Reading the Comics, June 18, 2016: The Quiet Week Edition

It’s been a quiet week. There’s not a lot of comic strips telling mathematically-themed jokes. Those that were didn’t give me a lot to talk about. And then on Friday nobody came around to even look at my blog. I exaggerate but only barely; I was down to about a quarter the usual low point of page views. I have no explanation for this and I just hope it doesn’t come up again. That’s the sort of thing that’ll break a mere blogger’s heart.

Charles Brubaker’s Ask A Cat for the 12th got the week started with a numerals-as-things joke.

Mike Baldwin’s Cornered for the 12th uses the traditional blackboard — well, whiteboard — full of mathematics to represent intelligence. The symbols aren’t in enough detail to mean anything,

Jeremy Kaye’s Up and Out for the 13th uses a smaller blackboard (whiteboard) full of mathematics to represent intelligence. Here the symbols are more clearly focused, on Boring High School Algebra. It was looking like this might be the blackboard (well, whiteboard)-themed week.

Dan Piraro’s Bizarro for the 14th of June, 2016. Don’t be distracted by the little alien in the upper-right corner. It isn’t part of the joke. It’s just there in every panel. (Because Piraro loves drawing more stuff than he has to, and he works some number of recurring little figures into each panel. There’s also, often, a “K²” that refers to his daughter’s initials. There’s often also and a disembodied eyeball, a firecracker, a screaming rabbit, some pie, an upside-down bird, a crown, and other stuff. There’s also usually a digit near his signature that warns how many hidden symbols there are in the day’s panel so people know when to stop looking. In this case it’s ‘3’.)

Dan Piraro’s Bizarro for the 14th I admit I don’t quite get. I get that it’s circling around the invention of mathematics and of architecture and all that. And I expect the need to build stuff efficiently helped inspire people to do mathematics. I’m just not sure how the joke quite fits together here. It happens.

Bill Amend’s Fox Trot Classics for the 17th reruns a storyline in which Jason tries to de-nerdify himself. The use of many digits past the decimal make up a lot of what’s left of Jason’s nerdiness. And since it’s easy to overlook let me point this out: 0.0675 percent is only half of the difference between 99.865 percent and 100 percent. It’s not exactly a classic nerd move to use decimal points when a fraction would be at least as good. Digits have a hypnotic power; many people would think 0.25 a more mathematical thing than “one-quarter”. But it is quite nerdly to speak of 0.0675 percent instead of “half of what’s left”.

This strip originally ran the 24th of June, 2005.

My Problem With 7

My reposted problem of a couple days ago, about building all the digits of a clock face using exactly three 9’s and simple arithmetic combinations of them, caught in my mind, as these things will sometimes do. The original page missed out on a couple ways of using exactly three 9’s to make a 1, but it’s easy to do. The first thing to wonder about was how big a number could we make using exactly three 9’s? There must be some limit; it’d be absurd to think that we could make absolutely any positive integer with so primitive a tool set — surely 19,686 is out of the realm of attainability — but where is it?