Reading the Comics, July 28, 2018: Command Performance Edition

One of the comics from the last half of last week is here mostly because Roy Kassinger asked if I was going to include it. Which one? Read on and see.

Scott Metzger’s The Bent Pinky for the 24th is the anthropomorphic-numerals joke for the week. It’s pretty easy to learn, or memorize, or test small numbers for whether they’re prime. The bigger a number gets the harder it is. Mostly it takes time. You can rule some numbers out easily enough. If they’re even numbers other than 2, for example. Or if their (base ten) digits add up to a multiple of three or nine. But once you’ve got past a couple easy filters … you don’t have to just try dividing them by all the prime numbers up to their square root. Comes close, though. Would save a lot of time if the numerals worked that out ahead of time and then kept the information around, in case it were needed. Seems a little creepy to be asking that of other numbers, really. Certainly to give special privileges to numbers for accidents of their creation.

Scott Metzger’s The Bent Pinky for the 24th of July, 2018. I’m curious whether the background customers were a 2 and a 3 because they do represent prime numbers, or whether they were just picked because they look good.

Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 25th is an iteration of bad-at-arithmetic jokes. In this case there’s the arithmetic that’s counting, and there’s the arithmetic that’s the addition and subtraction demanded for checkbook-balancing.

Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 25th of July, 2018. I don’t question the plausibility of people writing enough checks in 2018 that they need to balance them, even though my bank has been sold three times to new agencies before I’ve been able to use up one book of 25 checks. I do question whether people with the hobby of checkbook-balancing routinely do this outside, at the fence, while hanging out with the neighbor.

Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur for the 25th is an Einstein joke. In a rare move for the breed this doesn’t have “E = mc²” in it, except in the implication that it was easier to think of than squirrel-proof bird feeders would be. Einstein usually gets acclaim for mathematical physics work. But he was also a legitimate inventor, with patents in his own right. He and his student Leó Szilárd developed a refrigerator that used no moving parts. Most refrigeration technology requires the use of toxic chemicals to actually do the cooling. Einstein and Szilárd hoped to make something less likely to leak these toxins. The design never saw widespread use. Ordinary refrigerators, using freon (shockingly harmless biologically, though dangerous to the upper atmosphere) got reliable enough that the danger of leaks got tolerable. And the electromagnetic pump the machine used instead made noise that at least some reports say was unbearable. The design as worked out also used a potassium-sodium alloy, not the sort of thing easy to work with. Now and then there’s talk of reviving the design. Its potential, as something that could use any heat source to provide refrigeration, seems neat. And everybody in this side of science and engineering wants to work on something that Einstein touched.

Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur for the 25th of July, 2018. In fairness to the squirrels, they have to eat something as long as the raccoons are getting into the squirrel feeders.

Mort Walker and Greg Walker’s Beetle Bailey for the 26th is here by special request. I wasn’t sure it was on-topic enough for my usual rigorous standards. But there is some social-aspects-of-mathematics to it. The assumption that ‘five’ is naturally better than ‘four’ for example. There is the connotation that some numbers are better than others. Yes, there are famously lucky numbers like 7 or unlucky ones like 13 (in contemporary Anglo-American culture, anyway; others have different lucks). But there’s also the sense that a larger number is of course better than a smaller one.

Mort Walker and Greg Walker’s Beetle Bailey for the 26th of July, 2018. Mort Walker’s name is still on the credits, and in the signature. I don’t know whether they’re still working through comics which he had a hand in writing or drawing before his death in January. It would seem amazing to be seven months ahead of deadline — I’ve never got more than two weeks, myself, and even that by cheating — but he did have a pretty good handle on the kinds of jokes he should be telling.

Except when it’s not. A first-rate performance is understood to be better than a third-rate one. A star of the first magnitude is more prominent than one of the fourth. This whether we mean celebrities or heavenly bodies. We have mixed systems. One at least respects the heritage of ancient Greek astronomers, who rated the brightest of stars as first magnitude and the next bunch as second and so on. In this context, if we take brightness to be a good thing, we understand lower numbers to be better. Another system regards the larger numbers as being more of what we’re assumed to want, and therefore be better.

Nasty confusions will happen when the schemes of thought collide. Is a class three hurricane more or less of a threat than a class four? Ought we be more worried if the United States Department of Defense declares it’s moved from Defence Condition four to Defcon 3? In October 1966, the Fermi 1 fission reactor near Detroit suffered a “Class 1 emergency”. Does that mean the city was at the highest or the lowest health risk from the partial meltdown? (In this case, this particular term reflects the lowest actionable level of radiation was detected. I am not competent to speak on how great the risk to the population was.) It would have been nice to have unambiguous language on this point.

On to the joke’s logic, though. Wouldn’t General Halftrack be accustomed to thinking of lower numbers as better? Getting to the green in three strokes is obviously preferable to four, and getting there in five would be a disaster.

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy rerun for the 28th of July, 2018. It originally ran the 13th of May, 2006. It may have been repeated since then, also.

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy for the 28th is an applied-probability strip. The calculating of odds is rich with mathematical and psychological influences. With some events it’s possible to define quite precisely what the odds should be. If there are a thousand numbers each equally likely to be the daily lottery winner, and only one that will be, we can go from that to saying what the chance of 254 being the winner is. But many events are impossible to forecast that way. We have to use other approaches. If something has happened several times recently, we can say it’s probably rather likely. Fluke events happen, yes. But we can do fairly good work by supposing that stuff is mostly normal, and that the next baseball season will look something like the last one.

