Reading the Comics, January 18, 2020: Decimals In Fractions Edition

Let me first share the other comic strips from last week which mentioned mathematics, but in a casual way.

Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s Zits for the 14th used the phrase “do the math”, and snarked on the younger generation doing mathematics. This was as part of the longrunning comic’s attempt to retcon the parents from being Baby Boomers to being Generation X. Scott and Borgman can do as they like but, I mean, their kids are named Chad and Jeremy. That’s only tenable if they’re Boomers. (I’m not sure Chad has returned from college in the past ten years.) And even then it was marginal.

John Kovaleski’s Bo Nanas rerun for the 14th is a joke about the probability of birthdays.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th features “the Bertrand Russell Drinking Game”, playing on the famous paradox about self-referential statements of logic.

Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine for the 17th has Rat use a bunch of mathematical jargon to give his declarations authority.

Cy Olson’s Office Hours for the 18th, rerunning a strip from the 9th of November, 1971, is in the line of jokes about parents not understanding their children’s arithmetic. It doesn’t seem to depend on mocking the New Math, which is a slight surprise for a 1971 comic.

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Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 12th of January, 2020. This and other essays with some topic raised by Andertoons should appear at this link.

So Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 12th is the only comic strip of some substance that I noticed last week. You see what a slender month it’s been. It does showcase the unsettling nature of seeing notations for similar things mixed. It’s not that there’s anything which doesn’t parse about having decimals in the numerator or denominator. It just looks weird. And that can be enough to throw someone out of a problem. They might mistake the problem for one that doesn’t have a coherent meaning. Or they might mistake it for one too complicated to do. Learning to not be afraid of a problem that looks complicated is worth doing. As is learning how to tell whether a problem parses at all, even if it looks weird.

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And that’s an end to last week in comics. I plan to have a fresh Reading the Comics post on Sunday. Thank you for reading in the meanwhile.

Reading the Comics, December 9, 2019: It’s A Slow Week Edition, Part I

Comic Strip Master Command decided to respect my need for a writing break. At least a break around here. So here’s the first half of last week’s comic strips that mention mathematics. None of them get into material substantial enough that I feel justified including pictures. Some of them are even repeats, at least to my Reading the Comics essays.

Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac for the 7th reprints the part of the Christmas Tree guide with the Platonic Fir. It’s drawn as a geometric illustration. I’ve discussed this before.

Ed Allison’s Unstrange Phenomena for the 8th riffs on mathematics-formula rules of thumb. Here, by presenting a complicated expression for the Woolly Bear Caterpillar’s judgement.

Neil Kohney’s The Other End for the 9th uses mathematics as the subject for its quiz. In this case, apparently, simplifying algebraic expressions. I discussed it back in February.

Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate: First Class for the 9th has Nate and Francis working on some arithmetic problem. The strip originally ran the 10th of December, 1994.

John Kovaleski’s Bo Nanas rerun for the 9th shows someone proclaiming himself the superhero “Perpendicular Man”. Then, “Parallel Man”. It’s basically wordplay with implied slapstick.

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This does not exhaust all the comic strips run the past week that at least mention mathematics. I’ll pick up the rest in a post at this link, likely on Tuesday.

Reading The Comics, May 20, 2012

Since I suspect that the comics roundup posts are the most popular ones I post, I’m very glad to see there was a bumper crop of strips among the ones I read regularly (from King Features Syndicate and from gocomics.com) this past week. Some of those were from cancelled strips in perpetual reruns, but that’s fine, I think: there aren’t any particular limits on how big an electronic comics page one can have, after all, and while it’s possible to read a short-lived strip long enough that you see all its entries, it takes a couple go-rounds to actually have them all memorized.

The first entry, and one from one of these cancelled strips, comes from Mark O’Hare’s Citizen Dog, a charmer of a comic set in a world-plus-talking-animals strip. In this case Fergus has taken the place of Maggie, a girl who’s not quite ready to come back from summer vacation. It’s also the sort of series of questions that it feels like come at the start of any class where a homework assignment’s due.