös is also credited as the originator of the “coffee into theorems” quip above.) John von Neumann was supposedly presented with this problem:

Two trains are on the same track, 60 miles apart, heading toward each other, each travelling 30 miles per hour. A fly travels 60 miles per hour, leaving one engine flying toward the other. When it reaches the other engine it turns around immediately and flies back to the other engine. This is repeated until the two trains crash. How far does the fly travel before the crash?

The first, hard way to do this is to realize how far the fly travels is a series. It starts at, let’s say, the left engine and flies to the right. Add to that the distance from the right to the left train now. Then left to the right again. Right to left. This is a bunch of calculations. Most people give up on that and realize the problem is easier. The trains will crash in one hour. The fly travels 60 miles per hour for an hour. It’ll fly 60 miles total. John von Neumann, say witnesses, had the answer instantly. He recognized the trick? “I summed the series.”

The personalities can be known more remotely, from a handful of facts about who they were or what they did. “Cantor did it diagonally.” Georg Cantor is famous for great thinking about infinitely large sets. His “diagonal proof” shows the set of real numbers must be larger than the set of rational numbers. “Fermat tried to do it in the margin but couldn’t fit it in.” “Galois did it on the night before.” (Évariste Galois wrote out important pieces of group theory the night before a duel. It went badly for him. French politics of the 1830s.) Every field has its celebrities. Mathematicians learn just enough about theirs to know a couple of jokes.

The jokes can attach to a generic mathematician personality. “How can you possibly visualize something that happens in a 12-dimensional space?” “Easy, first visualize it in an N-dimensional space, and then let N go to 12.” Three statisticians go hunting. They spot a deer. One shoots, missing it on the left. The second shoots, missing it on the right. The third leaps up, shouting, “We’ve hit it!” An engineer and a mathematician are sleeping in a hotel room when the fire alarm goes off. The engineer ties the bedsheets into a rope and shimmies out of the room. The mathematician looks at this, unties the bedsheets, sets them back on the bed, declares, “this is a problem already solved” and goes back to sleep. (Engineers and mathematicians pair up a lot in mathematics jokes. I assume in engineering jokes too, but that the engineers make wrong assumptions about who the joke is on. If there’s a third person in the party, she’s a physicist.)

Do I have a favorite mathematics joke? I suppose I must. There are jokes I like better than others, and there are — I assume — finitely many different mathematics jokes. So I must have a favorite. What is it? I don’t know. It must vary with the day and my mood and the last thing I thought about. I know a bit of doggerel keeps popping into my head, unbidden. Let me close by giving it to you.

Integral z-squared dz
From 1 to the cube root of 3
Times the cosine
Of three π over nine
Equals log of the cube root of e.

This may not strike you as very funny. I’m not sure it strikes me as very funny. But it keeps showing up, all the time. That has to add up.

This and other Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z posts can be read at this link. Also, now and then, I talk about comic strips here. You might like that too.

Reading the Comics, September 11, 2018: 60% Reruns Edition

Three of the five comic strips I review today are reruns. I think that I’ve only mentioned two of them before, though. But let me preface all this with a plea I’ve posted before: I’m hosting the Playful Mathematics Blog Carnival the last week in September. Have you run across something mathematical that was educational, or informative, or playful, or just made you glad to know about? Please share it with me, and we can share it with the world. It can be for any level of mathematical background knowledge. Thank you.

Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winkerbean vintage rerun for the 10th is part of an early storyline of Funky attempting to tutor football jock Bull Bushka. Mathematics — geometry, particularly — gets called on as a subject Bull struggles to understand. Geometry’s also well-suited for the joke because it has visual appeal, in a way that English or History wouldn’t. And, you know, I’ll take “pretty” as a first impression to geometry. There are a lot of diagrams whose beauty is obvious even if their reasons or points or importance are obscure.

Dan Collins’s Looks Good on Paper for the 10th is about everyone’s favorite non-orientable surface. The first time this strip appeared I noted that the road as presented isn’t a Möbius strip. The opossums and the car are on different surfaces. Unless there’s a very sudden ‘twist’ in the road in the part obscured from the viewer, anyway. If I’d drawn this in class I would try to save face by saying that’s where the ‘twist’ is, but none of my students would be convinced. But we’d like to have it that the car would, if it kept driving, go over all the pavement.

Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff for the 10th is a joke about story problems. The setup suggests that there’s enough information in what Jeff has to say about the cop’s age to work out what it must be. Mutt isn’t crazy to suppose there is some solution possible. The point of this kind of challenge is realizing there are constraints on possible ages which are not explicit in the original statements. But in this case there’s just nothing. We would call the cop’s age “underdetermined”. The information we have allows for many different answers. We’d like to have just enough information to rule out all but one of them.

John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 11th is here by popular request. Jughead hopes that a complicated process of dubious relevance will make his report card look not so bad. Loweezey makes a New Math joke about it. This serves as a shocking reminder that, as most comic strip characters are fixed in age, my cohort is now older than Snuffy and Loweezey Smith. At least is plausibly older than them.

Anyway it’s also a nice example of the lasting cultural reference of the New Math. It might not have lasted long as an attempt to teach mathematics in ways more like mathematicians do. But it’s still, nearly fifty years on, got an unshakable and overblown reputation for turning mathematics into doubletalk and impossibly complicated rules. I imagine it’s the name; “New Math” is a nice, short, punchy name. But the name also looks like what you’d give something that was being ruined, under the guise of improvement. It looks like that terrible moment of something familiar being ruined even if you don’t know that the New Math was an educational reform movement. Common Core’s done well in attracting a reputation for doing problems the complicated way. But I don’t think its name is going to have the cultural legacy of the New Math.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 11th is another kid-resisting-the-problem joke. Wavehead’s obfuscation does hit on something that I have wondered, though. When we describe things, we aren’t just saying what we think of them. We’re describing what we think our audience should think of them. This struck me back around 1990 when I observed to a friend that then-current jokes about how hard VCRs were to use failed for me. Everyone in my family, after all, had no trouble at all setting the VCR to record something. My friend pointed out that I talked about setting the VCR. Other people talk about programming the VCR. Setting is what you do to clocks and to pots on a stove and little things like that; an obviously easy chore. Programming is what you do to a computer, an arcane process filled with poor documentation and mysterious problems. We framed our thinking about the task as a simple, accessible thing, and we all found it simple and accessible. Mathematics does tend to look at “problems”, and we do, especially in teaching, look at “finding solutions”. Finding solutions sounds nice and positive. But then we just go back to new problems. And the most interesting problems don’t have solutions, at least not ones that we know about. What’s enjoyable about facing these new problems?

One thing that’s not a problem: finding other Reading the Comics posts. They should all appear at this link. Appearances by the current-run and the vintage Funky Winkerbean are at this link. Essays with a mention of Looks Good On Paper are at this link. Meanwhile, essays with Mutt and Jeff in the are at this link. Other appearances by Barney Google and Snuffy Smith — current and vintage, if vintage ever does something on-topic — are at this link. And the many appearances by Andertoons are at this link, or just use any Reading the Comics post, really. Thank you.

Reading the Comics, January 13, 2018: Barney Google Is Messing With My Head For Some Reason Edition

I do not know what’s possessed John Rose, cartoonist for Barney Google and Snuffy Smith — possibly the oldest syndicated comic strip not in perpetual reruns — to decide he needs to mess with my head. So far as I’m aware we haven’t ever even had any interactions. While I’ll own up to snarking about the comic strip here and there, I mean, the guy draws Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. He won’t attract the snark community of, say, Marmaduke, but he knew the job was dangerous when he took it. There’s lots of people who’ve said worse things about the comic than I ever have. He can’t be messing with them all.

There’s no mathematical content to it, but here, continuing the curious thread of Elviney and Miss Prunelly looking the same, and Elviney turning out to have a twin sister, is the revelation that Elviney’s husband also has a twin.

This means something and I don’t know what.

To mathematics:

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gets my attention again for the 10th. There is this famous quotation from Leopold Kronecker, one of the many 19th century German mathematicians who challenged, and set, our ideas of what mathematics is. In debates about what should count as a proof Kronecker said something translated in English to, “God created the integers, all else is the work of man”. He favored proofs that only used finite numbers, and only finitely many operations, and was skeptical of existence proofs. Those are ones that show something with desired properties must exist, without necessarily showing how to find it. Most mathematicians accept existence proofs. If you can show how to find that thing, that’s a constructive proof. Usually mathematicians like those better.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 11th uses a bunch of arithmetic and word problems to represent all of Dean’s homework. All looks like reasonable homework for my best guess about his age.

Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse for the 11th is a fun, simple joke with some complex stuff behind it. It’s riffing on the kind of atheist who wants moral values to come from something in the STEM fields. So here’s a mathematical basis for some moral principles. There are, yes, ethical theories that have, or at least imply having, mathematics behind them. Utilitarianism at least supposes that ethical behavior can be described as measurable and computable quantities. Nobody actually does that except maybe to make video games more exciting. But it’s left with the idea that one could, and hope that this would lead to guidance that doesn’t go horribly wrong.

Don Asmussen’s Bad Reporter for the 12th uses knowledge of arithmetic as a signifier of intelligence. Common enough joke style.

Thom Bluemel’s Birdbrains for the 13th starts Pi Day observances early, or maybe supposed the joke would be too out of season were it to come in March.

Greg Evans and Karen Evans’s Luann for the 13th uses mathematics to try building up the villainy of one of the strip’s designated villains. Ann Eiffel, there, uses a heap of arithmetic to make her lingerie sale sound better. This isn’t simply a riff on people not wanting to do arithmetic, although I understand people not wanding to work out what five percent of a purchase of over \$200 is. There’s a good deal of weird psychology in getting people to buy things. Merely naming a number, for example, gets people to “anchor” their expectations to it. To speak of a free gift worth \$75 makes any purchase below \$75 seem more economical. To speak of a chance to win \$1,000 prepares people to think they’ve got a thousand dollars coming in, and that they can safely spend under that. It’s amazing stuff to learn about, and it isn’t all built on people being too lazy to figure out what five percent off of \$220 would be.

T Lewis and Michael Fry’s Over the Hedge for the 13th uses &infty; along the way to making nonsense out of ice-skating judging. It’s a good way to make a hash of a rating system. Most anything done with infinitely large numbers or infinitely large sets challenges one’s intuition at least. This is part of what Leopold Kronecker was talking about.

Are … are [ the Smiths’ next-door neighbor Elviney and Jughaid’s teacher Miss Prunelly ] the same character, just wearing different glasses? I’ve been reading this comic strip for like forty years and I’ve never noticed this before.

Really. Apart from their accessories the characters are the same.

And then, published by John Rose today, the 3rd of January, 2018:

So. Per the US Navy’s Julian Date converter today is 2458121.5. The 17th of September was Julian Date 2458013.5. (Never try to work out the difference between two dates by yourself. Use a Julian Date converter.) So that’s 108 days, or just over 15 weeks. Good to know.

How October 2017 Treated My Mathematics Blog

October paid less attention to my mathematics blog than did September. I expected that. I published rather fewer pieces in October as the A To Z project had finished. And there’s some extent to which publishing anything is valuable in getting readership. How important I don’t know. I’ve never tried testing the relationship between how many readers I get and how many articles I post. I imagine the number of confounding factors would make their relationship vague. But I could run it anyway, as an example of how to do that kind of calculation.

It also makes me wonder whether republishing older essays is worthwhile. Or at least posting links to older content. I worry about boring longtime readers, although I’m not sure how many of those I even have. And it happens two of my most popular essays this month were fairly old bits of writing. I like to list the top five around here, but there was a three-way tie for fifth place. Big in October were:

That “here’s a thing I read” also seems to be a reliably popular post suggests maybe I need to do a weekly post about just other mathematics stuff I’d read.

United States 632
United Kingdom 76
India 67
Philippines 60
Germany 16
Slovenia 16
Singapore 15
Australia 12
France 11
Austria 10
Romania 7
Spain 7
Malaysia 6
Brazil 5
Kuwait 5
Netherlands 5
Turkey 5
Belarus 4
Hong Kong SAR China 4
Italy 4
South Africa 4
European Union 3
Poland 3
Slovakia 3
South Korea 3
Argentina 2
Denmark 2
Indonesia 2
Iraq 2
Ireland 2
Mexico 2
Norway 2
St. Kitts and Nevis 2
Sweden 2
Thailand 2
Ukraine 2
United Arab Emirates 2
Albania 1
Belgium 1 (*)
Bulgaria 1 (*)
China 1
Hungary 1
Japan 1
Latvia 1
Macedonia 1
New Zealand 1 (*)
Russia 1
Switzerland 1
Taiwan 1

I make that out to be 51 countries sending me readers at all, down from September’s 65. There were 13 single-reader countries, down from September’s 20. Belgium, Bulgaria, and New Zealand were single-reader countries for two months in a row, and no country’s on a three-month single-reader streak. “European Union” is back after a month’s absence. I’m still surprised by the number of readers from the Philippines I’ve drawn two months in a row now.