As to how to bet wisely — well, many have tried to work that out. One of the big questions in financial mathematics is how to hedge bets. I write financial mathematics, but it applies to sports betting and really anything else with many outcomes. One of the common goals is to simply avoid catastrophe, to make sure that whatever happens you aren’t too badly off. This involves betting various amounts on many outcomes. More on the outcomes you think likely, but also some on the improbable outcomes. Long shots do sometimes happen, and pay out well; it can be worth putting a little money on that just in case. Judging the likelihood of those events, especially in complicated problems that can’t be reduced to logic, is one of the hard parts. If it could be made into a system we wouldn’t need people to do it. But it does seem that knowing what you bet on helps make better bets.

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If you’ve liked this essay you might like other Reading the Comics posts. Many of them are gathered at this link. When I have other essays that discuss The Bent Pinky at this link; it’s a new tag. Essays tagged Daddy’s Home are at this link. Essays that mention the comic strip Non Sequitur should be at this link, when they come up too. (This is another new tag, to my surprise.) Other appearances of Beetle Bailey should be on this page. And other Get Fuzzy-inspired discussions are at this link.

Reading the Comics, July 15, 2017: Dawn Of Mathematics Jokes

So I try to keep up with nearly all the comic strips run on Comics Kingdom and on GoComics. This includes some vintage strips: take some ancient comic like Peanuts or Luann and rerun it, day at a time, from the beginning. This is always enlightening. It’s always interesting to see a comic in that first flush of creative energy, before the characters have quite settled in and before the cartoonist has found stock jokes that work so well they don’t even have to be jokes anymore. One of the most startling cases for me has been Johnny Hart’s B.C. which, in its Back To B.C. incarnation, has been pretty well knocking it out of the park.

Not this week, I’m sad to admit. This week it’s been doing a bunch of mathematics jokes, which is what gives me my permission to talk about it here. The jokes have been, eh, the usual, given the setup. A bit fresher, I suppose, for the characters in the strip having had fewer of their edges worn down by time. Probably there’ll be at least one that gets a bit of a grin.

Back To B.C. for the 11th sets the theme going. On the 12th it gets into word problems. And then for the 13th of July it turns violent and for my money funny.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City has a number appear on the 12th. That’s been about as much mathematical content as Heart’s experience at Math Camp has taken. The story’s been more about Dana, her camp friend, who’s presented as good enough at mathematics to be bored with it, and the attempt to sneak out to the nearby amusement park. What has me distracted is wondering what amusement park this could be, given that Heart’s from Philadelphia and the camp’s within bus-trip range and in the forest. I can’t rule out that it might be Knoebels Amusement Park, in Elysburg, Pennsylvania, in which case Heart and Dana are absolutely right to sneak out of camp because it is this amazing place.

Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey Vintage for the 21st of December, 1960 and rerun the 14th of July, 2017. Wow, I remember when they’d put recipes like this on the not-actual-news segment of the 5:00 news or so, and how much it irritated me that there wasn’t any practical way to write down the whole thing and even writing down the address to mail in for the recipe seemed like too much, what with how long it took on average to find a sheet of paper and a writing tool. In hindsight, I don’t know why this was so hard for me.

Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey Vintage for the 21st of December, 1960 was rerun the 14th. I can rope this into mathematics. It’s about Cookie trying to scale up a recipe to fit Camp Swampy’s needs. Increasing the ingredient count is easy, or at least it is if your units scale nicely. I wouldn’t want to multiple a third of a teaspoon by 200 without a good stretching beforehand and maybe a rubdown afterwards. But the time needed to cook a multiplied recipe, that gets mysterious. As I understand it — the chemistry of cooking is largely a mystery to me — the center of the trouble is that to cook a thing, heat has to reach throughout the interior. But heat can only really be applied from the surfaces of the cooked thing. (Yes, theoretically, a microwave oven could bake through the entire volume of something. But this would require someone inventing a way to bake using a microwave.) So we must balance the heat that can be applied over what surface to the interior volume and any reasonable time to cook the thing. Won’t deny that at some point it seems easier to just make a smaller meal.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th goes to the old “inference testing” well again. This comes up from testing whether something strange is going on. Measure something in a sample. Is the result appreciably different from what would be a plausible result if nothing interesting is going on? The null hypothesis is the supposition that there isn’t anything interesting going on: the measurement’s in the range of what you’d expect given that the world is big and complicated. I’m not sure what the physicist’s exact experiment would have been. I suppose it would be something like “you lose about as much heat through your head as you do any region of skin of about the same surface area”. So, yeah, freezing would be expected, considering.

Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 17th of May, 1930, and rerun the 15th, maybe doesn’t belong here. It’s just about counting. Never mind. I smiled at it, and I’m a fan of the strip. Give it a try; it’s that rare pre-Peanuts comic that still feels modern.

And, before I forget: Have any mathematics words or terms you’d like to have explained? I’m doing a Summer 2017 A To Z and taking requests! Please offer them over there, for convenience. I mean mine.