Reading the Comics, November 16, 2018: The Rest Of The Week Edition

After that busy start last Sunday, Comic Strip Master Command left only a few things for the rest of the week. Here’s everything that seemed worthy of some comment to me:

Alex Hallatt’s Arctic Circle for the 12th is an arithmetic cameo. It’s used as the sort of thing that can be tested, with the straightforward joke about animal testing to follow. It’s not a surprise that machines should be able to do arithmetic. We’ve built machines for centuries to do arithmetic. Literally; Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz designed and built a calculating machine able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. This accomplishment from one of the founders of integral calculus is a potent reminder of how much we can accomplish if we’re supposed to be writing instead. (That link is to Robert Benchley’s classic essay “How To Get Things Done”. It is well worth reading, both because it is funny and because it’s actually good, useful advice.)

Alex Hallatt’s Arctic Circle for the 12th of November, 2018. Other essays based on Arctic Circle should be at this link.

But it’s also true that animals do know arithmetic. At least a bit. Not — so far as we know — to the point they ponder square roots and such. But certainly to count, to understand addition and subtraction roughly, to have some instinct for calculations. Stanislas Dehaene’s The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics is a fascinating book about this. I’m only wary about going deeper into the topic since I don’t know a second (and, better, third) pop book touching on how animals understand mathematics. I feel more comfortable with anything if I’ve encountered it from several different authors. Anyway it does imply the possibility of testing a polar bear’s abilities at arithmetic, only in the real world.

Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County rerun for the 13th of November, 2018. It originally ran the 17th of February, 1983. Never mind the copyright notice; those would often show the previous year the first couple weeks of the year. Essays based on topics raised by Bloom County — original or modern continuation — should be at this link.

Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County rerun for the 13th has another mathematics cameo. Geometry’s a subject worthy of stoking Binkley’s anxieties, though. It has a lot of definitions that have to be carefully observed. And while geometry reflects the understanding we have of things from moving around in space, it demands a precision that we don’t really have an instinct for. It’s a lot to worry about.

Terry Border’s Bent Objects for the 15th of November, 2018. Other essays based on Bent Objects will be at this link. It’s a new tag, so for now, there’s just that.

Terry Border’s Bent Objects for the 15th is our Venn Diagram joke for the week. I like this better than I think the joke deserves, probably because it is done in real materials. (Which is the Bent Objects schtick; it’s always photographs of objects arranged to make the joke.)

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 15th of November, 2018. In case there’s ever another essay which mentions Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal it’ll be at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 15th is a joke on knowing how far to travel but not what direction. Normal human conversations carry contextually reasonable suppositions. Told something is two miles away, it’s probably along the major road you’re on, or immediately nearby. I’d still ask for clarification told something was “two miles away”. Two blocks, I’d let slide, on the grounds that it’s no big deal to correct a mistake.

Still, mathematicians carry defaults with them too. They might be open to a weird, general case, certainly. But we have expectations. There’s usually some obvious preferred coordinate system, or directions. If it’s important that we be ready for alternatives we highlight that. We specify the coordinate system we want. Perhaps we specify we’re taking that choice “without loss of generality”, that is, without supposing some other choice would be wrong.

I noticed the mathematician’s customized plate too. “EIPI1” is surely a reference to the expression . That sum, it turns out, equals zero. It reflects this curious connection between exponentiation, complex-valued numbers, and the trigonometric functions. It’s a weird thing to know is true, and it’s highly regarded in certain nerd circles for that weirdness.

Hilary Price’s Rhymes With Orange for the 16th of November, 2018. And times I’ve discussed something from Rhymes With Orange should be at this link.

Hilary Price’s Rhymes With Orange for the 16th features a what-are-the-odds sort of joke, this one about being struck by a bolt from the sky. Lightning’s the iconic bolt to strike someone, and be surprising about it. Fabric would be no less surprising, though. And there’s no end of stories of weird things falling from the skies. It’s easier to get stuff into the sky than you might think, and there are only a few options once that’s happened.

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And as ever, all my Reading the Comics posts should all be at this link.

Through the end of December my Fall 2018 Mathematics A To Z continues. I’m still open for topics to discuss from the last half-dozen letters of the alphabet. Even if someone’s already given a word for some letter, suggest something anyway. You might inspire me in good ways.