All together there were 1,069 page views from 614 unique visitors in October. That’s down from 1,232 page views and 672 unique visitors in September, and an up-and-down split from the 1,030 page views from 680 unique visitors in August. In August there were 21 posts here, in September 20, and in October 13. I kind of get the feeling people like me, but only a certain amount of me, and then they drift off.

The number of ‘likes’ went back to cratering, down to 64 over the month of October. There’d been 98 in September and 147 in August. The number of comments fell too, to a meager 12 from September’s 42 and August’s 46. The A To Z format definitely looks more inviting and welcoming to commenters, I have to conclude.

October finished out with my page here having collected 54,336 total page views from some 25,288 admitted unique visitors. I believe there were a few more visitors but some of them were copying.

Insights says that the most popular day for page views was Monday, which drew 18 percent of page views, down just a bit from September’s 20 percent. In a major upset 6 pm was not the most popular hour for readers, though. 7 pm was, when 8 percent of page views came in. I’m not sure how that happened; 6 pm is when I set most stuff to post and readers seem to follow. Maybe it’s a Daylight Saving Time issue. Oh, come to think of it, this is one of the few weeks that Greenwich Time and Eastern Time aren’t in Daylight-Saving/Summer-Time synch, isn’t it? I started out with this as a joke but perhaps that’s really going on. (No, I guess not. 12:00 am is still my most popular hour on my humor blog.) Anyway, I’m figuring to skip future mentions of what Insights tells me about popular days or hours. I can’t figure how they’re indicating anything more than “I’m about equally popular-ish any hour of any day of the week”.

WordPress says I’m starting November with 709 WordPress.com followers, which is down from September’s 717. Well, I’m sure all 709 of them are live, active accounts from people who’ve used them more recently than three years ago when they posted twice. If you’d like to follow my mathematical chats here you can add it to your reader. Go to the upper right corner of this page and click the ‘Follow NebusResearch’ button. If you’d rather get things by e-mail, there should be a ‘Follow Blog Via E-Mail’ button there too. And if that’s all fine enough but you’d like to see me limited to about 22 words at a time, try out @Nebusj on Twitter. Thanks.

Reading the Comics, September 16, 2017: Wait, Are Elviney and Miss Prunelly The Same Character Week

It was an ordinary enough week when I realized I wasn’t sure about the name of the schoolmarm in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. So I looked it up on Comics Kingdom’s official cast page for John Rose’s comic strip. And then I realized something about the Smiths’ next-door neighbor Elviney and Jughaid’s teacher Miss Prunelly:

Are … are they the same character, just wearing different glasses? I’ve been reading this comic strip for like forty years and I’ve never noticed this before. I’ve also never heard any of you all joking about this, by the way, so I stand by my argument that if they’re prominent enough then, yes, glasses could be an adequate disguise for Superman. Anyway, I’m startled. (Are they sisters? Cousins? But wouldn’t that make mention on the cast page? There are missing pieces here.)

Mac King and Bill King’s Magic In A Minute feature for the 10th sneaks in here yet again with a magic trick based in arithmetic. Here, they use what’s got to be some Magic Square-based technology for a card trick. This probably could be put to use with other arrangements of numbers, but cards have the advantage of being stuff a magician is likely to have around and that are expected to do something weird.

Susan Camilleri Konair’s Six Chix for the 13th name-drops mathematics as the homework likely to be impossible doing. I think this is the first time Konair’s turned up in a Reading The Comics survey.

Thom Bluemel’s Birdbrains for the 13th is an Albert Einstein Needing Help panel. It’s got your blackboard full of symbols, not one of which is the famous E = mc2 equation. But given the setup it couldn’t feature that equation, not and be a correct joke.

