Reading the Comics, July 6, 2016: Another Busy Week Edition

It’s supposed to be the summer vacation. I don’t know why Comic Strip Master Command is so eager to send me stuff. Maybe my standards are too loose. This doesn’t even cover all of last week’s mathematically-themed comics. I’ll need another that I’ve got set for Tuesday. I don’t mind.

Corey Pandolph and Phil Frank and Joe Troise’s The Elderberries rerun for the 3rd features one of my favorite examples of applied probability. The game show Deal or No Deal offered contestants the prize within a suitcase they picked, or a dealer’s offer. The offer would vary up or down as non-selected suitcases were picked, giving the chance for people to second-guess themselves. It also makes a good redemption game. The banker’s offer would typically be less than the expectation value, what you’d get on average from all the available suitcases. But now and then the dealer offered more than the expectation value and I got all ready to yell at the contestants.

This particular strip focuses on a smaller question: can you pick which of the many suitcases held the grand prize? And with the right setup, yes, you can pick it reliably.

Mac King and Bill King’s Magic in a Minute for the 3rd uses a bit of arithmetic to support a mind-reading magic trick. The instructions say to start with a number from 1 to 10 and do various bits of arithmetic which lead inevitably to 4. You can prove that for an arbitrary number, or you can just try it for all ten numbers. That’s tedious but not hard and it’ll prove the inevitability of 4 here. There aren’t many countries with names that start with ‘D’; Denmark’s surely the one any American (or European) reader is likeliest to name. But Dominica, the Dominican Republic, and Djibouti would also be answers. (List Of Countries Of The World.com also lists Dhekelia, which I never heard of either.) Anyway, with Denmark forced, ‘E’ almost begs for ‘elephant’. I suppose ’emu’ would do too, or ‘echidna’. And ‘elephant’ almost forces ‘grey’ for a color, although ‘white’ would be plausible too. A magician has to know how things like this work.

Werner Wejp-Olsen’s feature Inspector Danger’s Crime Quiz for the 4th features a mathematician as victim of the day’s puzzle murder. I admit I’m skeptical of deathbed identifications of murderers like this, but it would spoil a lot of puzzle mysteries if we disallowed them. (Does anyone know how often a deathbed identification actually happens?) I can’t make the alleged answer make any sense to me. Danger of the trade in murder puzzles.

Kris Straub’s Starship for the 4th uses mathematics as a stand-in for anything that’s hard to study and solve. I’m amused.

John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison lee for the 6th of July, 2016. I’m a little surprised the last panel wasn’t set on a duplicate Earth where things turned out a little differently.

John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison lee for the 6th is about the existentialist dread mathematics can inspire. Suppose there is a chance, within any given volume of space, of Earth being made. Well, it happened at least once, didn’t it? If the universe is vast enough, it seems hard to argue that there wouldn’t be two or three or, really, infinitely many versions of Earth. It’s a chilling thought. But it requires some big suppositions, most importantly that the universe actually is infinite. The observable universe, the one we can ever get a signal from, certainly isn’t. The entire universe including the stuff we can never get to? I don’t know that that’s infinite. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s impossible to say, for good reason. Anyway, I’m not worried about it.

Jim Meddick’s Monty for the 6th is part of a storyline in which Monty is worshipped by tiny aliens who resemble him. They’re a bit nerdy, and calculate before they understand the relevant units. It’s a common mistake. Understand the problem before you start calculating.

Reading the Comics, October 25, 2014: No Images Again Edition

I had assumed it was a freak event last time that there weren’t any Comics Kingdom strips with mathematical topics to discuss, and which comics I include as pictures here because I don’t know that the links made to them will work for everyone arbitrarily far in the future. Apparently they’re just not in a very mathematical mood this month, though. Such happens; I’m sure they’ll reappear soon enough.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’ Working Daze (October 22, a “best of” rerun) brings up one of my very many peeves-regarding-pedantry, the notion that you “can’t give more than 100 percent”. It depends on what 100 percent means. The metaphor of “giving 110 percent” is based on the one-would-think-obvious point that there is a standard quantity of effort, which is the 100 percent, and to give 110 percent is to give measurably more than the standard effort. The English language has enough illogical phrases in it; we don’t need to attack ones that are only senseless if you go out to pick a fight with them.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons (October 23) shows a student attacking a problem with appreciable persistence. As the teacher says, though, there’s no way the student’s attempts at making 2 plus 2 equal 5 is ever not going to be wrong, at least unless we have different ideas about what is meant by 2, plus, equals, and 5. It’s easy to get from this point to some pretty heady territory: since it’s true that two plus two can’t equal five (using the ordinary definitions of these words), then this statement is true not just everywhere in this universe but in all possible universes. This — indeed, all — arithmetic would even be true if there were no universe. But if something can be true regardless of what the universe is like, or even if there is no universe, then how can it tell us anything about the specific universe that actually exists? And yet it seems to do so, quite well.

Tim Lachowski’s Get A Life (October 23) is really an accounting joke, or really more a “taxes they so mean” joke, but I thought it worth mentioning that, really, the majority of the mathematics the world has done have got to have been for the purposes of bookkeeping and accounting. I’m sorry that I’m not better-informed about this so as to better appreciate what is, in some ways, the dark matter of mathematical history.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s chipper Lard’s World Peace Tips (October 23) recommends “be a genius” as one of the ways to bring about world peace, and uses mathematics as the comic shorthand for “genius activity”, not to mention sudoku as the comic shorthand for “mathematics”. People have tried to gripe that sudoku isn’t really mathematics; while it’s not arithmetic, though — you could replace the numerals with letters or with arbitrary symbols not to be repeated in one line, column, or subsquare and not change the problem at all — it’s certainly logic.

John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not (October 23) besides giving me a spot of dizziness with that attribution line makes the claim that “elephants have been found to be better at some numerical tasks than chimps or even humans”. I can believe that, more or less, though I notice it doesn’t say exactly what tasks elephants are so good (or chimps and humans so bad) at. Counting and addition or subtraction seem most likely, though, because those are processes it seems possible to create tests for. At some stages in human and animal development the animals have a clear edge in speed or accuracy. I don’t remember reading evidence of elephant skills before but I can accept that they surely have some.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (October 24) applies the tools of infinite series — adding up infinitely many of a sequence of terms, often to a finite total — to parenting and the problem of one kid hitting another. This is held up as Real Analysis — – the field in which you learn why Calculus works — and it is, yeah, although this is the part of Real Analysis you can do in high school.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day (October 25) picks up on the Math Wiz Monster in Maria’s closet mentioned last time I did one of these roundups. And it includes an attack on the “Common Core” standards, understandably: it’s unreasonable to today’s generation of parents that mathematics should be taught any differently from how it was taught to them, when they didn’t understand the mathematics they were being taught. Innovation in teaching never has a chance.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check (October 25) reminds us that just because stock framing can be used to turn a subtraction problem into a word problem doesn’t mean that it can’t jump all the way out of mathematics into another field.

I haven’t included any comics from today — the 26th of October — in my reading yet but really, what are the odds there’s like a half-dozen comics of obvious relevance with nice, juicy topics to discuss?