John Rose’s Barney Google for the 14th does a little more work than necessary for its subtraction-explained-with-candy joke. I non-sarcastically appreciate Rose’s dodging the obvious joke in favor of a guy-is-stupid joke.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 14th is a kind of lying-with-statistics joke. That’s as much as it needs to be. Still, thought always should go into exactly how one presents data, especially visually. There are connotations to things. Just inverting an axis is dangerous stuff, though. The convention of matching an increase in number to moving up on the graph is so ingrained that it should be avoided only for enormous cause.

This joke also seems conceptually close, to me, to the jokes about the strangeness of how a “negative” medical test is so often the good news.

Olivia Walch’s Imogen Quest for the 15th is not about solitaire. But “solving” a game by simulating many gameplays and drawing strategic advice from that is a classic numerical mathematics trick. Whether a game is fun once it’s been solved so is up to you. And often in actual play, for a game with many options at each step, it’s impossible without a computer to know the best possible move. You could use simulations like this to develop general guidelines, and a couple rules that often pan out.

Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 16th qualifies as the anthropomorphic-numerals joke for this week. I’m glad to have got one in.

Reading the Comics, July 8, 2017: Mostly Just Pointing Edition

Won’t lie: I was hoping for a busy week. While Comic Strip Master Command did send a healthy number of mathematically-themed comic strips, I can’t say they were a particularly deep set. Most of what I have to say is that here’s a comic strip that mentions mathematics. Well, you’re reading me for that, aren’t you? Maybe. Tell me if you’re not. I’m curious.

Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac rerun for the 2nd of July is the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. And a great one, as I’d expect of Thompson, since it also turns into a little bit about how to create characters.

Ralph Dunagin and Dana Summers’s Middletons for the 2nd uses mathematics as the example of the course a kid might do lousy in. You never see this for Social Studies classes, do you?

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 3rd made the most overtly mathematical joke for most of the week at Math Camp. The strip hasn’t got to anything really annoying yet; it’s mostly been average summer-camp jokes. I admit I’ve been distracted trying to figure out if the minor characters are Tatulli redrawing Peanuts characters in his style. I mean, doesn’t Dana (the freckled girl in the third panel, here) look at least a bit like Peppermint Patty? I’ve also seen a Possible Marcie and a Possible Shermy, who’s the Peanuts character people draw when they want an obscure Peanuts character who isn’t 5. (5 is the Boba Fett of the Peanuts character set: an extremely minor one-joke character used for a week in 1963 but who appeared very occasionally in the background until 1983. You can identify him by the ‘5’ on his shirt. He and his sisters 3 and 4 are the ones doing the weird head-sideways dance in A Charlie Brown Christmas.)

Mark Pett’s Lucky Cow rerun for the 4th is another use of mathematics, here algebra, as a default sort of homework assignment.

Brant Parker and Johnny Hart’s Wizard of Id Classics for the 4th reruns the Wizard of Id for the 7th of July, 1967. It’s your typical calculation-error problem, this about the forecasting of eclipses. I admit the forecasting of eclipses is one of those bits of mathematics I’ve never understood, but I’ve never tried to understand either. I’ve just taken for granted that the Moon’s movements are too much tedious work to really enlighten me and maybe I should reevaluate that. Understanding when the Moon or the Sun could be expected to disappear was a major concern for people doing mathematics for centuries.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 5th is a Special Relativity joke, which is plenty of mathematical content for me. I warned you it was a week of not particularly deep discussions.

Ashleigh Brilliant’s Pot-Shots rerun for the 5th is a cute little metric system joke. And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that’s enough mathematical content. I’ve come to quite like Brilliant’s cheerfully despairing tone.

Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 7th mentions fractions, so you can see how loose the standards get around here when the week is slow enough.

John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 8th finally gives me a graphic to include this week. It’s about the joke you would expect from the topic of probability being mentioned. And, as might be expected, the comic strip doesn’t precisely accurately describe the state of the law. Any human endeavour has to deal with probabilities. They give us the ability to have reasonable certainty about the confusing and ambiguous information the world presents.

Vic Lee’s Pardon My Planet for the 8th is another Albert Einstein mention. The bundle of symbols don’t mean much of anything, at least not as they’re presented, but of course superstar equation E = mc2 turns up. It could hardly not.